Insomniac Nightmares

He wasn’t certain of where he was, or what he was doing there, but he did know one thing: his back hurt like a bitch.

He was sitting in the center of a five-by-five room. The walls were concrete blocks, most of them leaking through the gaps; whoever had built the place had obviously been cutting corners, or hadn’t had any kind of building code to live up to in the first place. The floor was bare concrete, spiderwebbed with cracks and dotted with patches of mold that were busy assaulting his sense of smell with the odors of mildew and rot.

The part of the room that had the most pressing impact on him – literally – was the chair he was seated in. It was cold against his naked flesh, meaning it was probably metal. The seat itself was flat, and at just the right height that his feet were planted perfectly on the floor. The back, though… that was another story.

It was covered in knobs that pinched and punched in all the wrong places. Trying to shift only made it worse. One, right at the base of his neck, left him hunched like a grotesque, staring down at his own feet with almost no opportunity to raise his head.

His arms were dangling above him, chained to the ceiling – or maybe just a higher part of the chair, it was impossible for him to tell with his limited movement – with manacles that were barbed on the inside. Trying to pull himself up, for even a moment of respite on his overtaxed shoulders, caused searing pain in his wrists and sent fresh trickles of blood running down his forearms to drip on the ground below. He wasn’t entirely surprised to see the blood blossoming over older stains. Apparently he wasn’t the first person to wake up in the chair.

“Ah. You’re awake,” a voice said from behind him. Feminine. Husky. Slight lilt to it, like she was amused.

A figure came into view. Wearing a shapeless black cloak and with the hood pulled down low over the eyes, it made it impossible to tell anything about her, beyond the pouty lips she spoke from. One hand, wearing a black leather glove, came out from the cloak and pinched his jaw with more strength than he would have expected, forcing his mouth open and a groan of pain to slip out.

“Now. Let’s talk about why you’re here.”