Chapter Three
Jonathon Gentry Stoker was not in hell; he was in a woman’s bedroom.
I’m in a woman’s bedroom,he thought, the sentence coming to him fully formed, no gaps or blackouts, no confusion, when he...
What had he done?
Come to?
Resurrected?
Resuscitated?
It was as if he had awakened, but he had no memory of going to sleep. His only memory, as disjointed and tortured as it was, had been of being dead. And in hell. Racked with chills and burning with fever and tortured. He remembered suffocation, muteness, and pain.
So much pain.
Stoker took a deep breath and focused his new lucidity on his left side, which had been the distinct source of the most terrible of the pain. Carefully, he endeavored to prop himself up.
The jolt of pain was so immediate and intense, his vision swam and nausea pitched his gut. He collapsed against the pillow, sweat beading his brow.
For five minutes he forced himself to breathe slowly in and out, in and out, willing the revolt to subside.
When his vision cleared at last, when his heart slowed (he would table the notion of sitting up for the moment), Stoker looked around the room.
First, the door.Am I captive or guest?
The door to this room stood open. Limp cotton garments hung from a hook—not his clothes, but someone’s.
He raised his right hand and examined the sleeve of what appeared to be a white nightshirt. He moved his right leg and felt bare skin against a crisp sheet.
He had the impulse to tear off the covers and examine everything about the alien clothes and his damaged body, but the memory of the pain was too great. He remained supine, sheet bracing him tightly around the chest like a bandage, and breathed in and out, in and out.
He turned his head and scanned the other side of the room. The walls were bright; the furniture was spare. A cluttered sort of casualness pervaded the space. Not unclean, simply... strewn. Bandages and paperwork were heaped in a scramble on a desk. Linens drooped in an uneven stack on a chair. A vase beside the bed held a profusion of flowers ranging from thriving to decomposed. Books were stacked in crooked towers across the floor. Morning sun poured through an open window, the breeze fluttering an apricot-colored curtain that sent a pile of newsprint skating across the floor.
Although his crew and his friends took him as careless and undomesticated, he would not, in his own room, allow newspapers to blow to and fro; he would not tolerate the scattered lack of order on the desk, or books on the floor, or the loosely folded wash. He would not, but someone, obviously, did.
He thought he should call for his host (captor?). Most people would do this; they would simply summon whomever was responsible for the soft bed and the sunny room. But Stoker was not most people. It was one thing to be bedridden but quite another to lie prone and cry out. God grant him death before he reached the point of bellowing from a sickbed.
Instead, he closed his eyes and forced himself to call up his last cogent memory, before the pain, and death, and descent into hell. Before this room. Before...
Had he been in Spain?
No—Portugal.
Yes. He’d sailed to Portugal to... to look in on a villa.
Cabo de San Vicente on the coast in Portugal, and then there had been—
Creeaakk.
His thoughts froze on the strained sound of hinges on a door. Next, he heard a female voice, her words indistinguishable. He heard theclunk-clunkof possessions piling onto a wooden surface. He heard laughter and then... growling?
There were footsteps, a pause, and then the determinedclick, click, clickof tiny paws on stone floor.
Moments later the ugliest mongrel Stoker had ever seen—part dog, part... weasel?—clicked into the room and continued to the bed as if they shared it. Stoker held his breath when he saw the dog’s intention, bracing his damaged body for impact. The animal leapt and landed unevenly at Stoker’s feet, scuttling up his legs and belly and stopping on his chest, sniffing along the way. The tiny tapping paws from the floor felt like talons against his skin. Only when the animal hovered over him, nearly nose to nose, did the dog pause and stare down into Stoker’s face.
Stoker opened his mouth to say,“Off,”but the dog beat him to it, filling the quiet room with an explosive round of frantic barking.
