“Hello?”
No answer.
“Hello?” she repeated herself rolling her exhausted eyes. Still silence. Slamming the phone down she returned back to her desk feeling annoyed that someone had disturbed her. She took another sip of her wine and unwillingly picked up her fountain pen again. Jackie sat in her warm office in deep concentration. She had no longer sat down that she was bothered again. But this time it wasn’t her annoying telephone. The noise that filled her ears made her jump out of her skin. It sounded like a lost soul shrieking from the depths of hell. It was her car alarm. Jackie strided through the narrow hallway and wrenched open the front door causing a gust of icy wind to hit her and enter the house. She cautiously walked down the footpath, biting her dry lips, her once warm feet slapping against the smooth glacial pavement. Pushing her tangled curly hair out of her face she bent down and checked underneath her car. Nothing. She glanced across the drive and not wanting to catch a cold for her big day tomorrow she hopped back up the footpath and back into her heated house.
Turning the heating up on the wall she returned back to her work filled desk. She picked up her glass and stopped. The glass that she had left on the desk to go and investigate her car alarm going off had been half full. Now it was empty. She stood up, heart racing and stared around the room. She looked back at the glass suspiciously and rubbed her weary eyes.
“I’m going mad” she muttered to herself. Jackie tried to dismiss that somebody had drank from her glass but she couldn’t stop thinking about the fact she was sure she hadn’t drank it all. She glided over to the front door and pulled across the top lock. She felt slightly easier and safer now. Positioning herself in her chair she went to begin her work. Again she stopped. Her fountain pen that she always kept on top of the mountainous piles of work had gone. Puzzled, Jackie began moving her papers out of the way and searching the whole desk work top for the pen. Giving up and becoming very stressed out because of all her disturbances she furiously got up again and went in search of another pen.
She stomped in to the kitchen opened the white sliding draw looking for a biro or something of that sort that she could carry on scrawling her notes with. With no look she slammed the drawer shut and spun back around to have a look in the sitting room. She froze. There was her fountain pen propped up against her porcelain vase on the corner table. The hairs on the back of Jackie’s neck stood up. She was positive she hadn’t even been in the sitting room all night. She attentively moved across the room towards the pen. When she got there she stopped for a moment and just looked at it, it had been balanced against the vase. She was so bewildered that her heart started to race. She heard a deep breathing sound coming behind her. She couldn’t move as her legs had gone numb with terror. Slowly she turned her head but before she could catch sight of her intruder she felt a sharp pain in the back of her head. Jackie fell forward knocking over the vase and hitting her face against the solid wall. She fell to the floor in a state of shock. The stranger dragged Jackie up by her long, blood-soaked hair. Without thinking she grabbed the man’s thick, hairy arm and sunk her teeth deep into his flesh. His grip loosened on her hair and she stumbled across the room falling against her desk. Hitting the floor again Jackie began to crawl towards the door in hope to get away from the attacker. She lunged for the handle and tried to turn it. It didn’t move. She remembered she had locked it minutes before. Frantically trying to unlock it she could hear him breathing behind her. The lock clicked open but it was too late. She felt another piercing blow to her head, then darkness.
Jackie woke up with a start. The pain in her head was unbearable. She was trying to catch her breath but she couldn’t, her lungs felt as if they were about to explode. She attempted to sit up, but hit her head on what seemed like a wooden surface that was inches in front of her face. She was terrified; she needed to know where she was. She hated not being in control of situations. She tried to move her arms. They were pressed tightly to her sides. She was in some sort of box. She let out a long, high pitched scream. Little did she know that there was no chance any living person would ever hear her.
