DOMINION by Wayne Sharrocks
PROLOGUE
Sat hunched within the dark recess Karl Connor felt as small and vulnerable as a china doll. As what seemed like hours passed he could feel the welts from the cigarette burns rising up on his body, smarting, searing…
His body still hissed from the pain of her nails gouging his young and tender flesh. As dread washed through him, how he longed for a shining light in the great dark loneliness of human existence.
Terror began with the fact that he could hardly move. His mind wrestling with some unbalanced nightmare, whilst his body ached with cramps, knots in his muscles as the cupboard under the stairs was no more than three feet long, roughly the same in height and was crammed full of assorted bric-a-brac (a vivid testimony to his mother’s car-boot compulsion).
As his panic escalated with him, all his desires diminished to just the need to move, a desperate, overwhelming need to free himself from the dark and cramped conditions. As his mind fractured he tried to scream but found that he could not even speak. The unbearable stress shattering his logic to pieces, finally breaking him from reality as thoughts like moths fluttered through his mind, seeking light in his darkness.
The punishment was as if a tourniquet around his neck, strangling the life from him. His pallor ghostly, he began to writhe and squirm as his shoulders began to shake. His grief vast enough to bring down an empire, as the waiting silence dragged him down like exhausted sleep and his wanting; longing to be freed filled the space oppressively.
Crippled by fear he was suddenly aware of the darkness sucking him down.
Although he had long since managed to spit out the rag that was stuffed into his mouth to stifle his earlier protestations, his breath was still very shallow, trapped by the dull suffocating heat of the blackness that had encroached upon him. He found that his palms were sweating. He had gnawed at his knuckles until they bled, sucking at the warm blood that flowed from them as it were comforting nectar. Recoiling, his mind snatched feebly at passing thoughts whilst above him, he could hear the sound of the splintering wood and the creaking floorboards. He could hear his mother’s gin soaked voice echoing as she descended the wooden staircase, her rage biting deep.
‘Filthy, dirty boy, I told you he wasn’t right, he is the devil’s child. I should have had him aborted when I had the chance…’
Moments later he heard the catch being slid from the lock and the cupboard door sprang open, battering his eyes with light.
Springing back from the sudden brilliance, he flinched as the light scolded his vision, momentarily dazzling him.
A torch shone in his eyes but all he could see was the glare, burning his eyes and dragging him still further into his mother’s alcohol fuelled nightmare.
Her voice now seemed distant and slurred as she brandished the huge torch at him. Under the skin on the back of his neck, ticks of apprehension still burrowed and twitched, but heart pounding he unfurled from the fetal position that he had been forced into and achingly crawled out from the cupboard. His muscles and limbs screamed with every movement and the abrupt definition of sight stung his eyes, whilst his nerves were shredded and crippled by his own deceiving mind. Believing that to be the end of the punishment he began to apologize, even though he sensed that he done nothing wrong. As he spoke, there was a tremor in his voice, a fragility, not pain so much as emotional distress. The hardness of her heart frightened him. He had taken two faltering steps before he was doubled over, as if a hook had caught his stomach, knocking the air from him. The world had become too strange for him to fully comprehend, and as the large torch lay broken in pieces upon the threadbare carpet, he gazed meekly up at her, into a face set with thunder. He let out a cry of sheerest childlike terror but as he tried to kid himself into believing that life had a purpose worthy of his struggle he knew deep down that he would be made to pay further for his actions… Continue reading
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