A billowing draft rustles and lifts the curtains, granting me a fleeting glimpse of the world that lays beyond this darkened room that is my prison: a lush green sward stretching in rolling folds, an azure sky wide and unbroken in a vast curving expanse, and far in the distance, perched upon the horizon line is an oak tree spreading its branches like reaching, trembling-leafed fingers, each broad leaf burnished to luminescence by the great, glowing, blinding sun.
All this in a fragment of a moment, then gone. The curtains fall closed again and the room is bathed in darkness, affording me only dim outlines of the sparse furniture: a small cot, a table and chair, a candle for which I have no matches. I feel eyes watching me; the door silently opening behind me had caused the draft that lifted the curtain.
She smiles slowly at me, a sinister curling of her cold red lips like a serpent coiling to strike, showing a pair of fangs that gleam in the gloom as sharp white omens of death. I shrink against the wall, knowing what is coming. I edge for the window. "Go ahead," she says, gesturing at the window. She laughs, a vicious, tinkling chuckle like breaking glass. I lunge to throw open the sash, knowing it is in vain. Her fangs pierce my throat, and darkness, hungry and breathing, washes over me.
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