The Beast

As a girl, she was always deathly afraid of the dark.

But she could keep the lights on in her window, keep people she thought she could trust close to her, learn from others how to fight anything which might come through it. She could cope with it that way.

It didn't last. She'd never had good luck - while working the fields, she was ambushed by an aged tiger; driven insane by sickness, the other hands put him down quickly, but it could never have been soon enough. The tiger'd leapt at her pinched face and torn from the left side across. Her face felt awfully warm, but she couldn't make anything out - she was dimly-aware of a horrible screeching noise, which was soon joined by others of its kind, dull thuds, grunts of exertion.

Something knocked her to the ground. The rest was darkness, and always would be.

Durham didn't have the facilities to deal with the disturbed, and any visits or attempts (growing further-and-further apart over time) to help her adjust to her blindness only ended in her lashing-out. They had little choice but to lock her away. No-one would know how long she spent there, but she spent it tortured by faraway scraps of conversation, a wooden spoon that she would gnaw on and snap at shoved into her mouth a few times a day, an awful scrabbling noise she couldn't locate.

All of them terrified her. Eventually the conversation grew lighter, and the meals came less and less. No-one was outside anymore, but the scrabbling was still there. She shrugged-off her bonds, struggled to her feet.

She stumbled through the darkness, but she only seemed to get further and further away. She picked her way across brick walls and crawled up stairs. She was thankful more than anything to be away from that scrabbling, but she could swear...

Her thin body shoved onto a wooden wall which fell away on hinges. She tumbled jarringly onto the ground; the whisper of the breeze hit her face, and then,

The noise.

It was like a tsunami. It crashed into her, shattered her bones, washed over her and washed her away. She wanted so badly to scuttle back where she'd came; scrabbling and all, but she didn't know the way, and how could she, now she knew everything that was so near out there? Everything that was ready and waiting to find her. A cacophony of voices and movements she struggled to pick-apart and understand, though no doubt discussing the freak that'd gone missing... voices even belonging to creatures who might have seen her already.

This wouldn't do.

This wouldn't do at all.