Trial of Terror by Evelyn J. Steward (best books to read now .txt) 📕

TRIAL OF TERROR

April Pandorsky rang her sister late October. She phoned the apartment several times over the course of the next two weeks., finally notifying the police that her sister should have been at home on at least one of those occasions and her Company manager rang her to see why her sister had not been to work in all that time.
It was sheer accident several weeks later that a fire had swept the dock down at the disused harbour, only partway catching the old building, leaving much of it intact. When the firemen broke in and found the partially eaten corpse of a young woman, the police scanned their missing persons list. They found her name on their list, had the dental records checked and contacted April Pandorsky who, in a flood of tears, identified the mutilated body.

Julia Rein drew ragged breaths as she sat on the filthy bed and tried to make some sense out of the situation. She had gone to bed as usual in her small ‘loft’ overlooking the Hudson with its twinkling lights advertising the fact that New York never slept. Unable to recall anything other than profound sleep until this rude awakening, she was at a loss to know what had happened to her.
She never saw the shadow in her bedroom that moved only after she was fast asleep. Never felt the prick of the needle that injected the dose to keep her asleep.
She had no real enemies, as far as she could remember. Her job as a tax assessor might bring a few mingers down on her head from time to time, but that was all part of the job. No one that might do her real harm. Try as Julia would, she could not recall any special person that she had seen lately who had threatened her with bodily harm over a misjudged deposit to Uncle Sam. It never occurred to her that she had been taken by a man who had never met her but had watched her habits and taken her because her could. Taken her for his own vile purpose.
When she had first awoken terrified as if in a dream, this unreal situation, she had felt around the blackened room, barking her shins several times on junk of one kind or another, to find the only door. When she found it locked and bolted, she had screamed for help for some minutes. Her throat closed up and the screaming stopped. All she could hear were various fog horns echoing from the obviously nearby river.
Having deemed, in this nightmarish position that she might be in some wharf building, she finally realised that however much she screamed no one would come, not in the darkness anyway.
The thoughts that there might be bums, drop-outs or drug users using other buildings to keep out the night air, did cross her mind but she dismissed those thoughts as ludicrous, for what dope-enhanced soul would even bother with someone else’s predicament through a haze of cocaine or an empty meths bottle. With horns blaring, her small voice would be lost in the mist anyway. Fog always blanks out sound, distorts all but the sharpest noise.
She had grown up on the coast where fog was a regular occurrence. Sounds thought to come from one direction, always turned out to emanate from somewhere totally different. You had to be aware when fog came down. She thought about April,. She would contact the police and they would find her. She had to hold on to that hope.
After several hours she came to terms with where she was, however terrible it may be. It was the why and the who she could not determine.
The all-pervading smells were of salt water, rust, old oil (like when a car is left in a garage with a dripping tank and leaves a fetid pool on the floor that gradually gets filled with dust and grime and rotting bodies of insects) and an animal scent she could not determine but realising the building’s proximity to water, she terrifyingly thought it might be from rats. She was determined to ignore the rustling sounds from within the room though her heart leapt at each and every sound. It had to be daylight soon, surely?
Little whimpering noises left her mouth now at every new scuttling. Terror rose in her mind. Rational thought as well as her sanity was slowly ebbing away. Daylight had come and gone, she tried to count how many days and nights, Why? WHY? The word shouted within her brain. Julia, not normally what the kids referred to as a ‘wimp’, started to bite her nails that first night (something she had not done since she was in High School). Her perfect manicure had already been ruined when she banged and scraped the wood as she tried to break down the door. The once polished nails were now jagged, they caught on her silk nightgown, the attire she had gone to bed in.
Cold seeped in through unseen cracks and Julia shivered as the thin nightgown did nothing to warm her body. She also shivered for the terror that filled her mind. Someone should find her. Someone must!
But then the days came and went. Hunger and thirst drove into her mind like a ragged knife. Shouting brought silence. No noise save that of distant boat sounds, broke the quiet that was the darkened, dirty room.
She surrendered and sat with her knees under her chin, rocking her body like a frightened kid. She finally ignored the rustling noises, the fog horns, the breaking of wood and metal that all added to the cacophony of dangerous sound imploding within her brain. Tears dripped down her face to fall unseen on the dusty floor. Tiny puddles of salty tears that drained away the humanity to leave an ancient primordial fear, a terror of the unknown

When firemen broke in to assess the damage some weeks later, they called the police who identified her by her dental records and part of the silk nightgown which her sister had given her as a birthday gift a week before her abduction. No one was actually charged, though the police had a few ideas. It was weeks later they scrutinised the list of John Does, matching one man in a fatal traffic accident to their view of who the abductor was. That unforeseen accident happened the day after the abduction occurred, based on the fact that the woman was at work the previous day, seen by many of her colleagues.
A strange quirk of fate or Divine Retribution? Many hardened officers on the case felt their hearts quicken at this revelation.

© Copyright Evelyn J. Steward. November, 2002 (additional edit Oct. 2009/10)

Publication Date: 11-11-2010

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