Tea with The Black Dragon by R. A. MacAvoy

Author:R. A. MacAvoy [MacAvoy, R. A.]
Format: epub
Tags: Fantasy
Published: 2010-11-02T23:00:00+00:00

Chapter 8

Martha Macnamara awoke with a miserable aching nose. It felt as though it had been stuffed for two weeks straight. Her hands were cramped; she must have been lying on them. There was something else bothering her as well; it took her a few confused minutes to figure out what that was.

“Oh!” she cried out. “I have to go to the bathroom.” She opened her eyes, and the results were so unpleasant she closed them again. The ceiling had looked so ugly, and it swept by with unsettling speed. The spinning ceiling was mere dizziness, of course, like the time she had had her wisdom teeth pulled. And the ugliness must be a result of nausea; dizziness and nausea always went together.

But why was she nauseated? Why dizzy? And why couldn't she place that ceiling she had glimpsed, with its acoustic tile and round fluorescent lights?

Where was she? Where should she be?

Not at home; her own ceiling was plastered, with a crack through it like a lightning bolt, and the fixtures wore white paper lanterns. Besides, Martha knew she was not at home; she was staying at the James Herald Hotel.

Which did not look anything like this. Those ceilings were arched, and the picture moldings were impressively Corinthian.

She felt so awful that maybe she was in a hospital. Yes. She had passed out on the street. Someone in a black car had spoken her name…

And now she just had to go to the bathroom, dizzy or not. She pulled her eyes open.

How very odd. She was stretched out flat on a table. Brightly colored lengths of wire were wrapped around her wrists, tying them together in front of her.

“Out that door and to the left,” said a voice. She searched for the speaker.

He sat sprawled in a white director's chair, amidst a clutter of magazines.

He was a small man whose dark hair was carefully slicked back and curled about the ears. He wore a wine-red shirt which hung open, revealing a gold medallion. His belt was wide and black, his trousers white. His voice matched his appearance perfectly.

Martha tried to sit up; it was a hopeless effort.

“I can't do anything without my hands.”

He stared insolently and flung another magazine to the floor. He lounged across the barren room toward her. In his hands were black steel dikes, he snipped through the skinny windings on her wrists.

“Try to run and I'll break your leg,” he said, as she slipped off the wooden table. “There's nowhere to go, anyway.”

He was quite correct. The tall, barnlike room had no windows and only two doors. One of the two was green metal. It had a key lock and a hole beneath where the doorknob had once been. The other door stood open, and as Martha passed through it, leaning on the doorsill for support in her vertigo, she saw that it led through a short hall to two other doors. One of them was identical to the door in the large room, except that it had a knob on it.

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