The Lord of the Curtain by Billy Phillips

Author:Billy Phillips
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gatekeeper Press
Published: 2018-05-20T23:22:29+00:00

CHAPTER Twenty-Two

Blackbeard opened the thick wooden door and entered the cell. Natalie was standing by the stool, staring at his scabbed face. She was holding the pee pail. It was half-full.

“Quite a load o’ piss ya got there,” Blackbeard said. “How big is that bladder o’ yours?”

“I haven’t been able to go to the bathroom since I got here.”

He scowled. “Well, be careful with that bucket.”

Natalie started toward him. His eyebrows arched.

“Where ya goin’ with that?”

She lifted the pail to her chest, left palm under the bottom, right hand gripping the rim.

Blackbeard’s face reddened. “Hold on—”

She hurled the pail at his face.

His batted his arms to block what he knew was coming.

SPLASH!

Too late.

Flustered and soaked, he snarled. “Aaaarrrgggggggghh!”

Natalie ducked past him and hotfooted it out of the cell. She fled down a skinny passageway that ended at the base of a short wooden staircase, steep as a ladder. Daylight spilled in from above.

Yes!

She climbed, step after step. Reached the landing. Escaped outside. Sprinted into the free and open air.

Behold freedom!

Suddenly, her eyes bugged out. Her shoulders sagged like a faulty parachute. And her mouth went slack-jawed. She felt as though the ground beneath her feet had just fallen away.

She was standing on the deck of a ship. A pirate ship. Sailing on a shoreless sea. She whipped around, searching every direction. The horizons were landless—nothing to the west, east, north, or south! No other ships were out there. And there was no sun in the sky, only rainclouds on the verge of opening their floodgates. The air was salty, subtropically humid, and slightly fishy-smelling. The only sounds she heard were windblown sails, breaking waves, and the lingering wails of distant seagulls.

Atop the ship, the skull and crossbones flag flapped in a light southerly wind.

And then thunder clapped. The skies opened. Lashing rain fell like crystal pins.

“Pretty, ain’t it?”

Natalie turned. Blackbeard stood behind her, eyes transfixed by the open sea and rain-swept skies. The view clearly touched him.

Natalie began to tremble, but not from the cool sting of rain. She was thinking of Caitlin.

So this is what it feels like. Neurosis. Phobia.

She realized there was no getting off the boat. There was no one to call. Nowhere to run. No place to swim to if she jumped overboard. She loosened her collar and started nibbling on her pinkie nail.

Blackbeard shoved her from behind. “Back inside ya go before we catch cold.”

She had to tamp down the uncomfortable feeling gathering inside her, a feeling teetering on unbearable cabin fever. A disturbing sense of being vulnerable and totally out of control of her situation. If she’d been tied up and stuffed in a box locked inside a dark, cramped closet located in the basement of an old, abandoned house, she would have felt the same strong unease that verged on panic as she had felt upon seeing the wide-open sea. Equally harrowing. Like two sides of one coin called phobia hell!

She couldn’t let Blackbeard know how vulnerable she was, or that all these bleak, unbidden thoughts were cropping up in her mind.

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