AcmeShorts

Henry Smith awoke shivering in a cage to Mozart’s Serenade No. 13 in G major with the metallic taste of blood filling his mouth and the dream-image of a girl he had never met fading from his memory. Henry’s eyes fluttered. Disoriented, he squinted in to the gloom. He couldn’t make out a thing. At first, he did not know where he was or why.

He stood up and realized the cage was suspended by a thick, rusting chain over a cavernous concrete room. The air felt oily. He inhaled a sickly brew of aromas, an admixture of pickled meat and jasmine and ammonia that congealed in to an unnatural odor. He glanced down and noticed a dark ring staining a makeshift drain drilled in to the cage floor.

Henry pressed his face against the bars. He traced the outline of a vaulted door at the far end of the room. Behind it he heard peculiar noises beneath the Mozart. It was a dissonant cacophony: The chugging of a gas powered generator. Steel whetted against steel. Human squeals. Laughter, black and jubilant.

He slumped against the bars and slid limply to the floor. The movement caused the cage to gently sway. The chain creaked. He closed his eyes.

“Aw man,” he said to himself. “Not again.”