Site hosted by Angelfire.com: Build your free website today!

Back to homepage








NARRATOR: Elizabeth’s eyes flew open. Her breath caught raggedly in her throat and her long lashes fluttered as she gazed about her in alarm. She slipped cautiously out of the mahogany four-poster bed. Her long dark hair tumbled down her back in disarray. Standing in the middle of the floor, she twirled slowly to look around the room. The hem of her long white nightgown swirled about her dainty feet. The walls of the chamber were roughly hewn stone, illuminated only by a cheerless gray light from the only window. At the far end of the room stood a forbidding oaken door bound with iron.
Despite her best efforts to remember, Elizabeth had no memory whatsoever of the gloomy chamber and no idea how she had gotten there. Had her vengeful stepmother locked her in a tower? Had some foul and unnamed fiend stolen her away in the dead of night? What would become of her?

Her heart beat faster and faster as she stepped toward the door and tried the knob.

It was locked. She opened her mouth to scream.

ELIZABETH: All right, what makes you think I was going to scream? And I don’t have a stepmother. Or dainty feet, for that matter.

NARRATOR: A chill breeze seemed to enter the chamber, like the wailing of lost spirits from beyond the grave. Dread and an overwhelming sense of lurking evil overwhelmed the poor girl as she…what are you doing?

ELIZABETH: These hinges are kind of rusty. In fact, if I wedge this in here like this and then twist and pull down sharply like this

(grinding sound)

NARRATOR: Hey, hey, hey, you can’t break the door down! That happens to be a genuine forbidding oaken door bound with iron, young lady. Don’t you have any respect for narrative convention? What would be the point of locking frightened girls up in towers if they could just stroll out any time they felt like it?

(silence)

NARRATOR: Elizabeth? Elizabeth! Wait for me!


This appeared in my head fully formed, like Athena but without the helmet and the owl...Neil Gaiman does a better job of this sort of thing. In my defense, I wrote this before I read his short story entitled "Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Nameless House of the Night of Dread Desire", which is wonderful, by the way.



Back to homepage