HIDE & SEEK | PERSONAL VERDICT
Ralph Langer RalphLanger.com
NOT GUILTY - Preview

-----ROBYN-----
It's happening again. I'm awakening somewhere in a thick fog bank, groggy and disoriented. I don’t know where I am, but I know what's happening. I've relived this swirling cloud of confusion many times. And I can't stop it this time, either.
I'm on my back, my body rocking rhythmically and pain surges and surges, matching repeated compressing weights assaulting me from toes to chest.
Absurdly, I dimly hear a male voice counting cadence.

"Hut, one. Hut, two, Hut, hut, hut, hut.  Hut, one.  Hut, two."
Do I know that voice?
Another voice grunts and exhales in my ears, his foul breath fills my universe.
A disembodied man's face drifts toward me and retreats into the fog.  He is smiling.  And counting.  "Hut, one..."
Do I know him?
Multiple brilliant lights momentarily sear through my closed eye-lids.  Camera flashes?
The mocking face emerges again from the fog.
I try to twist or roll away but I can't.  I'm as confined as if in a casket, claustrophobia imprisoning me in panic.
I feel like I'm screaming but I can't hear myself.  And I know no one else hears me, either.  
I know I'm reliving what happened but I can't stop the attack, the dream, the hallucination, this assault as razor sharp as the first one, indistinguishable from the first time.   And the endless times in the eternity since.
I feel myself bobbing to the surface of consciousness, a brilliantly white-clad angel hovering above my flickering eyes, saying something to me, then morphing into Beverly, the night nurse I remember giving me something to swallow…minutes ago…or hours or yesterday?
"Robyn. Robyn. You're awake now. Everything's going to be okay."
NOT OKAY!  IT WILL NEVER BE OKAY! I WILL NEVER BE ME AGAIN!