“What
should I write?” she asked, becoming frustrated. “I’m not a writer for God’s sake!” If this were a kitchen counter with a big
metal bowl, a bag of flour, some eggs, milk, butter, oil, maybe some basil and
thyme, then she would know what to do.
“Oh,
great, now you’ve lost it,” Madeleine said to herself with a laugh. “You’re all alone and shouting at no one.”
She
calmed herself.
Then
came the voice again.
“Write
about…the last things…you remember,” it said.
That
was the first thing the voice had said to her that made any sense. She picked up the pen, immediately feeling
spent and weak. If only they would give
her something to eat, something with some sugar, maybe she would be able to
concentrate.
Seeing
nothing else to be done, Madeleine used all of her strength to put her pen to
paper and then she started to write, but as her pen made the faintest mark of
black ink on the white lined paper, a familiar melody crept into her consciousness
from somewhere in her subconscious.
“And
in the valley of the deep,” she softly sang, “is where your secrets I shall
forever keep.”
Where did that come from? she wondered.
It
certainly wasn’t anything easily accessible to her recent memory. And yet those two lines seemed engraved in
her brain.
“And
in the valley of the deep is where your secrets I shall forever keep,” she
repeated, this time without singing it.
“But what’s the next verse?” she asked.
After
a moment more Madeleine dismissed it as a song or nursery rhyme she had learned
as a child. “Nonsense,” she said aloud,
again to nobody. She went back to the
task a hand. She wrote:
The last things I remember are being warm, hot
actually…from the sun. Yes, I was
outside in a park somewhere. I remember
because there were children laughing and dogs running. And green grass. Yes, I remember the grass because I had taken
off my shoes and the grass felt wet and wonderful beneath my feet, in between
my toes. It had been freshly cut because
I remember the smell of it.
Just
thinking about it caused Madeleine to forget for a moment that she was locked
in a cement room. She felt free again,
so she continued to write.
I remember a hand on my shoulder. I remember turning around and seeing a police
officer. He was speaking words to me,
but I couldn’t hear them. And the words
I could not hear were causing tears to run down my face. Despite being hot in the sun for so long, my
veins ran ice cold. I shivered.
Madeleine
shivered in her cell. And again came
that melody. She wrote:
And in the valley of the deep…is where your secrets
I shall forever keep.
To be continued/what now??
