Kathryn looks back and continues to run for her life. The wind is blowing through her thick red hair as she runs. There is no one there but she swore that there was someone following her. She comes to a halt and begins to walk as she tries to catch her breath for a moment as she looks behind her. She looks back in front of her only to find an abandoned cabin.

“Who would want to live here,” she thinks aloud.

The windows are blown out and broken from years of exposure to the wind, and there were floorboards missing from the porch. The green tin roof showed some promise as to how much weather it has been allowed inside the cabin. Inside it looked like an animal had found something good to eat but couldn’t get to it. The blankets and curtains that had once been hanging up or lying on the couch were shredded and torn beyond use. The chairs at the table had been tossed around the room like a child’s play toy. She walks from the front doorway to the back bedroom. When she gets to the back bedroom she finds something that nobody should ever find.

The color fades from her face.

Lying on and beside the bed were three bodies. Actually they were skeletons. Who were they? How long have they been here?

Outside the wind is ripping through the forest as she walks back through the cabin to the front door where she had entered only minutes before. She walks outside to collect her thoughts and to try to keep her sanity. It starts to rain, and the wind just adds to it. As Kathryn looks down, she realized that there as a set of footprints that were much bigger than hers.

Small braches are breaking and the leaves are rustling as someone is walking up be her. She turns around, looks up and then everything goes black.

“I see that you decided to wake up,” he says.

“Who are you?” Kathryn asked.

“That doesn’t matter to you right now. All you need to worry about right now is your life,” he warns.

“What do you mean?” the hint of fear in her voice was detectable.

“You’ll see” he said as he walked out of the room.

Kathryn looks around the room of which she was kept and there were no windows to be found and the lighting was dim. The room smelled a little of copper and blood. Red carpet covered the floor and small shards of bone littered that red carpet. Her hands*. She couldn’t move her hands. They were tied behind her back. She tried to get her hands free, but every little movement only made the rope dig into her wrists even more. She could feel the blood start to run down her hands as a result of her struggle and failure to get the rope off.

After a few hours of being left alone in the little room, he comes back with a medium sized object in his hand. Kathryn gets worried even more than she was when he told her that she needed to worry for her life. He can read the worry and fear off of her face like a little child reading a book.

“Why do you worry?” he wandered.

“Because you took me from the middle of the woods to this little room with the carpet the color of blood and little shards of bone everywhere. How do you think I’m going to feel? I don’t k now where I am and more importantly I don’t know you,” yells Kathryn.

“You are so beautiful,” he said as he put his hand on the side of her face.

“Get your disgusting hand off of my face, now. Or I’ll…”

“You’ll do what?” he argues back, “There is nothing you can do.”

He walks closer to Kathryn with the object still in his hand. Then, he sets it down in front of her and she realizes that it is a bowl full of water. He walks behind her and cuts the rope that binds her hands together allowing for her to look at her wrists after she tried to get out.

“Why cut the rope? You know I want to leave,” she asks him.

“Yes, I know you want to leave. That is why I’m not leaving the room until you are done,” he said as he puts a piece of cloth beside the bowl of water.

Kathryn asks, “What is this for?”

“Wash the blood off of your wrists and hands,” he instructs.

With her bloodied shaky hands she does as he instructed Kathryn washed off the blood and the copper smell grew a little more intense due to the amount of blood there is. After she is done he picks up the bowl of water, now the color of blood, and walks out of the room locking the door behind him.

How much time has gone by? How many days have I been here? Where is he I’m hungry? She thinks with no purpose really but to pass time until he shows up again. She notices a small mirror hanging on the wall she didn’t see that when he put her in here. Standing up with shaky legs she walks over to the mirror and looks at the reflection.

Is that me? She wonders and tries to remember who she is looking at. Her beautiful thick red hair is now tangled and knotted. Those bright blue eyes of hers are now a dull shade of blue almost like they were gray. That beautiful 16-year old girl is no longer there. She is replaced by the girl that looks like she has been beaten and abused her entire life.

The girl in the mirror is someone that has been inside of her for so long that she has forgotten about it and of all the pain that it had brought her. The past that she wants to forget has now made its self another living nightmare with only two things the same. The abuse and the victim haven’t changed, and this is nothing new to her. She just doesn’t want to relive the horror of her childhood and the fact that her parents never wanted her no matter what she did to please them.

“Why does it have to be me again?” she asks herself aloud, “I have done more than my body is or was willing to take. I never wanted it to happen in the first place but I couldn’t control it. If only someone could come rescue me like they did when I was 6. This doesn’t make sense though. Of all the 16 year old girls out there, why does he have to pick me? I haven’t done anything to him I don’t even know him. Why me?”

After Kathryn sits there for what seems like hours he decides to return to the small room. Only to find her sitting in the corner of the room whit her knees pulled to her chest and her head hanging on her knees. There is nothing spoken as he walks over to her and sits down beside her against the wall. Only was it in that moment he realized that she wasn’t the perfect girl that he thought she was. No, this was a girl that was very deeply troubled. She had her own demons to fight without having to add to them.

“What’s wrong?” he asked

“Nothing that you need to be worried about, just go away and leave me alone,” she told him.

“Whatever, but you know that I’m not going to go away,” he told her.

He stands up and goes to sit on the bed. She just continues to sit in the there in the corner motionless. The only movement that you could see was her breathing and it also looked like she was crying. He finally decided that he had had enough of her attitude.

He walks over, grabs her, pulls her to her feet, and then the throws her to the bed. He starts to advance towards her while she is on the bed when he realizes that the look on her face reminds him of his sister. The way that she looked when their dad abused her and made him watch just made him stop everything. The memories of their childhood were all coming back. Up until the day that strange person came and took his sister away from him and out of his world. The only person that he had left besides his abusive father, was now gone. She left him there alone with their dad and no one to help him. He was only 4 years old when they took his sister away.

Kathryn looked puzzled as to what was going on. He just stopped as if to suddenly realize that what he was doing was wrong. Why did he stop? She wondered.

“What’s going on? Why did you stop?” she asked him.

“You wouldn’t understand,” he said.

She gets up and walks over to him. As she gets closer he pushes her back onto the bed in the middle of the room. He approaches her once more, only this time he doesn’t stop when she gives him that look that made him stop before. He reaches for something under the bed and proceeds to beat her. Kathryn screams but no one seems to hear her.

After he releases all of the anger and rage that he had inside of him, he leaves the room again. He comes back a few minutes later with another bowl, only this one has something in it for her. It’s a bowl of soup. He sets the bowl on the stand beside the bed, and then walks out of the room once more.

She looks at the bowl and just returns to the corner that she was sitting in. Several hours go by when he returns to the room. Only this time his intentions were not what she expected. Kathryn expected him to come back and abuse her even more, but he didn’t exactly do that this time. He walked around the room for a few minutes and thought about what he was going to do. All of a sudden he just leaves the room. Without rime or reason he just walks out without saying a word.

When he comes back he is enraged because apparently the police are outside patrolling the area looking for her. A knock at the door draws him out of the room and to the front of the house. She can hear voices of several different police officers. They have that authority in their voice that makes him quiver where he stands. The sound of footsteps grows louder as multiple people walk back the hallway.

“Why are you arresting me?” he shouts.

“Sir, your have the right to remain silent, anything you say can and will be held against you in a court of law…” the one officer explains to him.

“What do you mean?” he asks.

They walk him out of the house to their police car and put him in the back of the car, then proceed to slam the door. At that moment Kathryn decides to stay quiet while they search the house. She can hear the bark of the search dogs, which they brought in to look for her, as they indicate that she is indeed here. It can smell her scent on the bowl of water that she used earlier. She hides in the corner right beside the bed opposite the door.

The one officer with the dogs stops outside the door that leads to her room. He tries the handle only to find it locked. The one dog with him starts bark uncontrollably as it can smell her scent coming from the room. The officer leaves for a moment and comes back with several other officers to see if they can open up this room. They do get the door open only to find someone else is in the room with the girl that they have been searching for. This girl is holding a knife to Kathryn’s throat as the police enter the room.

“I’m going to have to ask you to put your weapon down, miss,” said the officer.

“Make me,” she shouts at him.

The knife just keeps getting closer to Kathryn’s neck. The edge of the blade shines in the dim light of the room with the blood stained carpet. More shards of bone litter the floor now as she walks Kathryn over to the bed and lays her down just like she was going to sleep. The way that she was laying gave the girl a clear way to Kathryn’s throat if she wanted to do anything to her.

Slowly the police advance towards the bed. Two of them had their weapons drawn and the other two had them is their holsters. She draws the knife closer to Kathryn’s throat the closer the police get to her. The next thing you hear is someone screaming. No one knows where it came from but none of the police officers touched the trigger of their weapons, and the knife blade is clean, but it had to come from somewhere. But where?

Someone saved Kathryn that day. Not from the situation she was in, but from the demons inside of her. Those demons that have been haunting her so much and for so long she can now finally say goodbye to them, and now rest peacefully at night. An angel was watching out for her that day.