A Kind Face, A Handsome Face

The Welcome Inn

And then everything went dark.

I awoke to the gentle touch of a fire's warmth against my face. My eyes opened, and I found myself in a small room.

I was lying on a bed with about three blankets loaded onto me, and a soft symphony of crackles came from the small fireplace that lay across the room.

There were no windows of which to speak. A number of odd things lay in places; bookshelves containing old and withering leather-bound journals, jars and containers next to old rolls of parchment and a series of interconnected tubes with a colourful array of liquids whooshing through.

As this all registered, the headache set in, and after that, nausea, for some strange reason. I got up and sat on the bed, my throbbing head in my palms.

Where am I?

Moments later, two popping sounds erupted and there appeared a man in the room. He paid no attention to me, and immediately began busying himself at his desk.

You could not believe the amount of confusion that powered the headache.

"Erm...hello?"

The man turned around. He had a hard face, masked by worry, and his eyes were black and filled with hatred and fear. He wore a layer of threadbare cloaks, all brown and dirty, but they looked warm.

"Sorry," he said, his voice hoarse. "I didn't see you had woken up."

He got up from his seat and went over to one corner, where he fumbled through some bags and found a load of bread and a flask of what looked like water.

Tossing them to me, I began tearing pieces from the stale bread and washed them down with water (yes, it was water).

"You know...I...ugh...I just have no idea what's going on here."

The man didn't respond. He just kept at whatever he was doing.

Here I was, in some strange room, no idea how I got here, and now some man pops into the room out of thin air, and the last thing on this man's mind is to explain what was happening. Did he know how much I was suffering?

© 2014 Mr. Misanthrope

Author's Note

I can't be sure whether this was part of something else, although if I had to guess, it's part of the Welcome Inn story I had going at some point, which isn't on here - the only bit that's connected to it is that Guilt story. There were at least two chapters, that's for certain, but I don't know what happened to them. However, like I said, this might not have even been part of the same idea, for all I know.

Written 11 January 2010.