What did I do today? I did the Sunday crossword and I wrote this in my weekly writing group:
The assassin analyzed the unlocked door, not so much frightened as puzzled by its sudden appearance and by the possibility — or threat — of what might lay behind it. There had been no door the first time she had circled through this room, perhaps only an hour earlier, she was certain of that, and all of the other doors she had encountered scattered through Benedict’s maze had been firmly locked, or had opened to brick walls, empty rooms, traps meant to deceive, distract, or kill. Benedict’s strange sense of humor showed in every one of them, and the assassin remembered, not for the first time, why she had taken special delight in the thought of killing him.
And yet she had been sloppy. She’d not taken him seriously; a madman, she’d accepted that, and the newsreel footage her employers had shown her would have been reason enough to end Benedict’s life, even without the mountains of other, even less palatable, evidence they had accumulated. But she had thought of him as just another target, and an easy one at that, and that, obviously, had been a mistake.
He’d trapped her in this maze of windowless rooms two, or maybe three hours ago now, and there was no reason to think he was even still in the building, still in the city. She knew him, or his file, well enough to know he’d want to watch; this whole basement expanse was obviously some kind of torture playground; just because she couldn’t see the cameras or Benedict’s laughing eye didn’t mean they were not there. But Benedict could be watching on the run, his private jet at the ready, perhaps already in the air. The sooner she got out of here, the better chance she would have of picking up his trail.
So the door. It was obviously another trap, or dead end, but she had limited options. She’d been drugged when they left her here — again, she’d been sloppy — and if there was any other way out, it had not revealed itself in the last few hours. She tried the doorknob, felt it give, but hesitated at pulling the door open. She knew she’d seen this room before — there were the notches she’d carved in the far column with her knife, the blade they’d for some reason left her. She’d been traveling in circles for twenty minutes before she decided to start marking her trail, but this room had definitely been along it. She remembered the columns, the gray walls, and lowered ceiling. She did not remember any doors, least of all this one, in this particular wall.
She was being foolish hesitating, she knew; Benedict was on the run and she needed to escape if she had any hope of tracking him, stopping him, killing him. She didn’t know where the door led, or how it had suddenly just appeared, but she knew she had to open it. She’d been everywhere else down here, and opening this new door was the only option left.
Opening it would turn out to be a huge mistake.
At the time, though, it had surprised her by being just like any other door, swinging open not to reveal any new danger or pitfall, nothing jumping out at her to find itself at the other end of her knife. It was just a door, and it swung open to reveal what was just another room.
But it was the woman sitting in that other room that caught the assassin’s immediate attention. The assassin could see the woman through the doorway, leaning back in a wooden chair against the opposite wall. The lights above the woman flickered, then came on stronger, perhaps activated by movement or the door opening or Benedict’s own sick whim. The woman was older, her thinning hair beginning to gray, but there was no mistaking who she was. She sprang to her feet when she saw the assassin, the chair falling to the floor beneath her, and raced over to the open door.
“Oh thank god,” the woman said. “I was worried you’d never come.”
No, the assassin thought, there was no mistaking who the woman was, but there was also no way this could possibly be. This was some kind of trick, Benedict’s worst yet, and she readied her knife for whatever would come next.
The woman staring desperately at her now was the assassin herself.
Not the most eventful day, but that was Sunday.
Great piece. I wonder why she was left the knife. Maybe if this turned out to be an assassin game, you could reconcile some of the mystery in the narrative. For example, her being left the knife was a test of some kind. Happy Writing.