Moving Images Challenge #55

PRISONER

He opened his eyes, wondering why he couldn't see past the bottle lamp swinging over his head.  There must be a wind, he surmised, though he was damned if he could feel it.  He blinked, and then blinked again, and again, trying to get the other lights he could see into clearer focus.  No good.  They remained fuzzily flickering just out of his reach.  He wondered why he couldn't see them more clearly, but no answer suggested itself to his still somewhat addled brain. 

He stretched to alleviate the stiffness he felt in his arms, and found that they were bound fast to the arms of the chair in which he had just discovered he was seated.  No wonder he was stiff!  Taking a further visual assessment, he found not only his forearms and wrists bound, but his chest and thighs as well.  And judging by the feeling, or lack thereof, in his ankles and legs, he was as securely bound down there as well.

It figured!  The one time he was on legitimate business -- if you can call a half-hearted vacation in the desert a vacation -- he was captured.  Way to go, Brand!  He shook his head, irritated by the prospect of having to fight to escape.  He was tired, so tired, he had wanted to crawl away from his last battle and hadn't been able to do it without help from a most unlikely source.  And now this.  Can't a fellow get a break?

He listened.  Might as well make use of his enhanced senses if he were to have even half a chance of escaping without serious or life-altering -- or life-ending, truth be told! -- injuries.  He heard nothing, not even the cry of insects.  He only knew of one place that was insect-free, but he could not imagine how he or his captors could have gotten there from where he had been, unless they were...  He stopped that thought in its tracks, because to admit that possibility meant he also had to acknowledge the even more frightening possibility that he was in the last place anyone like him would ever wish to be.

So far, his limited investigations into his situation had made the following things crystal clear -- he was a prisoner, and alone.  No one was with him...the vibrations of their energy would have set his nape hairs quivering, particularly if they were outside his field of vision.  He tried desperately to free his forearms from the restraints which held them down, but he knew it was a futile attempt even as he wiggled his fingers uselessly. 

Giving up on his latest escape plans before they had even gained ground in his mind, he moved on to another of the senses he could deploy in his efforts to gain much-needed intel on his situation, and make better plans than the just-foiled one.  He looked straight ahead, and sniffed, like a dog on the hunt for his bitch in heat.  His acute sense of smell picked up, far out on the very edges of his olfactory range, an odor that sickened him, and made him wrinkle his nose.  It fluctuated in and out of range, a sonar blip appearing and disappearing on the screen of his mind, a vaguely familiar smell having some dangerous import that just escaped his memory, though he tried hard to bring it into focus.

Closer, and more sharply pungent, was the scent of meat at the very end of freshness, or at the very start of rottenness, depending on how sensitive your nose was.  His nose was so sharp that he gagged at the scent and searched for other scents to erase the one that now dominated.  Up close, aside from the sweat that had dried on his skin and clothes, and the scent of incense lingering in the air, as though the stick had long since burned itself out, and the bog that lay somewhere to his right, was the jasmine.  The sweet smell was almost overpowering, and it gave him pause.  Where could there be such a gathering of jasmine that it almost made one swoon?  The only place he knew...  He let that thread go too, as quickly as he had the first disquieting conclusion, but began to feel panic waking from its deathlike sleep in his chest.  He never panicked, and he would not start now.

Only one more avenue was open to him.  The air was cool, but that meant nothing if it was the result of its being night time, which was likely given the lanterns in the space he occupied.  He pressed his feet down, hoping to discern the nature of the ground beneath them, but was disappointed (fancy that!) to discover that his captors had apparently left his sandals on, as all he could feel were the ridges and hollows left by the imprint of his feet on the smoothly supple leather soles.

He shivered as though he were in the freezing cold, because all that he had managed to discover with his superior sensory investigation was what he had known almost from the start.  He was a prisoner and alone.  That was the clear bottle lamp in his situation.  The rest of the evidence -- bringing with it the fear that he was in the hands of captors he would gladly die to avoid -- was as blurry as the lights just out of focus.  He was screwed.  He did not know where he was, who his captors were -- even if he suspected -- or why he had been taken.

He didn't like the odds.  He didn't like them at all.  Best not to think on them, he decided, but how to occupy his mind, and take it away from the path it seemed hellbent on pursuing?  Ah...

He began to count the times the bottle lamp swayed before his eyes...