Closer Now

The waves embraced Cin like a lost lover. 

The dog thing jumped into the water after her, the surfboard long forgotten in the waves. It swam for Cin, grabbed her arm in its mouth and started to pull her deeper. The waves whirled and swirled around them, frothing and bubbling with chaos and noise. There was nothing that Cin could do anymore to know the up from down or make any sense of anything around her. It was sheer chaos and the water was pressuring its way inside her mouth. She felt herself blackout from the lack of oxygen in her lungs. The dog  thing kept pulling her in some direction only known to itself. Just as she was about to swallow her first desperate mouthful of water, the dog thing pulled her out of the water's surface. Instead of water, she sucked in lungful of tepid oxygen. She fell on the cold surface and coughed till she could not cough anymore. 

Finally, when she got hold of her senses, she got up and saw where she was. It was a small, dark room with a door at one end. The only smell in the room was of the sea and she saw that she had been dragged into the room through a hole in the ground where the water still frothed. She was glad that she didn't pass out and exit this place. She could feel that she was near her objective of finding the boy and once she found him who knew how she'd get out of here. She went up to the door and pushed it open. It opened to a staircase that wound up inside the tower. Cin climbed and climbed. Weary as she was from the ordeal in the village and the swim through the water, she was soon tired and wound up. The stairs just didn't seem to end. Finally, when she gave up hope and sat down on a stair, waiting for some kind of divine intervention to show her the path. She heard footsteps coming towards her from the stairs above her. She craned her neck to get a look at whoever was coming down to meet her. A rank smell of rot assailed her nostrils even before she saw the person. A twinge of horror shot up her spine as multiple thoughts of who it could be fluttered through her mind. She was afraid that it'd be the butcher with his flattened face and mad eyes but it was something worse than her imagination. 

It was her mother. In a wedding dress. 

"Hello, daughter dearest," she said and sat down besides Cin.

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Chapter 18. By the time you reach this stage in a story, it seems just like any other story in the world. 

To the new and old readers, thanks for sticking around. I do this for me first, and then you ;)