Samuel Grady, known as Sam on account of his father being Samuel, woke up with a massive headache. He clenched his jaws tightly against the pain, but that only made the pain worse. So he started counting deep breaths and tried to relax his face. It felt like the time that Pater Wyatt's eldest boy had convinced a few of the younger town kids to drink some of the sacramental wine from his dad's church supplies. Sam had never received a walloping so bad in his life than when he was found drunk and asleep in the pig pen the next morning. The headache when he woke up felt like it was eating his eyes from the inside, just like this one did. The problem was, Sam couldn't remember drinking the day before.
When he was finally able to peel up one eyelid, all he could see was darkness. This helped assure him that his headache would not get worse thanks to light searing his overly sensitive retinas, so he pried the other eye open as well.
Dark shapes stood out in the blackness,but he could not tell what they were. He was almost definitely sitting on a mattress, but it was so smooth. Like every feather was laying just right inside so that no pointy shafts stuck up and poked him in the back. He had only ever heard of a mattress so soft once before. A boy who worked in Master Douglas' home said that all the beds were soft like this one. The boy ran away shortly after that. He was probably punished for lying and knew he wouldn't be accepted as an apprentice anywhere when he made age, so thought he would have a better chance in another town. That happened sometimes, kids got in trouble and ran off to find somewhere better. Every now and then, they would be brought back to be punished, but that was happening less and less the last few years. Master Douglas didn't seem to care so much about keeping bad seeds amongst the good grain anymore.
Master Douglas. A memory tried to surface in Sam's mind, but he couldn't quite grasp it. It had something to do with the village head, but...Sam groaned and rubbed his forehead, letting it slip away for now.
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A sound, muffled , caught his attention. He slowly sat up and looked around. A very faint line of light was near what he thought might be the ground a few feet away. Sam lowered himself off the bed and onto cold wooden floorboards. Carefully patting his hand out in front as he crawled, to make sure that he didn't bump into anything, he inched closer to the light. His fingers traced the line, the gap letting light through, up and around as far as he could reach without rising off of his knees. His hand brushed against smooth metal just inside the vertical line he was following, a line rising up at almost a perfect corner from the ground. Even thought he couldn't see anything, he still closed his eyes to concentrate. The metal stuck out from what felt like a wood surface, a smooth barrel flaring out into something shaped like a bread roll that moved just a little when touched firmly.
"A knob," he thought to himself. "It's a door." Once he thought the words he knew it was obviously a door, the line of faint light at the bottom couldn't be anything other than that. He was never praised as the smartest kid in town, but even he couldn't believe he hadn't figured it out sooner. A room with a bed had to have a door, didn't it?
The strange sound came from just outside the door this time, and the light dimmed as though something were passing in front of the flame. Sam lowered his hands back down to the ground, and then laid his body flat against the wooden surface. He pushed his face closer so that his left eye would be right against the crack. The door was thick, and he could not see but a sliver just above the floor outside. Closer to the gap he could tell the sound was something like scraping, like pulling a hay bale across the barn floor when his scrawny arms couldn't reach around it to pick it up. With that connection, he could tell that the dark shape was something being drug along the ground right outside his door. He watched until it passed out of his sight, leaving only dark floorboards to be seen.