Basement

[Cade]

The door to my basement has a bolt lock.
It's dark in my basement, even with the single incandescent bulb fighting against the shadows vainly. There's a dankness to the shelf-less wooden walls that barely hold out the earth. If you listen too closely, you may regret what you hear in those walls.
The creak of the loose stair boards reminds you to pay attention, you don't want to stumble after all. You may not recover.
Dust rises from your foot hitting the cold floor (at last). There's too many obscured corners, you immediately think looking around my basement. Whether cluttered with random debris from forgotten lives - the trash of ghosts, or just pitch black abyss threatening to swallow the space whole. 
Why are you here, you wonder as you creep further away from the rickety staircase...why are you creeping deeper is a better question! Yet, your feet shuffle forward, light and reason to your back, bathing the descent in your own dancing shadow, mocking you forward.
Forward in my basement is a lonely mattress on that dusty floor. It's a small mattress and looks as if it wouldn't accommodate a person comfortably, covered in stains of various shapes and colors. One of the corners looks chewed, surely an angry dog must have attacked it fiercely and without remorse, age tainted stuffing spilling out.
A sparkle catches your attention, something serpentine across the floor from the darkness somewhere. Your eyes follow it, link by link, creeping closer toward you, until you're staring straight down. There is a metal cuff wrapped around your ankle attached to that heavy chain. You see yourself as you really are: naked and filthy, stripped of your humanity and kept as an ***...scratch that, less than an ***. How dare you think so highly of yourself. You deserve another beating. More *** and indignity. Fresh trauma to dream you escaped and disassociate...

...in my basement.