Good Afternoon, welcome to my daily writing exercise. Please leave your feedback and your own responses to the prompt.
Prompt: You wake up in a warehouse with no memory of how you got there. The warehouse office is filled with newspaper clippings of missing people from the past 20 years. Who is the kidnapper and why are you in this warehouse?
Genre: Mystery
Source: 70+ Mystery Writing Prompts & Story Ideas | Imagine Forest
Time Spent: 45 minutes
Word Count: 1646
Prompt: You wake up in a warehouse with no memory of how you got there. The warehouse office is filled with newspaper clippings of missing people from the past 20 years. Who is the kidnapper and why are you in this warehouse?
The purple light of sunrise is streaming through the half-broken windows high on the wall of an old warehouse. The dawn light adds an eerie aspect to the body lying prone on metal stairs heading up to the warehouse office. If anyone had come into the building, unlikely as it had been sitting unused for thirty years or more, they would be forgiven for thinking the figure dead, such was his position and the blood around his head. Only a closer inspect would have revealed the slow breathing of one unconscious.
The man stirs as the light reflects off metal in the rafters into his face. He opens his eyes and quickly shuts them in pain. Opening his lids more slowly he takes in the room and sits up with a groan. His body is scratched and bruised, which he suspects were from falling down the stairs and his head is absolutely throbbing with pain. Attempt to reach up and check the still slowly oozing wound on the side of his head and he discovers that his hands are bound, crudely with a belt.
For a moment confusion overrides the pain, enough for him to realize that the belt appears to have been tied around his hands in a hurry, and it does not take him long to free his hands. This allows him to inspect the deep gash on the side of his head and the extensive bruising around it. Even the light brush of his finger brings the radiating pain back, as well as a new stinging from the contact. Weighing his options of heading down into the maze of old crates and boxes below to find an exit, and going up to the office, the man chooses to head up, wrapping the belt around his left hand as a sort of makeshift boxing glove.
Walking up the stairs in painful, his muscles are sore, his joints are stiff, and if he had to guess, his left ankle was, at minimum, severely sprained and multiple ribs on both sides were broken. As he gingerly climbs the stairs, he carefully checks his pockets for a cellphone. He doesn’t find one, but had a weird suspicion that he likely wouldn’t get service in a warehouse such as this.
In his condition, it takes several minutes and a lot of effort to reach the top where he, thankfully, finds the door unlocked. Opening the door with caution, the man finds himself in what appears to be a standard office. There is a desk, filing cabinets, several chairs, and all manner of paper files scattered around. There is a cot and some clothes in one corner, all looking to be recently used, in one corner. On the opposite wall of the room from the door, however, is something that at first the man doesn’t understand. A series of bulletin boards with photographs, newspaper articles, and some written notes. Calling out hoarsely and with as much breath as he could manager, the man checks if there is anyone asleep or hiding in the room, but gets met only with silence.
Limping over to the chair that appears to be the most together, the man lowers himself onto the seat as gently as he can, although it still generates a deep wince and grunt from him. Using the desk as grip, the man is able to wheel his way over to the board. With his head still pounding, only slightly quieted by his interest in this wall, it took him a few moments to glance the material on the board.
Much of it was undated, but the newspaper clips and the time and date stamps on some of the photographs indicated, showed that the clippings all went back at least twenty years and they were all around the disappearance and murder of multiple people in the area, and the manhunt for their killer.
The man recognized the names of the victims and what was done to them and seemed lost in thought. Perhaps it was his throbbing head and the concussion that was making him dizzy but the pictures before him seemed to come to life and swim before his yes. Closing his eyes and then opened them, hoping his vision would improve. The pictures were very real, but no longer seemed to be dancing around. He pondered wondering why these people looked familiar. Was one of those a relative? A sister? A partner? he just couldn’t be sure.
As he gave the items on the wall, and the rest of the office another look around, more things came back to his memory. Rolling over to the desk, he opened the odd drawer and seemed to know what was in them before he did so and there was a familiarity with the layout that he couldn’t explain. Did he live here? He found that he had little more than jumbled memory of his life and his head hurt when he tried.
The sun was now fully up, bathing the factory in a combination of golden sunlight and deep shadows and the man continued searching the room. Part of him said that he should go get help, especially if he had any internal injuries. . .how did he know something like that but not who he was? The other part of him felt comfortable in that place.
At last his searching brought him to a locked filing cabinet and after looking around he found the key in his pocket. Opening the cabinet he found journal after journal filled with writing, at least half of which was illegible to him on a quick flip through, with the name Tom Warner on the front.
Picking a journal at random, he sat back and started to read. This Tom Warner was clearly angry, talking at length about missed opportunity, people holding him back, and always feeling like an outcast. The writing went on and on and as he read it, the writing seemed to tickle his brain more and more and the ineligible parts became clearer and clearer. He had a point, this Tom, society was setup to keep people like them down. It was all a conspiracy, all a scam, that only those that were corrupt and dirty could get ahead. To be true to yourself, to get ahead, you had to compromise oneself, or one had to take it by force. If fairness was not an option, vengeance would have to do.
Like the last piece of a puzzle, sliding into place, it all came back to him. After years of disappointment, he had found his first snake, a manager who had fired him to help her bottom line. He had gotten lucky after that one, but he felt a kind of satisfaction he had never known and after that it became easier. This warehouse, long abandoned, was the place he had taken his third snake. It had been his home ever since. He had floated on the edges of society, as he always had, always keep his eyes open for his next snake. He knew them when he saw them, those snakes in the grass, and when he found them he found ways to follow them, learn their routines, and then cleanse the earth of them when he had the opportunity. He followed the investigations of each disappearance, had even been questioned a few times, but just like always he was overlooked and unseen and un-regarded.
In this realization, just a second too late, he heard the foots stops on the stairs. He grabbed a gun he kept in his desk, and was just raising it when the door burst open and three shots rung out. The first tore through his left shoulder, the second smashed several more of his ribs, and the final, from his gun as he fell backward ripped through the wooden planks that served as the roof of the office. He landed on his back with a thud and was unconscious again.
Heavily sedated, he slipped in and out of consciousness on the way to the hospital and he thought back on the previous weeks. He had found another snake, a shabbily dressed man who always seemed to have money, and was getting into people’s business. Surely someone who took advantage of others. The man was cagey with his movements, it had taken him twice as long as usual to find the man’s routine, but find it he did, and a kick syringe of sedative and his car well placed saw him get the man back to the warehouse with none the wiser. As he was getting the man up to his office, to question him about his activities so he knew all the sins he was purging form the world when the man had awoken with a start. Whoever this person was, he had awoken suddenly before he could get the man fully tied to one of the room’s pillars.
Taking only a second to register his surroundings, the man had bellowed in rage and charged at him, lowering his shoulder and sending them both flying out the door of the office and down the stairs. He remembered his ankle getting stuck and twisting with a sharp pop, several crushing impacts on the metal stairs were reasonable, as he had guessed, for his bruises and broken ribs. The last thing he remember was the searing pain of his head careening into the edge of one of the steps. Whoever that man was, be it cop or private eye, he must have not been as severely injured and gone for help.
Tom new that he was destined for a court case and likely a life sentence (probably several) but the world might finally hear him, might finally see them, and he could educate everyone on the REAL dangers facing the world. A smiled played on his sleeping face.
A bit of a morbid one, but hope you enjoy this scene that I wrote to a prompt about Mystery! I would love to read your response to this prompt as well and also what you think of what I wrote!
I hope you all have a wonderful day, get the chance to do or experience something creative, and I’ll catch you on the next one.
– Jon
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