Jilted
Jilted
She could remember the monsters that just stalked her, faceless masses that pounded at her bedroom door and shrieked laughter. Even when the laughter stopped she didn't believe she was awake. Too dark to see anything, and her eyes were open. She tried to reach up and brush at her eyes, but her hands didn't move an inch- imprisoned against the chair's arms, with the dull pressure of metal unyielding...
("Never going to break on you in the middle of a session, doesn't matter how much you fight..." He promised her, dangling the woven-titanium braid before her eyes before dropping it on the hard steel workbench. "This is what they use in Kijillo Prison. Watch." And he cut and hacked at it, pulled in vain at the bolt-cutters, dulled his bandsaw on the metal belt without leaving more than bright scratches.)
Even in the darkness there had been a faint glint, the workbench's status LEDs flashing the idle pattern. Now there was nothing. She shook her head and was rewarded with a feeling of cloth slipping, as if firmly held in place. A blindfold, taped in place if her guess was right, tamped down around the edges to make sure no ray of light got through. She'd warned him before that she didn't enjoy being left helpless like that, and moving her from the bed to this chair was going to land him in enough hot water already. When he came in and had his fun she was going to make it very clear what she thought.
("Four months and counting...might as well use those new restraints, hmm?" His grin was so eager, with the way he shifted his weight back and forth, tapping a slow cadence on the counter. She leaned forward with a soft laugh, telling him what her mother would have done if that purchase- a damnably expensive purchase- showed up in the financial records. "I miss her too, but she had millions, a few thousand astray couldn't have been missed..." And he reached out to stroke her cheek, gentle as ever, as she bit her lip. That money was inviolate.)
Her sense of unease returned. The blindfold must have been incredibly well-fastened, since she could now feel the palpable warmth of the overhead light everywhere her leather coveralls exposed, and it was still abyssal dark all around her. But the old arc lamp's buzz was so faint she had to concentrate to hear it. Something was blocking her ears, and as she took a deep breath in her next suspicion was confirmed: while she was asleep he had effectively removed her senses, plugging her head and sealing her in until she could only feel her immediate surroundings and taste the inside of her mouth.
(Days earlier he had comforted her, wiping the tears from her face as she collapsed against him and sniffled, the sobs long since exhausted. Whispering over and over how sorry he was that her mother had been taken, finally letting go hours later to trudge outside and sort through their mail with impatient trembling hands. Hands that clenched into fists when he came in empty-handed, then reached up to stroke along her back again.)
Pupils gaped hungrily for any glimmer of light, eyes twitching in their sockets under the blindfold. Their contract had specifically banned him from using sensory deprivation on her. The lamp's deadened buzz wormed into her head, and strapped into the oily metal of his chair, she began to shiver. Her nightmare flashed into her pitch-black vision: the laughing creatures were surrounding her again, claws scything just past her body where she couldn't see them, helpless whenever they chose to attack, while she begged for it to end...
("I'm sorry, honey, but the restraints are all I can get this year. If your mother had left us something...but, downsizing left me in the cold." She'd complained like a child, not at the missing gifts and trinkets but the knowledge that her classes left no time for any decent job, and their love was going to be bled white by hungry taxes and bills. Her stomach roiled at the thought of touching that obese bank account and attracting the government, but bile rose even higher at the thought of being paid to lie on her back and spread her legs for any greasy stranger who paid his money and-) laid hands on her!
She tried to scream at the heavy weight resting on her shoulder, but the shock was too great, her head swam for a moment as the nightmares fell away. The fictional ones, at least. There wasn't time to scrape her wits together before there was a harsh jerk at her ear, the plug coming free to let the thunderous electrical buzz fall on sensitive eardrums. Cringing away as much as the metal bands embracing her allowed, she barely heard a demand whispered into her ear. "ATM PIN. Now." Neon spots danced in her useless eyes, pulse hammering through chafed flesh at wrist and throat, her lungs straining to fill through the noseplugs that withered the tender membranes inside with scent-deadening rubbing alcohol...
The bubbling burning in her snout doubled to clamor above the new pain- her assailant had shoved something into her eye, distending the soft jelly and sending discolored rainbow streaks across the black field. Yowling as she tried to clap hands up to the wound, protect it from the hundreds of knives imagined hovering just beyond the other eye. She could feel the jelly pulsing behind her eyelids, a raw vulnerable spot beckoning to the world, announcing where to strike her... "PIN. Now." Then a rough hand seizing her head, harsh cloth glove clamping down on her skull. The breath caught in her throat still as she struggled to yowl out the numbers of her secret account, but the terror had driven them away.
A corner of the blindfold peeped up, scorching dilated pupils with the blaring arc light. She mewed and tried to jerk her head away, failed, and saw through the actinic blur a glitter of harsh metal before her eye. Blood raced in her veins, one eighty, two fifty beats per minute, and the sour tears wrenched from her eyeball quickened at the knowledge of how much filled that eyeball, vulnerable to any notion this god took. Metal struck like a cobra and she screamed through the gag, throat raw, as jackhammer agony burst into her skull, her eyelid torn open, and a messy twist of the blade let greasy fluid dribble down her face. Darkness returned, shot through with red. She trembled damnably.
"PIN. Now, or..." The trembling continued. She felt herself surrounded by a black universe of jagged blades. And her blood vessels so close to the surface. Her flesh would part like liquefying rotten fruit, she knew it. She knew a thousand knives danced in front of her remaining eye. Vitreous humor reached her lips, and her throat pulsed in vain to spew up the bile that would never escape her gag. It was controllable. Get the gag away and she could howl out the numbers, forfeit her millions for half-blinded existence...her teeth clamped shut. Too well had she been conditioned. No efforts of tongue and lips could part the ranks of teeth that bit her gag in place.
"I'll find it somewhere. They won't find you." Gurgling shriek that burbled into nothingness before she could voice it. A harsh intake of breath that set corroded membranes aflame with agony, the hand on her head inescapable, and from the blank void invisible razors danced on her face. She could feel their sharpness without them touching her. A billion knives swarmed around her. And divine wrath claimed her eye from out of the darkness, a squelch of jelly she felt and heard and tasted as the bile gushed up to her mouth, soaked the gag, lingered abominably on her tongue. Her eyes were both gone. The blindfold didn't matter. She was blind. Oh, God, she was blind. The earplugs went back in and bounced her screams back at her, reverbrating in her skull.
Terror drowned her, pumped more acid into her mouth to eat at gums and tongue. Hot urine puddled between her thighs. The air was made of knives pointed at her, jabbing into her sides with spurting pinpricks, opening canyons in her tender flesh like divine plows, cold metal tracing along her skin, sometimes only the flat, sometimes dragging over unbroken flesh for yards before a sudden unexpected sting. Her nerves sang, shrilled until they equalled the squalling in her head and the gargled moans behind her gag. She rested in a tornado of blades. There was a pause while she panted and drooled bile through a saturated gag, wounds gaping like labia, that lasted centuries before there came a strong jet of fluid up each nostril. Her nose was burned smooth inside so that she couldn't smell her own blood and piss. Her breath whistled through a dissolved septum. Oh God. No eyes or nose.
Touch. Touch and taste were all she had with the plugs in. Taste of stale vomit, drool, lacerated ruins where her tongue was gnawed in twenty places until scraps fell off like lace. The hundred razor bites in her body oozed a fear-numbed sting and the cold seep of blood leaving the body. Monstrous irregularities of heartbeat tore at her plugged hearing, shattering her desperate efforts to hear the world outside, track the infinite universe of blades still whirling past and waiting to eat her, strip her to the bone. More vomit seeped from her gag to land in the cesspool between her legs, red and yellow and brown mingling with drips of clear jelly. Her head lolled idiotically, and edged fury again tore from the darkness to pry out one earplug- still the arc buzz, shaking her numbed eardrum- before the stiletto sank just so. Cold slick metal filled her ear canal, found the fragile membrane of skin inside. Blood ran down the side of her face as dread silence returned.
The other plug slid out. The arc buzz still. The quietest sloshing of liquid, half-drowned by her broken screams from a throat long since hoarse with strain and rushing acids, nothing more than dumb mewings in her neck. A deluge of apocalyptic pain that ate into each gaping wound on her body, splashed on her like water, runnels of it poured over her body from all sides. Sticky eye sockets burned at it, her body twitched without smelling the nightmare fluid. Its vapors clung to her gag, but she couldn't sense it through the festering liquids already in her mouth...she gulped down vomit. The taste of it was there on her gag. Gasoline.
And heard with her one eardrum, coming on and cutting to silence, coming on and cutting to silence, a lighter sparking with flame.