Chapter 30 Avalynne #2
They lead me down a flight of winding stairs and into the basement beneath the convent. My feet fumble on the steps, and if the sisters weren't holding me upright, I probably would have tumbled down them and broken my neck.
I scream again, but it's no use. The gag stifles everything and makes it hard to breathe as we enter the basement and pass the baptismal chamber.
I can't be here again!
I can't fucking do this!
I thrash, kicking my legs, but my feet find nothing except air.
I lunge forward, trying to run, but the sisters yank me backward into their waiting hands.
I twist and jerk, sending the binds at my wrists sawing deeper into my raw flesh, and throw myself to the opposite side.
I try to shove one of the nuns with my shoulder, but I miss.
It's too dark, and I don't know this place like they do.
I can barely see much less fight.
Shadows blend with stone down here, and a sickly wetness sticks to my skin and invades my nostrils. It reeks of mildew and decay.
The nuns force me into another room, this one even darker than the long corridors that never seem to end.
Sputtering lightbulbs in mounted lanterns cast long shadows across the inky stone floor as the nuns unceremoniously strip me of my habit, the coarse fabric scratching my skin as it's torn away.
I fight, but it's three against one, and I'm not as strong as I used to be.
This place, the sad excuse for what they call meals, and the days of confinement have worn me down.
I'm left naked, and the cold sends goosebumps spattering my flesh. I shiver as the sisters deposit me in front of a massive altar of polished black stone. It takes up nearly half of the room with long steps in the same black stone that rise to a large pulpit and a matching marble lectern.
Behind the altar, a monstrous, all-metal crucifix hangs on the wall. It's like nothing I've ever seen before. Jesus Christ, skeletal and tall, hangs suspended in silver-plated glory against a matching cross, his sunken eyes two black pits staring down at me.
It's the Lord and Savior in metallic terror.
It's nightmarish and bone-chilling.
Reverend Mother strides up two steps to stand in front of me. I scream at her behind the linen gag.
"Like the early Christians of our Lord and Savior," she reaches down to hold me by the chin, her fingers on either side of my throat, "we now mark you, troubled child, with the signs of our faith and cleanse you of the demons that haunt your mind."
She releases me, and a breath later, I am pushed from behind. I stumble, my knees buckling to the hard stone, but with my hands bound, I can't catch myself. My head meets the steps.
Whack!
Pain explodes behind my right temple as my vision scrolls, black to color to black again. The world breathes with me, narrowing with each inhale and expanding with each exhale. Darkness slips from the shadows that cling to the walls and slithers in sable tendrils across my vision.
W … what is happening?
I raise my head, forcing myself up and back on my heels as the nuns busy themselves around me.
Smoke curls in the air as one of the sisters grabs hold of me and forces me upright. She drags me up the steps to the obsidian altar, and my feet scramble to keep up. I stagger and nearly fall again as smoke snakes around us.
We arrive in front of the altar, and my gaze slips unfocused to the slab of black marble. Now that we're close, I see that it's not a typical altar. No, this one has been carved by sharp tools, its surface inscribed with symbols that pulse with my vision.
The staurogram, the ichthys, the chi-rho, the alpha and omega, and more I don't recognize, all etched into the polished stone.
The symbols swell and recede, and the room along with it. A wave of dizziness tumbles over me, and my vision shutters as I collapse to my knees again. When I open my eyes, the nuns circle me with silver censers swinging from black iron hooks.
Smoke gyrates in the air as they murmur words I don't understand.
I try to rise to my feet but fall again as the sisters swing the smoking censers around me, all the while chanting foreign words.
The foggy mist curls from the censers between the tendrils of connected metal, escaping like winding serpents released into the air.
It pricks my eyes and makes me cough into the gag.
Reverend Mother moves in front of me before she opens her hands wide, the movement lifting the sleeves of her black habit like a raven spreading its wings. I blink up past her to the silvered crucifix blankly staring down at me as she begins to chant in Latin, her voice a droning incantation.
The empty eyes of Christ stare down and judge me, yet I feel nothing. I am as cold and dead as He is.
Reverend Mother hands one of the nuns a hairskin flogger, strips of rough fabric connected by a braided handle. The falls tickle my shoulder as the whip is passed over me, and a breath later, a snap splits the air before I register the pain.
I scream into the cloth as fire divides my flesh.
My heart, my breath, my vision, all of it stutters.
It is agony.
"Misereatur tui omnipotens Deus," Reverend Mother says above me, her voice rising above the muffled sound of my suffering.
"May Almighty God have mercy on you," the nuns repeat.
Snap!
A fresh wave of agony carves my flesh in two. I cry out, and the world around me melts further, blackness weaving with the climbing tendrils of rising smoke.
Snap!
I scream, gagging as my vision dims. Bile edges up my esophagus, and I swallow it down.
The room melts even faster now, dissolving to nothing at the seams, as the flogger is placed on the altar, and something starts to move across my back. It digs into the raw wounds and wrenches another anguished scream from me.
The thing continues up and over my shoulders, across my breasts and clavicle, then lower, over my belly, and down my legs.
My head lolls forward, and I watch as the hands of nuns draw symbols on my skin with sticks of charcoal, their rough strokes smudging on my flesh.
The cross.
The anchor.
The dove.
The Christian symbols brand my flesh as Reverend Mother's chanting grows louder. Latin words blend together into a single, oppressive drone.
Snot clogs my nostrils as I drift further into the darkness. My body trembles, and I hear Reverend Mother's voice, distant and echoing.
"You will be cleansed, child," she tells me. "You will be purified."
The stench of smoke and spilled blood clogs my nostrils as my mind drifts into the void. Then darkness devours me, and I fall into an inky oblivion.