Chapter 2
2
N ightmares are my constant companions in this godforsaken place.
Blood oozing down walls. Spiders scuttling across my skin.
Looming, faceless, hooded figures.
These days I have a hard time discerning what is truth and what is dredged from the recesses of my mind.
However, none of those awful half-awake, half-asleep visions are more ghastly than the man .
He leers at me from across the room.
This man controls everything and everyone in this pitiful existence I now inhabit. Every morning, we’re administered our medicine, and he strolls through our grimy mattresses lined up in rows along the bare floor with a superior look in those hazel eyes I once thought could be trusted.
“ I’m your master now .” He tells me each morning as those pills slide down my throat at knife-point and once again leave me feeling like I can’t even trust my own memory.
How did I come to be in this living hell ?
My life as I knew it has gone, and I’m terrified that soon, I won’t still retain the last threads of remembering who, or what I was.
It took me over an hour to recall my best friend’s name the other night. As I lay curled on my side, sweat covering my limbs and shivering relentlessly, I tried to sound out various letters. Starting from A and progressing through the alphabet, it took me an age as I mouthed the syllables and consonants until something clicked into place. Rita.
Other than Rita, there’s no one to notice that I’m missing. When you’re a foster reject and a perpetual loner, the city lights of Port Macabre easily swallow up souls like mine. Has she tried to look for me? In clearer moments, I wonder if maybe she found her happily ever after and that’s why she didn’t show up pounding on my front door.
A part of me likes to think she found her dream man and has been whisked off to float on some multi-million dollar yacht overlooking the crystal waters of the Mediterranean somewhere.
I’m too tired to cry. There aren’t any reserves of tears left to shed. I think they all left me when I first woke up in this gruesome place. My damp pillow beneath my cheek had absorbed them all as my eyes leaked, and my soul sobbed in agony.
It’s impossible to know how long it took before I woke up. My last memory is of seeing champagne and glass coating the floor. Of seeing his hands, no longer covered in tattoos.
Did he ever have tattoos in the first place? Was it all just an elaborate ruse? A performance by their secret society to lure in unsuspecting, foolish girls like me?
Were the lines of ink, I was so sure of seeing, only a temporary disguise?
My skin crawls when I glimpse flashes of memory, remembering how I let them use my body .
There are men who run this hellish place. Men, who only have to enter a room, and I see the others around me flinch. Some try to hide it, and do so remarkably well, but even through the constant waves of headaches and nausea plaguing me, I still see the way they never turn their backs to any of them.
Others are much more openly terrified of them all. Fear pales their sallow faces, and some of the girls here try to sneak into each other’s cots for protection during the night.
I might, if I wasn’t so out of it half the time to know how to even make that decision.
Am I more terrified of them, or my own mind? I’m hardly certain anymore.
“Posey.” The man with the hazel eyes barks my name. “Follow me.”
We leave the room with bare concrete walls and an ever-present smell of mildew. I trail behind on unsteady legs. This is the worst part, when we’re summoned.
Passing along the narrow corridor in this windowless place, the garish overhead fluorescent strip lighting casts everything in a sickly green, including my skin. We pass rows upon rows of doors. They’re all sealed shut, but the noises coming from behind them make me want to vomit.
Some contain screams.
Some contain rhythmic thudding.
Some contain the distinct wails of children.
I feel nausea rising and have to swallow bile back as the young, helpless cries ring out loudly from behind one particular unmarked door.
This place is hell, and I’m following the man who keeps the keys to our purgatory.
What I would do to be able to fight, to flee, to rescue the others who are stuck in this place enduring the frightening, utterly sickening practices he trades in. There’s no doubt it’s flesh. Willing. Unwilling. Bartered and sold to whoever he deems fit.
Up until now, the only reason I’ve been called upon has been to dose me up with whatever they keep shoving into my mouth while threatening my life. Yet, I’m too drugged and numb to figure out how to get to the part where they just take my life, instead of dragging out this torture. I’d much rather choose the option that ends all of this, but they know if I’m out of my head, I can’t make decisions, much less actually fight them on their commands.
We reach a door at the end, and he ushers me inside. Those eyes that I don’t recognize anymore are beady and calculating. How I ever found myself under this man’s spell is beyond me.
When I enter the room, I stumble a little.
There are two other men, already seated in plastic chairs, who allow their open interest in my body to coat their faces. One stares at my breasts. The other lets his lip curl into a gruesome snarl as he fixates on a spot much lower on my body.
Making this worse, the clothing issued in this place is hardly much more than sleep shorts and a tank. It’s revealing and threadbare, leaving me standing before them feeling much the same as if I were fully naked.
My shoulders fold in on themselves, my arms wrap my torso, and I try to cover my cleavage. I feel so unwell and shaky; there’s every chance I might just collapse in a heap on the floor right here.
“Don’t you recognize them?” The man at my back shuts the door.
Shivers wrack my body.
The last thing I want to do right now is look their way. So, I let my gaze drift around for a second before I take a proper look at these sick fucks.
This room is functional, and its purpose is painfully clear. Against one wall is a double bed, with nothing more than a plastic sheet attached to the mattress.
On the other side of the room stands a tripod and camera.
If I felt nauseous before, now I’m downright swallowing back vomit that threatens to rise up.
“Well? Don’t tell me you don’t know who they are?”
This time, I have to listen to him. That much I know about the man who controls everything within this prison of abuse and fear.
Clutching my arms tighter to myself, I raise my chin in their direction. Of course, I don’t know them. However, there are enough doubts in my mind—enough dark thoughts that point to conclusive evidence that my mind cannot be trusted—that I begin to second-guess everything.
One of them is broad shouldered, big framed, but he doesn’t have long hair. He’s the most obvious figure who might have been wearing the skull mask drenched in crimson. On the night at the mansion, he didn’t speak, didn’t make a noise. However, what I see before me means absolutely nothing because he could have cut his hair off since then, and if he speaks now, well, I don’t know what he sounded like to begin with.
Where the other man is concerned, I have even less to go on in order to determine if he was one of the masked strangers. It’s hard to discern if he was the one with gold splattered across the skull covering his face. I can’t make out his eyes from here. Are they blue? Right now, he looks like any tall man with short brown hair wearing a suit might look.
To make matters more confusing and terrifying, is that he didn’t say anything that night, either. So all I’m left with is a fucked up brain, a cocktail of drugs in my bloodstream, and a sinking feeling about why I’ve been called in here.
“She really is nothing more than a whore.” The man standing off to one side shakes his head. “Can’t even remember who fucked her. The cunt took three dicks at the same time. Look at her. Doesn’t have a clue who jammed inside her body until cum oozed down her legs like a proper little fucktoy dumpster.”
All of them laugh.
Shame floods my body.
The night we played that game inside the mansion, what we did together… I let them use me. They taunted me then, and here they sit, openly mocking me for being part of their stupid secret society invitation.
A ticket to a sex club. More like a ticket to a land of nightmares.
Now I stand surrounded by vultures who are going to peck at my flesh until I’m broken. Nothing more than a shell for them to discard when they’re done.
My eyes drift back to the camera, poised and waiting.
Oh god.
They really are going to drug me, gangbang me, and film the whole thing.
This time, the nausea overwhelms me. I spot a trash can in the corner, and collapse to my knees in front of it. Clinging to the metal rim, I hurl up nothing but water, filling the room with retching sounds.
“Might need to up the dosage on this bitch,” one says, as if I’m not even in the room.
“They want them conscious on camera, not lifeless corpses.”
“Yeah, well, sometimes they’ll just get what they get. There’s always a buyer for the shit where the chick is passed out.”
I retch again, not even water left in my stomach to discard now, before crumpling to the floor.
“Get her on the mattress. We’ll have to make do.”
Voices move around like a swirl. I don’t know who’s speaking, nor do I fucking care. I’m about to get violated by these sick bastards, and I can hardly see straight, let alone stand up.
“Wait,” I mumble. Sticking out a hand, in a pathetic effort to try and stall the inevitable. “Please.” My eyelids feel so heavy. I just want to crawl my way back along the concrete walls to the relative safety of my bare mattress.
“You’ve fucked us all before.” A voice sneers. “Don’t pretend you’ve got any morals now, bitch.”
Swallowing down pooling saliva and the acrid taste of bile, I suck in a shaky breath.
“I—I can’t.” The lie forms quickly, despite my sluggish brain. “I’m… you know… bleeding.”
I feel the three of them standing over me, even if I can’t bring myself to look up at them from my position, kneeling on the floor, with clammy palms bracing my weight.
“Good money in that shit,” one says.
My stomach flops.
“Some buyers pay a premium to see ‘em bleed everywhere,” another adds.
The blood has already long drained from my face, and now it feels as though it vacates my limbs, too. A dull roar fills my ears, like an approaching freight train.
“When did it start?” My head gets yanked back, and my eyes go blurry. Their three forms looming over me all swarm into blackened shapes rather than anything discernible. Not that I want to see their faces or remember them. I’d rather not have any memories of who these monsters are.
“This morning,” I croak, while sending a silent prayer to fuck knows who that they don’t attempt to confirm my lie.
I’d hate to think what the consequence might be for me if they discovered the truth.
“Fuck,” one of them barks. My head is roughly shoved away. “Nah, we got specific orders on this one. What they wanna see, how they want the scene to go, and that ain’t it. ”
I nearly sob with relief.
“Get her the fuck out of here.”
Cold, demanding hands pull on my upper arm until I’m forced to stand and marched toward the door with vile words pouring into my ear.
“Don’t think this is over. You’ve bought yourself four more days.”