Harrowing

by S. E. Amadis

  Another cloth clamped itself over my eyes, tied itself into a knot behind my head. As I battered with my hands to free myself, a bolt of white electricity arced through me. My head exploded into unbearable pain, followed by utter blackness.

  *

  I woke up. I felt like I’d just come out of a nap.

  Except I never napped sitting up in a hard wooden chair with my stilty legs cramped into a minuscule space underneath me.

  I tried to lift my head. The insides of my head were pounding as if someone had turned my head into a drum and was playing heavy metal on it. As if someone was bludgeoning me right now this very minute with a baseball bat.

  I took a deep breath. Ropes gouged into my chest, constricting my lungs. I raised my head. To my relief, the blindfold had disappeared and I was able to have a good look around.

  I was in some sort of cramped, rustic space, like a shed. With crooked wood panels for walls, with wide spaces between them that let the light pass through. The ground was dirt, unpaved. A series of empty wooden counters lined the walls, but there was nothing on them. I glanced up. One bare light bulb hung down.

  I wondered who had done this to me. Who would dare touch Bruno Jarvas, the regional Vice President of a major corporation as important and international as Herbert and Mons?

  I twisted my wrists behind my back, hoping the idiot who had done this to me wouldn’t have had enough wits to fashion a tight knot. But I was mistaken, of course. My wrists were tied so firmly not only was I unable to move them, the more I wriggled them, the more deeply the cords cut in, blocking off my circulation.

  Well, there was nothing more to it but to sit here and wait. I imagined whoever had done this to me wouldn’t be able to resist eventually making himself known to me. I doubted it was his intention to just leave me here to fester away and die of hunger and thirst.

  It took a while, but as I’d predicted, eventually he did show up. I heard the screech of tires as a car pulled up outside. Scuffling footsteps. A wail of protest. Then the door banged open. I blinked at the sudden onrush of sunlight, blinding me.

  Someone dark and hazy dove through pushing an individual in ahead of him. I recovered my eyesight with painstaking slowness. Eventually succeeded in looking up. To my amazement, I found myself staring into the indignant and furious gaze of Sandy Bleckley. A dishevelled, deranged-looking Sandy trussed up with ropes like a turkey.

  Our captor dragged Sandy over to my side and tossed her to the ground, where he secured her with more ropes to the legs of my chair. I had no idea how he’d got a hold of her but I imagined a Taser worked wonders on everyone.

  I studied our captor with undisguised hatred. It was the most ordinary, unremarkable man I’d ever seen. Medium height and average weight, dressed in black from top to toe with his face concealed by a black balaclava that revealed only a set of deep brown eyes framed by lined lids with the hint of crow’s feet disappearing back into the headgear.

  “Let us out of here, you stupid lout!” Sandy shrieked, battling against her bindings with rage. “Let us out right now or I’m suing you.”

  Our captor ignored her completely, turning his full gaze entirely onto me.

  “You did what you did to our sweet little Annasuya Rose,” he said to me, his voice thickly muffled by coarse wool. “Now you’ll have to pay.”

  I gulped.

  “Pay?” I vociferated. “I did what was right. I was delivering my message to her.”

  The significance of what he’d just said hit me all of a sudden. I squinted.

  “How do you know what I did to Annasuya?” I asked. “And who are you? Why do you even care? She’s just one of thousands of unskilled office clerks in this city. What is she to you?”

  My anonymous captor only grunted. He stepped out through the door, returning a minute later with a machete. He planted himself in front of me, his legs spread wide apart, and studied me over. My eyes must have been bulging out of my face as I stared at him in horror.

  “So, where did you attack Annasuya Rose? What do people usually do when they rape someone?” He ploughed ahead with his plans without any compunction. He pointed at my crotch with the tip of his machete. “Is that what you used?”

  He raised his weapon high over his head. I tried with all my might to skew myself to one side, straining against my bindings with greater terror than I’d ever felt in my entire life. What Brionna had done to me in the past struck me as mere child’s play compared to the carnage this ghastly being was apparently capable of wreaking on me.

  “Wait!” I screamed. “Can we talk?”

  I knew my words came out stilted, trite. Like in some B-grade trial video game that never made it out onto the market.

  The man’s breath rasped in and out of him harshly. The thick wool sucked into his mouth as he spoke.

  “There’s nothing to talk about,” he said. “You did what you did and it can’t be changed.”

  He raised the machete again over his head. The grimy blade whirled dully in the bright sunlight, too smeared with dirt and rust to catch the glinting of the light. It was the last thing I saw before my world exploded into a miasma of excruciating agony that filled my entire being and hurled me plummeting into a deep pit of endless blackness.

  After that, and until the moment I died, I enjoyed only sparse moments of coherent consciousness.

  I was in a field covered with bobbing scarlet poppies, prancing with Brionna and all my childhood friends. Brionna was laughing, weaving a garland of daisies and dandelions to pose about my head.

  “There, little Bruno. Now you will be king of the island,” she cried with a trilling giggle. Then she reached out and hugged me. “I love you, Bruno. I’ll always take care of you.”

  My vision cleared, and I was glancing down at the gaping hole in my crotch. Blood spurted out of me as if I were a fire hose, pouring over the middle-aged hawk crouched at my feet – I couldn’t remember her name anymore. The agony was so excruciating, so immense, so unbearable, I nearly blacked out again.

  Then I was alive and awake, dancing with my mother and Brionna in the field again. We linked our hands together and my mother began to sing Ring-Around-the-Rosie. I knew if the kids at school saw me doing this, playing these sissy girlie games with my family, they’d never let me see the end of it. But now I was alone here with the two people I loved most in the world. There was nothing shameful, nothing censurable, about enjoying the time of my life with my loved ones. My mother dropped her hands and grasped me in her arms.

  “I love you, Bruno!” she shrieked. “I love you so much I want the whole world to hear about it.”

  She threw her arms up wide into the air.

  “I will always love you, little Bruno. Always protect you. With me by your side, you’ll always be safe. Always.”

  I opened my eyes to blackness once again. My legs were bathed in warm blood and I was starting at last to feel numb. To enjoy respite from the racking agony in the end. All I wanted was to lay my head back and sleep forever. Succumb to oblivion and the sweetness of hell for the rest of eternity.

  I closed my eyes and when I opened them I was in a black box. A black wooden box. I gazed out. My mother and Brionna, dressed in reams of trailing black lace with black flowers in their hair, carrying cups of pale-tinted bouquets, circled about me with their heads bowed low, tears dripping from their eyes. A parish priest approached them and laid one hand on each of their shoulders.

  “I’m sorry, Mrs. Jarvas, Brionna. Your son died in disgrace, a contemptible rapist and sexual pervert. I’m afraid there will be no place in heaven for such a detestable being. But you can come with me and recite the Lord’s Prayer for his soul. May he one day, a thousand years from now, be granted the mercy and forgiveness of the Lord. For the Lord is bountiful and his mercy and forgiveness boundless and all-encompassing.”

  He wrapped his arms around them, and they turned away from me and began to disappear from my sight.

  I sat up in my coffin, a little boy dres
sed in scruffy blues.

  “Momma?” I whispered. “Daddy? Brionna? Where are you?”

  I looked about, but there was no one there.

  “Momma? Brionna?”

  My voice came out tinged with fear and desolation.

  “Don’t leave me, Momma! Don’t stop loving me!”

  My eyes tried to penetrate the impenetrable darkness around me. As my eyesight adjusted to the light, I could make out the bare, indistinct form of my anonymous aggressor, dressed in black. He was leaning over the hag at my feet.

  “Now, Bruno’s out of the way, it’s your turn,” he mumbled almost incoherently through the masking wool.

  The middle-aged vixen began to shake like a leaf.

  My aggressor turned towards me.

  “Not dead yet, Bruno?” There was a sneer in his voice.

  He strode towards me, brandishing the machete once again. He lowered the tip of the machete, gouging away at the hole at the bottom of my abdomen. I thought I’d felt all the pain it was possible to feel in this world, but I was wrong. I screamed until I was hoarse as he began chipping away at my flesh some more. I felt like a barrel of blood with the bottom removed.

  At last, mercifully, the light began to dim. Perhaps that’s a bit of a cliché phrase, but it really was how I experienced it. Everything simply began to flicker and waver, like a candle flame going out with painstaking sluggishness. An overwhelming exhaustion came over me and finally, I couldn’t keep my eyes open. There was still pain, throbbing away at the edges of my consciousness, dull, amorphous. But with each heartbeat the pain began to lessen.

  I opened my eyes one final time. Brionna and my mother were floating in the air, smiling down at me. Brionna tossed another garland of roses over my head, and they both reached down towards me.

  “Come home with us, li’l brother,” Brionna cried.

  I reached for their arms and rose out of the sordidness and the living hell called Earth.

  The last thing I saw, as I looked back over my shoulder, was my former nemesis carving great chunks of flesh out of that middle-aged hag I’d once referred to as Sandy.

  Chapter 32

  Romeo was towering over me. An aura of ethereal white light surrounded his entire being, illuminating him like a mystical creation in spite of his tacky T-shirt and dusty jeans. I thought he’d died and turned into an angel. He held something out to me.

  “Look, Mami,” he whispered. “Water. I’ve found water.”

  The blue-tinted plastic bottle glinted in the air before me, shimmered and shone like a miasma, a mirage, an illusory heat-wave. I wanted to reach for it, but I was scared it would turn out to be just a hallucination.

  “This is a mirage,” I said.

  Romeo shook his head.

  “No, Mami. It’s water. I found it in a corner.”

  I tried to pull myself up high enough to glance into the corners, but I had no strength left.

  “Are there...” My voice was merely a croak, my throat harsh and dry as sandpaper. “Are there any more?”

  Romeo squinted.

  “I dunno, Mami,” he said. “But I didn’t find any more.”

  I rolled over a bit, so I could pry the bottle from his hands. I grasped it in my fists. Twisted the cap. I peered inside and sniffed it.

  It was water. Pure, sweet, crystalline water.

  Water that could quench my raging thirst. Water that could grant me one more minute of life. Water that could save me.

  I stuffed the neck of the bottle in its entirety into my mouth, greedily, and tilted myself backwards, ready to guzzle down the entire load in one swallow.

  Water. I’d never wanted. Desired. Needed. Anything more in my whole, entire life.

  Except Romeo.

  I wanted Romeo more than anything.

  I glanced at Romeo. His skin was dull and sagging, like that of an old man. His eyes were sunken into their sockets and the veins stuck out on the backs of his hands.

  Romeo was dying.

  I longed more than anything to tilt that paltry little drop into my mouth and swallow it.

  I needed to drink it. I had to have it.

  The need was so primal, so basic, so bestial and irrational. I had to drink.

  If I didn’t, I would die.

  But if I drank it, Romeo would die.

  I looked at Romeo.

  He had brought the water to me, his mami, instead of gulping it down when he’d found it.

  He had the self-control I was lacking. He was better than me.

  What would be worse than death for you, Annasuya Rose?

  Living without Romeo would be worse than death for me.

  I couldn’t live without him.

  I’d rather be dead than spend the rest of my life without him.

  I wouldn’t be able to survive one minute in a world where Romeo no longer existed.

  Reluctantly, even though it cost me the world, I replaced the cap on the bottle. Held it aloft and handed it back to Romeo.

  “You drink it, honey love,” I whispered with a smile.

  Romeo began to sob.

  “If I drink this, you’ll die.”

  I shook my head, although it was barely a hint of a movement.

  “I won’t die. I’ve got more reserves than you,” I lied. “Go on, drink it.”

  When I saw he still hesitated, I added: “Drink it and get your strength back. Then you can go and look for another bottle and when you find it, I’ll drink that one.”

  Romeo clawed at the bottle, eyeing it with unceasing longing.

  “Are you sure, Mami?”

  I nodded again. I wanted to whisper the word “yes”, but it wouldn’t leave my throat.

  My eyes closed of their own accord. I forced them open long enough to watch Romeo uncap the bottle and guzzle all the water.

  PART III

  Chapter 33

  The newscaster was perky. His tie was adjusted just right, the smile plastered on his face was perfect, the row of immaculate white teeth behind his smile could have worked in an ad for dental brightener.

  “The badly beaten and mutilated bodies of two residents were discovered early this morning in a shed,” he explained without ever losing his cheery expression. “The bodies had lain there for at least a week before being discovered, due to the remoteness of the area. The victims have been identified as thirty-four-year-old Bruno Jarvas and forty-six-year-old Sandra Bleckley. Jarvas worked as regional Vice President of the international clothing corporation Herbert and Mons. Bleckley was the office manager at a local business, Quality Movers. She was married and had no children.”

  The host grinned with delight towards the camera.

  “The murderer is still at large,” he concluded happily.

  He shuffled some papers on the desk in front of him in an obviously fake gesture. Everyone knows that newscasters read from some sort of cue cards projected on a screen behind the camera.

  “In other news,” he continued, “the young boy rescued from a basement in the Bedford Park neighbourhood on the verge of dehydration is up and running about now, according to his doctors at the Hospital for Sick Children. He and his mother had been taken hostage and locked in a room for several days without food or water. The doctors have pronounced his survival a miracle. He is slated for release in a day or two.

  “The mother, on the other hand...”

  Someone turned the television off.

  Chapter 34

  I felt water on my lips. I remembered that.

  Then someone was holding my head up, sticking something hard between my parched lips, tilting my head backwards.

  Water splashed out over my face, trickled from the corners of my mouth and slipped into my ears.

  But a little bit of it made it between my lips and down my throat.

  My throat was swollen. I couldn’t swallow. There was a lump in it about the size of a golf ball.

  A raspy, spiny lump. Like a cactus.

  More water poured down my throat, soothi
ng it, smoothing over the cactus.

  For a while water just dripped into my throat drop by painstaking drop.

  I wanted to open my eyes, but my lids were stuck together.

  Vaguely, faintly, I heard voices. It sounded like the voice of my bestie, Lindsay. But what would Linds be doing here? She didn’t even know this place.

  Eventually, I heard and felt more presences about me. The shuffling of feet. Someone lifting me up onto some sort of board or hard bed. A prick in my arm.

  Then everything was a blur.

  When I woke up again, all I saw was a sterile white. Antiseptic and alcohol stung my nostrils. People talked in hushed voices.

  Lindsay was sitting in an armchair next to me. She leapt up with a yelp as soon as she saw that my eyes were open.

  “You’re awake, Annasuya!” she shrieked.

  I smiled.

  “Obviously,” I said, weakly.

  She dashed to my side and seized my hand in hers.

  “I knew you’d be okay. The doctors said you’d pull through.”

  She grinned like a child on Christmas morning.

  “Oh, I’d hug you if I could,” she gushed. “When I found you I thought you were dead.”

  “Found me?”

  “Don’t you remember what happened?”

  I shook my head from side to side.

  “I’ll probably remember, soon,” I said. “But tell me now.”

  “You were both lying in the basement. Both you and Romeo, I mean. You were all covered with blood. I thought I’d got there too late and you were dead,” she repeated. “I couldn’t wake you. But Grant – he’s the guy who brought me over, cos I don’t have a car. I hope you’ll meet him soon. Anyways, Grant’s studying nursing, and they learn a whole loada symptoms over there. So he said you looked like you needed water and at any rate, it wouldn’t hurt to give you a bit.”

  She paused, looking thoughtful.