by Stella Hart
Since I had been deprived of all my physical senses, there was nothing for my brain to concentrate on other than mental stimulation. Nothing for me to do but turn inward, burrowing into my own mind. It reminded me a bit of Dr. Fitzgibbons’ guided hypnosis therapy, only this seemed far more effective. As if the tank was forcing my mind into deep meditation from the outside in.
I took another breath and tried to focus on what Alex told me to think about.
The hallway and the double doors popped into my head first. I saw them, clear as ever, but this time, it was like the memory was on steroids. There were sounds accompanying the image, and smells as well. I could hear faint jazz music coming from beyond the doors, and I could smell chocolate, cigar smoke and whiskey. I could even smell the light fragrance of the bowl of peonies that sat on the accent table next to the right-hand door.
Suddenly I was aware of another presence. Someone next to me, much bigger than me. I must’ve been a child of four or five to be this short.
I looked up, my eyes raking over the man’s black dress pants and crisp pale blue buttoned shirt. In the memory, I felt myself smiling as I spoke up. “Is this where the party is, Daddy?”
There was a whirring mixture of light and color, like a glitching computer screen. Memories flooded back too quickly for me to see them properly. There was the double circle tattoo again, playing on a loop, and smiling faces which flashed by too fast for me to recognize.
After that, it was like a light in my mind switched off. Everything was blank again, and I was suddenly aware of the nerve pain in my back, throbbing and burning. I tried to kick at the edge of the float tank, but it was impossible to tell where the edges were.
Mercifully, the lid opened a minute later.
“Are you okay? Did you remember anything else?” Alex asked, looking down at me through eyes slightly narrowed with concern and curiosity.
“Yes,” I whispered. “I think so.”
“And?”
“The doors. I know why I was there now. I was at a party with my father, at his friend’s mansion.”
“What friend?”
“I… I don’t remember.”
“Where was the mansion?”
“I don’t know.”
If he was disappointed, he didn’t let on. He extended a hand to help me out of the tank. “Anything else?”
I shook my head. “Lots of stuff that came into my mind too fast to process.”
He nodded. “That’s something you’re going to have to get used to for a while, okay? Now that it’s started coming, it’ll keep coming.”
He didn’t elaborate on that. He simply threw me a towel and told me to get dressed again. I did as he said, and then he took me back outside, all the way to my cell in the shelter.
The strange man was awake now, standing by the bars of his cell. When we came in, he shouted at Alex and pounded on the bars. “I’m not scared of you, you fucking cunt! I know who you are, and I’ll fucking kill you before you can get to me!”
Alex didn’t respond. He pushed me into my cell, then locked the door and looked at me, his brows pulled down and his stare distant and empty. It was almost a sad expression, though I wasn’t sure someone like him was capable of feeling true sadness.
“Have a chat to your new friend. I’m sure you’ll find it enlightening,” he said softly. “You’re almost ready for the truth, Celeste.”
I was too shocked by today’s events that I didn’t have time to reply before he disappeared down the hall and up the steps, the sound of his footfall drowned out by my new fellow prisoner’s shouts and threats.
“Don’t bother,” I said to the man, giving him another curious stare. “I’ve tried. You won’t get out.”
He began to pace up and down his little cell, his fists bunched by his sides. “I have to. You have to. We both have to get the fuck out of here.” He stopped for a second, then peered at me. “What has he done to you? Has he raped you?
I hesitated and looked down, unsure how to answer. I begged Alex to fuck me yesterday. I was desperate for him. But I was a prisoner here, and I wasn’t sure where the lines were drawn anymore. Was it truly consensual, given the circumstances?
I tilted my head back up to face the man. “No,” I said softly. “No, I don’t think so.”
“Who are you?”
With those three words, he dashed any small hope I still had of ever being found here. If the outside world was taking my disappearance seriously, then my face should be everywhere, my name a regular fixture on the news. But this man didn’t have a clue who I was at all. No one was looking for me.
“My name is Celeste,” I mumbled.
“I’m Dan. Dan Vallone,” he offered. “How long have you been here?”
“About five weeks. Maybe a bit more.”
He sighed. “Shit. Then you haven’t got much longer.”
My brows shot up. “For what?”
He didn’t answer my question right away. Instead, he squinted at me. “I haven’t seen you before, but there’s something familiar about you. Can’t put my finger on it. Are you new?”
“New to what?” I shook my head. “Why would we have seen each other before?”
“Well, you know….” He shrugged. “It’s not like he just takes anyone.”
“Wait, you know who he is?” I asked, my eyes wide.
Dan gave me a look people usually reserved for silly little children. “You don’t?”
“I… well, I know his name is Alex, and he’s a doctor.”
He scoffed. “I meant who he really is. What he is. Why we’re here.” I stared at him blankly, and he shook his head slowly. “Fuck, you really are clueless, aren’t you?”
“I’m sorry, I just don’t know what you’re talking about. I still don’t know why he took me,” I said, my face flushing.
He narrowed his eyes and jabbed his right thumb in the direction of the steps. “That guy,” he began. “That fucking psycho. He’s the Heartbreaker. You know, the fucking serial killer?”
My lungs stopped filling with air. My heart stopped pumping blood. The world stopped turning on its axis. At least that’s what it felt like.
“What did you say?” I asked, my voice scarcely above a whisper.
“He’s the Heartbreaker. Shit, how could you not know? You really had no idea?”
“No,” I whispered. I slowly sank to the floor, my body trembling uncontrollably.
Dan was right. How could I not know? All this time, imprisoned by a man like Alex who loved to inflict pain, and it hadn’t crossed my mind that he might be the very man I’d spent so many hours researching, so many hours wishing I could find.
This man who took me, this man I willingly gave my body to… he was the most dangerous serial killer in our city’s history.
He was the Heartbreaker.
He was the man who killed my father fifteen years ago.
23
Celeste
I screamed until Dan gave up trying to calm me down.
I screamed until my throat went hoarse and my lips went dry.
I screamed until I had no voice left.
Finally, Alex arrived. He went into the other cell and jabbed a hypodermic needle into Dan’s neck. Dan did his best to fight off the drugs, but he quickly crumpled to the floor, swept away on waves of numbness until he was unconscious again.
Alex stepped away from him, then came and stood by the bars of my cell, hands in his pockets. We both stared at each other, me in horror and him in impassive silence. My pulse was skyrocketing, my legs quivering, my lips barely able to form words.
“It’s true. You’re him. The Heartbreaker,” I finally choked out. My throat still felt as if it was on fire from all the screaming.
He nodded. “Yes.”
I keeled over and vomited on the floor, unable to stop it. He hadn’t given me any breakfast, though, so it was just water mixed with bile. As usual, he’d taken care of every detail, predicted my every action.
I wiped
my mouth and looked back up at Alex. “That’s what I wasn’t ready to know? That’s what you hid from me? That you’re a murderer?”
“I never hid that from you. You never asked.”
I slammed my hands on the bars. “What the fuck kind of bullshit logic is that? Who the hell goes around just asking people if they happen to be a serial killer?”
“Don’t pretend you didn’t already suspect I was a killer every time I showed you those awful photos. And remember who you’re speaking to. It doesn’t pay to piss me off.”
I spat at him. “Fuck you. Fuck you and your bullshit rules.”
I expected him to drag me out of my cell and back up into the playroom to whip the hell out of me again for my insubordination. Instead, he nodded curtly and sighed. “I understand how shocked you must be, and as such, I will allow you to speak freely.”
“How fucking generous.” I narrowed my eyes, seething. “You’ll allow me, a fellow human being, to speak.”
His lips turned up in a half smile at that. Asshole. Fucking prick. Motherfucker. “I see part of you never left.”
“Screw you,” I whispered in a hollow voice. “You’re sick.”
“Perhaps.”
“I can’t believe I let you break me down so much that I actually wanted to….” I stopped talking for a second, overcome with horror and sickly regret. “I actually wanted to sleep with you.” Overcome by a wave of hopeless sadness, I sank to my knees. Then I looked up at him with pleading eyes. “You have to let me go. I’m not the kind of person you kill. I’ve studied you,” I said in a ragged whisper.
“I studied you too, angel.”
Yeah, I bet you did, I thought bitterly. He let me believe that he first saw me when he treated my mother at the hospital a few years ago, but I knew better now. He knew me long before that; almost an entire decade before. He’d had fifteen years to study me. Fifteen years since that day….
“You killed my father,” I choked out, my eyes brimming with hot tears. I felt like I was suffocating, tangled in barbed wire.
“I protected you from him.”
I shook my head wildly. “No! He wasn’t doing anything! You butchered him like an animal for no reason!”
My mind flashed back to that day. I was upstairs. My parents were arguing. I’d never heard them fight before, and I was frightened. I didn’t want to listen anymore, so I played with my dolls and teddies for a while, and then read a short book.
When I went downstairs, Mom was half-passed out on the sitting room sofa, a vacant stare in her eyes and a half-empty bottle in her left hand. I wasn’t sure what it was, but it was a bottle from the cabinet I wasn’t allowed to touch, so I knew it was bad. She was barely even holding onto the thing. I wasn’t sure she even saw me come into the room. I asked her where Dad was, and she shrugged and closed her eyes. ‘I think he went outside. I don’t know and I don’t care.’
Maybe he was out picking winter camellias to give to me to say sorry for yelling at Mom and frightening me. Happy and energized at the thought, I skipped down the hallway and slipped out the back door.
I didn’t make it all the way to the garden.
The once-beautiful and pristine winter wonderland that was our backyard had been transformed into a slaughterhouse. There was blood. So much blood. Too much. It pooled around my father as he lay prone and gasping on the ground, flowing red streams soaking into the white snow. A heavy metallic scent seeped into the air and surrounded us until I could barely breathe.
I stopped dead in my tracks and put my hand over my mouth. Hovering over my father was a man clad in black boots and matching dark clothes. His hair was covered by the hood of his jacket, and his lower face was obscured by a black scarf which had been wrapped around it. All I could really see was part of his forehead and his eyes. From this distance, I couldn’t even tell what color they were. This man could be anyone.
Whoever he was, he had just butchered my father.
But I didn’t run. I didn’t scream. I simply stood there and stared, stunned into silence. I watched the man’s knife come down again and again, and I watched him tear my father’s heart right out of his chest.
I still didn’t move or speak. Why was I like this? What was happening to me?
The man finally seemed to notice me. He looked up, then shook his head and put a finger to where his lips would be under the scarf. Shh.
I nodded dumbly. He nodded back at me, then stood up straight. I was too young to know how to estimate heights, but I knew he was tall. Taller than my father. I had no idea how old he was, seeing as his eyes were the only visible part of him, but when I squinted hard, I could finally see that they were blue without any wrinkles around the edges. He was a man, but he was young.
He looked at me for a few more seconds. Then he headed around the garden and toward the far end of our property, which backed onto the nature reserve. He didn’t look back at me. Didn’t check to see if I was chasing him. He just kept walking until he was nothing but a dark shadow disappearing into the trees. Nothing but a distant memory.
That was the main reason I hated going back to my parents’ property. The memories. Not just of my father’s brutal murder at the hands of a dark stranger, either. The awful vision of me standing there doing nothing for so long haunted me far more. I could’ve screamed. Could’ve gone and got my mom to call 911 sooner. Dad probably wouldn’t have survived, but at least I’d know I tried to do something. Anything.
But I didn’t, and the thought made me shrivel with shame.
Sobbing, I sank to the floor again. “I knew you were probably a psychopath. Probably a killer,” I choked out. “But this… this is so fucked up….”
Why take me? Was it part of some sick game because he hated my dad so much? Did he want to kidnap me and break me to the point where I begged him to fuck me, just so he could go and spit on my father’s grave and tell him that even after his death, he was still fucking him over?
That’s what it seemed like.
“Like I said, I protected you from him.” Alex seemed unfazed by my words. “Just like I’m protecting you now.”
“He’s dead! How the fuck are you protecting me from him?”
“Try to remember, angel. Remember his friends,” he said, his tone surprisingly soothing.
“No….” I clamped my hands over my ears, trying to drown out his voice. But that didn’t stop the sounds in my mind.
More memories roared back, filling my brain with endless noise. I squeezed my eyes shut and pressed my hands to my forehead, trying to make them stop, but they kept coming.
In my mind, there were middle-aged partygoers staring down at me with smiles on their faces as I gazed up at them from where I stood, clutching my dad’s hand. Hushed whispers about how beautiful I was, how tight I’d be, how sweet my pussy would taste. My father smiling proudly throughout this, quietly agreeing with the horrible men. Telling them that soon I’d belong to them. Soon I’d be theirs to fuck and cut and chain to the wall.
“No! No!” I screamed, writhing on the concrete. “Please… make it stop!”
I was truly breaking now. The things Alex had done to me were nothing compared to this. It was too much, too far, too fucked up.
For a fleeting moment, I considered that the memories could be false. Implanted somehow, perhaps through hypnosis. Dr. Fitzgibbons did tell me that her hypnosis therapy could result in the creation of false memories on some occasions. Besides, my father was the Pittsburgh Police Chief when he was alive. A man in such a position couldn’t possibly be such an evil monster.
But I knew it was true. The newly-returned memory was so stark, so clear. It was something real that I’d suppressed for this long. I knew it, deep in my marrow.
“You’re seeing it now, aren’t you?” Alex said, crouching down to my level. “You’re remembering more.”
“Yes,” I sobbed, tears flowing endlessly over my face and into my mouth, mixing with mucus. I looked like a disgusting mess, but that was the least of
my worries right now.
“Then I think you’re finally ready to see this,” he said, pulling out his cell phone. He stepped into my cell and dragged me to my feet.
“Please….” I whispered. “What happened to me? I don’t remember if they… if they.…” I couldn’t even say it.
Alex looked me right in the eye, one hand forcing my chin up. “He didn’t touch you. None of them did. They didn’t get the chance.”
I shivered. Small comfort.
“Watch,” he commanded, pushing me down on the cot. I sat up and stared at the screen of his phone. “This is your father when he was alive. This is why I had to protect you from him. Or this would’ve eventually been you.”
There was a video playing. Grainy, old. I could still make out what was happening on it, though. My father was crouching over a girl on a bed. She had a circle carved into her abdomen, just like all the other girls Alex had shown me in those mysterious photos, and she was chained down, screaming and begging.
My father seemed to enjoy her cries for help. I watched, sickened to my core, as he slapped her in the face, hard, and pressed himself between her legs.
No.
No.
No.
“Turn it off. Please.” I turned away. Rolling over on the cot, I began to cry. Big, heaving sobs wracked my body, my chest hurting from the sheer pressure. I curled up in a ball, wishing and praying that this would all go away.
I wasn’t sure how long I cried for, but Alex finally pulled me back over and gestured to his phone again. “It’s hard to watch, but this is what he did. He and all his associates in the Circle,” he said quietly.
I wiped my face. “The Circle? What the hell is that?”
“It’s a clandestine group of powerful men. Some women, too, but the vast majority are men. They take girls and boys. Kidnap them right off the street sometimes. They abuse them, torture them, force them into sex slavery for years. Keep them chained up or in servitude while they aren’t being used.”
“No….” I shook my head. It was too awful to imagine.
A second later, I didn’t even need to imagine it. Several more images flashed into my mind. A big ballroom, filled with jovial older men and women. Kids and teenagers too, who seemed normal to me when I was so young. It seemed like a nice family evening, everyone gathering in nice clothes in such an elegant, extravagant setting. But now I remembered the kids’ expressions as they were. Flat. Emotionless. Broken.