Page 17 of The Devil In Blue
“We do love the smell of these ones,” she said, her voice layered with many tones.
“Yes, like fine wine,” Lura added.
“So clean, the lot of them,” Naeve said, her now long, sharp nails trailing down the front of her slender neck.
The crowd did not react at first. Perhaps it was a trick to get everyone in the mood on Allhalloween. I’d heard of some towns putting on shows of such nature or decorating mansions in macabre ways for the entertainment of their patrons.
But sheltered as I was, something about the situation felt too real. Only a fool would not realize something was off.
My skin tingled with uncomfortable awareness. The feeling was familiar in a way that made me sick. My heart knew something my mind did not. A memory. Something awful inside me wept at the danger I now knew we were all in. Panic sat in the pit of my stomach waiting to grip me and pull me under. The people around me slowly began to tighten up, inching closer to one another as if they were finally beginning to feel the danger as well.
But being in a large cluster felt counterproductive.
The night was about to end in a nightmare.
I could feel it in my bones.
People used the word “numb” so freely without truly understanding what it was not to feel. To be hollow and weightless and cold was a void I never wished to enter again.
And I remembered it all too well.
Even more than that, I remembered the pain that led me to that emptiness. Immense pain. Scalding, slithering, burning, slicing agony. In my spine, my skin, my lungs. All of it ached.
I was young when I was taken in by the sisters at Southminster Asylum. A child, they told me. Dirty and injured, I was the face of madness and despair, saved from such horrors that I could not distinguish the help from the demons. Half the sisters bore scars from my fingernails before they chose to dock them so short my fingers bled.
I deserved it.
They were only trying to help and I’d lashed out at them, again and again and again.
But the pain from my past always surged forward when they were in the room and it was like I was reliving it all again. Something lanced down my back like red-hot blades cutting into my skin. Then I heard the deafening screams. I couldn’t remember whose they were, but my Father Eli suggested the screams were the people of my village as they burned under the devil’s thumb. Every time he spoke to me about it, I would find a new way to act out.
I began biting.
So they began binding me. They found new different to do it every time until my sessions at the asylum had me buckled into a jacket, a leather strap across my mouth. I thought it was humiliating for a short while and then my soul began to die.
And dead people could not be humiliated.
I did not speak. I did not eat.
So they forced the food down my throat with tubes, my ankles and wrists strapped to an uncomfortable chair so I could not thrash.
I wanted to die.
But they kept me alive.
They cared…
My throat burned every day. The tubes scratched the sensitive insides and each morning my esophagus was on fire. So I began eating again to save myself from that agony. Soup at first. And then soggy oats and bread.
And back to Father Eli I went. I found it strange that I did so little talking in our sessions and he barely asked me to. I suppose it was because he was trying to help me and I didn’t have much to say outside profanities and insults. I don’t know why I hated them all so much. Perhaps because when my soul was dying, I didn’t care to save it and they did. They kept me from the sweet oblivion I longed for.
I’d become so empty. They tried to fix my silence and emptiness with methods that only got more extreme. The lines were blurred. Day after day, more of me died, and soon… I didn’t care whether or not my heart still beat. I was already gone.
. . .
The numbness I knew so well grew inside me and I felt the world fading away into bitter silence. Looking down, the hems of my golden skirts were soaked with blood. I knew it was blood because I could smell the coppery tang of it in the air. It had never bothered me before. Blood fascinated me. Everyone needed it to survive and yet it was always so eager to leave the body. So vivid against any drab background. Enticing and so uncomfortably beautiful.
My head canted at the realization that everyone around me was dead. Their corpses were spread throughout the large chamber, laid in grotesque, twisted positions like they were marionettes after someone had cut their strings.
