Page 18 of Torment

5

Jolie

I didn’t hearthe bars slide open, but I knew he was back. I could feel it in my bones; a cold, lingering sensation that danger was near. Evil.

I kept my eyes closed as I lay on my back, taking short, shallow breaths. This was the only position I was comfortable in, since I couldn’t lie on my sides due to all the bruising there. I was sure my ribs were broken at this point.

“Wake up.”

The deep voice sounded from above me as a rough hand shook my left arm.

I was right. He was here, crouching over the mattress. I did my best not to wince from his fingertips digging into the deep purple bruises on my arm, and I kept my eyes firmly shut. If he thought I was still sleeping, he might leave me alone, or at least be less cruel to me.

“I said, wake up.”

A jet of freezing water hit me in the face. I yelped and got up, skittering to the far side of the makeshift bed before cowering away from the hose. “I’m awake,” I whispered.

It was dim in my cage. Or cell. I hadn’t really decided what to call it yet. Certainly not an aquarium, as my captor referred to it. Calling it that reminded me of the claustrophobic horror I felt whenever I thought about where I was being forced to spend my days.

I had no idea what the time was. It could be morning, noon, or night, and I wouldn’t know. Considering my cell was on the bottom of a swampy lake, there was no way for me to tell. Not unless the tiny TV in the corner was on.

It switched on at random intervals every couple of days. Never on a show that would allow me to figure out the date; just random reality shows, cooking shows, or cartoons. My captor had presumably put the TV there and set it to switch on occasionally so I wouldn’t completely lose my mind in this place from lack of stimulation. If a morning cartoon for kids was playing, then I’d know the approximate time of day, but that was all. Never the date.

It was insane how fast I’d managed to lose track of time since being brought here. I knew it was November, but I had no idea what day of the week it was anymore. Or which week it was, either. I estimated I’d been here around nine or ten days, but it could be longer or shorter. Probably longer.

“I knew you were faking it,” my masked captor said. “Although that isn’t surprising, given your history. Lying little slut.”

He let out a low chuckle, but there was no mirth in it. I thought he might spray me with the hose again, like he did every couple of days to wash me, but he put it down on the concrete instead. I breathed a sigh of relief. I hated that fucking hose. The water from it was always ice cold. While I preferred being clean over being dirty, I’d obviously much rather have a nice hot shower.

That was a luxury I would never be afforded again.

My captor, who I’d started referring to as the Devil, had forced me to remain naked at all times in this room. When he felt like washing me, he would make me stand in the corner while he blasted me with the freezing hose water which disappeared into a small drain on the floor; one I hadn’t noticed when I first arrived. Every time it happened, I would stand there shivering and silently praying for it to be over, my fingernails turning blue while my skin prickled terribly with goosebumps. Sometimes my lips turned blue too. I could see it all in the mirror.

On my second day here, the Devil had done something strange with the hose. He’d washed my hair, but not with regular shampoo and conditioner. He must’ve added some sort of dye-stripping substance to whatever he’d lathered into my scalp, because for the next ten minutes, I’d watched my deep carmine hair dye swirl around the gray floor before slipping down the drain. It looked just like blood.

When I looked in the mirror afterwards, I saw the old Jolie staring back at me. The girl I’d tried so hard to leave in the past. Blonde, barefaced, broken.

Based on that incident, it seemed as if the man was trying to strip me of my new identity as well as my dignity. As if he hoped that by physically returning me to my old appearance, I’d mentally return to that awful time as well, back in the days when I was a sedated husk of a girl, too brainwashed and petrified to ever stand up for herself.

Or perhaps he had some sort of issue with ‘fake’ women. I’d met a few guys like that in the past. They hated and openly insulted women who dyed their hair, wore makeup, or had piercings and tattoos. It was all ‘fake’, and these women were evil tricksters with their hearts set on cheating and whoring, according to those guys.

I’d asked the Devil if that was why he stripped my hair of the red dye, but he refused to answer. In fact, he very rarely spoke to me when he came in. He seemed intent on focusing all his energy on breaking me down instead.

Over the last several days, I’d been mercilessly slapped, punched, and kicked on repeated occasions, leaving my body covered in cuts and bruises. That was just the beginning of the torture. The Devil clearly wanted to destroy me mentally as well as physically.

Whenever he deemed me ‘bad’ for asking too many questions or somehow insulting him, he left the curtains open so that I would be forced to spend the day looking out at the dark water beyond the glass. When that happened, I would try to close my eyes and sleep away the hours, but I’d always wind up having terrible nightmares of the water pressure building around me, slowly crushing me in my glass cage. Suffocating me. I woke up shrieking and crying every time.

The Devil knew this would happen. He enjoyed watching me scream and sob and quake with terror, and he encouraged it with everything he did to me. Sometimes he even showed me horrifying things for no reason other than to make me physically sick as well as terrified and sore.

Like yesterday, for instance.

He’d brought in a series of photographs for me to look at; picture after picture of people lying on morgue tables, burned to crisps. I’d seen glimpses of such things before, back at New Eden whenever the men decided to kill a girl for fun under the pretext of her being a ‘sinner’, but during those times I’d always turned away, unable to stomach the sizzling flesh and the charred remains left on the pyre afterwards.

When the Devil brought in the morgue photos, I wasn’t allowed to turn away. He forced me to look at each and every image, taking in all the gory details.

A few hours after that, he brought my daily meal to me. This one was a far more generous serving than the others I’d received, and he didn’t make me eat it out of a dog bowl for once. He let me eat the grilled pork chops with apple sauce, mashed potato, and buttery vegetables with a knife and fork like a regular person.

Afterwards, he calmly told me a fact I’d never heard before. Pork was considered to be the closest thing in taste to cooked human meat, according to people who’d cannibalized others before.

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