Page 7 of Torment

2

Mason

She couldn’t see me.

In fact, in all the months I’d been watching her, Jolie had never seen me. Never once suspected I was near her, sometimes coming within just a few yards. Like now, for instance.

The pale pink Creole townhouse directly across the street from her apartment building had a perfect view of her balcony window, where she often liked to stand and gaze out at the world. As far as she knew, the narrow three-story townhouse was a bed and breakfast. To be fair, that’s exactly what it was before I quietly bought it.

The owners didn’t want to sell at first, but then I offered them twice what it was worth, and they took it and gleefully ran before the offer expired (it wasn’t actually going to expire, but they didn’t know that). Now I had the perfect place to sit and watch Jolie through the window whenever I had spare time.

With the curtains mostly drawn and the lens of a high-powered video camera pressed right in between them, mostly concealed by the gray curtain fabric, I was able to record and watch her every movement in the apartment, even when I wasn’t around. When she wasn’t home, I was able to follow her movements via the tiny tracking bug I’d hidden underneath her car one evening when she was passed out drunk on the couch. She could never go anywhere without me knowing exactly where she was and exactly what she was doing.

Pretty good considering how incredibly difficult it had been to track her down, and even more impressive given that I’d only recalled her existence a few years ago. Before that, she was a lost memory, hidden in the deep dark recesses of my mind.

I yanked my gaze away from Jolie’s treacherously beautiful face and looked at the large mirror to my right. Wincing, I turned myself in my chair so that only my right side was visible in the reflection. Unfortunately, hiding the bad side from myself didn’t help as much as I hoped it would. I could never undo the images that were so thickly embedded in my troubled mind.

Grimacing, I ran the pad of my thumb over the jagged raised streak running from my left temple to my jawline.

That side of me was maimed from my lower leg to the top of my head. The scars covered me like a hundred silvery serpents coiling around my flesh. Years ago, they had all been bright pink. Now they were mostly shiny and pale, yet still very thick and obvious. I would often find my hands going to my left side automatically, running my fingers over the ridges and jagged edges of the scarring.

I rarely went outside during the day, at least not without something to cover myself as much as possible, because I couldn’t bear to see people recoil from me; to watch them try and swallow their horror when they caught sight of my scarred face.

It was mostly children and teens who reacted like that. Adults were disgusted by my appearance too, but most of them had the maturity and awareness to know better than to openly show it.

There were surgeries to lessen the appearance of scarring, but in my case, it hadn’t made much of a dent on the beast-like ugliness of it all. It hadn’t helped the numb areas on my legs, face, and chest, either.

Multiple doctors had told me the numbness was due to nerve damage from the burns. They said I might eventually regain sensation in those areas, but after eight years without any change, I considered it unlikely. I somewhat liked the numbness, anyway. It was preferable to the blinding, agonizing pain I’d experienced eight years ago after being blown out of my car in the little town of Amiens.

I still remembered exactly what it was like to wake up in the hospital all those years ago with half my body burned to a crisp. First there was nothing but whirling confusion. Every memory from the previous several months had been eradicated from the trauma of hitting my head on the pavement after I was flung out of the wreckage of my car from the sheer force of the explosion. I had no idea where I was, what happened, or why.

Then my brain began to register the pain. It seared through every inch of me like a branding iron, burning and radiating. It owned me, dominated my mind, controlled every action. My mind conceded to the torment, unable to think or make myself speak. All I could do was grunt and groan like a fucking animal.

The doctors upped my pain meds until it was somewhat bearable, at least enough for me to stop thrashing around, and then they finally explained where I was and what had happened to me. Apparently I’d already been in the hospital for a few weeks in a medically-induced coma after being brought in from Amiens sometime in January with burns covering almost forty percent of my body.

According to those who had witnessed the events of that afternoon, my car had blown up outside an empty store. I was thrown out of the way of the inferno by the powerful blast, but half my body was already on fire. Luckily, one of the closest bystanders was a jaded ex-Army medic who’d seen it all before. Instead of screaming or standing there hoping someone else would do something, he sprang into action, and he managed to douse the flames and keep me alive until the ambulance showed up.

‘You’re one lucky son of a bitch,’ the main doctor kept telling me with a stupid grin on his face. As if I was supposed to feel good about the fact that I was alive after having my car explode on me. I was in so much pain, even with the meds, that I figured I’d be better off dead.

One lucky son of a bitch, my ass.

After a while, I noticed the nurses and doctors were acting very oddly around me whenever they came in to change my dressings or simply check on me. Without my memories, I didn’t understand how the hell I ended up in such a strange situation, or why my family seemingly wasn’t allowed to visit. But they wouldn’t tell me anything other than the story about my car blowing up in a small town in the middle of buttfuck nowhere, Louisiana.

Eventually, they let some sort of police or FBI agents in to talk to me, but they weren’t helpful either. Instead of telling me anything useful, they asked vague questions day after day, as if they were hoping to coax the memories out of me.

It was fucking infuriating. I kept telling them over and over: the last thing I remembered was waking up and going into my office in Manhattan sometime in the summer of 2010. At that point it was late February of 2011, so I’d obviously lost a lot of time, and no one would tell me a damn thing.

Eventually one of the agents said they’d been told by the doctors that they thought it was best if I started remembering things on my own. When it became clear that none of my memories from the last several months were coming back anytime soon, they finally started talking. There was only so long they could keep this shit from me.

According to them, I’d allegedly joined some sort of cult out on a ranch in Vermilion Parish. The Path of the Covenant. Apparently they were a group of men that enslaved and tortured young girls and women under the pretext of the goddamned apocalypse. The agents showed me photo after photo, lists of names, and even videos in an attempt to jog my memory.

I didn’t recall a thing.

I did, however, recognize one of the men in the photos they showed me—the cult leader, Jacob Chastain. I’d met him as a teenager when my parents and I visited his ranch in 1999. I had no fucking idea why I’d gone back there in late 2010, though. None whatsoever.

According to the agents, I’d joined the cult with the intention of exposing the sordid underbelly to the world. I’d gathered a lot of evidence against them and contacted the FBI, who wound up raiding the place the same day my car blew up.

They had a theory that I’d been made at some point. The cult leaders had discovered what I was up to, and they’d decided to take revenge on me over my betrayal. After trying to kill me with the car bomb, they tried to escape the country on a private jet, leaving all the innocent women and children behind. The plane crashed somewhere over Texas, killing every single one of them, and the innocents had been saved from the ranch.

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