The Beast and Me (20 page)

Day 75

It was in the middle of the night, dark, and they were dressed in black. The light in the corridor was off so I couldn’t see much, when the door was opened, pulling me from my unsteady sleep icily. I was wide awake and somehow it reminded me of that moment when they abducted me. I had never been so terrified in my whole life, I guess not even the first time I met Jay, and that moment was just the same, because I knew it was them, and even though I had no idea what was about to come, I could sense it, like the monster beneath the bed, like the thunder in the distance, promising a wrecking storm.

I kept reminding myself that they needed me to be untouched in some way, because they needed Jay to get me pregnant and not someone else. But then again, there were such neat inventions preventing things like these. Whatever my mind came up with in these few seconds, the realist always knew an argument against it. They didn’t need my brain to do the math for them. They were prepared. Obviously, they were more than that, because there were a lot of possibilities left, without taking risks.

Me being important to a subject that was more important than their superior didn’t stop them from anything else. I’m sure that White gave them rules which they wouldn’t dare to break. So, they didn’t... They simply tossed me around, like dogs sharing a bone.

You know that dogs don’t share a bone. Whatever time they get with it, they use it in the most effective, greedy way. They were meant to terrify me. And it worked. Feeling their hands groping every part of me... I just... I don’t want to write the details. They didn’t force me, not in the classical sense anyhow, but there was no difference for me. I was dehumanized, stripped of more than just clothes, mutilated in a different sense.

They were three of them, and they didn’t talk to me, just laughed, muttering things. I didn’t want to hear any of it. Somehow I managed to just blank out, but I can’t remember what I was thinking at that time. I just don’t recall, I can’t even pretend to.

When they left, one of them tossed me a bone and all three of them laughed.

Message received.

Even if I would have had a blanket it wouldn’t have been able to cover me the way I needed it to. Since I didn’t want them to surprise me at night again, I tried my best to sleep during the day, which is hard when you are hungry and images haunt you.

I try to explain all of this with reason, because White has a reason. Maybe he wants me to be afraid of meeting Jay again and having sex with him, as his own special torment. He definitely wasn’t happy about me enjoying myself, about me not caring about them.

In my way I was the worst kind of disobedient to him. I know, despite being here because of Jay and especially for him, in some sick way White wants me for himself, and the only way that is possible apparently is that I think exactly like him about Jay.

He wants me to despise him, he wants me to hate him, and I know retrospectively that this probably was what having to look at him that one time was all about. I think. White wants to be able to pretend that I’m thinking of him. It would make so much more sense.

He definitely wanted to make a point.

Not that he hadn’t already.

I’m wondering if he watched it as well, all the time, if he keeps tapes of it. However, he definitely wasn’t one of them.

Every sound made me jump.

I tried to sleep, but the further the day the more difficult. And then, the door was opened.

I’m sure it was one of them, because he kept talking about it. He offered me something to eat and I could tell what exactly he meant. Eat something of ‘him’. The way he placed his hands on his belt made it pretty much undeniable what he was hinting at. I didn’t answer and tried to ignore him and his taunting.

At some point I couldn’t hear it anymore, him talking about what I was, what I looked like, that he would love to to every hole of mine. Maybe that was why I had to spend another night. I already had considered accepting the offer just to bite his precious thing off. The only thing that held me back was the thought of having that piece of flesh in my mouth.

Instead, I got up slowly and stepped towards him.

I bet he thought that I was about to give in, to capitulate, especially since he offered to bring me real food if I’d do it well.

I didn’t.

My voice was weak and throaty, when I told him that “I’m going to kill you. I will remember you, and I am going to kill you. Or maybe I will tell Ten to kill you while I watch you getting ripped apart. I will make Severin allow him to kill you for me.”

After that the door was smashed shut and it was I who laughed. I laughed briefly though, since I realized that I had just admitted knowing Severin’s name. It was too late. I should’ve kept my mouth shut. But it was too late.

Day 76

When they came that night I fought. Like an animal. But that was the closest they would ever get me to be one.

I love every bruise and every scratch of mine. They are my trophies. And I knew it, I was right. They weren’t allowed to do more than molest me in order to abase me. For me, however, there is no difference.

Even though their flies stayed shut, until then...

The guy I threatened the day before, he was about to break that rule. He told the others to pin me against the wall, my back facing him, while they told him that they weren’t allowed to do this. Still, they were following his order, like saying that this wasn’t okay would take the guilt off of them.

“The rule was not to fuck her”, I can still hear these words, and they won’t stop repeating themselves in my head with his voice, and I still feel his hands sliding down my tailbone and further down, between the cheeks...

“STOP!” someone yelled through the open door.

My muscles were cramping, still trying to obey me and evade him, though there was no way out. Despite that yell his fingers stayed where they were and I sensed the damp warmth of them against my cold body.

I couldn’t tell whose voice it was, but after a moment of hesitation, the men who had held me against the wall let me go, retreated, just a moment before that guy who I’m going to kill, followed them. They left and the door was slammed shut. What followed was silence. There is nothing worse than silence. And I was buried with it.

Anger kept and keeps me from crying. Wrath kept me from collapsing and still does. The thirst for revenge was what did the most terrible things to me. It burned and blazed inside of me, eating away the hunger and thirst my body sensed. It has rebuilt me from the inside.

White is in for extreme measures.

Mine have to be more extreme.

I cannot let him win, and if that means the only thing I can do is not let him break me, then I won’t. I know that open rebellion will only make it worse, but I want to keep my self-respect at all costs. Yet, this might mean that I will never get out of here.

So, what am I willing to sacrifice?

I knew that they wouldn’t take me back to my room the next day, well, I expected it. And I felt like starving. I tried to distract myself with working out, but I was too weak for pushups or anything.

Then I remembered the Yoga and Tai Chi figures and it helped, doing it over and over again calmed me down, helped me focus and even made me forget about painting out my plans for revenge and escape, and thinking of touching Jay, being close to him, being intimate with him, knowing that this abomination of a human would watch us and still never get me.

My mind was empty as long as I managed to keep up the movements. Yet, with an empty stomach, and freezing because of being naked, it was hard to continue, and my thoughts went back to vengeance. I wanted it and it was the only food I got. They need to suffer more than I did. I erased every doubt, about if I would see Jay again, the second it appeared in my mind. I will do everything to see him again, because I need him, and he needs me. We keep each other sane. We are saving each other. I will do everything to get the both of us out of here, and I don’t care if he’s dangerous. He’s not when he’s with me.

And there I wrote it down, but do I really mean it? Am I willing to do everything for my freedom? Even lose myself and loathe myself?

I was ready to fight tonight. But it was today that the door was opened and White stood there, wearing his white clothes. The way he looked at me... I just ignored the bile’s fluid that tried to crawl up my throat, I swallowed it down. Severin’s face showed me perfectly what I had to do. There it was again, the question of what I was willing to do, in form of an invisible wall between him and me. I could stay myself and stand there, disobedient, pretend to be too weak to walk, but show that he hadn’t broken me. Or I could deceive him, and play the role he wanted me to, delude him into believing that he had won. I made a choice, I just don’t know if I can live with it.

Closing my eyes, pressing them shut, I ran up to him and tossed myself into his arms. Using all the energy I had left in me to pretend that he was someone else, not Jay, my Dad. Hell, no I didn’t hug him, I couldn’t right then, but I pressed myself against him, digging my hands into his shirt. Telling myself, that I just wanted to steal his warmth, and that I just wanted to make him feel that I was his remorseful, scared and broken little girl that promised to be good. Maybe I would have puked as I felt his hands on my back after a moment of hesitation, but there was nothing in my stomach to puke out. I called upon the image of my father, pictured every detail of the last time I saw him, as he waved goodbye, and when I decided that I would need another hug.

I don’t know how I managed to hold on to that illusion, and it worked, pretending that this man I loathed, despised, and wanted to strangle was in fact my Dad, who had come to take me home. My face was covered in tears, my body was shaking, and my knees gave in, while I murmured words I didn’t even comprehend.

White took off his coat and wrapped it around me along with his arm as he walked me back, caringly, and I held down my head, used my hair as a veil between him and them so that I could keep up the act, even though I wasn’t really acting. His behavior, though, his low voice speaking softly to me, saying that everything would be okay now, helped a lot.

I made sure to glare at the guy whose days were about to come to an end. And he flinched.

Day 77

I’m still tired and edgy and I couldn’t stand the look on Peter’s face as he brought me Breakfast. Worry.

I think that’s what I saw, but I’m not sure. I don’t know if I even care, let alone trust him or his expression. He will not help me. Can I be sure about that?

I’m too quick to decide what I know and what I don’t know. Some things are clear as a bell: that there is a chance that White planned all of this, even the humiliation going that far. I don’t put that past him. Everything he has done and everything I know about him, just points at the possibility of it.

Peter, however, is still unclear to me. There is a facet of him lying in the dark, a shadow, something that is important. From the memory of the moments we have shared I can tell that he feels something for me, but I don’t know if it tends into the direction what I believe Jay to feel for me, or what White feels for me. In the end it’s not important, because my heart belongs to one, my hate to another. Still, the question remains if he would help me. I think he would, I’m just not sure what I have to do for it.

All White achieved was that I miss Jay even more, and that I hate this SOB increasingly. Or did he aim for that? I’m not sure again, but I believe that he wants me to go full Stockholm syndrome on him and side with him: my dungeon master. I think I have to make him believe that. For now I did, but still it feels like making a deal with the Devil. Yet the Devil seems more sympathetic than White.

I’m not able to sleep, and I wasn’t able to sleep last night. Not even after Severin plucked me into bed.

So the first thing was checking the vent, while I went to the toilet. It’s not shut tight, but I can’t tell if they have checked it. I missed this bathroom. It’s so clean, has a door and a shower. I went right in, heating myself up. There was no way that I would clean myself while White was there with me, so I had just dug into my physical weakness that he would never have the idea to make me shower. Thank god I don’t have a bathtub, because he probably would have wanted to wash me. There is no word in my vocabulary to describe my distaste of that idea.

I kept wondering if they would suspect me if I went through it now to get some tools, or if they would believe that I’m too shocked, too shaken and too weak, that I am incapable of it. Why I didn’t believe it myself, I can’t tell.

Every time I loosen that vent it gets harder to put it back, so it seems, at least just with my fingers. And this time they were shaking that heavily that I almost dropped one screw into the sink. Still, it didn’t keep me from continuing, but I wasn’t able to pull myself up. The only person who’s able to defeat me is me, and that night I was really good at it.

And today, well I won’t try anything today; all I do is catch up on sleep and eat. Apparently that’s fine with everyone, especially me.

Day 78

I only sleep and eat and they leave me in peace. Still I wake up now and then to sit up straight in bed. Whom am I kidding? There’s no way I’ll get over this quickly.

My sleep is messed up, just as I am. Because while dreaming I am always thinking, just for a moment, that I am still in the cell. Until I realize that I am covered with blankets, wearing clothes and I have my flashlight beneath my pillow. As always.

It doesn’t take long for me to fall asleep again, because I am so exhausted, so tired, and I am grateful, because I slip back into sleep before the memories barge in on me. There are the dreams of course and in these dreams I’m still helpless, still not capable to defend myself. I have to change that. I will change that. I will get out of here and leave every cruel memory behind.

And then I start to dream about Jay, my Jay.