Mistress of Redemption (31 page)

“I love you, my dearest and only

Lord.”

121

Joey W. Hill

Chapter Twelve

“Clear!”

Fire through his body, jerking him,

his heart pumping irregularly,

faltering, stopping again.
Oblivion.

All I want is oblivion.

“Again!”

Heart yelping in protest.
Don’t make

me feel… For one moment, don’t

make me feel…

Air, painful, dragging into the lungs.

Heart feeling like a jagged rock

pounding on the inside of his chest.

Fire in his midsection.

Light… Shattering agony, so bad that

sound was coming from him… How

could he hear his own screams when

his vocal cords had been burned

away an eternity ago along with all

vestiges of a physical body? But yes,

that was his voice. He was

screaming, screaming the way a

banshee screams. His eyes were

squinting at the light, streaming with

tears as he stared wildly around the

room of people, things that he

couldn’t see clearly but fumbled to

understand. Medical equipment,

lights. He spoke words, he didn’t

know what, a wild stream of

gibberish that turned the faces around

him as white as their clothing. There

was actually a moment they all stood

back and he felt the weight of their

wide-eyed stares even if he could not

clearly see the features of their faces.

Then he collapsed back on the gurney

and the moment passed. They

pounced back on him.

A haze as time churned forward.

Lying somewhere, somewhere soft.

Voices.

“You should have seen this guy in the

ER…it was like we were transported

to the set of
The Exorcist
. Scariest

shit I’ve ever heard coming out of his

mouth. His eyes…”

Nathan felt a shudder run through the

hand resting on the blood pressure

cuff wrapped around his arm.

“Colleen even fainted, if you can

believe that. Man, nothing fazes that

woman. We’ve had homeless people

in here that acted way less crazy.”

“Well, what did he say?”

“It wasn’t what he said, it was how

he said it… To be honest, I don’t

think anyone knows what he said. It

was just…it sounds stupid, but it was

like the room got cold as Alaska

when he started screaming. For a

minute we were all just frozen. I felt

like I’d just found out my whole life

was over, the worst feeling of

despair and rage you’ve ever felt.

You know how sometimes when you

get so crazed by everything around

you and you want to break out and

you don’t know how? You think up

some crazy shit like shooting

everyone? That was what this feeling

was like.”

“James, I think you’ve been on too

many back-to-back shifts.”

Trembling, shuddering, speaking

words that he didn’t remember…
The

worst feeling
of despair and rage
you’ve ever felt.
That was probably

as close to the truth as anything.

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Mistress of Redemption

Consigned to Hell, denied the ability

to scream until he’d woken in a

mortal body again.

He lost consciousness again, leaving

the invisible James and his cohort

behind.

Moved through a thick fog where he

had no sense of anything except he

wasn’t being hurt, tormented, burning

or freezing. But he did ache. Deep

inside him something ached, wanting

to call out a name. He couldn’t

remember that name. That was the

most horrible thing of all. He had to

remember that name. Had to

remember it…

For several days they kept him under

heavy sedation, for he was so

disoriented that everything frightened

him. They told him his name and it

meant nothing. He forgot it a moment

later and had to ask again, mumble

for it. They treated him with some

impatience, which, compared to what

he’d known, was akin to being given

every consideration. As some

cognizance returned, he noted one of

his hands always remained

handcuffed to the bedrail. He had a

vague sense of a guard walking in

and out at times, sitting outside the

door. A prisoner. He’d always been

a prisoner. The thought stretched his

face in a grim smile. Having skin and

a body…was strange.

Perhaps he was free now, despite the

handcuffs? He didn’t want to be free.

Needed that name. Need the name.

Then he’d doze and the nightmares

would come back, nightmares even

more

powerful because he knew they

weren’t nightmares at all.

Fire…monsters…every fear that a

person could imagine having. Those

that lived in the darkest part of the

psyche, things he hadn’t even known

he feared above all the other, more

mundane fears, such as falling, being

buried alive, spiders crawling across

the skin to bite the most tender areas

of the body, high-pitched shrieking

laughter while being tortured, cold,

darkness… No, there were worse

fears. Shut in a small, dark place

deep under the earth, being forgotten,

unimportant for all eternity, tortured

for amusement until the mind had

shattered at the weight of all of it.

Knowing that it was all deserved, so

not even a sense of injustice

provided a haven. There would be no

escape from it, not ever.

He’d surrendered. Just surrendered,

with no other choice. Standing free of

all bonds, no longer even trying to

draw away as everything was done to

him and more. In the end, rationality

fled, the mind, soul and body broken,

nothing left. He couldn’t remember

the last time he’d thought of anything,

a macabre meditative state based on

torment instead of peace. His soul

had floated, no longer weighed down

by anything.

Then, lying on cold, wet stone, he’d

felt a touch, a brief flash of eyes too

powerful to be met, wings so pure

white the beauty of them choked him.

Goodbye, my child. You have paid

for your sins. Now forgive yourself

and love her as she
deserves.

Don’t fuck up.
That from a different presence, male. A brush of gray

wings along his brow that offered

encouragement with the warning.

A few days later, he remembered a

conversation. Dr. Adams.

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Joey W. Hill

“Mr. Powell…can you understand

me? You were stabbed in a fight at

the prison.

…died for nine minutes before we

restarted your heart. We think…Mr.

Powell? Still with us? We think that

may explain some of your

disorientation and your memory

problems…”

It was an understatement. At first, his

vision was cloudy and he could only

see blurry outlines of people or

things. Everything startled him. Noise

was too much. All of it could be the

fire, monsters…

With his physical body, the attempt at

rational thought returned. As he

gained in strength, his mind tried to

tell him that he’d had some weird

hallucination when he was gutted in

the knife fight, that none of it had

been real.

No, it wasn’t his mind trying to

convince him of that. Not exactly.

Jonathan. The part of him that would

always be afraid of truth. But

sometime during those minutes when

he’d stood on the other side of the

threshold between life and death,

Nathan had taken the reins and

Jonathan wasn’t getting them back, no

matter what he tried.

Nathan. That was what someone had

called him, long ago when he was

young and more possibilities had

been open to him. Then later…

Nathan and Jonathan. Two parts of

the same whole. Made whole by

someone… Someone…

It hurt so badly, the not knowing, that

as he lay in bed on the tenth day he

curled into himself and made the

agony worse by putting the pressure

of the position on the largest stab

wound across his belly. He cupped

his hand over it, held it as he rocked.

I have to remember, I have to

remember… It’s not real. You’re

losing your fucking mind.

There’s no one. No one…

I love you, Nathan. I always will.

He jerked up out of the bed and

immediately bent double, cursing as

the stitches tore and blood leaked

onto his fingers. Looking down, he

saw the blood drip and land on his

bare groin, the skin of his cock. He

had piercings. Why hadn’t he noticed

that before? Jesus Christ, piercings

all over the place. Barbells up the

bottom, a ring in the tip, a ring in his

ball sac. His fingers touched the

ladder, explored it, even as the blood

wet his fingers and his genitals,

mixing with the metal. A canvas of

pain and memory, tormenting him as

badly as his nightmares.

Her voice. He’d heard her voice.

Who was she? His life depended on

it, he was certain.

It was three months before he’d

recovered enough mentally and

physically to the satisfaction of the

doctors to be released from the

hospital. By then, he’d remembered

who he was and why the police

treated him with such hostility, doing

the bare minimum for a prisoner who

was in jail for aiding someone who’d

tried to kill two cops. He found out

he had six months left on his

sentence.

Was it a dream? Was all of it some

type of twisted retelling of
A

Christmas Carol
to get him to change

his ways? No and yes. Because that

night
had
happened to Scrooge. It

was a dream, but it was real as well.

It’s illusion and reality both…

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Mistress of Redemption

“Aarrgghhh…” Back in his cell, he

snarled into his pillow, pressing his

face against the scratchy surface. He

wanted to beat his fists on the

concrete walls until they were

bloody to assuage this gnawing

inside. “Who are you?
Who are

you
?”

* * * * *

He kept quiet, kept to himself during

those six months. He began to write

letters.

Letters that he tore up and rewrote

again and again, until he was

regularly bartering for more packs of

notebook paper. When he finally got

one right, he’d carefully address it

and put it on the shelf above his bunk,

never mailing a single one, though the

stack grew. It wasn’t time to mail

them. He didn’t know how he knew

that, just that it felt right. He was

following his intuition. Lauren,

Narcissa, Lady Jane… Even Mac

Nighthorse.

His mother…then Eliza. The hardest

one of all, a letter he would have to

put on her grave because he had no

ability to change what he’d done to

the first person who’d ever truly

loved him. He had to discard at least

two versions because the tears he

couldn’t manfully control made the

ink run and stain.

When he wasn’t doing that, he did

laundry duty or walked around the

yard by himself. He paced by the

portion of the fence that let him see

the highway coming from the east.

Keeping his eyes focused there the

whole time, he felt like a tiger in a

cage, waiting for release to go in that

direction.

A red car…a woman with dark

hair…

The other inmates gave him no more

trouble. He didn’t think to question it

until Mario stated it baldly to him

one day while they pulled laundry out

of one of the carts.

Mario was in for life and had been at

the prison over twenty years.

“You got the ‘Come to Jesus’ look,

the look of a man who know what

Hell be like,”

he stated matter-of-factly. “The

others don’t want no part of that. Our

boy Jonathan, he know what true fear

is now.”

“Nathan,” he corrected automatically,

and started folding.

Studying himself in the mirror in his

cell, he saw it. A disturbing, haunting

quality, something apparently so

uncomfortable that many of the

inmates never met his gaze now. In

fact, most gave him a wide berth

entirely.

That was fine, because nothing but

that name he couldn’t remember

could ease the loneliness inside him.

He couldn’t face his own haunting

expression for long either. It

reminded him of too many things.

Horrors that shifted in his mind like

lingering shadows, too elusive to

hold on to, but dogging him

nevertheless. Particularly in his