Your Turn to Suffer by Tim Waggoner (the ebook reader .txt) 📕

“The Intercessor provides,” the Driver said. The firebabies repeated his words, almost as if it were a religious invocation.

The Driver stepped over to the table and perused the instruments displayed upon it. Goat-Eyes and Rauch joined him. They took their time, but eventually each selected one of the tools, pulling it free from the surface of the table with a tug. Goat-Eyes held something that looked like a speculum covered with inch-long spikes. Rauch held a knife with a blade that had been beveled to give it four separate cutting edges. At first, Lori thought the hand that gripped the knife trembled, but then she realized it wasn’t Rauch’s hand that was shaking – it was the blade. The thing quivered in Rauch’s grasp, as if it couldn’t wait to begin cutting into her smooth, unmarked flesh. The Driver had chosen a rod-like device that looked something like a cross between a huge dildo and a cheese grater. He touched a button on the base, and the device began to hum softly. At first she thought it was vibrating, but then she saw it begin to emit a faint orange glow, and she realized the device was heating up – and fast. If it kept going like this, it would soon be white-hot. The dildo-grater didn’t have a protected handle, and she heard the sound of the Driver’s palm flesh start to sizzle, and she smelled burning meat. The Driver’s eye patches thrummed as quickly as hummingbird wings, and his mouth stretched into a wide smile.

Lori couldn’t take her gaze from the trio of horrible instruments the Cabal members held. She felt cold inside, sick, and she shook her head in denial as the three stepped closer to her.

“Please,” she said, her voice little more than a whisper. “Don’t do this. Please!”

“I hope for your sake you figure all this out soon,” the Driver said. “But not too soon. My friends and I would like to have a little fun first.”

The three crimson-robed figures began their work then. Lori screamed, and while she couldn’t be certain, she thought she heard the firebabies giggle with delight.

* * *

She opened her eyes.

She didn’t scream, didn’t throw herself off the couch as if desperate to escape. She simply lay there for several moments, head resting on one of the couch arms, the soothing warmth of a fuzzy blanket over her body. She was alone. She remembered Larry holding her as she fell asleep. Where was he?

Her phone lay on the coffee table in front of her and she reached for it to check the time.

Seven fifty-two.

Groaning, she pushed the blanket off her and sat up. She expected to feel her head pound in response to this action, but it didn’t give so much as a twinge of pain. After the nightmare she’d had, she wouldn’t have been surprised to wake up with a raging headache. Thank Christ for small favors. Her first client of the day wasn’t scheduled until nine, but she double-checked her work schedule on her phone to make sure. Yep, nine. She was scheduled to work with Debra Foster today, and while Lori usually dreaded working with her, she’d do so today with a glad heart. Anything to take her mind off the shadow creatures and lunatics dressed in red robes.

She rose from the couch, her body protesting. She always felt achy if she fell asleep out here. The couch was secondhand – she’d gotten it from her parents when they’d decided to refurnish their house – and while it was comfortable enough to sit on, it played hell with her back whenever she slept on it.

A thought came to her then, that maybe she hurt this morning because of what had been done to her in the Vermilion Tower. Her dream hadn’t ended as Goat-Eyes, Rauch, and the Driver began torturing her. It had continued for some time, and she recalled every horrible detail. The things they’d done to her…. She hurt everywhere this morning, outside and inside. She felt as if she’d been taken apart piece by piece, and every bit of her – skin, organs, bones – had been violated in unspeakable ways before being put back together. Except – she didn’t feel exactly herself. It was like some of her pieces were missing, as if her torturers had forgotten to put a few back or perhaps had put them together in the wrong order, forcing some pieces to fit where they shouldn’t, like the way someone frustrated with a difficult puzzle tries to jam a piece into a spot where it doesn’t belong.

She shuddered and pushed the memories away. It had been a nightmare to end all nightmares, no doubt, but it hadn’t been real. Then again, if she’d fully experienced pain in her dream – and she had, god, how she had – how was that any different from experiencing it in real life? Beyond the fact that she hadn’t woken up with any injuries, of course. Pain was pain, however you experienced it, and the emotions she’d felt as the Cabal members had violated her body to the sound of the firebabies’ delight – the shame, the humiliation, the absolute and utter degradation – had been real, and she still felt them now. It seemed to her that being tortured in her dreams was, in one way, worse than being tortured in real life. The next time she fell asleep, it could all begin again. She could be tortured night after night, rising whole the next day, like a warrior in Valhalla whose battle injuries healed each evening so he could fight anew in the morning, on and on for eternity. She didn’t know if she could take another night like that, thought she might go mad, or maybe her heart would give out, her mind pulling the plug to keep from experiencing such agony again.

She knew the pains she felt were psychosomatic, a result of stress from the break-in