A Place Where There Is No Darkness

Seventeen

I glanced at my watch anxiously. I didn’t need it, of course, but I found the constant confirmation of my inner clock incredibly comforting.

Ten minutes to five.

My leg bounced up and down, trying to get rid of its nervous energy. There was nowhere to go now. Nowhere to run.

I was locked in a small room that reminded me somewhat of a cupboard. Not because of its size – even though it was tiny – but rather because the air was musty and the wooden walls reeked of mould. I was sat on a stool, ready for the whipping that was to come. Shirtless, I was wearing black pants and a top that left most of my back exposed. My side burned at the mere thought of something touching it – hitting it – and I glanced down at the half-healed wound anxiously. During the ordeal, the stitches would rip for sure and the flesh would break open once more. It wouldn’t be pretty.

Then again, it wasn’t supposed to be.

My wrists were cuffed together with ornate shackles that weren’t much more than cheap, oversized props. I could have got out of them in a matter of minutes, but that wasn’t the point. Their purpose wasn’t to restrain me; it was to keep up someone’s – Orwell’s – twisted fantasy.

I sighed, glancing back down at my watch. Eight to five. If Mitchell listened to me, he would start moving now. And if everything went as planned, they would be out in about fifteen minutes. And Willy would be safe.

I had got Alfred the doorman to go along with our plan. He would let the three men – well, Mitchell and the two boys – out without making a scene. But he had agreed to more than that. In addition to the door, he was also in charge of the lighting of the whole building, and after minutes and minutes of begging, he had finally promised to send me a sign once Willy, Mitchell and Evan were out. He would dim the lights momentarily – just a quick flicker no one but me would detect – and I would know they were safe.

It was important, too, because Orwell’s whippings were very specific. They took as long as the offender was awake. Once I fell unconscious, the whipping would end and Mitchell’s window for escape would close. This meant that I had to stay conscious until I saw the flicker of the lights.

Five to five. It wasn’t long now.

A man I had never seen before stepped into the room. He was big and bulky, mean-faced and ill-mannered. He let a huge hand fall onto my arm and squeezed it like a toothpick. I had no doubt at all that he could have broken the bone had he wanted to. Also, I had no doubt at all that he wanted me to know.

“Come,” he grunted under his breath and I had no problem imagining him as a giant or a troll. He pulled me to my feet by the shackles and then continued to pull me out of the room and into a big hall that had no obvious purpose in an abandoned warehouse. Yet here we were, on a stage surrounded by rows and rows of benches – the rows farther to the back were raised, so that I ended up with a dizzying feeling of vertigo in my stomach, as if I were falling into a deep, deep hole in front of all these people – and yes, there were people. A lot of them. All of them, actually, everyone working for the Elite, save for a few guards and Alfred, who was the doorkeeper and could never neglect his duties. Well, them and Mitchell and Willy and Evan.

It felt good, not seeing their familiar, warm faces in the crowd of hostile ones. It also felt really, really bad.

The huge guy led me to the centre of the makeshift stage. There, he made me kneel and bow my head. This didn’t come easily, but I did it anyway, because I knew better than to resist. Any kind of dignity I might have preserved making a stand would have been beaten out of me tenfold later.

So I kneeled. And I bowed.

The crowd roared. I felt like in one of those Roman gladiator games and I thought I was probably supposed to feel that way. This was supposed to hurt and scar. And not just on the outside.

Since my gaze was directed at the ground, I could only see the bottom of his cloak as he slowly came closer. He dragged his feet, as if tired of life. As if this was an inconvenience to him and not something he wanted to witness.

Something touched my head, then my right shoulder and then my left. I knew it was the whip and I knew Orwell had performed a sad imitation of a knighting ritual, just as I knew exactly what was going to happen next. I had witnessed many of these spectacles. Normally, though, I was not the one kneeling in the dirt.

“Rise,” Orwell said. The crowd quietened, because they knew that it was near. I lifted my head, resting my but on my heels.

A veiled figure was standing over me – black cloak, black hood, black mask –, holding a whip. Whenever he moved, his cloak billowed in a non-existing wind, and it made him look powerful. This was the image of Death, if there ever was one.

“For crimes against this family, you are to receive a whipping. The blood we spill today shall clean your flesh and the tears that fall today shall clean your soul.

“Let it commence!”

Of course, Orwell himself would not be wielding the whip. For as long as I had been with the organisation, I had never heard of an incident where he had done the dirty work himself. I didn’t think there was a man alive that had so little blood on his hands and so many lives on his conscience.

He handed the whip to the big man that had brought me to the stage and turned, heading back to his bench.

He would not, however, give up his first-row seat for anything. Ever.

“Bow,” the huge man said and I couldn’t help but hesitate, but in the end the decision was logical and shouldn’t have been hard to make at all. My brow touched the hard ground. My body tipped forward, off balance, and this was the position they wanted me in. Infinite subordination.

And so it began.

I expected the first strike. Still, it hurt. I felt the welt the whip left behind, the promise of swelling and pain, but I knew that it hadn’t broken the skin. It would, though, and sooner rather than later. After all, this had to be a spectacle, and simple bruises weren’t obvious enough to be seen by the spectators at the far back.

No, there had to be blood. There always was.

The whip whistled through the air again and landed on my exposed back. I winced. The huge man smiled maliciously above me – if I angled my head just right and rolled my eyes up in my head to the point that they hurt, I could only just see his face.

He lifted his hand and struck again.

It hurt so much that I suddenly wondered how I was going to get through this. I’d been trained to withstand torture, to hold onto my secrets under duress, but it was only now that I realised how much the years in prison had changed me. Not necessarily for the worse, but there hadn’t been any pain in my cell – aside from the usual pains in my neck. I had grown tired of fighting and running and hurting, and since I had come back to the Elite, I had grown scared of it, too.

It was weird what a promise of a better life could do to a person. Now I asked myself why I’d ever let myself believe that the Elite would ever leave me alone in the first place.

The fourth strike finally broke my skin.

The man sneered.

And it really went uphill for me from there. Because I had found my motivation – not a secret to protect, not a life to save, but under the circumstances, it seemed just as important.

The man would not grin again. Not because of something I did. Not because I screamed and not because I winced. Not because I reacted at all.

This was now my only purpose.

This and to stay conscious.

I knew how to do it, too. I forced my mind away from the action and into my safe place. Deep breath. It was a simple beach house we had sometimes visited when I was little. Breath. Simple, but effective. I had learned in my early days with the Elite that you needed some kind of refuge if you wanted to survive in this world.

Two deep breaths.

This was my refuge. I escaped. Gradually. But I did.

I still felt the pain, but it was more distant. Real, but I wasn’t really me. I knew every time that the whip hit me. I felt it, just as strongly as before. But I could watch it from afar. I could choose not to react, and I could count the strikes and I could keep an eye on the time and it all seemed important, but not fundamental.

I felt hot blood run down my naked back and drip, drip, drip down to the ground on either side of me. I imagined it pooling on the floor, forming two long lines, one to my left, one to my right, and framing me, the art, in a macabre display of cruelty.

It wasn’t scary to think about it this way. It helped, taking my mind away from my back and from the pain.

After ten strikes, the whip stopped. I knew Orwell got up from his seat, but I kept my head dutifully bowed. It was time for him to say a few words. He did it after every ten strikes.

I didn’t listen to what he said. I let the eerie melody of his voice serve as a backdrop for my vibrant thoughts. The hatred fuelled me. Made me stronger.

I glanced at my watch. It confirmed my suspicions. Five past five. We were getting somewhere. I had to get through another batch of ten strikes, and then, maybe, with a touch of luck, it would be over. Maybe I was already halfway there.

As the man picked up the whip for the second time, though, I found that I was nowhere near halfway. My back was already burning hot; it was tender and sore and swollen. The faintest touch would have lit a fire, not to mention a strike with a whip. This round would be a thousand times harder.

He hit me. I bit my lip. The little cottage at the beach started evading my mind, and so did all other coherent thoughts.

Another hit. And maybe another, or maybe the first one was just echoing and echoing through my body. It was getting really hard to concentrate. Glancing at my side, I thought I noticed ripped stitches and a wound bleeding profoundly, but a moment later I wasn’t so sure anymore. There was just so much blood, mixing together and running down my skin. And who was to say it was all mine, anyway?

But hey, what was I thinking? Of course it was all mine.

The whip cut into my flesh again, opening another spring for another bloody river, and then again and again and once more in rapid succession.

I lost count.

And then I lost track of time.

I heard another whistle, the whip came down again and – wasn’t it time for Orwell’s next speech? Or had he already spoken? Had I somehow missed that? – nope, it didn’t stop, and I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. It was too late, though, because I had promised myself not to scream and I would have – I would have, had my body not betrayed me.

Well, a second chance for me. How lucky I was.

So I kept my mouth shut from then on, digging my teeth into my lips, drawing blood – because there wasn’t yet enough – but then funny things started happening in front of my eyes – okay, now Orwell’s speech was really long overdue – and shapes danced and collided and burst and I found it easier to just close my lids.

But then I forced them open again, because I remembered …

There was something.

Important.

And I forced myself to remember, because I knew it was more important than me or my pain or my stupid brain, and yes …

Yes.

I had to wait for a flicker.

The problem was that now my whole vision was flickering and it was hard to tell whether those were the lights or just my eyes playing tricks on me. I tried to lock my gaze on something, but my back flared again and the whip cracked and I lost my grip.

I’d already forgotten I had a watch, but now it was painfully obvious against my white, flickering wrist, and I looked at it and it was already twelve past five.

So I decided to trust Mitchell to have got them out by now. He was the only one left I could trust, because my body wasn’t mine to control anymore.

And I gave up.

Just like that.

Without screaming or wincing or reacting at all, I allowed myself to slip away quietly and peacefully.

***

I opened my eyes to another room and knew immediately that something was wrong. I tried to look around, but it turned out I needn’t have bothered. His face was immediately shoved into mine. I needed much too long for his features to finally swim into view, and when they did, I was sure that he wasn’t supposed to be here. I just couldn’t quite grasp what was wrong. The answer was there for the taking; I knew it was plain and simple, but it was still too far away.

Then, it came back all at once, together with his name and the cruel fear that twisted my stomach into a painful, horrible knot.

It was Evan.