Page 13 of Fear No Hell

Calliope

Sam went upstairs hours ago.

After taking a shower and pulling on one of Sam’s graphic t-shirts with the words Sleep Token written over a masked man’s head, I lay down and tried to go to sleep. The minute I close my eyes, a deadly combination of panic, rage, and shame pulse through me.

Hours pass with me lying in the most comfortable bed I’ve ever slept in, staring blindly at the ceiling while the moon passes across the sky.

It has been a big night. I escaped Arthur and his plans for me.

I committed arson. I touched someone willingly for the first time in decades.

On the other hand, I signed up to torture someone, which doesn’t bother me at all, and am voluntarily staying in another man’s house, which has me drenched in a cold sweat, despite the closed door and staircase between us.

I press my palms against my closed eyes and force myself to breathe. I need to sleep—it’s one of the few needs deities and human share—but every time I try to doze off, I jerk awake, terrified I’ll be back in the attic, chained to a bed, Arthur’s heavy tread on the stairs.

I can’t breathe.

It feels like something is sitting on my chest. A hand wrapped around my neck.

I can’t inhale past the tightness in my throat; somehow, my terrified whimper and the slightly hysterical laughter that follows, muffled though they are, manage to escape.

No matter how hard I try, I can't bring air in, though.

Tears pool against my closed eyelids. For a second, I think they’re trapped there, held in place by my hands and eyelids, but it doesn’t take long for them to stream out, down my cheeks, tracing across my neck before falling backwards onto the sheets.

My hysterical laughter morphs, turning dark and broken, becoming sobs that rack my body.

I don’t know how long I cry, my mind torn apart by everything I’ve survived and the disbelief that I’m finally free.

After all of these years. Never to see that awful room again or ever be Arthur’s victim again.

Tears are pouring down my face as my chest rattles with the deep sounds tearing out of me, and my body shakes under Sam’s sheets.

Sam.

Sam who came to save me, even though I managed to save myself. Who helped me burn down Arthur’s house and sat watching it with me until it grew too risky for us to stay. Who gave me my first ever nickname. Who abducted and enchained his father because I asked him to.

Sam who I hugged. Who I touched of my own volition.

My tears slow then stop as I picture his face. With his dark hair, defined features, and warm hazel eyes, he looks nothing like Arthur. It’s not just that, although it does make it easier for me to interact with him. It’s that he doesn’t act anything like Arthur.

When he pulled up his pant leg to reveal his prosthetic limb, I almost vomited at his loss and my own selfishness.

I spent so long wondering what happened to the child who tried to save me, fluctuating wildly between fear that he died after being carted off by the medics and anger that he didn’t come back for me.

As it turns out, my rage was misplaced. He tried to come back for me, even after I cost him his lower leg.

No. I huff. I didn’t cost him his leg.

Arthur did.

All of this leads back to Arthur. Arthur who took me from my home. Arthur who raped me for four decades in pursuit of fame, fortune, and the next Great American Novel. Arthur who maimed and abused his godsdamned son.

Arthur is the rotten fruit. He is the villain in this story.

I’ll show him what a villain really is. I’ll make him realize he should have left me and Sam unharmed.

A hiss whispers out of me as I throw the sheets back and get out of bed, padding across the room to open the door and step into the hallway beyond it.

The wooden floor squeaks under my bare feet as I walk towards the basement, the thick door muffling Arthur’s gagged shrieks until I tug it open to reveal the stairs to the lower level.

The December chill manages to permeate the basement walls, allowing for the cold blast of air that strikes my face the second I reach the bottom of the stairs.

I didn't feel the cold while I made my way down the steps.

Once I step into the open space, coming face to face with a dangling Arthur, any concerns I might have had about the temperature vanish.

His body went to seed years ago. If I didn’t know what I do, hadn’t had the experiences I’ve had with him, I might have thought he was handsome in his youth. Nothing like Sam, but good looking enough.

Years of heavy drinking—and likely hard drug use if the broken blood vessels around his nose are anything to go by—paired with the passage of time have stripped any attractiveness he might have had.

After Sam found me the first time, Arthur spiraled, his weight fluctuating drastically from month to month, his skin sagging, his teeth yellowing.

His visits to the attic grew more frequent and, somehow, more violent with each passing day.

It didn’t feel like he was only seeking inspiration anymore.

It felt like he was exacting revenge, although for what I didn’t know.

Now I realize it was for what he perceived as my role in his divorce and the loss of his son.

After all, Arthur doesn’t believe in accountability and self-awareness for himself. Only for others.

A cruel smile stretches across my face, one with too many teeth and no pleasantness, as I saunter across the basement.

Arthur’s head jerks up when I finally stop feet away from him. Over the strip of tape covering his mouth, his eyebrows dip into a V over a venomous stare. Muffled words, unpleasant ones if I’m going by the tone he says them in, emerge through the makeshift gag.

“Hello,” I greet him, reaching out to rip the tape from his mouth.

“You fucking bit—”

“Ah, ah, ah.” I wag my finger before crumpling the tape into a ball and tossing it on the floor. “I didn’t let you have your speech back just for you to insult me.”

His mouth snaps shut before parting again, his next words emerging in a voice about an octave higher than it was before. “Let me have my speech back?”

“Umhm,” I hum in agreement. “We took away your ability to speak. We’re the ones who can give it back.”

“We being you and Michelle’s bastard son?” He jerks his chin towards the stairs, his body swaying with the movement. “He always was a disappointment. His existence a slap in the face of my marriage.”

I flinch in surprise at the vitriol he’s spewing about his only son before I retort, “He’s a better man than you’ll ever be. Not that that’s a high bar.”

“You spent years on your back for me. Now you’re trading me in for a younger model, huh?” He smirks, a repulsive twist of his mouth that makes me want to peel his lips off his face.

“By ‘years on my back—’” My fingers flex by my head in scare quotes—“Are you referencing chaining me to a bed and raping me for inspiration?”

“You wanted it.” Arthur’s nostrils flared. “Your sole purpose is to provide inspiration to authors. Can’t blame me for accepting a service you’re literally intended to provide.”

White-hot anger pours through me, and the tingle at my fingertips tells me my new claws are forming. “No.” The word emerges so guttural it sounds distorted and wrong.

At the barely human sound, Arthur recoils. The chains shift, their metallic clank followed seconds later by a mewl of pain as his shattered leg sways.

“No,” I repeat, relishing the confused look forming on his smug face. “I choose who I share my gift with. I’m not some possession to be passed around or exploited, no matter what the men of this world think.”

“Sure, you keep telling—"

Without any thought, my arm shoots out, my claws ripping across his chest. His flesh tears easily, like tissue paper, and so quickly that it takes blood several seconds to collect along the split skin.

“What the fuck!” Arthur howls.

“Don’t be so hysterical.” I sneer. “Your worthless, fragile mortal flesh is so easily flayed open. By your logic, doesn’t that mean you want this?”

For the first time, I see fear in his eyes.

A warm sensation flares to life in my chest, one that sends pleasant shivers through me.

“I’ve been waiting for this a long time.

” I step forward, stabbing my finger at his shattered knee.

The already mutilated flesh gives easily as I prod at it, fresh blood pouring over his lower leg and drenching the one sock he’s still wearing.

I can’t stifle my giggles at the sight of this man, this monster I feared for so long, dangling uselessly from steel beams in his son’s basement.

His son.

Sam.

Suddenly, I realize I don’t only want to take revenge for me. I want it for the ghost of young Sam who tried to save me and lost his leg and years of his life for it. Sam would probably never ask me to seek vengeance for him.

But I want to.

I can give Sam something no one else ever can. I can make this monster pay for what he did to the caring man sleeping two floors up.

That thought is at the front of my mind when I slash down Arthur’s lower right leg.

Arthur shrieks as the skin splits open. Unlike the scratches on his chest, the blood rises immediately to the surface, pouring past the serrated edges of flesh and staining his torn pants.

Through the crimson flood pouring from his wound, I can see flashes of white. Apparently, I cut him to the bone.

There’s something poetic about that.

A manic laugh slips from my mouth.

“Please, please, no.” The smugness from before has melted away, replaced by terror and begging. “Please I’ll do anything. Just don’t hurt me. I won’t tell anyone what happened.”

“This feels familiar, doesn’t it?” I purse my lips and tap my chin in mock thought. “Kind of sounds like the way I begged you to let me go. After you abducted me from my home and I woke chained to a bed in your attic. Magic nullified, family gone, trapped for your sick pleasure.”

“No,” he moans, thrashing in his chains

“Yes,” I cackle. “And do you remember what you did?”

Bleary eyes widen in his gore- and snot-stained face. There’s a split second of confusion, chased away by recognition.

“You do, don’t you?” I tug on the fingers of his broken hand.

His shrieks of pain send pleasure dancing across my skin, centering in my stomach before sliding downwards.

I feel alive for the first time in years.

Alive and beyond aroused, my thoughts turning to Sam before I focus my attention back on Arthur. “You laughed at me.”

The recollection of his riotous amusement in response to my tearful pleas—the memory still fresh after all this time—sends scarlet shadows flickering across my vision.

“Please,” he whines. “I’m sorry. Just please don’t hurt me anymore. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s far too late for apologies.” I observe. “In fact, I don’t need them anymore. I want something new from you.”

A garbled response is halfway out of his mouth when I tear open each of his arms, starting shallow at the shoulder and digging in deeper as I get closer to the wrists.

“You know what I want now?” I lean forward, resting a hand on his chest, the tips of my claws curling into his flesh but not breaking it. Not yet, at least, even though the bloodlust inside of me demands more. More agony. More pain. More torment. “I want you to bleed for me.”

He screams in response.

Rage obscures my vision, and then I’m nothing but instinct, slashing at him, delighting in the high-pitched noises pouring out of him.