Woman Scorned Read online

  Woman

  Scorned

  Man Hunt, Book II

  This book is a work of fiction. People, places, events and situations are the product of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or historical events, is purely coincidental.

  ©2014 K. Edwin Fritz. All rights reserved.

  See more of K. Edwin’s works at FritzFiction.com

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

  First printed by Tempus Fugit Publishing,

  February 2014

  Cover design by Joe Mankowski & Adriana Grecu

  Printed in the United States of America

  Though I have never met them,

  this book is dedicated to

  Gina DeJesus

  Amanda Berry

  and Michelle Knight

  May your lives be filled with happiness,

  and your healing be complete.

  My eternal thanks goes to

  Fred Wish

  and

  Loretta Wish

  for their invaluable help

  in the editing of this book.

  CONTENTS

  Author’s Foreword

  Chapter 1: Another Fallen Angel

  Chapter 2: Sad Descents

  Chapter 3: Scrupa

  Chapter 4: Strategem

  Chapter 5: Betrayal

  INTERLUDE: A MIRACLE

  Chapter 6: Offerings

  Chapter 7: Evidence

  Chapter 8: Demons

  Chapter 9: Departures

  Chapter 10: The Making of Ghosts

  EPILOGUE

  Author’s Foreword

  Readers of the first book in this series will already know I hold a special place in my heart for any victim of sexual abuse. While I count myself among those lucky enough to have never been mistreated in this way, I have known many who have, and I have met several more since- and perhaps because of- the first publication in this trilogy.

  It has not been easy to come back to these pages of fiction knowing more stories of real terror continue to make headlines or, worse still, go entirely undetected. A full year has passed since the publication of Man Hunt, and within that time some dozen new stories of rape and abuse have hit the headlines. And these, of course, were simply the ones the media has deemed sensational enough to occupy their valuable minutes and columns. Statistics tell us that thousands more will never see the light of day.

  My chief concern in writing this sequel has been to meet what my fans have said they want (which is more of the gore and grue that makes up the mainstay plotline of the Man Hunt trilogy) without crossing the invisible line that pushes the imaginative mind of my readers too far. I feel it goes without saying that we all still slow down to get a good, long look at the accident that has caused so much traffic, but do we not also breathe a secret sigh of relief as we confirm that the victims are not our own friends and family?

  In this I believe our natures rebel against us. We are curious and can accept all manner of destruction and depravity… just as long as it doesn’t affect our own lives. We are hypocrites, in other words. We choose to read the horror novel or watch the scary movie because we want to be scared. Or, rather, because we want to have a safe place to pretend we’re scared. You see, we’ll easily turn the page or change the channel when the news occasionally tells us these things are actually real. And true fear only hits us when we ourselves or our loved ones become the actual victims.

  I believe this is because the average person is totally unprepared with what to do in such a situation. This is why I want to focus your attention now not on the acts of depravity each victim of sexual abuse has suffered, but on the long road to recovery they will inevitably plod through in the years thereafter. Consider, if you will, the healing you can bestow by simply having the courage to be patient as they work out the strength to share their story. Be understanding when the person they choose to include may not be you. Be honest when you give a hug or a promise of support. And most importantly, remember they are so much more than victims. They are normal people with hopes and dreams, senses of humor and wonder, and imaginations and appreciations as complex and varied as everyone else. As much as they want to be comforted, they also need to laugh and dance and sing.

  I don’t mean to preach at you, Dear Reader, though I see I’m too late for that. I only know that while forever avoiding a frank discussion with the appropriate professional is detrimental to their ultimate recovery, it is equally true that to dwell on their suffering in daily life is equally damning.

  So please join me, if you will, in a promise to not only teach the young how to prevent and avoid such crimes in the future, but to give the victims of today what they truly need: help when they need it, and a life filled with joy every moment from today until the end of time.

  -K. Edwin Fritz

  February, 2014

  Freedom is what you do

  with what’s been done to you.

  –Jean-Paul Sartyr

  For every man who lives

  without freedom, the rest of us

  must face the guilt.

  –Lillian Hellman

  Liberty without learning

  is always in peril,

  and learning without liberty

  is always in vain.

  –John. F. Kennedy

  None are so helplessly enslaved

  as those who falsely believe

  they are free.

  –Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe

  CHAPTER 1

  ANOTHER FALLEN ANGEL

  1

  The stairs led up, surely they did. They led down, after all, and that’s how logic worked. What goes up must come down, so stairs that lead down must also lead up, mustn’t they? But they didn’t seem that way to Angel. After all that time down in that horrible room, how could anyone still believe that up was possible, that up was real?

  They say freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you, but they don’t tell you that you need strength to do it. Angel had proven strong enough to survive, but perhaps not strong enough to believe the stairs could still lead to freedom. The bottom step was as far as Angel’s eyes ever went. It was the threshold between two worlds, and for eight years Angel’s entire world had been the square of gray that lay below that final, creaking step.

  Against the far wall rested a simple bed in a metal frame. The mattress was without sheets or a blanket, was lumped over with age and hard use, and was a collection of stains and the faint yet persistent smell of mildew. In the corner sat an exposed, unwashed toilet. Angel used the bowl for its intended purpose and the tank as both a sink and a fountain. It was the only fresh water that ever came down the stairs.

  But the bed and toilet weren’t the problem. Angel had learned to live with both. It was the table that caused so much pain and fear. Marred with gouges of abuse and the faded maroon of old blood, it took the place of prominence in the center of the room, just three short strides from that awful, creaking step. Invisible to the naked eye but oh so evident to Angel’s heart, the table also had soaked within its pulpy pores a score of innumerable tears. In truth they numbered in mere thousands, but they seemed like millions, didn’t they? Like the count of stars in the sky or the grains of sand along the ocean floors.

  Tears were how Angel had learned to feel the ebb and flow of life. Days and months had no meaning. Only tears marked the passage of time, for Angel usually cried when the abuse came, for it was always a congruence of emotional and physical torture alike. On days when Angel’s captor had more time than the usual to kill, the tears flowed like the leak from a forgotten faucet.

  The table was oak and far
stronger than Angel’s will, but it was giving, too. It had given Angel a reason to lose all hope. It had given Angel’s captor a release of the demons that screamed within. And, as one must realize, it would also one day give the world a haunting image at which lawyers and juries will stare in speechless solemnity while they try to make sense of what happened down below that creaking step in that square of gray concrete.

  The table had chains, of course, but this is another easy assumption we can all cross off our mental checklists. Secured to the head and base of the table, the chains culminated in shackles like those found in period prison movies. They chafed and rubbed the skin, causing some- but not all- of the blood stains, and they were rusted. As neglected as the unwashed toilet. As used as a kidnapped soul.

  When the chains sang their jangling songs and the shackles wrapped Angel in their steely embrace, Angel often escaped into a special place within the mind. It was the same place where any doomed prey goes to avoid witnessing its own demise. Rabbits do this when caught in the jaws of the wolf. They feel no pain because the brain shuts down. Of course, they don’t try to escape, either. All the better for the wolf.

  The chings! in the ears and the gashings of the flesh were mostly lost to the other, more conspicuous pains and noises Angel endured. When it was over, the chains were removed and Angel was left on the table of oak, usually bleeding or crying, but sometimes both.

  There were other items that made regular appearances, brought in every other or every third day and, in seeming defiance of the stairs, leaving again some minutes or hours later. There was food, always cold and never above simple palatability, but there were also items brought specifically to bring more tears, more blood, and more pain. Many were designed to be inserted into the body cavity. Others were designed to mar it. Still more were there to leave not marks upon the skin but scars upon the soul.

  The first year had been the most difficult.

  Suicide was of course a constant contemplation in Angel’s mind. But each of the many failed attempts had resulted merely in longer beatings and larger insertion devices. Angel hadn’t tried that escape method in over thirty months. Counted out, this had been some six thousand tears. Angel counted every one as it welled and rolled down the cheek. A good day had no tears at all, but was rare. A bad day was hard to count out, but this had become one of Angel’s tricks. Counting the tears took effort and concentration which took Angel’s mind away from the teeth and claws of the wolf. Freedom is what you do with what’s been done to you, if you are strong enough. This one strength had become Angel’s lone freedom.

  There was prayer, too, which occupied Angel’s seemingly endless time in the gray room. But the supplications had never been answered, and the nearly-daily visits of the wolf had never stopped. God, for this Angel at least, was as fictional as the fabled Golden Fleece and as useless as a broken vessel. And isn’t that all Angel had become? A thing molded only to hold and to take and to receive? A thing now so shattered that only scattered pieces remained? So why contemplate the supposed afterlife when the current one was so consuming, so impossible, so interminable?

  This leaves us, finally, with only those stairs that lead down but not up. Down is where Angel had stumbled more than eight years before, and down is where Angel has stayed. Down below that step is where Angel lives and fears and cries. And whenever the feet appear, the chains soon sing and the shackles quickly embrace. It is then that the wolf howls so loudly. It is then that Angel counts the uncountable tears.

  Every morning during those eight long years Angel has stared at that final, creaking step, abhorring its squeal and cursing the heavy foot that makes it cry. The stairs seemed to lead only down, never up, this is true. But perhaps the question one should ask is not which way the steps go, but where are they so cozily nestled? Are they in the secret basement of a white fortress in the middle of a forgotten island? Or is that final, crying step in the underbelly of an unkempt house in Portsmouth, or Sacramento, or Cleveland?

  And it is thus that Angel’s gender isn’t the true question one should be asking. Because today Angel will finally be killed and disposed of like a common pest. An accident, really, by a heavy hand distracted by too much worry and paranoia. An unfortunate turn of events for the wolfish feet that creak the stairs and must later carry Angel’s body upwards at last.

  The true question one should ask, then, is this: Be it Portsmouth, or Cleveland, or the island called Monroe, is it not predictable- nay, inevitable- that one day soon another Angel will fall, and another vessel will begin to break?

  2

  Beneath the thin covering of her clothes, Josie’s skin bore a dozen yellowing bruises and a semicircular mark now scabbed and healing on the side of her left breast. Charles had done the former with his hands and the latter with his teeth. He hadn’t punched, exactly, but he’d squeezed and pushed and pulled with the very strong hands of a laboring man pulsing with adrenaline and unheeding testosterone. He had slapped her again, too. Not once this time but whenever and wherever he had felt like it once he’d gotten going. There was no sign of it now, but when she’d looked at herself in the bathroom mirror in the minutes afterwards, most of her body had been covered in stinging, red handprints.

  It was now nine days after she had met her former lover and rapist in a bowling alley parking lot. In that time they had had sex no less than twelve times. She’d kept count. The first time had been hard, very hard. She’d felt like she was being raped both in the past and the present at the same time. And though she’d found a new strength, a new resolve in herself in the hour afterwards in the bathroom, the days afterward had been a different kind of abuse. In that bathroom she had made up her mind to allow him whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted it. She would take it all and use it as fuel to torture and kill him on the island. As those days had progressed, his sexual actions had gotten more violent each time.

  She sat in the coach section of a plane bound for Hawaii, and Charles sat next to her, lost to the in-flight movie and unaware he was bound for torture and screaming and the fullest possible retribution of a woman scorned. He wore a black t-shirt adorned with a trio of skittering cockroaches. He had already explained not only that “NukeNorm” was the best metal band in all of Portland, but the band members were friends of his. Josie didn’t care for the shirt or for Charles’ enthusiasm over it.

  She didn’t care for the film either. It was another in the world’s longest line of feel-good tales about people with broken hearts and no brains. In this one, each lonely heart was unknowingly watched over by an angel who schemed romantic hookups for his or her human charges but inevitably fell into comical hijinks with other angels.

  The inevitably happy ending had been evident ten minutes into the story, and now finally nearing its crescendo, Josie was fantasizing that the womanizer who had cheated on every girlfriend he’d ever had was about to be thrust into hell instead of getting the forgiveness from his One True Love.

  Beside her, Charles laughed aloud at a clever line from the most bumbling of the angels. Josie faked a smiled, pretending to agree with its witticism. In her mind she saw the handprints across her cheek and thighs, felt the too-strong bite of his teeth on her breast, and heard the grunting of his ox-like orgasm from the week before.

  I’m going to tear your balls off with a wrench, she thought while adding another chuckle to her fictionalized personae. And you’re going to scream at me to stop. But it won’t work. No amount of begging or praying will save you. And I’m going to see it in your eyes when you finally learn there are no such things as miracles.

  “He’s so funny,” she said aloud, and Charles nodded his agreement. Beneath the thin cover of her clothes, however, Josie’s skin seemed to crawl like so many skittering cockroaches.

  3

  The man screamed because it was his job to scream. Gertrude, of course, had her own duties. But since he screamed so quickly these days, mostly she just listened and smiled.

  “Why don’t you just kill me,
bitch!?” the man shouted. Gertrude didn’t say anything while he bled and cried and waited. In her mind, she was counting the days he’d been on Monroe’s Island.

  Eight full years times three hundred and sixty-five… she mused.

  “Just kill me!” he screamed into the silence. “Just get it over with! Please!”

  “No.” It was a statement devoid of emotion. A simple fact declared for his ears to hear and his brain to process. Nothing more.

  Minutes went by. She reached toward the chef’s knife sticking out of his right knee, grasped its handle, and twisted it just a few degrees. He screamed again, but she ignored him, still trying to do the math in her head.

  Later, he tried a different tactic. “You’re useless without your chains and your weapons, you know.” At this Gertrude turned on him.

  “And what did Tricia Ciccone think about your basement full of toys?” she asked. “Today is July 20th. Did you know that, pig? According to Tricia’s testimony, on this day you forced her to give you oral sex until she nearly choked to death. She could hear a birthday party going on at a neighbor's house outside, but nobody could hear her suffering in your basement. They had fireworks, and just as they reached their climax, so did you. You ejaculated on her face. Do remember that day? Do you remember how disgusting you have been?”

  The man didn’t look away. Instead his eyes narrowed and filled with venom, and Gertrude frowned. All this time, she thought, and he still hasn’t learned basic decency. Not even enough to fake it. I should kill him. He is unteachable, a true waste among those already valueless. And still…