Author Games: Red Room

Task Five: Hunters of Artemis

Angela Belmont

To look into the eyes of one who can see the sins of all written before them and know that they see only hell inside you is an experience. To look at oneself and also see those sins, ones never committed by thought, crimes of mind that torture the soul, is something else altogether. As Angela Belmont stood, shakily, without a scream left inside her, she looked down upon her muddied form in the puddle of water and saw only death. Sins she had never known were sins sank inside her sanguine soul as the somber reality forced itself upon her. It was alive, a knowledge she could not escape as it became true in ways that Angela could not bear.

She was a sinner.

She was a creature--a monster--a human being who was worse than that, no more a being than a common devil, no more alive than the fur that lined her body.

There is a torture perhaps worse than the body can bear--that is one within the mind, where a twisted form of retribution plays like a song you can hear but cannot remember the words to. It sticks, just on the tip of your tongue. It sits, staring at you. It reverberates throughout your mind and crawls over you, inching across your open body like a tapeworm you know you love to hate. Oh, sin is a delicious lie we gladly take part in every day, and as she stood there, unable to stop staring at her form, Angela Belmont was a living sin.

The hide covered her back and forearms, stretching down onto her stomach, covering her nakedness but just barely. Her normally pink pussy was now a brown masterpiece of stitched thread and raw skin, cut to pieces where they had sewn it up, leaving only two little fragile holes--one to pee and the other to shit--the only two things that had yet to become sinful.

She cried upon seeing herself, but worse when she realized the warmth that was for so many hours pressed against her had left, leaving her colder than she'd ever been before. Even her tormentors cared not.

"Free from sin," they'd claimed. "Pure." "Clean." "Innocent." There was no innocence about her. Nothing innocent about the pain that had become her friend, coursing through her like it had never not been there, a reminder that she was still, for some wretched reason, living.

Leaving the building, she found that her legs did not feel as they had before. Rocks stuck to her heels and her feet were peeling and raw. They did not feel pain. They were stoic, just as she, and the bright rays of a fading sun greeted her with only a dim hello. There was no answer from her. She had nothing left to say for the world.

Though something left in her heart told her to try and run again, one look at her fingers, at the broken bones and the deerskin that protruded from them, and she was crying, a broken sob of a woman who had no escape. It would be with her forever. Even if removed, the scars would line her body, reminding her of her sins. Reminding her that she could never, ever, be free.

"You're a filthy little whore, aren't you?" His fingers rubbed against her cheek. There was a flurry of heat that rose from her toes, lingered down below, and finally reached her face. A playful smile lined her pretty pink lips. The others waited gleefully, hoping for something, but her toying form would never allow those lips to know of another human. It was just the ones on her face, bright pink with lipstick that would never last, that tasted of his rough lips, of his scratchy beard, of his hard hands that rubbed all over her neck and head as though he owned her.

"Mm," she moaned, starting to move away.

"Not so fast."

Angela shook her head. "No, I--"

But that wasn't right. Angela knew that her memory was wrong. They'd told her the truth, hadn't they? Angela knew the real truth.

She would never turn away from a man.