Author Games: Red Room

Task Seven: Angela Belmont

It would be nice to say that Angela Belmont had been changed in some way after the death of someone she'd known and loved. Nice does not equal true, however, and the truth of the situation was that Angela had changed so dramatically up to that point that any change thereafter would never be enough to give meaning to her. A hollow had burrowed inside and as the sisters took her to a corner of the woods where more stakes rested, she knew that time was running out. They had others there, already beginning to tie some up, though Angela was far from the last they brought forward. She didn't know if they too were dead inside, if they felt nothing at the grief of others and had no caring left, or if they had found hope despite their tribulations.

All Angela did know was that every single one of them were terrible, horrible, sinners.

A few remained dressed in the white gown that she'd slipped out of so quickly that first night. Others still were dressed as she, naked as a newborn, covered in blood and dirt for a dress with their hair adorned with dead leaves and twigs. They were bugs the lot of them.

Angela felt nothing as they stopped before an emptied stake and pointed up. They had her step upon a scaffold and stand. It was a simple motion, a simple act, and she felt nothing, knew nothing, saw everything.

She saw the lights that climbed up the sides of the mountain, coming through the countryside and passing the trees in shades of blue and white. Alongside them came a distant purple, crafted perhaps by the red included, and though her ears were full of blood, she could distantly hear their shrill sirens.

It would be nice to say that Angela Belmont had changed after she was rescued. That though tied, the flames never reached higher than her feet, and she never even got the chance to scream. That the sisters ran through the woods, some escaping, some lost to the wilderness. That she was able to be cleaned with hot water, fed an actual meal, and that she would be able to talk again.

Oh, Angela could talk.

It was getting her to shut up that was the issue.

"Sinners, sinners, sinners," she muttered, her voice scarcely making a sound at all. The cops moved about her. Paramedics were taking care of the victims. The bodies were all collected. Some had been identified. No one knew who Angela was, but she wasn't dead, and they had other victims to take care of as well. Some had suffered worse. Those they had already escorted away, the ambulances blazing through the small road that ran through those twisted woods.

Angela? She waited there, a blanket bunched around her shoulders as they assessed her wounds. Two people, a man and a woman, were tending to her. They hadn't yet seen her back, nor her shoulders, but they saw her ribcage, the busted rib on her left side, the cuts and scrapes that covered her body. They saw the indentions where her skin had been carefully ripped out.

What they didn't see was the deerskin draped around her. It was still there, Angela knew, but no one else had any clue. All they saw was bloodied skin and a scared girl, sitting there, voiceless except for that mutter she kept repeating, over and over, just underneath her breath.

They think I'm clean.

They came to save innocent girls and boys who had been taken against their will for cult activity. They came to get rid of the cult members. They came not for those who were caught within the thread of sanity with something heavy looming over them and digging into their spine. They came not for the sinning whores who deserved fates far worse.

They came not for her. They knew not what she was. They knew not who she was.

Still, Angela, in all her sinful ways, was perfectly content to allow them to take her with them.

"It's gonna be okay, sweetie. Can you tell me your name?"

"Belmont." Then, after a short breath, "Angela."

"Angela. It's nice to meet you. My name is..." The woman droned on, asking more questions of Angela, but all the answers were fake. Angela could have been anyone. Angela Belmont was a party girl who failed at university and took home strange men to make a quick buck. She was taken because of her rash and unpredictable nature that led her into the hands of those who cared not for such sins. The sinner before them shared her name but not her identity. She shared her face but not her hands.

Angela looked down to see the dirt under her nails. She peeled skin out from one. The backs of her hands were full of deerskin, the soft material coating her body in its warmth, and she longed to be returned to the earth where she belonged. Her feet were numb as she walked. Now, they were black as well, a tender gray slowly creeping in where the red blood vessels had yet to burst.

Oh, it could take years to describe the undertaking Angela's mind had gone through. Her body could be healed to some extent, but the mind is an unsavory masterpiece, and Angela wanted not to be cured. To her, there was nothing to cure. Nothing to fix. She had been deemed a sinner and there she would stay.

"You're a nasty whore. You're an evil being. You're sin. You're sin. You're sin."

"Relish in this, dear Angela, for your metamorphosis."

"Moicheia."

Under her tongue, she could taste the words before she spoke them. "Sinner, sinner, sinner." It was the only truth she could speak. The only words her heart could muster.

The ride to the city was dull and slow. Others in the vehicle avoided her eye--did they too know of their sins, or were they yet ignorant?

We were supposed to burn, she thought, a seed of anger cast within her soul. It festered there for the next several hours. As different doctors saw her in the hospital, all asking the same questions, a repetition of sound and noise, Angela's heart felt a spark that would soon blossom. Slowly, ever so slowly, Angela's body held within it the flames that had never reached her.