The Pain Inside

Chapter 11

    Kaitlyn felt the cold stone before she saw it. As everything came into focus she found herself laying on the ground in a dark corridor. At one end stood a pair of large wooden doors, one of them slightly ajar, light filtering out to her through the opening. She'd seen the doors before, as she was being led through them. She was back in the castle, the first of the worlds of Matt's mind that she'd found herself in, and through those doors was the throne room of Prince Frost.

    She didn't rise immediately though. If there was a real possibility of the shadow following her between worlds, then she needed to start making progress, and quickly. It wasn't enough just to try to help him, if the shadow  would be able to intervene and potentially undo whatever she'd done. What had she decided in the world with the statue? That if she was going to help the pieces of him in these worlds, she needed to figure out what each world was supposed to represent? After all, if the Matt of that world had represented his loneliness, and the Matt in the institution had represented his surrender to his pain, and his guilt over it, and the shadow represented his negativity, then the Matt of this place had to mean something too. But which Matt held that meaning? Prince Frost, or the version of Matt he'd been torturing? Then she remembered. The look in Prince Frost's eyes the last time she'd been here. And in that instant the answer became clear. It was both, this world represented... Matt's hatred of himself. Prince Frost was the cold judgment he cast on his own flaws, and the copies of Matt that were brought up from the dungeon, which Prince Frost had implied were numerous, perhaps even countless, represented how Matt saw himself and the pain that he inflicted upon himself through his hatred.

    If she was right though, then how did she change that? How did one make someone stop hating themself? It couldn't be as simple as telling him that he needed to love himself, that mantra graced the pages of enough self-help books and emerged from the lips of enough talk show therapists that Matt had to have already heard it before at some point, and she was sure if it was really that easy for him it wouldn't be an issue. But that being the case, if he really wasn't able to find a way to love himself, then how could she help? What was worse, she didn't have a great deal of time to think of a way. Just as dangerous as moving around without a plan was going too long without moving at all. She was sure it wouldn't be long before the shadow arrived, and who knew what it would do if she wasn't already acting, if it gained the advantage over her.

    "Whoever you are that helped me in the other world... Who gave me those things to say, guided me in what to tell him. Help me now. I don't know if I can do this by myself. Help me save him," Kat whispered, hoping that somehow they would be able to hear. She was going to have to take  a major step, throw caution to the wind and do whatever it took to get through to him. It was a risk. She'd been told that jolting his conscious could be dangerous. But she wasn't sure she had an option anymore. And so, before she could give herself a chance to think twice about it, she rose to her feet and started walking for the door.

    As she reached it and pulled it open just enough for her to slip through, she wasn't quite sure what she expected to find in the throne room beyond, but whatever she might have imaged never would have prepared her for the scene before her. The entire room, from the stone of the floor to the throne itself, even the walls, was covered in blood. The coating wasn't uniform, but instead more like a massacre had occurred, like a hundred different people had been slaughtered and their blood had sprayed everywhere, causing haphazard streaks to land against every available surface. And while there were no complete corpses, here and there along the floor were bits and pieces of flesh, bone, and things she didn't want to imagine, organs perhaps. The only living creatures occupying the room were two of the prisoner copies of Matt chained to the stone slabs, and Prince Frost himself, standing in the middle of the room, his entire body covered with blood. It was clear none of it was his own, but it was also clear from the way the blood had been sprayed around the room that not all of it came from victims restrained upon the slabs. Some of them had to have been standing in other spots, perhaps even trying to run.