Page 46 of The Associate
Before Samuel could process it, Elias turned his head, looking up at the Director’s face above him. He gathered the moisture in his mouth, and with a sound of pure contempt, he spat. A small, wet glob landed on the Director’s cheek.
“Fuck you,” Elias snarled, his voice raw but clear, “and your God!”
For a heartbeat, there was absolute silence. The Director didn’t flinch. He didn’t wipe his face. His expression, previously a mask of cold judgment, seemed to crumple in on itself, twisting into something ancient and ravenous; pure, unadulterated rage.
His hand shot out. A wet, meatycrackreverberated off the wooden walls as it connected with Elias’s cheek. He was thrown sideways, his body hitting the floorboards with a sickening thud, limp as a ragdoll.
A sound tore from Samuel’s throat; a high, ragged scream that didn’t sound human. Tears, hot and immediate, spilled over his cheeks, blurring the horror. He tried to lunge forward, but his muscles were locked in frozen panic.
He watched, helpless, as two other counselors moved in. They hauled Elias’s limp form up, holding him bent over a wooden bench that had been dragged into the center of the room. One of them produced a leather strap, thick and worn.
The first lash cut through the air like a whistle, then landed across Elias’s bare back with a sound like a butcher cleaving meat.
Samuel screamed again. And again.
Each impact jolted Elias’s body. He didn’t cry out. He didn’t make a sound. His head hung down, his wild hair obscuring his face. Red welts, angry and brutal, began to bloom in parallel lines across his skin.
Then, hands closed like vices around Samuel’s own arms, digging into his biceps. He was hauled to his feet, his knees scraping on the wood. The world tilted.
“No! NO! ELIAS!” he shrieked.
He began to struggle in earnest, a wild, flailing animal. He kicked out, his bare foot connecting with a counselor’s shin, earning him a grunt and a fiercer grip. He twisted, he bucked, tears and streams blurring his vision. But his eyes never left Elias’s form slumped and motionless over the bench.
They dragged him backward toward the heavy wooden door of the chamber. He fought every inch, his screams becoming hoarse, wordless pleas. The thwack-thwack-thwackof the strap was a metronome in his ears.
Then the door swung shut with a solid, finalthud.
∞∞∞
The cold was not an absence of heat. It was a presence. A solid, damp thing that had seeped up through the concrete floor and into his bones, replacing his marrow with a slow, crystalline ache.
Samuel knelt in the exact center of the cube, a point he’d determined by touch in the absolute dark. A meter and a half. Two meters tall. He knew the dimensions now as intimately as he knew the contours of his own skull. He had measured them with his body, with the span of his arms, with the scrabbling reach of his fingertips against the unyielding, rough-hewn slabs.
He was still in his underwear. The cotton offered no barrier against the chill of the floor. He didn’t know how long he had been here. It could have been hours. It could have been a month. The concept of time had lost meaning. There was onlyBefore the Door Closed, andNow.
AndNowwas eternal.
His back was a canvas of fire. The lashes, administered before he was thrown in here, still burned. But the pain was a distant signal, a broadcast from a country whose language he no longer spoke.
His knees, pressed hard against the gritty concrete, had gone from sharp agony to a dull, wet numbness. He knew they were bleeding. He paid it no mind. The pain was a clock ticking in another room.
His lips moved. They were cracked, swollen from biting down on screams. A sound emerged, a dry, papery whisper that scraped the walls of his throat raw with each syllable.
“For I know my transgressions, and my sin is ever before me. Against you, you only, have I sinned and done what is evil in your sight…”
The words were not a prayer anymore. They were a ward against the silence that pressed in on his eardrums until they rang with a high-pitched phantom tone. If he stopped the words, the silence would get in. It would fill his mouth, his lungs, his mind. It would become him. So he didn’t.
“Create in me a clean heart, O God, and renew a right spirit within me. Cast me not away from your presence, and take not your Holy Spirit from me.”
A metallic shriek tore through the cube.
Light stabbed his eyes.
Samuel flinched, his whole body convulsing in a single, violent spasm. He squeezed his eyes shut, but the afterimage was burned onto his retinas.
He didn’t stop the scripture. His whisper became a frantic, speeding murmur against the assault.
“Restore to me the joy of your salvation, and uphold me with a willing spi…”
