The Last Rite

Chapter Six: The Whole Story

A Maggie-less chapter! But the title says it: here's where I get you caught up on what's happening to a lot of other charcters, including Jason, Aaron, Scott, and curious Detective John Tamblyn.

Chapter Six: The Whole Story

Here it is, thought Jason, expecting the absolute worst.

But no, it wasn’t the end. Guards led him through a new series of corridors. He struggled to keep his feet.

The beating had stopped, and they didn’t mean to kill him, at least not right now. A doorway was indicated to him, and he went through to find himself in a small room filled with towels stacked on shelves; the air was warm and humid.

Through an archway, he found a recess like a hot tub carved into the floor, filled with steamy hot water. There was a faint odor of sulfur, but no more unpleasant than the usual tinge of chlorine around a public pool.

Weak, battered, and not in any condition to protest, Jason allowed himself to be stripped. One guard stayed by the doorway, as if they expected him to make a run for it in the buff. As if.

Another lowered him into the pool and bathed him. His bruises were treated gently, the dirt and gravel eased out of his cuts, and his entire body soaped down and sponged clean.

It would have been easier to take if he didn’t hate so much feeling like an invalid. Correct that - an invalid and a prisoner. Being bathed by someone else was the subject of embarrassing baby photos, not something suffered lightly by a fourteen year old boy, despite the lack of options.

By the time they lifted him out, Jason was frustrated and angry, snatching at the proffered towel with more violence than gratitude.

It was difficult to admit even to himself that it was nice to be clean and to have no more stones plastered into the cuts on his elbows and hands, and just as hard to admit how grateful his muscles were for the exposure to the warm water.

He was allowed to dry himself off and wrap a fresh towel around his waist. After that, they picked him up gently but (he thought) excessively firmly and laid him out on the floor. Here, two of them were needed to hold him down while a third poured something that burned and fizzed like peroxide, into his cuts.

Bandaged and humiliated, Jason was hardly aware of how much fitter he felt. As well, the attention to him and his own annoyance had temporarily made him forget about what he’d seen in the gym, what made it clear he was in terrible danger every moment he spent in the clutches of whatever had spoken to him out of thin air back in the mine field.

Those memories, and others – Maggie, fear, dirt – came back one by one as his body cooled and dried. They dressed him, back in his own clothing. When he tried to protest, and then to help, his hands were slapped aside.

This suggested that the beating needed only encouragement from him to recommence. He wouldn’t have been surprised if someone had stepped in to explain that the bath and the first aid were only offered so he could be beaten up more later.

No, he would have been surprised. Since his invisible tormentor, he had heard not a single word of English, or any other language. Mute prison guards.

And the sound, again and again, of the explosion ringing in his ears. It had taken a good long time for his hearing to come back completely after the blast, which only made the damage they'd done to his body that much more surreal.

They took him out of the bath room and back into the twisted, labyrinthine corridors. Instead of the high, rough passages he had been in before, the new ones were lower but wider, and the walls were smoother and brightly lit.