Love & Exorcisms | 18+ | COMPLETE |

- Chapter 20 -

Damian Hearst stood in the doorway, carrying a tray with a bowl and a teacup. The moment he laid eyes on me, both were dropped. The tray clattered, the bowl - which seemed to have been filled with some kind of soup - shattered and sent its contents splattering everywhere. In one fluid movement the man went from dropping the tray to maneuvering himself to shut and block the door. His arms were out, ready. His eyes flickered behind me to the discarded restraints and the broken gaslight.

"Put that down, Samara," he said, his voice stunningly calm.

I clenched the glass so tight that my hand began to burn where it was being slowly cut into. I shook my head. "Not until you tell me where I am. And why you took my clothes, and why you tied me up, and why the hell you think you had any right to bring me here." I jabbed the glass at him for good measure, even as my voice cracked with fear.

The tension in his shoulders loosened and he sighed, lowering his hands slightly. " I don't want to hurt you, Samara. Please, calm down. Put down the glass. You're bleeding."

"Don't tell me to calm down! Answer my questions!"

Killhimkillhimkillhimkillhim-

"I want to help you, Samara. I brought you here because if I didn't, it would have been prison or the asylums for you, and I don't think you'd like that, would you?" The frustration in his voice grew as he went on. "You lost control. You may hurt yourself, or someone else. You need to be under the supervision of someone who can handle you."

I laughed, nervousness and anger balled up into one sound. "Handle me? Oh really? And you think you're the one to "handle me?" How dare you? Let me leave! Give me back my clothes!"

He shook his head grimly. "I can't let you go. But I promise you, my only intentions are to help you."

"Coming from the man who paid to cane me not a week ago!" I scoffed. I had vague memories of him approaching me on the street, the sounds of an automobile horn, and a damned pistol being waved in my face. I wished I could remember what had happened...what I had done... "You can't keep me here. It's kidnapping, enslavement..."

"I'm a doctor," he said firmly. "And at this point, you are my patient and have been entrusted to my care. If you would just sit down, and listen to me, you may better understand what is going on."

I wasn't about to sit. I wasn't about to do a damn thing he wanted. But I did loosen my grip on the glass, and slowly lowered it. The savory smell of the spilt soup was filling the room and making my stomach rumble viciously. I was hungry - no, starving. I remembered the taste of raw meat in my mouth and my belly lurched.

"You can't keep me here," I repeated, my voice weakening. "You have no authority..."

But he was holding out a paper covered in typed print. I could not read it, but I recognized the signature upon it: Mary Jeffries. My eyes flickered between him and the paper with uncertainty. "I don't know what that is."

"A declaration of your insanity and recommendation to commit you to asylum," he said, his voice apologetic. "Signed by Mary Jeffries. All it takes after the recommendation of a doctor is the signature of a guardian."

I shook my head firmly. "She's not my guardian."

"The courts would say otherwise."

Anger made my lower lip tremble and my eyes fill with tears. I turned my face away so he wouldn't see it. Mary had betrayed me...I could not make myself surprised. She would sell a girl for a tin of tobacco if she thought it was worth it.

You cannot be kept here if you do not wish it...Samara...let us...

The voices sounded strangely distant, as if they were speaking to me from the bottom of a well. There was a humming that seemed to come from the strange mark above the door whenever they spoke, and it made my head pound.

"Do you remember what happened?" Damian said. "Do you remember the night of the festival?"

I frowned. The festival...of course, nearly all the women of the Doll House had gone to the festival. The crowds, the smell of the bonfire, the music...the memory gave me a slow, creeping feeling of dread. Something had been wrong. Why could I not remember?

"Did I hurt someone?" I said softly.

"Why would you believe that you hurt someone?" he said, in a tone that betrayed he already knew the answer. "Do you feel tempted to hurt others?" When I did not respond, he pressed, "Does something tell you to hurt people?"

"Why would you think that?" I muttered. "What would tell me to hurt people?" I couldn't look him in the eyes anymore. I was terrified that he knew...somehow, he knew about the voices. What if he did send me to an asylum? What if he did believe I was mad? I would sooner die than see my freedom taken away. Dizziness made me sway and I had to close my eyes for a moment to steady myself.

Slit his throat, slit it now, bleed him out while you can-

"Stop," I hissed, desperately. Damian began to move toward me slowly.

"How often does it talk to you?" he said. I shook my head quickly, frantically, but he insisted. "What does it tell you? Is it male? Female?"

"There's too many to say," I whispered. I watched the blood drip from my hand onto the wood floor and tried to focus on steadying my breathing. What else could I do? I didn't want to hurt him, and I was quickly realizing I felt too dizzy to fight. He already thought me mad. He had already seen the scars. What did it matter if I admitted the truth?

He blinked rapidly at my words and paused in his advance. "Too many?" he murmured.

I nodded. "Dozens. Hundreds. There are more voices all the time." I met his eyes, angry, frightened, and resigned. "Did you already know about them? Do you know what's wrong with me?"

Damian looked as if he were at a loss for words, and ran a hand through his hair. It was greasy, as if it had not been washed in days, and I wondered how long it had been since Halloween. How long had I been asleep?

"I suspected there was one talking to you," he said, almost to himself as he surveyed the spilled soup and shattered bowl. "Hundreds you say...Lucifer, help me." He pinched his mouth in his hand, eyes vacant as he slowly shook his head. With my rush of terrified energy beginning to dissipate, my lack of food and a sudden dry mouth utterly sapped my strength. I dropped the bloody piece of glass and sunk to the floor. I sat cross-legged, clutching the sheet, head hung, dirty hair hiding my face.

"I hear voices that tell me to kill people," I said numbly. "I hear them every day. They never stop." Bitterly, I looked up into his wide eyes. "Do you have medicine for that, doctor? Some surgery? Electrotherapy? Will you cut out part of my brain? Hmm? How will you help?"

I expected him to look on me with pity, or disgust. I expected him to speak to me with condescension. Instead, he began to unbutton his shirt.

"This is not a medical matter," he said. "Every day I see patients who suffer from delusions, hallucinations, uncontrollable fears. All natural maladies of the human mind that I believe we will someday have medicine to cure, or at least alleviate. But I can assure you, the voices you hear are very real. You are not ill. You are not imagining things. To treat you with opiates or lobotomy would only weaken you."

The last button popped, his chest laid bare, and my eyes widened as he pulled back the cloth, exposing himself further. I took in the ridges of his muscles, the dark hair that led down to his trousers... and the deep, intricate scars that marked him so much like they marked me.

"Tell me how you got yours," he said. "And I will tell you the story of mine."