A Resurgent Whore #2
Chapter Two - A Rude Awakening
Welcome to chapter two of a new gritty noir series from ‘Sin Street’ created in partnership between Kate Granger and Sissitrix. Chapters published weekly on Friday’s.
Follow a woman’s desperate tale of humiliation starting in a pit of despair before her rebirth, revenge and resurgence. This story begins in a dark place because it must.
Continued from Chapter One
“How do you feel?”
“How does who feel?”
“You Erin. How do you feel?”
“Is this real? Am I still alive?”
“Yes, but it was touch and go.”
“I feel dead.”
“Can you open your eyes for me please, Erin?”
“It hurts too much. I can’t.”
“Please try. I must inspect the damage, maybe there is something that can be done now to benefit you later.”
I tried hard, and it hurt so badly, but they were glued shut. A stinging headache dominated my thoughts while gut wrenching bile acid attacked, threatened to choke me. My body trembled, fluctuating wildly from frozen to sweating, with skin that felt clammy and sore.
I was being slammed by a mallet delivering four seasons in one day.
“I’m sorry. I feel awful.”
“That usually follows a two-day bender with as much alcohol as you consumed.”
His tone sounded non-judgemental, encouraging me to believe I might finally be safe. As I rested gently, the recent past came flooding back, wringing out another bout of terror that wreaked havoc with my psyche.
I struggled to sit, but strong hands restrained me. The sobbing of a child nearby struck horror into my soul, more so when I realized that it was me.
“Was I raped?”
He sighed miserably and defeated, as though I’d raised a matter he’d rather not discuss.
“I’m no fucking wallflower. Tell me now… was I raped?”
He coughed, choking back tears of emotion. That answered my question before his soft, gentle voice broke terrible news.
“Almost certainly judging by the violence you’ve been subjected to. The problem is, whoever abused you tucked a very ill-advised consent letter signed by you into your pocket. I called the police and they’re waiting outside, but they were already onto your case.”
I waved an arm blindly, needing human contact to lift a heart wrenching sense of loneliness blanketing me. The man cradled my hand in both of his, stroking gently with a thumb while I whimpered like a frightened puppy, beaten senseless and finally cornered.
“You’re safe now Erin.”
“Are you a doctor?”
“Yes. I’m doctor Menzies and I’ll be looking after you for the duration of your stay with us.”
I rested back on the bed, desperately searching a tortured mind for a safe anchor while taking stock of my situation.
My pussy and back passage ached really badly. The cheese grater that had torn soft tissues inside my throat suggested more sexual violence there, too. I gripped his hand desperately as my senses returned, anchoring myself to him while the enormity of a dire condition became increasingly apparent.
“Is Brian here?”
“Who’s Brian?”
“My husband.”
“I’m afraid not Erin.”
I choked back tears, kicking myself into survival mode. There was zero chance I’d talk to the cops because no sane prosecutor would ever take my case.
They’ll brand me as a slut who had it coming.
Any squealing about what happened to me might destroy the chances I had of getting away from Chester and the rapists alive.
They will hunt me to the ends of the earth.
Did I consent to being raped?
Surely I couldn’t. Consent wouldn’t be legally enforceable with this much violence.
I ached all over and felt a terrifying, rising anxiety. As my senses returned, both eyes felt heavy and excruciatingly painful. Confusing flashes of colorful light darted across the inside of both eyelids while searing bolts of super charged pain assaulted my brain.
“What’s wrong with my eyes?”
“They beat you real badly, Erin. It’s going to take a day or two for the swelling to diminish. In the meantime, we’ll try to bathe your eyes in a saline solution.”
“Can you keep the cops away from me for a day at least, please? I can’t remember what happened.”
Lying to everyone would keep me alive long enough to speak to Brian. I must find out what happened and whether his debt to Chester and my defilers had been settled.
“Dealing with the police is easy enough explained by short-term memory loss, Erin. I can’t keep the guy who arrived a few hours ago away, though. He won’t leave the hospital until you’re okay.”
“What’s his name?”
“Max.”
“Tell him to give me an hour.”
“Okay. He seems a nice guy Erin bu-”
“Am I going to be okay, doctor?”
I can’t explain Max, please don’t ask.
“We can’t run HIV tests yet. It takes time before an infection can be tested for. Other than that, you’ll recover, maybe suffer some flashbacks, but you need to change this lifestyle because next time, I don’t think you’ll survive.”
“I’ll change and this will never happen again, don’t worry.”
“I hope that’s true. You’ve survived against the odds, so you’re strong.”
“How do I look, doctor?”
“Like a woman who was repeatedly raped by six guys, then got beaten up and thrown from a van.”
“Not too bad then?”
Graveyard humor was my thing, but a split lip that opened when I tried laughing suggested avoiding any facial movements for a while.
I flinched and felt a chilling dread when the doctor’s hand unexpectedly touched mine. Once I knew it was him, my fear dissolved, but it worried me to be so jumpy. I triaged my feelings, determined not to consider myself a victim.
Turn the fucking page Erin. It's the only way to get revenge.
The doctor was gentle in touch, tone and manner, but I was terrified, not of my attackers but from the prospect of being seen like this by my first true love.
“Erin, this guy Max seems really worried about you. Is he the one wh-“
“No doc. Max is an old college friend that I haven’t seen in ten years.”
“Okay that’s good. The cops outside are eyeing him for this assault. I called Max because he’s your emergency contact.”
“Okay, doc. You’d better wheel him in now, before the cops take him away.”
I heard protesting voices outside from cops that undoubtedly wanted to close my case quickly and head for a coffee shop. In that melee, the room door opened violently, then slammed closed again.
A presence was nearby. I heard light breathing and shuffling leather-soled shoes.
“Who’s there?”
“Oh, Jesus Christ Erin. Please be okay.”
“Max?”
“Yes, sweetheart. What have they done to you?”
His voice cracked, filled with emotion and fear. I really must look worse than the doctor had quipped, but Max would accept me no matter my appearance.
I felt a hand slip softly over mine, then his forehead lay gently on my chest. My heart wrenching sobs were more raw than Max’s weeping but no less filled with emotion. It felt so good to have someone who loved me nearby no matter how long since we’d seen each other.
I buried sore, stiff fingers from one hand into Max’s thick hair, remembering how doing that with his head on my chest sent me to sleep after we made love.
“Thank you, Max.”
“For what, Erin?”
“For coming here to see me while I look like this.”
“I’ll always love you Erin. We’re the best of friends and that will never end.”
“Thank you, baby.”
Max’s touch comforted me and his friendship lifted my heart. I felt surprised about that, but it was as though my trauma and grief was being scrubbed clean, quickly replaced with a burning fury and desire for revenge.
“I have myself to blame for this, Max.”
“It wasn’t your fault.”
“I made terrible choices.”
“Brian?”
“Yes, and then by agreeing to pay off his gambling debt by prostituting my body. They disgraced me.”
He fell silent, trying to hide his sorrow with muffled choking. I felt more enraged, continuously mulling over the reasons for my condition. I’d allowed weakness for a pathetic man to pervade my soul, mistaking familiarity and companionship, however tragic, for true love that never existed.
Brian had drawn me from the light of a career and friends to a very dark, isolated place.
“Fucking Sin Street and Brian.”
“Is that what caused this beating, Erin?”
“Brian exchanged me for his gambling marker. Chester, my husband’s bookie and so-called friend, hired me out to anyone that could pay. The original debt was settled weeks ago.”
“And Brian kept on playing?”
“He accrued more debt than you can imagine constantly declaring he could beat Sin Street’s odds. I had more sex with strangers, continuously paying for his losses, until his poker buddies wanted to humiliate him and me before calling in their marker.”
“Was he in the room where they did this to you, Erin?”
“Yeah.”
I wept like a toddler who’d lost their mother in a supermarket while Max squeezed my hands. His tears fell onto my arm, weirdly comforting me because my old lover and friend truly cared when nobody else did.
“Fucking hell, Erin. That’s vile and I’m sorry it happened. Sin Street is dead to you.”
“No Max. I have unfinished business there.”
I heard the door slam open, and a scuffle between men ensued. My guess was the cops wouldn’t accept doctor Menzies’ explanation any longer. A cop shouted at me but I didn’t flinch because my heart was hardening as hatred burned and blackened it.
“Hey lady. This is a murder investigation. Hiding behind bullshit memory loss won’t cut it. You need to give us a statement now.”
“Leave her alone.”
After another scuffle and some shouting, the door slammed shut, opened again, then slammed hard and with finality. Their quarrel was taken outside and down the hall.
Peace fell like a comforting blanket as voices dissolved into the distance.
“Max?”
“I’m still here Erin. I won’t leave you.”
“Thank you. What did the cop mean by murder?”
A moments' pause chilled my heart. Sin Street was about to deliver me another shock.
“Brian is dead, sweetheart.”
The hollow feeling in my gut had already consumed me. When the cop mentioned murder, I knew confirmation of my status as a widow would follow soon. I felt numb and incapable of crying while consumed by an enormous sadness, stretching like an ocean in every direction around me to infinity.
Amid a tsunami of conflicting emotions I recalled our wedding day and the happy months that followed. Then came the excessive drinking, parties, swinging and out-of-control, decadent sex before his gambling caught hold.
Brian’s most toxic vice brought about our downfall from high income earning thanks to my job as a CEO, to whoring on the streets and illegal gambling dens for food money.
My head tilted upwards, a useless symbol of me searching the heavens for inspiration. I clenched my fingers, balling a fist without caring how much it hurt.
I’ll become A Resurgent Whore and fuck Sin Street back.
I had fresh purpose and felt renewed, more angry but calmer than ever as a part of my brain function locked a door signed planning my revenge.
“I guess that chapter of my life just ended then? Do you know how he was killed or why?”
“You don’t want to know, Erin.”
“Oh yeah Max, I really do. I’m getting out of this fucking bed when the drugs wear off. I’ve wasted enough of my life. Now tell me what happened to Brian, please.”
“I overheard the cops mention that after they took you away, he played more poker.”
“And the bastard lost?”
“Too much. When he couldn’t pay them his markers, they killed him.”
“How?”
“A 9 mm bullet to the back of his head.”
“How do the cops know that all of this happened to Brian?”
“The guy who drove a van with you in it, dropped his friend off home before dumping you in an alley. They were supposed to drown you in the river, but he couldn’t live with that. The cops got him from CCTV footage covering that alley from the back entrance of a bar. He’s singing like a canary, apparently.”
“What a fucking mess I’ve created, Max.”
“Brian is in the morgue here. Once you recover, Dr. Menzies says you can see him. Perhaps then you can move on.”
“Even if I could see him, I wouldn’t bother. Brian is dead to me.”
“Doctor Menzies needs your permission to harvest Brian’s organs. They have him in a pod that maintains body function even after all brain activity is dead.”
“They can do what the fuck they like with him.”
“The doctor needs your signature within the next hour so they can begin milking his body fluids and removing organs.”
“Okay, get me the paperwork now. Tell the doctor that anything left of Brian after they harvest the fuck out of him should be cremated and handed to me.”
“What do you want with his remains, Erin?”
“I’m going to flush them down the toilet, just like he did to me.”
My emotions were calm one minute, then all over the place with grief, anger and regret, reverberating through me, echoing my bad choices and gross stupidity. One thing I wouldn’t feel though was self pity because that offered no benefit to me.
“We can discuss revenge later Erin.”
“We?”
“You don’t think I’m leaving before we pay these bastards back do you?”
I thought about my situation, then of Max and the cops outside. I had no place to live because Brian had gambled everything we had. My only true friend in the world was standing inches away like a sole knight protector in a world I’d failed in.
“I need to build a resurgence, Max.”
“We’ll do that together, Erin. I’d like to take you to a clinic a couple of hours away once you can travel.”
“Rehab?”
“In a manner of speaking. My friend, Sissitrix, has a laboratory and is developing alternative treatments that will help you. They have pods designed to help recover and rejuvenate.”
“Is the same pod being used on Brian?”
“Yes.”
“Is it safe?”
“For you, definitely. For Brian, not so much.”
“Let’s go.”
Next Chapter:
It was a lot of fun to create a set of drawings for this new chapter.
OK! Excellent follow-up to Ep. 1! Kate, you're totally killing it here with this form of POV from the dark side via Erin. Crafting strong descriptive prose which you do for Erin as a victim--and she IS a victim, despite the "consent" letter she bears--of a brutal, violent, degrading, and dehumanizing ordeal of rape, beating, psychological and physical torture isn't easy. A far more difficult task is crafting the prose so precisely (in a "strategic" sense, so to speak), to have the images hit the reader right in the gut--to see the broken, devastated, ravaged, soiled body of Erin--this brilliant woman--once beautiful and successful--literally used as a toilet by a gang of antediluvian reptiles with her husband's "blessing." She has experienced Evil--she just cannot go any lower than a human being can go. Kate, you write incredibly vivid erotica, which is erotica as it's meant to be written. Some of it's romantic, some quasi-satirical/satirical as I've read your stories. But I see the beautiful women you write about, and your word choice describes the experiences of sexual ecstasy, adventure, and transgressive depravity with titillating impact--it's very hot, and very powerful. With your descriptive prose in Episodes 1 and 2, you've proven your talent functions just as well in the opposite direction--that there is a dark side--a dangerous and destructive side, to what appears at first glance to be something appealing and enjoyable: Brian's being too-good-to-be-true, for instance--a charismatic, fast-talker who wormed his way into Erin's heart--she bought his lies and deceit--his nature as a degenerate gambler and complete narcissist. Max is fascinating. I'm glad that she has someone from her past that she loves, who's actually been devoted to her all these years--but this being a noir universe--one of the conventions of this shady world is that nothing is as it seems, and the most intimate, passionate lover often turns out to be a stone-cold killer or ruthless mercenary--can't help but have a suspicion in the back of my head about Max here--what's he really about? She's a pile of broken pieces, and he's offering her a job? He's lived a kind of monastic existence all this time, but he's this big-time CEO? Something's not right. Glad Brian's dead, though I was hoping she would have gotten her hands on him herself and given her a "Pulp Fiction" style "pair of pliers and a blow torch" treatment--and much, much more--probably a long, drawn out affair involving corrosive chemicals, culminating with insertion into a wood-chipper, feet-first, but that's me. I love the self-insertion of Sissitrix as a principal! I 've heard and read many craft sources that authors should stay away from "self-insertion." What the hell for? Henry Miller's works are nothing but self-insertion! A writer writing a piece, or an artist drawing or painting is self-inserting because they're creating whatever it is they've dreamed up! So I call bullshit on that self-righteous, myopic claim! I also really dig this futuristic regenerative pod thing you've both come up with (and they're also destructive, since Brian's being destroyed by one!). I've already read through to the 4th episode, so I'll have more to say at the appropriate places, but Sissitrix, the first time I saw your work, I did get a very heavy H.R. Giger vibe from them--it's really cool, and you really do carry off the biomechanical aesthetic in a very brilliant, unsettling way, no offense meant, of course--I mean it totally in the aesthetic sense--the eerie mix of the living with the inanimate--another cognate I detect is the bizarre imagery typical of David Cronenberg's films. Your images in this installment were very arresting. I particularly liked the stark image of Erin in a hospital bed set in the solid black void. Isolated in the uncertain, dreamlike realm between life and death, or even the drugged-up, waking dream of anesthesia--unaware of her surroundings, body between numb and wracked with pain, infected with STDs and God knows what else, uncertain of her fertility, her beauty, her future--uncertain of everything, uncertainty being, in many ways, one of our ultimate fears, in this world where technology is seen as the ultimate solution which allows us access to information about any desired subject in seconds--our must be the most control-obsessed civilization in human history, since we've tricked ourselves into the hubris of absolute certainty about almost everything--but Erin is floating in a black void of total uncertainty--your drawing evokes that--the isolation of uncertainty. The other piece was the cluster of open eyes--this is highly evocative of the scenery which Dali painted for Hitchcock's psychoanalysis-themed thriller "Spellbound," with Gregory Peck and Ingrid Bergman. Peck is an amnesiac murder suspect (going by the name "John Brown" incidentally!), under the care of Ingrid Bergman, a Freudian psychiatrist who subjects him to detailed analysis of his dreams and such to find out the real killer, etc. One of Dali's sets is a giant cluster of open eyes--seen by Peck in one of his dreams--the open eye, or the eye itself, replete with symbolism from time immemorial. I have comments on the other two episodes, which I'll get to in due course--this is an amazing, ambitious project you've both embarked upon--it's rich, it's original, and wonderfully eclectic and mysterious--highest marks all the way!!!