"Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us and, sometimes, they win."—Stephen King
Ordeal
Vinson of Genlith, future knight of the realm if he didn't mess up this final test as he had failed so many classroom assessments throughout his years as a page because he was about as clever as his friend Joren was ugly, stepped into the dread Chamber that had been the doom of so many dreams of glory and knighthood. He shivered and tried to pretend it was from the chill of the bath tradition had forced him to take before spending the night in a frigid chapel. He didn't want to acknowledge that the shiver was one of foreboding and fear. Certainly, he didn't want to admit that he was terrified to be here, alone in the dark.
Wrapping his arms about his chest in a feeble defense against the cold that had already seeped into his lungs, suffocating him, and his heart, making it pound at twice its normal rate in a vain attempt to warm his shuddering flesh, Vinson thought that he had always hated the dark. The only thing worse than the absolute blackness enveloping this wretched Chamber was the darkness inside himself that he had carried into this chamber. He could feel that darkness rattling around inside him, begging to be released, and, already he wanted to scream. Taking advantage of his vulnerability, the Chamber launched its first attack on his sanity.
In every way that counted—mentally and emotionally—Vinson was nine-years-old again, peeking through the keyhole into his father's study. His mother was away, nursing a sick sister back to health, and Vinson was wondering why shouts, squeals, moans, and blows were emitting from that horrible office that dominated Vinson's nightmares.
He didn't fear that room because of any abuse that he had encountered there. Whenever he stepped into that study and took a seat in one of the plush armchairs across from his father's mahogany desk, he could be sure that his father would find something—however slight-to praise in his usually abysmal schoolwork. If his compositions were sloppy in both content and handwriting, his father would praise him for the basic ideas he had tried to convey in them. If his mathematics answers were consistently wrong, his father would compliment him for always showing his work and having some notion of how to solve problems even if he couldn't arrive at the correct answers.
No, the study wasn't a terrible place for him, but he knew that it was an awful one for his mother. He knew that the blows, moans, shouts, and groans that he heard coming from the office whenever he couldn't force himself to cover his ears when he passed that door that loomed so large in his imagination were the sounds of his father beating his mother. He knew, because he couldn't always bring himself to close his eyes to the horrors happening all around him just out of his sight, that the makeup his mother smeared over her face and the lengthy sleeves she wore even in the height of summer were just attempts to cover the bruises that she didn't want him to see.
Once, when he had gotten tired of pretending to be blind, he had asked his mother in a whisper when they were strolling through the gardens and she was admiring the roses in a voice that tried so hard to be hearty that it could only be grating, why she stayed. Then, she had gazed at him with wide blackberry eyes, and murmured that she stayed for love. And, he supposed that this was true, because when he mustered every bit of courage he possessed and asked his father why he beat his mother, his father had only smiled, patted him on the head, and said that she deserved it and liked it and that he would understand when he was older. Vinson could only suppose that this was true, because his mother stayed for love despite the blows and screams that came from his father's study at least once a week.
Vinson hadn't wanted to understand this, and so he had just labeled it, along with the bedroom mystery of what happened when two people loved each other very much, as something that would have to become clearer once he was older. However, he had thought that, just like the bedroom mystery of love, the sounds of beating that came from his father's office were an expression of love that was only done between married people. So, his mystification was only increased when he peeped through the door of his father's study to see a servant girl, her dress thrust up past her bared backside, shoved over his father's desk.
Confused and horrified, he watched as his father's hand slammed into the whimpering girl's rear. He wanted to look away and flee from the keyhole, but he couldn't tear his eyes away from the terrible scene, and his feet were stuck to the flagstones in the corridor, which echoed with the sound of his blood pounding in his ears. As a result, he was able to hear and see everything when his father pushed himself into the protesting serving girl, grunting that the girl would enjoy this, and Vinson supposed that she did, because she finally stopped struggling and became limp as his father pounded in and out of her.
Vinson wanted to scream, and he bit his lip so hard it bled to keep it inside his head, resounding there forever, rather than bursting out into the blackness of the Chamber, condemning him to be a failure for life. That memory was real. The Chamber didn't have to invent horrors for him to endure. He had experienced enough true nightmares that it could have shown him one after another for eternity until he would gladly scream if it would release just a fraction of the guilt and pain throbbing in his tortured soul.
Vinson was older now, and, in a dim, stinking alley in one of Corus' most impoverished districts. The heir of one of Tortall's wealthiest and most powerful families had no business in such a vile place, so, naturally, Vinson had ventured here only to drink until his stomach was hovering on the brink of vomiting up every intoxicating beverage he had put into it and the world, in his aching head, had split into three alternative planes, as far as his bleary eyes were concerned. Then, his intoxicated mind wonderfully out of touch with his sick body, he stumbled out of the tavern.
It was then that he heard the three girls laughing. Their giggles sounded as loud as war drums in his throbbing head and filled him with the same ruthless courage that provoked slaughter on battlefields. These girls with their flushed cheeks, mocking blood red lips, haughty eyes, and windswept hair were laughing at him. They were whores, surely—for whores were the only women who would gather around a disreputable tavern at night to laugh at men—and they dared to laugh at him, a future knight of the realm, for his bumbling steps.
They would pay for their boldness. They laughed so loudly because they wanted his attention, and they would just have to enjoy it when he gave it to them. That was all he thought as he balled his hand into a fist and slammed it into the jaw of the nearest woman. Watching the blood smear her lipstick, Vinson smirked. Now her lips were really blood red.
He smacked his fist against the cheek of the second girl, and blackened the eye of the third one. He felt a surge of joy pounding through his veins, intoxicating him more effectively than any tankard of ale he had ever consumed could have. It was so satisfying to see their skin sink and color beneath his brutal ministrations. It was empowering to hear their pleas for him to stop and to realize that they didn't really want him to stop. They wanted him to continue abusing them, because they were bringing him pleasure, and the only purpose—the only delight—of women was to bring men pleasure. So, as he ripped off their dresses—because their corsets had been squeezing their breasts to tightly, anyway, and they had practically been begging for rough treatment from the moment they dressed this evening—he reveled in their squeaks, shrieks, and screams. All of their protests were only proof of how much they enjoyed and deserved this, he thought as he plunged into them, smiling at the blood that trickled out of their privates when he invaded them and relishing the way their insides tightened in desperate, futile attempts to deny him entry. This was victory and defeat. This was pleasure and pain. This was the ultimate ambrosia.
Vinson felt like he was choking on his own blood. He must have been biting on it way too hard to prevent himself from screaming. His head was aching again, too, which he supposed meant that he must have hit it in an attempt to knock out all the pain, anger, guilt, and confusion welling inside him. Yet, he couldn't remember striking his forehead, and he couldn't make the blood stop seeping from his lip, either, even when he stopped biting on it.
Fresh pain rippled through his lip. An invisible fist lanced into his cheek, and then another smacked into his forehead. The air flew from his lungs as another blow connected solidly with his stomach. He was feeling every blow he had landed on the bodies of those awful whores as if he had dealt them to his own flesh. He could feel the blood trickling from his skin, and the bruises and the scars forming.
He wanted the pain to stop—he needed the invisible fists to stop hurting him—but he hadn't stopped that night. Even when the girls, with tears shining in their eyes like shooting stars, had begged him to leave them alone and to stop tormenting them, he hadn't stopped. He hadn't even thought about stopping. He had only smiled and tortured them all the worse. He had told himself, even as he heard their nightmarish screams for mercy, that they were enjoying every slap and thrust, but, as he felt the invisible hands punching into his battered flesh, he finally began to realize that nobody could possibly enjoy this abuse and the crushing shame it created.
"Stop!" he howled, his voice broken, because he was speaking both to himself and to the Chamber, and he knew that both entities were far too pitiless to heed his shattered pleas.
At his tormented shout, the Chamber door burst open, and he shot out as if he had been thrown by a catapult. Ignoring the gasps of horror at his horrible appearance that rose like a windstorm form the crowd assembled in the chapel to see if he was a success or a failure, he collapsed onto the cold stones. Gazing at the golden, remote depiction of Mithros hung over the altar and wondering if forgiveness and redemption would ever be an option for such a vile creature as he was, he exploded, "I request an audience with the king. I—I must confess."
If he could just bring himself to confess—and that wasn't by any means a given, because just admitting that he needed to confess his terrible crime was the hardest sentence ever to leave his lips—maybe the pain from the invisible fists would stop. Maybe his guilt would disappear if he was punished. Maybe the darkness inside of him would finally fade into the darkness outside him if he could force it out of him. If there was any hope for such a failure as he was, it had to be in confessing his own guilt. If there was any chance of a glimmer of light entering him again, it would only be because he had invited it there by acknowledging the darkness inside of himself and begging for it to be gone from his beleaguered soul.