There is a place that Credence forces himself to think of each time Mama orders him to remove his belt: rooftop of the Raffles Building on East 161st Street. It isn't exactly a pleasant place, but the less agreeable a place is, the easier to conjure.
When the leather cuts into his palm, he hears the frenzy of pigeons, and their mad wingbeats flood his chest. When the next lash scrapes its way into the narrow length of his back, he smells the droppings of the birds, sees their white and green blotches on the concrete. The belt cuts a strip into the backs of his thighs and he chokes on the soot of factory chimneys.
When his whole body is rucked with pain so he can no longer tell the angle of assault, or at what frequency, he starts to see further out into the city: the teething sprawl of buildings, billowing and breaking their ranks and greying out before him into a mirage of tears until there is nothing left but his fingernails, sunk into the wood of the banister.
The belt is lying beside him, on the floor.
Ma caresses him sometimes, after she's finished. She pushes his head into her chest and whispers into his hair. "I am notcruel. You must know that this is necessary."
"It is necessary," he repeats after her.
"Why have I named you Credence?"
"Because you have hope for me." As soon as he says these words, gratitude germinates like a seed in his chest.
"Do you remember what they used to call you before I brought you into my house and raised you as my own?"
Freak. Cretin, cretin, cretin.
He breaks to pieces in her arms, and through his sobs he counts. Sure enough, Mama, precise as clockwork, pushes him away after ten seconds and tells him to wash his face and clean up.
Only after Ma goes to bed does he open the shutters and peer out at the city, lit by the jaundiced glow of streetlamps, and think of Graves.