22: Victor

When the constable removed Victor's gag, he couldn't stop screaming. The officers tried to calm him, "Hush now, it's okay, everything's okay, you're safe now," but the truth was they wanted to scream too. They knew it was not okay, it would never be okay again. Not for Victor: what is a fourteen year old boy supposed to do after experiencing that? How is he supposed to go on living?

After some debate they moved him a little, tried to make him a bit more comfortable. When Steve had cut him free, Victor just collapsed, unable to stand or even crawl convincingly. Victor's abuser had been very thorough in punishing him for the freed leg. Later, the investigators would identify the iron crowbar the man had used, methodically shattering the bones of each limb in turn.

So they laid Victor down, covered with a blanket, and one stayed with him, reassuring, soothing, sickened, helpless to make things better, while the others searched the house and the cellar and the bare yard out back. Victor was still hoarsely screaming when the ambulance arrived. The paramedic who sedated him wept as she did it.

The house was cordoned off and the garden lit with huge searchlights. A crowd had gathered, neighbours and journalists, and dark rumours were spreading, none as terrible as the truth. Victor was stretchered out, and in his brutalized, delirious state, the blizzard of photographers' flashes seemed like the lights of heaven, the lights of welcome death come to take him away from a world in which such torments existed.

He blinked out into the hazy crowd, and for a minute the vision resolved into an image of his rescuer, bruised and handcuffed, leaning against a police van. A female officer was talking to him, and he was angry and shouting, and then she was, and people around were starting to pay attention. Suddenly, shockingly, she punched him, a massive blow to the face with the strength of her whole body behind it. He was thrown back against the vehicle, slid down to sit on the ground, and then other officers were rushing over to intervene and Victor's view was blocked.

Everything became vague again. The pain was still there, the shriek of burns and flayed muscle and twisted joints and shattered bone, but it was all at a distance, veiled, and Victor floated away from it. He felt as if he could see himself being carried into the ambulance, see the lights and the crowds and the grubby suburban street. Gradually, smoothly, he rose further and further, the sprawl of winding roads and terraces and schools and churches and hospitals opening out beneath him, canals and shopping centres and the twisting, glittering threads of traffic, red lights on one side, white on the other. Then he was up in the clouds; the city fogged over beneath him and was quickly lost.

Perhaps for a moment, just before he lost consciousness, Victor returned to himself as they carried him into the ambulance, and his eyes strayed over the crowd. Perhaps he saw the face of his nemesis in amongst all those people, staring at him, holding his gaze, rage bubbling out through his eyes like hot fire.

But Victor knew he would be seeing that face everywhere he looked for the rest of his life. It didn't mean the beast was really there.
Posted by matt at November 26, 2004 10:18 PM