In Death 05 - Ceremony in Death

fight, on a physical or emotional level. He's strong. Very strong."
    Chas closed his eyes a moment, reliving what he was constantly struggling to put to death. "I was afraid I could be like him, considered giving back the most precious gift I'd been given. Life."
    "You attempted self-termination?"
    "I never got as far as the attempt, just the plan. The first time, I was ten." He sipped tea again, determined to soothe himself. "Can you imagine a child of ten pondering suicide?"
    Yes, she could, all too well. She'd been younger yet when she had pondered it. "He abused you?"
    "Abuse is such a weak term, don't you think? He beat me. He never seemed to be in a rage when he did. He just struck out at unexpected moments, snapping a bone, raising a fist, with the absent calm another man might display while flicking away a fly."
    His fist was clenched on his knee. Deliberately, Chas opened his hand, spread his fingers. "He struck like a shark, fast and in utter silence. There was never a warning, never a gauge. My life, my pain, was totally dependent on his whim. I've had my time in Hell," he said softly, almost as a prayer.
    "No one helped you?" Eve asked. "Attempted to intervene?"
    "We never stayed in one place very long, and were allowed to form no attachments or friendships. He claimed he needed to spread the word. And he would snap a bone, raise a fist, then take me into a treatment center himself. A concerned father."
    "You told no one?"
    "He was my father, it was my life." Chas lifted his hands, let them fall. "Who was I to tell?"
    Neither had she told anyone, Eve thought. Neither had she had anyone to tell.
    "And for quite a while, I believed him when he said it was just." Chas's eyes flickered. "And I certainly believed him when he told me there would be terrible pain and terrible punishment if I said anything. I was thirteen when he sodomized me for the first time. It was a ritual, he told me, when he bound my hands and I wept. A rite of passage. Sex was life. It was necessary to take it. He would take me on the journey as was his duty and his right."
    He picked up the tea pot, poured, set it neatly aside. "I don't know if it was rape. I didn't struggle. I didn't beg him to stop. I simply cried without sound and submitted."
    "It was rape," Peabody said, and her voice was very quiet.
    "Well..." He found he couldn't drink the tea he'd just poured but lifted the cup, held it. "I told no one. Even years later when they had him in a cage, I didn't tell the police. I didn't believe they would hold him. I simply didn't believe they could. He was too strong, too powerful, and all the blood on his hands seemed to add to it. Oddly enough, it was the sex that pushed my mother to run, and take me. Not the violence, not the little boy with broken bones or even the deaths I think she knew he'd caused. It was the sight of him kneeling over me on his altar, with the black candles lit. He didn't see her, but I did. I saw her face when she stepped into the room. She left me there, let him finish with me, and that night when he went out, we ran."
    "And still she didn't go to the police."
    "No." He looked at Eve. "I know you believe if she had, lives might have been saved. But fear is a very personal emotion. Survival was her only goal. When they arrested him, I went to the trial, every day. I was sure he would stop it somehow. Even when they said they would lock him away, I still didn't believe. I erased his name, and I tried to slip into normality. I took a job that interested me, that I had some talent for. And I allowed myself to get close to no one. There was a rage in me. I would look at a face and hate it because it was happy. Or it was sad. I hated them all for their unshadowed existence. And like my father, I didn't stay in one place very long. And when I found myself considering suicide again with great calm and great seriousness, I was frightened enough to seek help."
    He was able to smile again. "It was, though I didn't realize it at the time, the beginning for me, taking that step, allowing myself to speak the unspeakable. I learned to accept my own innocence, and to forgive my mother. But the rage was still there, this hard, secret knot inside me. Then I met Isis."
    "Through your interest in the occult," Eve prompted.
    "Through my study of it, as part of my therapy." He drank his tea now, and his lips were curved. "I was angry and rude. Religion of any kind was an abomination to me, and I detested what she stood for. She