Read Online Ghost Shadows by Thomas M. Malafarina - Free Book Online Page B

exposure was to make access easier for the armies of pain inflicting demons.  
    Then in the foggy mirror-stone Winston saw why his arms had been hurting him so badly. Oh my God, no! he thought as he bellowed out yet another blood curdling scream. In the matter of a second, time seemed to stop as Winston took in the extent of what the vile demon of this particular torture chamber had done to him.
    Both of his wrists were secured to the top of the heavy arms of the chair buy two large rusted spikes driven down through them, essentially crucifying him to the arms of the chair. He thought again about his wire crown, about Jesus Christ and the blasphemy portrayed in Winston’s own painful crucifixion. In the mirror he could see that his fingers, which were curled around the front of the arms, had been relieved of all of their flesh and most of the musculature, leaving only skeletal remains, which he was strangely still able to move although doing so only caused him increased pain.
    As if that was not bad enough, he could see that the area behind his wrists and up to the tops of his forearms had suffered the worst of the damage. Strips of bloody flesh perhaps a half inch wide had been peeled back the length of his arms and curled up into rolls that were pierced and held together with long tarnished pins.
    Each forearm had ten or more of these crimson coils of flayed flesh and Winston could see his own exposed red glistening muscles dripping with blood reflecting in the light. To Winston, it didn’t matter that what he was seeing was not physical because the agony he felt most certainly was.  
    He prayed for this particular session to soon be over long before the real pain began, yet he knew his prayers would go unanswered as they always did. Hell was no place for prayer. Winston also understood, once his time in this particular torture chamber was over there would be another, even more unbearable period of pain waiting somewhere further up the Path.  
    â€œHow you like me work? Good job, no?” Winston heard an ominous guttural voice, not possibly human in origin, say from behind him. Like most of the hideous beings that were responsible for inflicting pain, this one was no doubt another moronic monosyllabic beast whose sole purpose for existence was to exact untold levels of agony. Winston slowly pulled his eyes away from his throbbing arms and looked into the reflective stone to see an incredibly heinous looking demon standing behind him. This abomination stood over seven feet tall and was rail thin but sinewy with ropy muscles. Its fingers were long and bony and had great yellowed talons. Like the rest of the creatures Winston had previously encountered, its face was pig-like in appearance with a pushed up snout and a large slobbery mouth from which long fangs jutted both upward and downward. Its cat-shaped eyes bugged from the sunken sockets of its skull and it had two long ram horns curling back from its forehead continuing over top of a long mane of greasy black hair. It stank like a filthy barnyard animal and its grayish flesh, sporadically adorned with long, rat-like hairs, glistened with sweat adding to its already obnoxious stench.
    The horrifying thing grinned sheepishly at Winston in the reflection and slowly lifted its right clawed hand upward toward the area atop Winston’s head where his vulnerable brain had been stippled with so many pins.
    â€œHumm.” The horrid creature said, “It have too many pins. You don’t feel ‘nuff ouches.” With that, the creature began to meticulously extract one pin after another from Winston’s brain. With each pull of a pin the level of pain intensified until it reached its crescendo and Winston once again found himself blessedly, albeit temporarily unconscious.  
    ***
    When he started to regain awareness again, Winston suddenly recalled the details of what he had just been through and reflexively grabbed for his head and arms,