Swim Deep - Page 84

“I don’t understand,” I said.

He explained to me that Madaster had turned the visual feedback on his brainwave lie detector into an auditory function, which he could hear through a small ear bud. Another supposed “advancement” of the Analyzer was an easily donned “sensor cap.” With it, no difficult individual attachment of sensors to the skull was necessary.

“Noah could ask questions of the person wearing the sensor cap and supposedly determine from the auditory tone in his ear if the person was lying or not. It was his ‘hands free’ option for the Analyzer,” Evan explained, his tone rife with sarcasm and anger. “Or at least, that’s what Noah and Elizabeth believed. But I think it was the force of Noah’s personality, the use of drugs—scopolamine, sedatives, LSD and other psychedelic drugs—along with his cruelty and mind games, that were really made the Analyzer ‘work.’ Not as a lie detector or mind reading technique, but purely as a means for control and brainwashing.

“He would give Elizabeth drugs that were meant to free her consciousness. Then he’d make her wear the sensor cap during.…” He winced and gave me a quick, reluctant glance. I merely nodded once, trying to assure him it was all right. “Various torture and bondage activities. She’d wear the cap during sex, and he would demand that she tell him the truth about whatever he was doing to her. He would insist she was lying, even when she was honest. Eventually, Elizabeth believed whatever he told her was the truth. He made up into down, Anna,” Evan said, his voice cracking. “Wrong into right… pain into pleasure and love.”

I covered his hand in mine. It killed me, seeing him like this. He glanced up, my touch pulling him out of his misery. I hadn’t even told myself to sit up in bed and try to comfort him. His anguish had been so tangible, I’d responded without thinking.

“You saw it. You saw them doing that?” I whispered shakily. The idea of him having to witness something so abhorrent firsthand was unthinkable.

He shook his head. “Not all of it, no. Not that night. I heard later about most of it, from Elizabeth herself. That night, I just saw her enter a room. There was a bed in the background, with some wires and equipment on it. A lamp was lit. Noah was there, and I could tell he’d been waiting for her. He embraced her, and she embraced him back. There was something so familiar about the way they touched each other. So charged. I remember he grabbed her hair and pulled on it, stretching back her neck. He jerked at the straps of her nightgown so that it fell down to her waist. I was horrified. I started to run forward to stop it all.

“But then I saw her expression. She stared up at him, not just with adoration. With lust.

“That was when I understood that she hadn’t only been sexually abused by her father. The abuse continued. And Elizabeth didn’t consider it abuse in the least. Then he kissed her, and Elizabeth reciprocated. In fact.… she became the aggressor… ”

His deep voice broke. I squeezed his hand tighter when he faded off, his jaw clenched tight. He squeezed back.

“It was like… part of me froze, and has never unthawed, to this day. Abomination. That’s what it was. That’s what he was. I can’t think of a better way of describing it. He’d corrupted her to the point that very little of her original self remained.

“But seeing them together like that, it changed me. Suspecting something and seeing the truth are two very different things, Anna. I’d hated Noah before that night. But after that… that’s when my obsession began, to see him pay for what he’d done.”

Chapter Twenty

Evan sighed heavily, but that hard, determined set to his mouth remained.

“Then Noah closed the door,” he continued. “And I heard a lock click into place. I didn’t confront Elizabeth until she returned to her bedroom, early the next morning.”

“What did she say?”

“It was a lot like so many times before. The tears. The confessions. The remorse. It was the same on her part, anyway. For me, everything had changed that night. Elizabeth cringed with shame and regret when she understood I’d seen her with her father and knew they were sexually involved. She cried. She admitted everything: how they’d first had a sex when she was just nine years old, how the abuse had continued since then, how their activities had grown in depravity, how he used the Analyzer on her. She insisted that she wanted it all to end, and begged me to help her put a stop to it all.”

“What did you do?”

“I insisted she check herself in for a long-term psychiatric hospitalization, and then for substance abuse rehab. I knew nothing could change until she got away from Noah and Les Jumeaux, and admitted what had been happening to her for most of her life to mental health professionals. I only had a vague idea of the effects of brainwashing and mind control at that time, but I understood that she r

equired professional care, an expert to help deprogram her from all of Noah’s deliberate brainwashing.

“I also insisted that we go to the police,” he said.

“So that she could report Noah?”

He nodded. “She was willing to do everything I asked in regard to treatment. But when I mentioned going to the police, she got frantic. Panicked. Did I want to see her charged with something? Did I want to see her family and herself, ostracized publicly?

“When I persisted, she turned angry. Spiteful. Vicious. She said she’d refuse treatment if I insisted upon her going to the police to report what Noah had done to her… what he continued to do. Then… ”

His eyes looked hollow as he hesitated.

“She laughed at me for wanting to save her from her father,” he said gruffly. “She told me that she was the one responsible for what went on between Noah and herself.

“It wasn’t until then that I realized she believed it; she honestly believed that she was as much at fault as Noah. More than equal in blame. I found out that Noah had convinced her that their first sexual encounter was initiated by her—Elizabeth.”

I cringed back. “But she was a child.”

“I know that. You know that a child can’t give consent for something like that; the idea is ludicrous and sick. She was completely at her father’s mercy. But that was the real terror of his brainwashing. Elizabeth didn’t understand that. She believed, body and soul, that she’d wanted what her father had done to her. Craved it. She was convinced she was warped sexually. That she’d been born depraved. Noah had her convinced he was trying to stamp the twisted gene out of her. That’s what she believed he was doing to her while she was hooked up to that Analyzer, and he was abusing her. The whole thing was so screwed up. It boggles the mind, to consider the evil one human being can force onto another. Worse, this was a father corrupting his daughter to the core.

“When I couldn’t convince Elizabeth that the fault was one hundred percent Noah’s, I realized the best I could do at that point was send her to treatment… get her away from the devil, free her from drugs and alcohol, and hope that professionals could deprogram her from the lies and filth he’d imprinted into her brain. Her soul. I hoped that after that, she’d be able to condemn her father for decades of abuse, separate from him—both physically and psychologically, and begin the long process of healing.”

Tags: Beth Kery Romance
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