开一篇在这里，等BH有空了。
The first thing they did was rip out my eyes. From there it got worse.
I've stolen, I've killed, and now you can add kidnapping to my portfolio, but I won't lie. I'm not what you'd call a "good person." I deserve everything they did to me, everything and more. But deserving something doesn't make it any easier to live through. And living through something, I've learned, doesn't make it any easier to believe.
Work was down. The Syndicate was prospering, their enemies in hiding or dead. That's the danger of being too good in my line of work. Since there was no one to kill, Danny O'Bannion asked if I would assist one of his contacts, who was after a human specimen. "For science."
Taking the job, in hindsight, was my first mistake. I'm a killer. "Bring 'em back alive" was never my thing. But the price was too good to be true, and not asking why the job paid so well was my second oversight. O'Bannion put me on the girl, I got close to her, and I brought her in. And look at me now.
Why did they take my eyes? I think it's because I fought back. I took one of 'em down when they came after me in the cave, and the others were on me. The struggle, the cold, cold mist...
Unconsciousness.
Agony.
Jolted out of the blessed darkness, my eyes opened just as one of them was ripped from its socket by a bony splintering claw. A claw? Yeah, that's what I think I saw, although it could've just as easily been a coat hanger or an ice pick or a broken pencil. Given the circumstances, it was difficult to focus. Then the claw returned to digging, digging through my clenched eyelid, tearing my other eye from my skull.
At which point I must have blacked out - if such a thing is even possible for someone who's already blind.
* * *
The pain returned first, searing and relentless, reminding me that I was, despite my body's best interest, still alive.
Then came the sounds. Fierce, helpless cries of some unearthly beast caused the room and the table upon which I was restrained to vibrate. It was close, whatever it was, and loud. I imagined it to be huge. What caused such pain?
At times I wondered: were the cries only in my mind? Could they have been a hallucination? Occasional flashes and brief moments of sight began to intrude upon my consciousness. At first just a hazy, sickly green light, then a hint of movement flashing across the field behind the light. Over time, these moments grew longer and more frequent. The fearsome, grotesque shapes moving just beyond the veil of green haze and the new reality of my sight took on greater and greater detail. I longed to shut my eyes against these visions, but to my abject horror I could not. The visions would not cease.
Once, for just a second, as if my mind were playing yet another insidious trick, I thought I saw the girl, the victim I'd kidnapped to fill the contract, huddled in the corner of a cage. The hallucination faded quickly, and darkness prevailed. What they might be doing to her I could not consider, for I knew that I was to blame.
