Abominations Read Online Free PDF Page A

embarrassed reactions of the men in the room.
      The woman looked up, and seeing no clock asked the time.
      The large man, Grainger, pulled a shiny pocket watch out of his black vest pocket and told her it was twenty past seven.
      “I last ate... three days and seven hours ago,” she said simply, then took a bite of her sandwich when Gwen urged her to. Both men blanched slightly.
      Her doctor, Schmidt, stammered slightly as he spoke.
      “But, but how? You're a Constabulary Detective, a Westmorland asset! Do you mean to tell me that no one thought to feed you or care for you in three days? This is outrageous! Who's your caretaker?” The man seemed truly concerned, as far as Gwen could tell. Indignant now that he realized the problem existed.
      Gwen suggested that she keep eating and the sandwiches began to vanish efficiently, as did the tea.
      “My last caretaker quit suddenly. There's a shortage of individuals willing to provide active twenty-four-hour-a-day care for someone like me, fewer women than men. The hours are irregular and the work can be tedious.” After getting this out, with more prompting from Gwen, she ate the rest of the sandwiches and drank the tea until they were gone.
      Gwen went back to drawing, letting the doctors fuss over the detective for a while. The woman obviously needed them at the moment more than she did. If she needed someone to tell her to eat it was shocking that they let her go out alone at all. Her words were bright enough sounding, if flat, so some kind of autism or... Gwen didn't know enough to keep going, it could be anything really.
      It was wrong of whoever was her boss not to see to her care though.
      When she had the picture done as well as she could, she handed it to the other woman, being careful not to reach too far, since her chest still burned and throbbed where she'd been stabbed. Luckily the long blade had missed the heart, and the major veins and arteries, she'd been told. They expected her to need several more days of bed rest before she could leave. She'd had beatings from school boys that had taken longer to heal from.
      “That's pretty close. I wouldn't try to use it like a photograph, but that's basically him. The hair's a mix of silver and white. I know I shaded it in gray, but it actually stood out a lot more than that, a stark contrast. I really noticed it. I couldn't capture it... but he looked almost fatherly, friendly even, until, you know, he stabbed me in the chest.” She went over the whole story again, telling them how she woke up and couldn't move, tried to observe everything in case she got out alive. She recounted the taste of the ball gag, what was said to the man when he removed it and what he said in return.
      Westmorland returned to her state of highly concentrated focus, staring right at Gwen, her eyes unmoving, the last bite of tasteless little sandwich in her hand, “This group had you lying flat, unmoving, most likely a form of systemic paralysis, not ropes, and when you spoke you fought them as you could, resisted and insulted them instead of pleading for your life?” Her eyes, which had been cold, or at least non-responsive, grew slightly misty at this.
      The doctors just seemed uneasy, as if shocked by her unladylike language. These people really had an almost Victorian vibe to them in some ways. The rest was mainly just strange. She was discussing being stabbed in the heart by a cult and the men were uneasy because she'd said “fuck” at the time? Would they have been happier if she'd used “darn” instead?
      “Well, I don't think it can really be called resistance when you're pretty sure you're about to be killed like that, but it's what I said. He seemed, I don't know, almost happy that I didn't beg for my life or something. He didn't say why, but the way he said it made it seem like these people had done