Chapter 6: Byles

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June 2015. Afternoon.

*Sound of a gunshot*

Joyce: That's not how you hunt a deer, Nathan. It's running away now. You missed it. Let me show you.

Nathan: I don't shoot very often. That's why I missed..

Joyce shoots twice.
Bang Bang.
Two deer lies dead in the distance.

Nathan's jaw drops.

. . .

4th June 2017.

"Samuel, check what these pills and prescription are about."

Nathan Byles then enters the interrogation room.

"Are you one of the Cannibal, Joyce?"

"It's complicated. It wasn't me but.."

"Are you the Campanula Cannibal or Trumpet Creeper Cannibal? YES OR NO!" my voice came out as a shriek.

Joyce sobbing.
"Nathan, the answer is not in yes or no. You don't understand.."

I bang my hand on the table between us. I stand up and kick my chair across the room.

"Don't you dare play with me now, Joyce!"

Samuel knocks on the door and calls me.

I go out of the interrogation room.

"What is it?"

"I checked out the pills and prescription. Joyce has multiple personality disorder."

It leaves me speechless. I didn't know if my resentment towards Joyce would be justified or not.

I go back to the interrogation room.

I keep Joyce's pill and reports on the table.

"So you found out, huh?"

I let out a deep breath.

"Joyce? I want the truth from this moment onward. Could you please do that for me?"

Joyce wipes her tears.

"I can tell you what I know. And I know very little about everything. If you want to know everything, you have to talk to my other personalities. They can hear everything I say, but I can't hear them."

"It's okay, Joyce. Tell me what you know. How it started."

Joyce started. But I didn't know if I should believe her.

"Back in 2013, when I was studying psychology, we were kidnapped by one of my professor's old students. My professor and a few of his students, including me, were running an experiment which was kept confidential. That man kidnapped all the people involved with running the experiments, including the professor, students, and the people we were running the experiment on. It wasn't only us, more random people were imprisoned along with us.
We all were kept in tiny cages. It was like a big necklace, the cages arranged in a circle, leaving a big space in the center. In this circle, the kidnapper and his men raped women, cut off parts of the liver from the living victims and then left them to bleed to death, and executed anyone who didn't abide by their rules. All the victims witnessed. Some men would come to me in the middle of the night, and then it's all black. I don't remember what they did to me. Next, all I remember is more than 27 of us escape from that place along with the professor, and we all went on our separate ways. The police only know of 27 survivors. There were more. He might've found some of them already. He is probably feeding on them, maybe. I helped my professor hide. I went to him from time to time. He treated me after I was diagnosed with multiple personality disorder. He helped me understand that the part of my memories, which are black and blank in my head, might have been when my other personalities showed up, and why I don't remember what happened to me. But then, I lost him too. The kidnapper found the professor's hiding place and murdered him."

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