Nothing could block those sounds, though: not these walls, not her arms, not the passage of time or even death itself. She had prayed for a very long time but she wasn’t sure if God or the angels could hear her prayers from Hell. It didn’t stop her from trying. Eventually, though, she ran out of ways to plead for help, to beg for an end to this nightmare. At first, she lay there with her mind so wounded and eviscerated she was certain she would never think again. All she would ever be able to hear were his tortured screams, and that was a sound that would be permanently etched in her mind. But gradually, an image, another dream or a memory, she still wasn’t sure what was reality in this place, started shuffling through those dark corners of her own pain and personal suffering, and when she recognized him, she grabbed onto it, and held on as tightly as she could. Part of her understood it was a pattern now: a happy, comforting dream replaced by a terrifying nightmare, but he was there in her mind, so young and so healthy and so free from this suffering.
