*
Some people wonder how I could have become so subject to Mitchell’s will, so utterly submissive and obedient. But when you consider my situation, it’s pretty easy to understand.
For one thing, I was only fourteen years old. And I was as na?ve as any fourteen-year-old girl could be. My innocence had been torn apart. And it seemed that Mitchell had done it with utter confidence and ease. He had shown the ability to get into my house. To pull me from my bedroom. To keep me in the mountains just a few miles from my home. Time and time again, he would hike down into the city with not a penny to his name, then return with all sorts of alcohol and supplies. He avoided the police. He avoided any suspicion. He seemed to move around the city without any fear at all. He may not have been omnipotent, but he seemed to get away with everything.
Physiologically, I was tattered. I had been tortured for months. Deprived of water. Deprived of food. Treated like an animal. No privacy. No hope. I lived in constant pain from being abused and cabled to the trees. I had been threatened and manipulated every second of every day. Mitchell was the master and I was the slave.
I was also terrified of making him angry. And I wasn’t alone. His own family was afraid of him as well, to the point that they had disowned him. His own mother had a restraining order placed against him. He seemed to have lost all of the normal emotions that humans were supposed to feel. He abused me as easily as someone might flick an ant off the kitchen table. And Barzee was no better. She had voluntarily given up her children in order to be with him. She watched him abuse me without any compassion or any attempt to help me. To her, I was nothing but competition for his affections and I believed she would have killed me if he had given her the go-ahead.
And I felt constantly outnumbered. It was one child against two adults, both of whom were evil and full of darkness. But they were not stupid. Especially Mitchell. He was smart. And experienced at his craft. He had been lying and manipulating his way through life for many years now and I was no match for his distortions.
But none of these factors explains the main reason I was so obedient to his commands.
Fear was the reason.
Fear for my own life. Fear for my family.
Terror had been my constant companion from the moment that I opened my eyes in the darkness of my bedroom to see Mitchell standing there. Every moment of every day, I was sick with dread. After a time, that begins to change you. It changes the way you think, your expectations, the things you hope to get out of life. I knew that he would kill me if I tried to run away. Nothing could have convinced me that wasn’t true. He’d kill my family. I wanted to protect them. I felt driven to protect them.
Mitchell would kill my family if I ran, so I wasn’t going to run.
As we prepared to go down the canyon, I felt my only hope for escape was that we would, at some point, be put in a situation where someone else could save me. But that process had to be completely out of my control. It couldn’t be my fault. I couldn’t contribute to my own rescue in any way. Otherwise, Mitchell would blame me. Then he would kill my family, or tell his friends to kill them. And as horrible as my life was, it was far preferable for me to suffer than to hurt those I loved.
*