Chapter 5: The Burn of Memory

The Punisher's fingers pressed against Joey's cheek, and the world exploded into agony.

But it wasn't the sharp, clean pain of a physical blow. This was something far worse—a burning that seemed to originate from inside his skull and radiate outward through every nerve in his body. Joey's scream caught in his throat as the pain became so intense that even breathing felt impossible.

Yet there were no flames, no heat, no visible source of the torment that coursed through him like molten metal in his veins. The Punisher's pale fingers remained pressed against his skin, cold as winter stone, but the burning sensation grew stronger with each passing second.

"Do you feel it, Joey?" The Punisher's voice seemed to come from a great distance, echoing through the corridors of pain that had replaced Joey's conscious mind. "The fire that has been waiting inside you all these years? The flames of truth?"

Joey tried to pull away, but his body had become a prison. He could see the hallway around him, could see the entities from his apartment gathering in a circle like spectators at an execution, but he couldn't move, couldn't escape, couldn't do anything but endure the supernatural fire that was consuming him from within.

And then, as suddenly as it had begun, the burning focused itself on his face—specifically on his cheeks, in the exact pattern of the scars he'd seen on all the faces that haunted him.

The phantom burns he'd felt for years, the sensation of fire on skin that had never been touched by flame, suddenly blazed with the intensity of red-hot iron. Joey could smell burning flesh, could hear the sizzle of skin charring, but when he tried to raise his hands to his face, he found them frozen at his sides.

"The marks of guilt," the Punisher whispered, and Joey realized the creature was branding him, marking him with the same scars that identified all the entities from the Abyss. "Every soul we claim bears these signs. Consider it... a uniform."

But even as the physical torment threatened to drive him insane, something worse was happening inside his mind. Images began to flood his consciousness—not memories this time, but visions, scenes playing out with crystal clarity as if he were watching a movie projected directly onto the inside of his skull.

The car. The rain. The night that had destroyed everything.

Joey found himself back in that moment twenty-one years ago, but this time he could see everything with an adult's understanding, could process details that his twelve-year-old mind had been too traumatized to fully grasp.

He was in the back seat of his grandmother's old Honda, the rain drumming against the windows like bullets. Eight-year-old Tommy was crying beside him, scared by the thunder that split the night sky every few seconds. Their grandmother, Margaret, gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles, her weathered face tight with concentration as she navigated the flooded streets.

But in this vision, Joey could see things that hadn't been there in his actual memories. Pale faces pressed against the rain-streaked windows from the outside—not his grandmother's car, but every other vehicle on the road. The entities were everywhere, feeding on the fear and tension of the storm, growing stronger with each flash of lightning.

"You see them now," the Punisher's voice cut through the memory. "They were always there, waiting for the moment when your emotions would reach the perfect pitch."

In the vision, twelve-year-old Joey was in full tantrum mode, furious about having to leave his friend's birthday party early because of the weather. The rational part of his adult mind could see how petty the anger was, how insignificant the slight that had triggered his rage, but he could also feel the raw intensity of his younger self's emotions.

"I hate this!" the memory-Joey screamed, his voice shrill with pre-teen fury. "I hate this stupid rain! I hate having to leave early! I hate—"

"Joey, please," his grandmother said, her voice strained as she tried to see through the windshield. The wipers were barely keeping up with the torrential downpour. "I'm trying to concentrate. The roads are flooded and—"

"I don't care!" Memory-Joey's voice rose even higher, carrying a viciousness that made his adult self cringe. "This is all your fault! You're the one who made us leave! You ruin everything! I hate you! I hate this family! I wish—"

And that's when Joey saw it—the detail his twelve-year-old mind had suppressed, the moment that had haunted him for twenty-one years without him even knowing it existed.

As the words "I wish" left his younger self's mouth, one of the pale faces outside the car suddenly appeared inside it, materializing in the passenger seat beside his grandmother like a reflection in a dark mirror. The entity's burned features were twisted in concentration, and its mouth was moving in perfect synchronization with Joey's tantrum.

The thing was feeding off his anger, using his emotions to manifest more solidly in the physical world. And as it grew more substantial, it began to interfere with his grandmother's driving.

Not directly—Joey could see that now. The entity didn't grab the wheel or obstruct her vision. Instead, it simply existed in her peripheral sight, a pale distraction that made her turn her head at exactly the wrong moment.

"I wish I was dead!" memory-Joey screamed, the words erupting from him with such venom that even Tommy stopped crying to stare at his older brother in shock. "I wish we were all dead! I wish—"

The drunk driver's pickup truck ran the red light at that exact moment, hydroplaning across the intersection at sixty miles per hour. But in this supernatural replay, Joey could see that the crash wasn't just a tragic accident—it was a summoning.

His words, spoken with such perfect hatred and self-destruction, had been exactly what the entities needed to fully manifest in the physical world. The pale face in the passenger seat smiled with satisfaction as the truck's headlights filled the Honda's interior, and Joey realized with sick certainty that the timing wasn't coincidental.

The crash had been orchestrated. His family had been sacrificed to create the trauma necessary to forge him into a key for the Abyss.

"No," the Punisher's voice cut through the vision, and Joey realized he'd been screaming the word aloud. "Not sacrificed, Joey. Invested. Your grandmother and brother were investments in your future. Their deaths created the guilt that would make you useful to us."

The vision shifted, showing Joey the aftermath of the crash from a perspective he'd never seen before. His twelve-year-old body was thrown clear of the wreckage, landing in a snowbank that cushioned his fall and saved his life. But Tommy and his grandmother...

Joey had never been allowed to see their bodies. The social workers and grief counselors had made sure of that, telling him it was better to remember them as they were. But in this supernatural replay, he could see everything with horrible clarity.

Tommy's small body twisted at an impossible angle, his eight-year-old face peaceful despite the violence of his death. Their grandmother slumped over the steering wheel, her weathered hands still gripping it even in death, as if she'd tried to protect them right until the end.

And standing over both bodies, barely visible in the falling snow, were the pale entities. Not mourning or gloating, but simply... collecting. Drawing something invisible from the corpses, harvesting whatever essence had been released by their sudden, violent deaths.

"The guilt was just the beginning," the Punisher explained as the vision began to fade. "Your family's terror in their final moments, their pain, their confusion—all of it was absorbed, processed, refined into a form of energy that we could use. And you, the sole survivor, became the vessel that would carry that energy forward."

Joey found himself back in the hallway, the Punisher's fingers still pressed against his burning cheeks. But now he could feel something different about the scars being burned into his flesh—they weren't just marks of ownership. They were conduits, channels through which the harvested energy of his family's deaths could flow.

"Twenty-one years," the Punisher continued, its voice filled with something like pride. "Twenty-one years of guilt and self-hatred, feeding on the energy of their final moments, growing stronger with each passing day. Do you understand now why you could never heal? Why therapy failed, why medication was useless, why you could never move on?"

The truth hit Joey like a physical blow. "Because I wasn't supposed to heal."

"Exactly. You were designed to suffer. Crafted to carry guilt like a battery carries charge. Every moment of pain, every sleepless night, every session with Dr. Henley where you tried to process your 'survivor's syndrome'—all of it was feeding the conduit that would eventually allow us to breach your world."

The burning in Joey's cheeks intensified, and he could feel the scars completing their pattern, marking him permanently as property of the Abyss. But even worse than the physical pain was the crushing weight of understanding.

He hadn't survived the crash by luck or chance. He'd been deliberately preserved, kept alive to serve as a living doorway between dimensions. His family hadn't died in a tragic accident—they'd been murdered, sacrificed to create the trauma necessary to break his mind and make him useful to creatures from another realm.

Every tear he'd shed, every nightmare he'd endured, every moment of crushing guilt over their deaths—all of it had been planned, orchestrated, cultivated like a crop being prepared for harvest.

"And now," the Punisher said, finally removing its fingers from Joey's face, "the harvest is complete. You understand your true nature, your real purpose. The guilt that has tormented you for twenty-one years is about to become something beautiful."

Joey could feel the scars on his cheeks throbbing in rhythm with his heartbeat, could sense the entities around him pressing closer with anticipation. The barrier between his world and the Abyss had grown paper-thin, held back only by the last fragments of his sanity.

But even as despair threatened to consume him completely, a small spark of defiance flickered in the depths of his mind. The Punisher was wrong about one thing—Joey did have a choice. Maybe not about being marked, maybe not about becoming a conduit, but about what he did with that knowledge.

The creatures from the Abyss had made one crucial mistake. In showing him the truth about his family's death, in revealing the scope of their manipulation, they had also shown him something else.

If his guilt was powerful enough to open doorways between worlds, then maybe—just maybe—his rage could close them.

As the burn of memory seared itself permanently into his consciousness, Joey Miller began to understand that his penance might not be what the Punisher expected.

The real nightmare was just beginning, but for the first time in twenty-one years, Joey wasn't planning to face it as a victim.

He was planning to face it as something else entirely.

Something that even beings from the Abyss might have reason to fear.