The eight-by-four feet of space appeared larger in the dark. The darkness first took hold in the corners, where the grime of decades had accumulated, and then it crept out – inch-by-inch – until the walls fell away into the gloom.
The man’s place of residence – he reminded himself that he was still a man – never saw any sun. An outcropping from the roof above effectively sheltered the window in the shadow of the building itself, and the high wall directly facing it removed even a sliver of sky.
It had been selected for him specifically, held for his arrival.
He had been led to it in silence, the usual noise of the old concrete building absent as other men – the man assured himself that they were still men – watched from their segments of eight-by-four. The man had expected the shouts and insults, but the silence had unnerved him down to the bone. There was anticipation in the silence, the eyes that watched him were knowing.
There was no death room on the grounds, and the man had never known anyone who had been taken to one of the death rooms, but he imagined that his walk to his new residence was like those long walks to nothingness.
He had always hoped it was nothingness.
He knew better now.
On the first night in his new home away from home, not that he ever had a real home, he felt an inkling of what the men in the rooms around him already knew. Something was wrong with his patch of eight-by-four; something keeping him up until the early hours listening in the darkness.
The man was not a newcomer to the world of the eight-by-four. He had seen many in his years. When he was an early teen, he had run away from home and was found sleeping on the floor of a low-level drug dealer. He was taken back to his parents but had done the same a week later. This time when the police took him home his father had shut the door in their face.
It had been a roller-coaster ride since then. The highs were chemically induced, and the lows were laced with acts that he would rather not remember but would still revisit him in the darkest moments of his life.
No, the man was not a stranger to the eight-by-four, but they had never struck fear into him as they did many others. A sense of safety followed the lock slamming shut on the stout door, not confinement. Usually, that was. Before this transfer. Back before he met with this patch of eight-by-four.
In the past, the man had what he thought of as ‘stopovers’, but this time it was no short stay. He had pulled a long-term visit, and considering his age it might be his last. After he had run from home that last time, he had spent some time in the care system before he had been let out into the world. Within a year of that he had seen a courtroom for the first time, six months later he had seen his first eight-by-four.
The man thought that this may be his thirteenth visit. The number caused him to pause for the first time and consider his predicament. It was now his second day, and the night before was sleepless. He lay on the thin mattress watching the walls recede into the darkness, and from that darkness, he heard the noises.
The next morning, he had been sitting alone in the mess feeling the hostile eyes when he thought of the number thirteen. The eight-by-four felt a long way away, and as bad as the eyes on him where he preferred them to whatever he felt watching in the dark of that small room. He ate whatever was on the platter before him. The taste of cardboard and salt stuck to the roof of his mouth.
When he was sent back to his patch there was a letter awaiting him, the arms of the establishment in its letterhead, and he realised that things were worse than he could have feared. He had been rejected for every work placement, not even the sanitary department wanted him on their books.
He read the letter over and over. Each time the lump in his throat grew larger.
They all knew.
He thought that when they had let him out in the general population they had kept it secret. He had stepped out into the pale blue painted corridors on the first morning expecting a sharp pain followed by blood, but aside from the looks he had to endure, there was nothing. He had thought this meant that no one knew, but they did, the letter proved it.
For the remainder of the day, he carefully watched them.
With no work placement he was locked up by eight-thirty in the morning and let out for meals and ‘association time’. Whenever he was around other people, he kept his back to the wall and watched, but there was nothing to see except the looks.
The high windows outside his patch of eight-by-four began to show grey creeping into the blue, and the man thought people were looking at him more. Their gazes were expectant, and the man thought he saw cruel humour behind their eyes. They were ushered back into their patches of concrete and steel, and the doors were rolled closed. The lights glared behind their mesh shields, under it was just the man, his thoughts, and the walls around him.
Then the lights went out, and the noises began.
In the darkness, the man felt the walls drift outwards, the security of his concrete grave along with them. The locks and bars were not to keep the man in, he had always known it was to keep the world out. Between the gaps, the sounds seep into the man’s eight-by-four as it becomes a ten-by-six, then a twelve-by-eight. Around him the room grows, and the noises begin to echo. He pulls the thin blanket higher, curling his legs up as the freezing air touches them. He could almost feel small cold fingers touch his naked feet. Tiny tips of tiny fingers brush his sweat-soaked hair from his forehead. Half-formed words were breathed into his ear, and the voices were childlike. The man drew the blanket over his head and forced the rough fabric into his mouth to stifle the scream.
The following day the man was haggard. His many observers watched him sway slightly as he held his utensil in his weak hand. He ate halfheartedly and did not even notice when a passer-by took some of his meal.
The smiles had left the eyes of his observers now, they wore them broadly, openly. They spoke to one another in hushed tones. Here and there contraband changed hands as bets were made. There would be no losers, they all wanted the same outcome. The others stopped and watched him pass as the man was led back to his patch of concrete. They hung around the doors of their rooms, and if the man had been awake enough to notice he would have seen that everyone else was housed two men to an eight-by-four, while he was the only one on his own.
He fell onto the concrete when he was pushed onto his patch, he didn’t feel it. One moment he was standing and the other he was sprawled. When the door was closed vigorously, the lock was thrown with abandon, and the man thought he heard laughter.
It had been no more than a week, three days? He could not tell. He thought that no more than two nights had separated him from the day he had walked the long corridor to this room, but those nights were so long. He drifted in a stupor until he felt the walls begin to withdraw and the fright catapulted him into wakefulness.
Around him, the walls were painted half blue and half white. In places, the paint was worn to nothing. In others, sweaty shoulders had stained it brown. The white was no longer any semblance of its original colour. It was smeared grey, and the man saw spots of what may have been blood.
The room had not been cleaned in a lifetime, not painted in far longer.
At least not painted with paint.
The grey smears grew, darkening like the final stage of decay as the walls fell into darkness. This time the man thought he heard a sound as they withdrew, it sounded like an intake breath, but it may have been his own. His heartbeat slammed behind his eyes. It was a thrust of a fist into his skull. His brain throbbed, and his mind reeled.
It was a day in June, and the sun beat down hard enough to melt the asphalt on the roads. He had been on a park bench in a part of town where even the park benches sported obscene graffiti. He was unaware of the man who slipped onto the bench beside him. He had felt the rotten wood bow under the stranger’s weight, but it seemed unimportant. Once, he had woken from a doze to find a two-ounce bag stolen from him, and he then realised that he had been aware of when it had happened. There was a point when nothing seemed important, all a man had was his blood and his bones, and even they were open for rent.
Regular people would step over him to get to where they were going, regular people who shaved every other day and sometimes changed their underwear even more often. The man who sat next to him probably paid for a shave and rarely wore the same underwear twice, washed or not, and that should have rung alarm bells if nothing else had.
The man was too clean to be anything other than trouble, he smelled of soap that hinted at strawberries, but when he asked if a few hours of work would be welcome, his new best friend pulled himself to a sitting position and smiled what he hoped was a welcoming smile.
The man in the eight-by-four bit the mound at the base of his thumb hard enough to break the skin. He would not think of it, no matter what the darkness in the eight-by-four wanted. He was not the first person to do something that raised bile to score some cash, and he would not be the last. He hadn’t done anything wrong, illegal, maybe; but wrong? No.
But that wasn’t it though; was it? The darkness whispered. It wasn’t what happened was it? It was where it led.
His court-appointed had told him that abuse was intergenerational. So, he had told him of all the horrors of his childhood, some of them had even been true. His court-appointed had eagerly encouraged him and by the time he saw the wigs amid the polished wood and brushed green velvet, the man had no idea where the lies ended, and the truth began. He knew that every word was true, even all the lies.
The wigs argued in that peculiarly polite way they always did. The man was called a liar, but it didn’t sting, because the man knew that to lie was to be alive. Every lie he told contained just enough truth. So, what if his father didn’t abuse him? Enough father figures had. The man didn’t care about those who had been buried in abuse. He didn’t spare a thought for those people who had memories that contained nothing but pain. He could not see a line between lies and truth, and so he could not see that line in other people.
Even as the woman, once a child, who tearfully pointed and said, “That’s him!”
He had squinted across the room, the lights overhead bathing the place in a glow that burned his retinas. Her face was familiar, but the lines that marred it were not. Under her eyes were grey and swollen. Frown lines split her brow so deeply the makeup she wore deepened rather than alleviated them. In some memory, deeply buried, he saw a similar face, but whereas this face was old the one he dredged from his memory was so young. He did not know this woman. Was it her daughter he remembered, a sister perhaps? But no, he knew. The woman pointing at him was not old, instead she was a young woman with the agony of memory weighing down her shoulders.
The man tasted blood as his teeth sank deeper into the flesh of his palm. In a moment, the memory faded, and the freezing air brought him back to his patch of eight-by-four. He could feel the cold reaching up through the thin mattress to draw the warmth from his body. His fingertips had turned into blocks of unforgiving ice, and he could feel his bitter breath each time he exhaled across the self-inflicted wound on his hand.
His body wanted to shudder with the cold, but the terror held it in a vice-like grip. He ran his eyes over the room. He could see the worn paint on the scuffed walls. The steel wash basin was little more than a breakfast bowl, and its side had a concave dent. Something had struck it hard at some point, driving the metal inward. The uneven curve was about the same size as a man’s head.
Above the small cage that covered the unlit light was twisted out of shape, a corner of it was pulled downwards, twisting the thick metal into a blunt point of mesh. Something had been pushed through that mesh and a weight had been added to it. A sudden sharp weight dragged the metal downward, pulling it to a near-breaking point.
The small window was protected by four evenly spaced bars that had been painted a matt black. The paint of the second one was worn through to the metal beneath. His eyes moved back over to the door, the first time he did not see what was beside it, it was so deeply swallowed by the gloom. When he turned back his attention was drawn to the figure. He knew what it was, it could be nothing else. At first, it was the barest impression, a slightly darker patch of shadow, but slowly it pulled itself together into a more coherent image.
It was not there; the man knew that there was no way it could have been. But the walls never fell away either nor were the whispers actual voices. He knew that the darkness had pulled these things from him. The hours here were different than they were in the outside world. In places like this, they were flexible in ways that threatened to make a mockery of physics, and long hours made a mind turn to dark thoughts.
And the man had many dark thoughts to spare.
The figure next to the door didn’t move. Its head was level with where a door handle would have been, and the man thought he could smell strawberries.
No, you’re mixing up your memories, he thought, she hadn’t smelt of strawberries.
The thought ran through him before he could shut it down, and with it came the image of her face.
The man bit down again on the fleshy part of his palm, his teeth popping through the muscle there. The pain was distant, his mind was far too removed from his body. It was drowning in the reflected pain he had caused another. His teeth scraped across the bloody bone of his thumb, and he bit down hard. When the joint that connected it to his wrist pulled free the pain exploded across his mind.
He could never see the line between falsehood and truth. Nor could he ever appreciate any lines he had crossed. Each line he had trampled as he had wrecked life after life was not as important to him as his immediate wants and needs. As his thumb ripped free from his hand, he moved his teeth towards his wrist.
The pain kept the thoughts at bay. It kept the figure in the shadows. Without the pain, he knew she would step closer, and he would see her face, the younger version of the woman who had accused him. Not much younger, her youth had not been robbed by time but by his actions.
Despite the pain the memory pulled at him.
He opened his mouth wide and clamped down hard on the taut flesh of his wrist. His teeth flicked the tendons there like a guitarist plucking guitar strings. He felt them stretch and retract as his teeth tried to gain purchase on them. Some escaped, but some were caught, and his teeth tore through them.
His blood turned cold on the thin mattress, but the man was not aware of it. In his delirium, he was aware of so little except the pain and the little girl who lived in the shadows.
The following morning everyone knew. The door locks were released, and the men had filed out, all except the man in four-oh-six. The floor guard had called for backup without looking inside the room. He was new enough not to want to go anywhere near four-oh-six. He didn’t even like to walk the floor next to it if he could help it. So, he had called for help without considering any consequences.
If something else had happened then he would be the butt of many jokes for the foreseeable future, but if what he had heard about four-oh-six was true he wouldn’t go in there alone.
Sometimes even walking past the room made him think bad thoughts, and he almost felt sorry for the one they had put in there. That was until someone slipped him his sheet, and he had learned what he had done.
When the other guards arrived, they came prepared. It was a full clean-up crew that looked like a science-fiction squad in their all-over bio-suits. They would tell each other that it was a precaution against whatever diseases the man in four-oh-six might have, but the guard thought it had more to do with the concrete and steel of the room rather than any flesh within it.
The guard crept closer to the door as the men inside worked. His curiosity drew him even as his common sense told him to get a job somewhere else, anywhere else. Room four-oh-six was not on any modern building plans, and it had probably stopped being included on plans about the same time it was last renovated. Way back when the first person in there had done something horrible to his bunkmate, back when the room had first gotten the reputation for being a Death Room.
As he neared the edge of the door the guard caught a glimpse of the body as it was put into the black body bag. Its right arm had been stripped to the bone almost to the elbow, and the dead man’s face was smeared in his blood.
The guard looked away.
He had been a bad man, he thought, he had done terrible things.
The guard looked over the rows of open doors, the men had all gone to the mess hall, work, or some other place.
Yeah, they had all done terrible things, and we locked them in little rooms with little to do but think about those things. Those with a conscience are torn apart by such horrible things, while those without embrace them, sharing their notes and becoming better in their trade. They are all death rooms, the guard thought, in every one of them a part of the occupant dies.
As the body was brought out past him, he closed his eyes and wondered what his wife would say if he told her.