Discord | Website | Twitch
The whip cracked against my back. My scored skin bled out. I winced.
Chaucer’s plan went to shit, but that story comes later.
That was the thirty fifth lashing and my flesh was open wide and stinging against the cold humid air, here in my small room in this very large torturer’s block of cells where up and down and left and right you could hear the screams of others. Familiar voices, strange voices; the same voice. A wiggle of my arms, the chains rustled and the rattle kept me preoccupied, like it does with infants. The balls of my foot rested on smooth pavement, I stood on my toes.
“This could end sooner if you’d allow it to, Virgil.” Gunther brought the whip up. It dragged across the floor and cracked on my left thigh. My body hinged at the angle.
My feet went weak, I fell. The cuffs dug deeper into my flesh, wedged in between the joints of my wrists with a pain so great it made me shuffle to stand again.
Gunther came around the metal tray to my rear, where a wax candle came down to glow with layered light the sharp and jagged and thick cast-iron tools. Pliers reddened on their teeth, saws rusted with week old blood. A thin coating of lacquered coagulated blood was half way down a thick slicing scalpel. It looked like a reg egg growing out the hilt with the giant giblet pooled down.
“There is no sadism to me.” Gunther grabbed me by he hair. “No pleasure, only a tired arm now. I’d like you to admit it, Virgil.”
“Admit what?”
“To the attempted escape. I’d like you to admit it, to end this and to finally send you up the floors where you belong. Where you should have been from the start.”
“I didn’t do anything.” I said.
“We know what you were planning with Chaucer and the others.”
“I just went to the bathroom and I came out. You didn’t catch me in anything.”
Gunther sighed.
“If it weren’t for the laws of this land, if it weren’t for those civilities that keep order then I would have you executed here and now.” He said. “But I am to give you trial.”
“This is a trial?”
“It’s the very slow start of one.” Gunther said, eyes still and beady. The reflection in his pupils flickered, a swaying red.
“You’re here to get admission to guilt. But you have no evidence for it.”
“We know you tried. We’ve known for a while.”
And how was that possible? And whom?
“I know what you do in the upper floors. I know what you put those men up to. Why the hell would I allow myself to go there?” I asked.
“Because you’d still be alive.” Gunther said.
He lowered the chain enough to allow me to fall to my knees. And with one hand grabbed the candle to our rear from its small saucer plate, the wax dribbling down the side. Above the chains drifted like cobwebs, small little swaying ropes of steel left to swerve at random across the ceiling. I turned away from Gunther, from his still and unmoving face, to the furnace instead with the cold iron stabbed through the perforated steel cover. The chimney tube rose up and disappeared into the stone walls.
I was afraid when they’d turn it on. Gunther brought my face back, dragging the candle light as he did until it sat in between us.
“If Chaucer admits to your conspiracy you will be put to death. If you admit it, we will allow to live in the upper floors. Those are the rules.”
“And I’d be stuck there.”
“Those are the rules, yes.” Gunther said. “You’d be stuck there, but you’d be alive.”
“And what kind of life would that be? With the few liberties I have yet-”
“I’m not here to argue what constitutes an existence. And I doubt a parasite like you would need much for one.” He came closer, chest jutted out. “Truth is, trash like you doesn’t need much. Not sunlight. Not shelter. Not love. Parasites like you endure regardless, in the cracks of the earth with the rainwater and the gutter that seeps in. You endure so well, consider that my only compliment.”
He held the whip tighter.
Gunther was cruel, the type of that is almost animal like. Not in it’s ferocity but in its impartiality. There was no lie to his words, no heat, no love, no cold or hot. He spoke still and tepid truth. One that only emotionless men could speak, one that only Gods or the Idea of God could speak.
I would live. I would never be seen again. I would not be killed until I broke or until time broke me. My existence would sink and I would be forgotten, so that even the king I claimed to have tried to kill would never even have the memory of contempt in him left to warrant my death.
I would be a rat in the wall. Here in Hannibal’s prison, mandated by Gunther’s will.
“Could I talk to Ritcher?” I asked.
“No.” He said. “And if you go up there, you never will.”
I looked down. My knees were so sharp and bony that they dug out of my thin pale flesh.
“You know the rules Virgil. You’d go up three floors and they would never see or hear of you again. There will be no Ritcher, only Hannibal. But you’d be alive.” He said. “Or you can keep quiet and wait for Chaucer to settle and for you to be put on the block.”
“Why would he?”
“Because the offer I’m giving you is the same offer they’ve given him, Virgil.” He put the candle down. “And he has more than endurance, he has hope and ambition. Of which you lack, Virgil. So no doubt he’s scheming, thinking that if he can just rat you out that he’d be sent up. That if he’s sent up, he could at least live and try again. Which is erroneous. But it’s what he believes.”
“That’s mad. You’re pitting us together-”
“I don’t make the rules.” Gunther look away. “I just enforce them. Hannibal is the one who has decided this.”
“So it’s a game then? Who breaks first? What if he doesn’t. What if I don’t?”
“Chaucer is sentenced to death. He won’t accept it, he’ll sell you out. I promise you that.” He said.
“But what if he doesn’t.” My breathing paced. “You have no evidence! I didn’t do anything. If he doesn’t- I’m innocent.”
I couldn’t control it, each breath came out rapid fire.
“I’m innocent. He won’t blame me. I’m innocent-!”
“It’s Chaucer.” Gunther said. “Why in the nine hells would he care about you?”
My face sunk.
“Now you get it.”
My mouth drooped. My cheeks went hollow as my breath left me.
“Will you speak?” Gunther asked.
My eyes would not blink and my face would not turn and it seemed like every organ in me and every cell in my body had come to creaking stop as the candle flickered and off in the diminishing darkness the foreign whip hit foreign men, here in this gallery of suffering in my own small framed article I sat knelt upon the torturer’s pew. To yield. To beg. To live again, a rat in the wall.
No.
“You have nothing.” I said. “No evidence. Nothing. You did not catch me, you did not find a thing on me.”
“Virgil. We’ll kill.”
“Not yet you won’t. You’ll trial.” The sweat went down my face. “Yes. Yes. You’ll hold trial. Because the shred of nobility that you imprison here demands it, because the world that abandoned you demands it. Though it is a nuisance to you, though you hate it.” I rose to my feet, my ankles wobbled. “I will not speak. Not to you.”
“Not to me.” He laughed and though I could not read his mind, the impression I got was that he to some degree respected me. So he looked at me, mouth ajar. His face tightened and his eye twitched and the hand that gripped his whip shook and one singular vein rose and ran from forearm to thumb and he brought his man-beater behind his back like a serpent left to rest inclined on his shoulder. He brought it back, further, all the way his arm would stretch. One quick flex, one of respect. One more painful because of that respect.
It snapped against my back.
But I would not fall, I would not bend. Not again.
I stood and took it.
Where? Where’d it all go so wrong? It was a lot of things, small things perhaps. A thousand flaws that had came back to us at the final hour and it all started in that bathroom. One brick.
It went like this;
