Discord | Website | Twitch
The chains rustled and rose and my body rustled and rose. Ritcher lifted me back to my place, held by the cuffs upside like a hog in the slaughterhouse.
“You don’t have to be as rough as the other prick, you know that, right?” I said.
“There is no other way. It either goes up or down and it’s as rough-” He slammed the lever in place. The chain went taut, feet barely not-dangling and my big toes aching against the cold floor. “It’s as rough as it’s going to be. There’s no in between.”
“We didn’t get through a lot today.”
“Do you remember anything about Obrick?”
“No.” Again, that name. My eyes shifted. “I don’t remember much but the sand on my feet at the end of each tired day. I think training then was rougher than being in here. I think.”
“Think. Any names or locations? Anything at all?”
“You’re desperate because you think I’ll be dead. Aren’t you?” I said.
He stayed quiet and rubbed the neckline of his shirt, outstretching it and venting air out. He looked away, through the interstices of iron bars on the top-front of the metal door. Where the centipedes crawled out of, where in the outside halls rats found little gaps to escape the blackened stone of the torturer’s hall.
“We won’t get through anything before your time comes.” Ritcher bit his nails. “You’ve got to tell Gunther what he needs to hear.”
“He’ll send me up. They’ll send me to the fifth floor and nothing lives up there.” I said. “Not in the way that you and I would consider living.”
“So long as you have a beating heart there’s still a chance for me to get to you. That’s all there is to it. Tell them you collaborated with Chaucer. That you tried to escape, that he was the leader.” He said. “That’s what Gunther is asking for. It’s what Hannibal wants.”
“If Hannibal wants it he can come down from his high tower and get it himself.”
Ritcher turned to me and leaned into my face. The crevices across his face that much deeper, darker, large.
“I don’t think you want Hannibal down here. No one does.” He said. “Gods damn him and damn you for doing so stupid as to try and escape.”
“I didn’t mean to be here.”
“Oh, you didn’t mean to? You didn’t mean to orchestrate an escape?” I asked.
“If I orchestrated an escape, I wouldn’t be here.” I smiled. “Because I’d gotten out.”
“How you can be laughing at a time like this is beyond me.”
“I laugh when I’m panicked.”
“Just beg them, Virgil. Do anything.” He shot his arms up and down like a man signaling a freight train. The looming doom, steaming and hot engined that came on its shaky tracks down the tunnel and straight towards me. Hannibal, that train. Me, the track-tied fool.
“I can’t do that.” My chains rustled.
“Say ‘I was involved. I was stupid and I did it with Chaucer. He planned it.’ Just say that.”
“I can’t do that either.”
“Why not?” Ritcher asked.
“’Cause I just can’t. That’s why.”
“Virgil, I don’t think you realize how deep into it you are.” He rubbed his forehead. “I can’t help you in the situation you’re in right now.”
“And how have you been helping me exactly? How have you stopped me from getting my hand broken? How have you saved me from the beatings or the lashings? How have you helped me to get out of here?”
“I’ve fed you.” He said. “Gifts. Accomodations... I’ve done a lot.”
“Fuck accommodation. Fuck gifts. Fuck you!”
He slapped me across the face and grabbed me by the hair, putting a finger somewhere in my temple.
“It is only the virtue of what you stand to remember that I don’t kill you here and now.”
I breathed heavy.
“I want you to get me out. I want things to go back to normal.” I said, spittle coming out of my lips. He let go.
“I definitely can’t do that.” He said. “This is too severe and even if I did have the power. I wouldn’t. You’re prisoners here for a reason.”
“You keep saying for a reason and now I’ve got the right mind to ask, what reason? Regicide? Murder?”
“That’s right-”
“I didn’t try to kill anyone. I just know it.” It all came blurted out. The air exhausted from my lungs. My cheeks flushed and the word escape me like a loud cannon shooting out of my mouth, with the same intensity and explosion of one too.
“I don’t have evidence. I don’t even remember, but I know. I feel it now, somewhere deep in me. Deeper than intuition. It’s like I’m so close to remembering it, but I know. I know it!” I said. I closed my eyes tight and released a loud gasp of air, my lungs exhausted. My heart racing, settling, racing again.
“I’ve lived all of my conscious life here and what a brief one it’s been.” I said. “But I know I’m not a king murderer. I know I’m not the monster you’ve all fashioned me for.”
Monster - that title that vindicates their brutality. And me, the year long fool who believed it as well as the wardens it. What a strange thing it is, isn’t it? But we do it all they time, don’t we? Accept titles whether at work or at family or in the anonymous eye of the public. Assume the role because it was given, never questioning it. Every day - we accept it in the minutia. When I went home and let my father call me fool. When we work and become servile, accepting the subservience to a boss. When our priests author and judge our lives by some higher power and call us sinner.
So I was. Fool son. Lazy wall-street man. Rich sinner. And here I was, the new title to supersede all. Monster. Trash. And we would all think ourselves deviant. Or perhaps dismissive. And each of us would like to pretend we are not some kind of prisoner to a fate given (not one made, certainly not one chosen), but we all succumb to our role in the end.
You are a doctor. You are a teacher. You were beaten as a child. You were spoiled as one. American. Xyrian. Chinese. Spanish. Foreign, native. You are smart, no you are stupid.
We are what the world tells us, we are the racked and set billiards to bounce and move to the shake of the table and the pound of the stick, the great prod of God or Gods or apathetic traversal of simple particles. Bounce here, bounce there. Never set your course.
Not without a cost, at least. I leaned in to Ritcher. My hair coiled in front of my eyes; vision blurred, mouth dried, quick breathed, ached in spots around my abdomen, numbed in the rest.
“I did not kill the king.” My eyes widened. “But I will kill the man who put me here.”
Ritcher looked at me, mouth twitching. His eyes closed and his face turned like an animal in pain, so that all I saw was the dried flaking flesh at the edge of his lips. He returned, flat faced and neutral. Composed.
“If you are innocent, we can only know that by reading. But for that to continue, you’re going to have to get out of this room. Do you understand, Virgil? I am on your side.” He put his palm on his heart. His voice went warm, low. “Even if you had any evidence - and perhaps could convince me - you still need to get out of this trial. You need to tell Hannibal the truth about your collaboration with Chaucer. We cant work if you’re conviction again, we can’t work with you getting your head cut off. Which is what will happen if you continue your defiance. Because if you don’t speak again Chaucer, Chaucer will certainly speak against you.”
“Hannibal. Always Hannibal.” I said. “That prick’s had it out for me since day one.”
Ritcher stayed quiet, his eyes looking away.
“Maybe there’s a reason for that.” He said.
Something in my stomach roused. It twirled.
“What’d you say?” I asked.
“Nevermind.” He tucked his lips in. “The important part is that you get out, Virgil. Under any circumstances, even if you have to go up the levels for the moment-”
“No.” I said.
“Just tell them about Chaucer.”
“No.”
“Did you find pride all of a sudden? Is it that important to you?”
“I’ve compromised enough. I can have myself broken. I can throw myself at any grinder. I can suffer any pain.” I said. “But I will not sell out a friend. Never.”
“Don’t think you haven’t been selling out your friends ever since you started reading that book.” Ritcher said, voice quiet. Quieter than the rats or the drip-drop of sludge that seeped down like long curtains on cobblestone. Somewhere far off a man screamed.
In another corner, in another room a whip snapped. Which was Chaucer? Did it matter?
The rusted wheels of the cart turned a bit to its side and creaked. The tools shook on top of their platter. The coals collapsed in their furnace.
My heart hammered loud and slow.
“If I had friends then I’m sure they’re innocent too.”
“Do you know it for a fact?”
“I’m not a holy man. But I have faith in who I was, faith enough to know how to pick out good friends.” I leaned into him now. “We are all innocent men. Obrick. Kal. Sylas. All of us were. Perhaps not innocent in the moral sense, but certainly what you’ve accused me of. That’s all you need to know, and all you’ll get by the end of that book. That - only that - I promise.”
“If you get to the end of that book.” Tight faced, he turned. "We'll read tomorrow."
In that quick stride like a man in spear-charge, he went to the exit. The hinges cracked, the metal slammed against the cobblestone. It closed on its own, in that scratchy screech. Half the candles near the door, set along an oak shelf on the wall, hissed and snuffed into silence. And I was made to stand and weep and stutter self-made criticisms and doubts.
The whos and the whats and the whys I’d said and screamed and told. Here I was left to feel a fool and a truth I doubted myself; and what made doesn’t doubt himself every day? Let alone an amnesiac.
The chains went still, my body went limp. And each time my eyes got tired and I went to sleep, somewhere in the remote corners of the torturer’s block a man’s cry woke me.
