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Enters a man, smoking, stands centre stage in a narrow spotlight.
The room was so terrible you could taste the misery flooding it. It permeated the space like a drug, the air laced with it. Every breath tasted like honey and dust and the faint taste of copper, a tang to contrast the sweet stench of soap and scrubbed out agony.
Walls of a simple mint green, a color innocuous enough, bear their own scars. Clawed marks, where people; and I hesitate to use the word, because by that time it’d be closer to ‘animals,’ what we’d reduced them to... Creatures, then, had tried to dig their way through the solid wall in desperate hopes of finding a sliver of sunlight. For those who’d retained a shred of themselves, there were messages scratched onto the walls. Nothing legible in the gratings, because clawing at stone till your fingers bled in the aching darkness wasn’t exactly conducive to penning a novel. The closest thing to sanity to be seen there was, in the bottom corner, a series of short lines. A soul who’d measured their time in this Hell.
For those that survived the standard retribution- four days, though there was no indication provided of how much time had passed –there were other options available. When I walked into the space I nearly tripped over a metal protrusion about an inch up the wall. A closer examination proved that there were more such things, in each corner of the space. For those who hadn’t been silenced nor broken, the option of complete dehumanization existed. To be chained, spread eagled and stripped of clothing, dignity and humanity, left face down on the icy floor. A week at a time, set ‘free’ for fifteen minutes a day to use the pot and eat, or be fed if your muscles were too sore to move. And if that didn’t prove to be enough, your stay was extended. A quick glance at the records in the Warden’s office proves that a stay in ‘the Hole’ could last up to six months.
The moment I stepped through the slit that amounted to a door, perhaps a foot and a half wide, narrow enough that I turned my hips sideways, I hurt. In every bone of my body I felt a lingering, aching agony for the hundreds of people who’d simply been shut away from the world. There was a murmur from the guide about the pressure of being so deep and the lack of ventilation, but somehow? I didn’t credit her cause. As she spoke candidly and casually of what had happened there, what had been done, and as my eyes widened and I shuddered and my back began to ache and my arms to strain… I didn’t believe in science, in the atmospheric pressure of the area, in any of it.
All I knew was that someone was whispering agonies in my ear, and something hissed behind me, there was a flash and my nose began to bleed. The blood spilled down my face, through my fingers and onto the stained concrete below.
I never used to believe in ghosts. I still don’t, I think. But there was something potent in that space: a memory that couldn’t stand to be lost, to be denied, to be left alone in the dark for another instant. And I swear on everything that I hold dear that I’m never going to forget it.
The room was so terrible you could taste the misery flooding it. It permeated the space like a drug, the air laced with it. Every breath tasted like honey and dust and the faint taste of copper, a tang to contrast the sweet stench of soap and scrubbed out agony.
Walls of a simple mint green, a color innocuous enough, bear their own scars. Clawed marks, where people; and I hesitate to use the word, because by that time it’d be closer to ‘animals,’ what we’d reduced them to... Creatures, then, had tried to dig their way through the solid wall in desperate hopes of finding a sliver of sunlight. For those who’d retained a shred of themselves, there were messages scratched onto the walls. Nothing legible in the gratings, because clawing at stone till your fingers bled in the aching darkness wasn’t exactly conducive to penning a novel. The closest thing to sanity to be seen there was, in the bottom corner, a series of short lines. A soul who’d measured their time in this Hell.
For those that survived the standard retribution- four days, though there was no indication provided of how much time had passed –there were other options available. When I walked into the space I nearly tripped over a metal protrusion about an inch up the wall. A closer examination proved that there were more such things, in each corner of the space. For those who hadn’t been silenced nor broken, the option of complete dehumanization existed. To be chained, spread eagled and stripped of clothing, dignity and humanity, left face down on the icy floor. A week at a time, set ‘free’ for fifteen minutes a day to use the pot and eat, or be fed if your muscles were too sore to move. And if that didn’t prove to be enough, your stay was extended. A quick glance at the records in the Warden’s office proves that a stay in ‘the Hole’ could last up to six months.
The moment I stepped through the slit that amounted to a door, perhaps a foot and a half wide, narrow enough that I turned my hips sideways, I hurt. In every bone of my body I felt a lingering, aching agony for the hundreds of people who’d simply been shut away from the world. There was a murmur from the guide about the pressure of being so deep and the lack of ventilation, but somehow? I didn’t credit her cause. As she spoke candidly and casually of what had happened there, what had been done, and as my eyes widened and I shuddered and my back began to ache and my arms to strain… I didn’t believe in science, in the atmospheric pressure of the area, in any of it.
All I knew was that someone was whispering agonies in my ear, and something hissed behind me, there was a flash and my nose began to bleed. The blood spilled down my face, through my fingers and onto the stained concrete below.
I never used to believe in ghosts. I still don’t, I think. But there was something potent in that space: a memory that couldn’t stand to be lost, to be denied, to be left alone in the dark for another instant. And I swear on everything that I hold dear that I’m never going to forget it.
