“You know they will.”
“Then look at my face, boy.” The old man blinked and was a ghost beside the bed. “Listen to my voice.”
“Everything hurts.”
“See how light it is. See how it floats.”
“It really hurts.…”
“But that’s fading now, son. Falling away.”
“I’ve missed you so much.”
“Steady, now.”
“Eli…”
“Just listen to my voice.”
*
They wanted what Eli had told him, plain and simple. And they ran everything: the phones, the mail, the other guards. That meant they had the power, and they had the time. When a year of knives and needles failed, it got psychological. Darkness. Deprivation. Hunger. Eventually, the inmates themselves were turned against him, one after another until every waking hour became a nightmare. And the rules were simple. Hurt him. Don’t kill him.
But hurt was a big word.
Ambush. Intimidation. Isolation. Friendly faces began to disappear: three men dead in the space of a year, killed by a single stab wound at the base of the skull. Their crimes? Adrian believed. A word in the yard. A place, once, at his table. The true nightmare began in the isolation wing. Once they understood the impact of tight spaces, they got creative; and prison, it turned out, was full of subbasements and old boilers and empty pipes. Adrian shuddered thinking of the pipes, of crevasses so airless and rust-choked that every breath tasted of metal. They liked to shove him in upside down, flood the pipe with water, haul him out. They used rats, at times; and once, they left him in for two days, and it was as if childhood terrors found him in the dark. Adrian went blank for a week after that. Lights turned on and off; food went uneaten. When he came back, it was a slow crawl from an empty place. They gave him a week more, then started the cycle again: in the black and on metal beds, hurt and healed, then in a boiler with rats.
A darker voice came, once. It spoke of endings and peace, told him to give up Eli’s secret and let the silence come at last. When that voice failed, they started to think maybe he knew nothing, after all. They left him alone for months: regular isolation, a regular prisoner. At times, Adrian’s thoughts were so splintered he wondered if he’d dreamed it all, if the scars came from fights with other inmates, as official records said. There were no more questions. No one looked at him twice.
But then he got out.
Adrian squatted by the fire; he added a few sticks, then moved, slow and silent, into the dark beyond the shell of his house. The fields were tall, so he stuck to the drive, hugged the ditch line, and kept his knees bent. When the road appeared, chalk white under the moon, he slipped into the field and drew close enough to see the car. It was not the same one that had followed him to the lawyer’s house. That was gray, and this was black. But, it was real, which meant the memories were real, too.
It wasn’t delusion.
He wasn’t insane.
At the house, he added a few more twigs to the fire, then stirred the coals until they caught in a sputter of flame.
“Talk to me, Eli.” He sat again, ancient trees above and the sky piled up forever. “Tell me what to do.”
But Eli was done talking, and that made it a bad night in the ruins. At one point, Adrian levered himself up and crept back to the road. The car was gone, but tracks were there, in the dirt. Even sleepless and pulled apart, Adrian knew what they wanted, and what they would do to get it. That made him not just cautious, but dangerous. The only reason no one had died yet was because he wasn’t yet willing, and they remained uncertain.
Did he know Eli’s secret or not?
They doubted it because no one should be able to suffer as he had and still keep his mouth shut. Not after so many years. Not after the knives and the rats and seventeen broken bones. What they failed to understand were the reasons. He didn’t keep the secret for greed’s sake. The reasons were older than that, and simpler.
He did it for love.
And he did it for hate.
Kneeling on the verge, Adrian put his fingers on the tire tracks where they were clearest. He saw cigarette butts, a damp spot in the dirt that smelled of urine. They’d been gone for an hour, maybe more. Had they given up? He doubted it. Laziness, maybe. Maybe they needed cigarettes.
When he returned to the fire, he piled wood until flames leapt higher. Dense clouds had moved in to cover the moon, so even with a fire the darkness pressed in. Adrian watched the flames, but visions still gathered in the dark.