“There!” yelled Zee, pointing down the corridor. I scanned the walls, seeing nothing in their raw red sheen.
“What?” The sound more a pant than a word. I knew the dogs would have halved the distance between us, driven by madness and hunger.
“The … floor.”
Sure enough the ground of the tunnel had several steel trapdoors set into it, each no larger than a manhole cover. I don’t know what I’d been expecting when I pictured the hole, but I hadn’t taken it literally. I thought it would have been a cell, beneath the prison, sure, but not actually in the ground.
This was no time to be choosy. The monsters were so close I could hear the ragged breaths in their throats. We reached the first of the round doors, skidding onto our knees beside it, twisting the lever and lifting the heavy hatch. The space inside—if you can call it space—was like a coffin on its end. There wasn’t even enough room for us both to clamber in.
“You take this one,” I said, diving across the ground to the next hatch and wrenching it open. I heard the crash of steel on steel as Zee’s trapdoor closed, and I made the mistake of looking around. One of the dogs was in mid-leap, its jaws open so wide that I almost couldn’t make out the immense body behind them. With a groan of fear I swung my legs into the hole and dropped.
I was just in time. The dog struck the top of the hatch and its body weight slammed it closed with a clang that made my eardrums ache. For a moment I could hear it muzzling at the steel and running its claws along the surface. Then came the distant call of a blacksuit and the scuffling stopped.
“Damn shame,” came the voice, softened by rock and metal. “Thought it had you there.” The dull throb of laughter. “Still, give it a day or two and you’ll be wishing they had caught you. Have fun, boys. Don’t go mad too soon.”
There was the sound of the lever on top of the hatch being secured, then there was nothing but darkness and the frenzied beating of my own heart.
“Zee?” I called out softly, stretching my arms to gauge where the walls were. To my relief the space was bigger than I’d first thought, although it was at most half the size of the cell I’d had on top.
On top? I shook my head, not quite believing I’d used the phrase to describe Furnace. Already the prison with its light and its mattresses and the sound of its inmates seemed like home.
“Zee?” I called out, louder this time. There was still no reply. I found the wall that separated us and thumped on it with my fist, but the noise was quickly absorbed by silence. I swore, and swore again, cursing with every word I knew as I kept on driving my fist against the rock. Each time it hit, the panic set in a little more, the fear of being alone, of being in the dark, and I could picture the intricate web of my mind unraveling into insanity.
“Zee!” A scream this time, but my cell didn’t even grant it an echo.
I collapsed to the floor, found that there wasn’t enough room to stretch out my legs completely. Instead I pulled them close, my knees touching my chin, and rocked gently. The blacksuit was right: pretty soon I would be wishing that the dogs had caught me. At least they would have had the decency to finish me off quickly.
This room was a different kind of beast entirely, infinitely more patient and infinitely more terrifying. The hole didn’t need monsters to do its dirty work, it had no use for brutes in black suits and their silver-eyed hounds, or wheezing freaks with filthy syringes.
No, all it needed was me, and my fear. Because alone in the silence, in the unfathomable darkness, I knew that my own thoughts would drive me mad. My own mind would kill me.
THOUGHTS FROM
THE ABYSS
WHEN EVERY LINK to the outside world is severed, time has no meaning. It ceases to exist other than as a dull memory, a vague recollection of what a minute used to be, an hour, a day. Sealed up tight so far beneath the ground, every single second was stretched out almost to infinity—each one a vast and empty abyss where time used to reign, an ageless aeon barren of significance and consequence.
When every scrap of light and sound has been taken away, reality has no meaning. It too ceases to exist, for what is reality other than the cumulation of senses—images witnessed by our own eyes and the noises that enter through our ears? But when all those senses are starved, then the real world fades away like the last frantic gasp of a television program when the set is switched off.
And when reality goes, sanity has no reason. How can your ability to behave in a normal and rational way still exist when nothing normal or rational remains? As soon as reality breaks, as soon as we are separated from the physical world, the cracks begin to appear in our minds. And through them seeps the madness that has always been there, flowing into your skull like a liquid nightmare.
I couldn’t tell you how long I’d been in the hole before the hallucinations began. Starved of sensory input my brain began to concoct its own reality, causing phantoms to peel themselves from the darkness of my cell. At first they had no faces, no bodies, other than a swirl of soft white like silk in water. But then they began to solidify, filling out until they resembled people I half recognized.
The first to take shape was somebody I hadn’t thought about in years—Mr. Machin, a teacher I’d had way back in elementary school. He was the one who first made me want to be a magician, back before I gave my life to crime. He performed an impromptu show one rainy lunchtime, and I’ll never forget the way he’d always known what everyone’s card would be despite the fact they’d been shuffled back into the pack, even my eight of spades, which he picked out with a flourish.
He strode toward me as if from a great distance, his features becoming clearer with every step. At first his expression was gentle, smiling at me with fondness the way he had done back in class. But I knew he was a figment of my imagination, and right now I had nothing good left inside me, just hatred of what I had become, what I had done to myself. So I guess it wasn’t surprising when his eyes narrowed and his mouth opened and he started ranting. There was no sound in this trick of the mind, but I knew what he was saying.
You took your life and wasted it, Alex. All the advice I gave you, all that inspiration, all those hours we spent learning. You wasted my time too, and all for what? You make me sick.
I scrunched my eyes closed but the image remained, projected onto my eyelids instead of the wall. Choking on my panic, I swept my hands in front of my face and the hallucination responded, exploding into light and drifting in fragments around the cell. It wasn’t long before it started coalescing again, this time forming a short, birdlike figure I knew immediately was my gran. The wraith seemed to struggle to take shape this time, the face twisting to form a nightmare parody of itself that grinned grotesquely at me in a way my mom’s mom never would have done.
To think of everything your parents did for you, that we all did for you, and how did you pay us back? By breaking our hearts. How could you do that to your own mother?
I wanted to argue, wanted to plead my innocence. But I was as guilty as they came, and those crimes I never would have dreamed of committing on the outside—assault, arson, even murder when I’d sent that kid Ashley falling to his death—Furnace had brought out of me all too easily. There could be no doubt about it, I was evil, rotten to the core.
My gran’s spectral form seemed to nod at my confession, then broke apart by itself. It wasn’t long before it swept into focus again, and I turned my back on it, unable to bear any more tirades from the people who had once loved me. But there was no stopping it—how could I hide when the only things that existed to me were my thoughts and the abyss?
I counted ten people in the procession that drifted through my cell, all with variants of the same message. The last three were my mom, my dad, and Toby, my friend from school—my dead friend from school—who materialized together and spoke as one. What they said seemed to carve out a little of my soul, and even though I forced myself to forget their words as soon as they had faded I could never get rid of the way they made me feel.
<
br /> I gritted my teeth, clenched my fists so tight I could feel the sting of nail against palm. It felt like I’d been in the hole for weeks already, tortured by the ghosts of my past for hours on end. But for all I knew it could have taken place in one of those gaping seconds, one single tick of a clock stretched to eternity by the horrors it contained.
Because time had no meaning, reality had no meaning, sanity had no meaning. And when everything else has been taken away, you have no meaning. You simply don’t exist.
* * *
I DIDN’T THINK I was going to survive that first second, first hour, first day. But there must have been a part of my mind that wasn’t convinced I was wicked. Somewhere deep inside me, past all the chaos, all the anger, the kid I’d once been still remained, and he wasn’t going to let me be consumed by my own nightmares.
Another figure began to form from the spots of white light in my cell, right by my side. I shied away from it, unable to bear another attack, but instead of hounding me with screams and accusations this one seemed to laugh—a gentle chuckle that was so alien to me that at first I couldn’t even work out what it was.
Would you look at the state of yourself, the voice said, and I recognized it straightaway. Snapping my head around I saw Donovan crouched beside me, his dark skin now glowing like some corny Christmas angel. Light seemed to spill from his eyes, pushing back the walls of the cell and the heavy curtain that had dropped over my thoughts. It’s a good thing there ain’t no windows in here, you look like a dog’s ass.
I laughed, another unrecognizable sound. But it soon died away.
“I’m a bad person, D,” I said, my voice slurred beyond recognition but clear enough in my head. “I deserve to be here.”
Donovan reached up a hand and slapped me around the back of the head. I couldn’t feel it, but the touch seemed to chase even more of the cold shadows from me, leaving a welcome warmth in their place.
If I hear any more of that crap, then I’ll give you something to cry about, he said, the grin never leaving his face. That’s exactly how they want you to feel, those are the same thoughts that went through my head when I was down here. This room, this pit, it’s designed to suck every last bit of strength from you, every last scrap of fight. Why do you think they’ve been using solitary confinement in prisons for thousands of years?
“To punish the guilty,” the dark part of me replied.
To make us weak, Alex. To rip out our spirit, to crush our self-worth, to make us feel like we don’t have a right to escape. Because if they do that, then they can pretty much guarantee we’ll never want to get out. If they break us, if they break you, they could keep you a prisoner in a place with no walls. You’re a good kid, Alex.
“And you’re a figment of my imagination,” I mumbled, but I was smiling.
I know, I know, he replied. But call me one again and I’ll kick your ass. I might not be real, but if I was I’d be saying the exact same things. Don’t give in, Alex, don’t let them win. You beat them once and you can do it again. Don’t let this place break you. Keep your mind busy, keep yourself occupied, find things to do. If you’re doing things, then you still exist, right?
I nodded to his fading form, watched his body dissolve into the darkness like sugar in tea. He was gone, but he’d taken my fear and futility with him. I knew it had been just another hallucination, but it had brought me back from the edge. The voice in my head masquerading as Donovan meant that there was a part of me which understood I didn’t deserve to be here, which still had faith in me, which knew I had escaped once and could do it again.
And it was right, if I kept myself busy then it meant I was still here, still flesh and blood and bone. It would keep the madness at bay.
I started immediately, scrabbling up and using my arms to map out the exact dimensions of my cell. I could just about stretch them from wall to wall, which brought a little relief—it meant that I could probably lie diagonally with a little room to spare.
The stone beneath my fingertips was solid, cut as smooth as the walls in the corridors outside. Even to the touch it conveyed a sense of its strength. It would take dynamite to make a scratch on it, and that’s probably all it would do.
But there was condensation there, a clammy sheen that felt like sweaty skin. I vaguely remembered Donovan saying he’d survived by licking the moisture from the walls, but I wasn’t quite thirsty enough yet—I still felt like I’d swallowed half the river when we’d jumped.
Next I reached up to the top of the cell, which was less than an arm’s length above my head. Feeling the ceiling so low threatened to bring back the claustrophobia. But I kept it at bay by trying to work out the exact size of the hatch, the method by which it had been wedged into the rock. It must have been just wide enough for a body and sealed tight, not even the slightest hint of light creeping through the joint between metal and stone.
I remembered how heavy the hatch had been when I’d lifted it—maybe minutes, maybe hours—earlier, and then I’d been pumped with adrenaline. I didn’t think I’d have the strength to push it all the way open from below, even if it wasn’t locked.
I paused, taking a good few breaths of stale, warm air, then I got down on my knees and started to investigate the floor. Like the walls, it was made of rock, polished flat. It was an unbroken slab, save for one corner where I could feel something metallic set into the surface. Running my hands gently over it, I discovered it was a small grille. I stuck a finger inside, feeling nothing where the floor should be and realizing that this was both my toilet and my air supply. I was grateful—a month doing my business on a watertight stone floor would lead to death by drowning in the most horrible way possible.
I hawked up a ball of spit and launched it through the opening, hearing a distant plop. Then I tried to pull on the grille, but it didn’t do much more than rattle. It was far too small a gap to escape through—not that I’d really want to, knowing what was down there—but it might have another use. A weapon, perhaps. I pictured myself trying to bludgeon a blacksuit with a foot-wide iron grille and laughed. It was ridiculous, but it was wonderful—my mind was working, too busy to give the darkness and the loneliness and the madness any room.
I placed my hand on the wall that separated my cell from Zee’s, hoped he was doing the same thing, trying to keep busy, trying to stay real. Then I leaned back, ran a hand through my hair, and tried to come up with a plan.
SCREAMS
PANTING LIKE AN OVERWEIGHT DOG, and sweating more than a sumo wrestler in a sauna, I pulled my aching fingers free of the grille and collapsed. It was still in place, but I’d been wrenching it and pushing it and stamping on it and twisting it for what seemed like forever, and its resolve was starting to wane. Another few attempts, maybe, and it would be loose.
I still hadn’t thought of a way to use it, but my mind had been busy with other things. I’d sat for what must have been hours going over everything in my head, trying to make sense of what was happening here. Back in Furnace’s general population, with all the other inmates, we’d been so focused on getting the hell out that I guess we didn’t let ourselves think about the other stuff—the wheezers, the monsters brought back, all bulging muscles and bloody-skinned, then somehow turned into blacksuits. Yeah, those thoughts had been in our heads permanently, but they’d been pushed to the side so we could give everything we had to the break.
Down here there was nothing else to do but think. I started with the wheezers and their gas masks, stitched into faces that looked so old, so decayed, that they could have belonged to corpses—black eyes like coal set into dark pits rubbed red raw. Everything about them was wrong, the way they looked, the way they screamed to each other, the way they moved—all staggered jerks like marionettes being operated by a child.
And the way they injected their prey with darkness.
They had to be human—what else could they be?—but twisted and broken beyond repair. By age perhaps? Or were they demons spawned here in the pits of hell? They ce
rtainly looked the part, and why else would they take people kicking and screaming down to the bottom of the world, to the pits beneath the prison? It would explain why those victims returned, morphed into freaks with grotesque bodies and appetites to match. What could do that to a human other than a creature of darkness, a demon? It would explain the warden too, because if anyone reminded me of the devil it was him.
But even as I thought it, it sounded crazy. Besides, the thought of the devil and his slaves didn’t fill me with one iota of the terror I felt when I thought of the most probable alternative.
Science.
Shuddering involuntarily I crouched forward again and hooked my fingers through the grille. It rocked back in its socket as if afraid that this time I might pull it free, but after a couple of tugs that almost ripped my arms from my shoulders it remained stubbornly locked in place. I’d heard the grating of mortar on rock, though, and I knew it was weakening.
I wiped the sweat from my brow, trying not to think what my hands must look like after groping the toilet for hours on end. Banging the back of my head gently against the wall, I attempted to analyze the thoughts racing through my skull.
Science. Bad science. It made sense. I mean, what had the warden called us? Specimens. Lab rats for some sick and twisted project. Surely some genetic experiment could be responsible for turning Monty into a creature so muscular it had threatened to burst right out of its stitched skin, so furious that it had broken Kevin into a thousand pieces barely held together by his prison overalls.
But then turning Monty from a monster into a blacksuit?
I could feel the thoughts all tumbling together and shook my head to separate them. Turning to the wheezers again, I wondered if they too had been the result of some kind of gene therapy. We’d covered the basics of biology at school, learned that genes were the building blocks of every living thing, but other than that it was all completely over my head. Although I hadn’t been so devoted to my life of crime that I’d missed the stuff on the news about gene maps and all the neat tricks they’d done with mice—giving them diseases, making them be born with a human ear on their back or an extra kidney, even changing their sex.