The Dark
Neither of them could see a thing. There was hardly any room to move, and zero light. In spite of that, both could tell that they were tethered to the walls, possibly to each other? It didn’t matter. They were stuck there with no hope of escape.
It seemed whoever had done this to them was a sadist, at the least. Apart from being tied down, their bodies had so little freedom of motion that they typically remained with their hands fixed on their knees. Sometimes, the stillness sat on their muscles to the point of agony, and one of them would thrash his legs for a few seconds if only to try and appease his nerves. They were fed at irregular intervals; sometimes the meals came almost immediately after the other, sometimes they had to wait half a day before they got anything.
Mostly, though, what consumed them were the intense, vivid effects of their sensory deprivation: illusions, shadows, visions... sometimes they felt even like other peoples’ memories were treating their minds like a premium vacation getaway.
Both of them had long since given up hope of escape. Even if they could get out, either one of them knew he had no idea where he’d go, what he’d do, or if there was even a life still waiting for him on the other side. Besides, they were both naked, wet, and all but completely feeble from their stasis.
It seemed like whoever put them in this place wanted them to hate each other. Every subtle movement one of them made, the other one felt. One couldn’t even turn his head without rubbing against the other. Their worst hells were an inch away from them every second of the day.
“I hate you,” one of them said.
“I hate you more,” the other shot back.
That was the most either said for a while, and then one asked, because the sound was better than the silence, “How long have you been here?”
“I don’t know,” the other replied. “I don’t think more than a few months, counting the meals.” He was completely guessing; even if the people keeping them there were benevolent enough to feed them three times a day, every day, he’d lost count long ago of the number of times he’d gotten food.
“It feels like I’ve been here forever... what’s your name?” The first asked.
“Why the hell do you care?”
“I was just wondering if you had one, alright? At least something to attach humanity to either of us.”
The one hadn’t thought of that. He honestly didn’t know what his name might have been, but figured he should give his cellmate an answer. “Gene.”
“Gene, huh? Call me Ted.”
“Great. So glad I finally know how to address the most annoying thing ever. Are we best friends yet?”
“Alright, fine. If you don’t want to talk, we can just go back to the hallucinations,” Ted said. Gene was completely silent for a couple of seconds, then groaned in exasperation. “Fine, what do you want to know?”
Ted rolled the thoughts in his brain around until a question fell out, “Do you remember anything before this?”
“I don’t know,” Gene replied. “I guess, maybe. But it’s hard to say.”
“I remember things, but I don’t know if they really happened. There’s a lot of guns, bombs, people dying. Murders, monsters bigger than trees, and a lot of red – I don’t want to see any more of that,” Ted confessed.
“I haven’t had anything like that,” Gene said. “I can understand why you’d want to talk... did you do any of that?”
“I don’t know. I really hope not.” Ted had wondered before if the blood spilled in any of the things he’d seen was on his hands. Maybe it was why he was here now.
“I see people, but there’s usually not red. People watching men run a ball up and down a field, a woman vomiting once or twice, men hugging, men kissing, men —” Gene trailed off, then slowly said, “There’s never men kissing women.”
Ted considered that. “I wonder what that means.”
Gene was going to say something more, but with as much warning as a car gives before it tears out of a back alley, Ted was ejected from the room by some force neither of them had known was even there. The tactile sensation of the experience only worked to heighten the point that he was now alone.
"Ted?" Gene paused, “Ted?” Ted wasn’t getting back to him. Gene waited, but nothing more happened.
For about a minute, the feeling manifested itself as solitude. But then the empty space began to itch at him. The air felt arid. The thoughts in his head churned thick and slow like curdling milk. Where did Ted go? Who took him away? Is he dead now? Is he worse than dead? But most importantly, what was going to happen to Gene now?
Something like a hand wrapped around Gene’s feet, and slowly Gene felt it creep up his body like strangling vines. And then Gene felt himself being pressed down to meet the pit.
“What’s happening? Ted? What’s going on?” Gene’s pulse elevated as the chasm slowly opened to swallow him. There was nowhere he could turn to get out, the walls began pressing in on him, as if claustrophobia were a malevolent spirit seeking revenge on him.
He sank further and further, and the walls continued to collapse around him. Thoughts barreled through his head faster than he could sort them out. His heart beat in tempo with the thoughts and the frenzy within him made him want to fight, but the only thing still outside of the maw was his head. He wanted to scream but he couldn’t.
And after what felt like an eternity of this panicked state his entire body was constricted by the walls of the tunnel. The pressure on and in his body was unbearable. There was nothing he could do, and the images he’d seen all before were bullets firing through his brain. The people, the places, the events; surely they were his sins, surely this was his judgment. He was being consumed by the transgressions he’d brought upon the others in his life. Hell had literally begun to swallow him.
His feet were engulfed by a devastating cold. In the matter of an instant, it felt like they were being assaulted with frostbite, and the cold, like the pit, crept up Gene’s body, one extreme to another.
All thought had began expelling itself from Gene’s mind. The only things he could concentrate on were the sensations, torturing him. One by one, each of the memories he’d been given passed back through his mind and then flew away from his conscious mind on angel’s wings. Then his memory of the place itself, the walls, and the one he’d shared the horror with; each one suddenly eradicated by the trauma of the motion.
Surrounded by a cold he’d never known before, Gene could do only one thing: cry. A hand he couldn’t see cut him free of his tether; the world was a shroud of white light, a colossus stood over Gene as he continued his wails.
A pair of giant hands wrapped a blanket around Gene, and then rocked him for a moment until the fear, pain, and cold were as faraway as the dark room.
Somewhere, a voice said, as Gene quieted, “Congratulations, ma’am,” and Gene slept.
