Through Finny's Eyes

Cold. My entire body is freezing cold. The impenetrable darkness is pressing in on me from all sides, slowly squeezing the life out of me with its icy tendrils. Soon it will have completely suffocated me. If I ever see the sun again I think I might be blinded by its beauty. What a foolish thing to think, Finny, you'll never see the light of day again. I have become an animal who lives in a tomb of shadow, wrapped in a shroud of frost beneath a wreath of blood. Everyday I'm dragged out of the cell that has become my home, yesterday's barely-formed scabs ripped off my heels as my bare feet are scraped along the floor of corridor after identical corridor.

I can tell when we near the room where I'm tortured daily for a reason I cannot and will not understand because I can hear the screams echoing around me even if my eyes can barely discern anything in the upside down dull dizziness of such a cold and dark world. Every day I will myself to be strong and brave as my parents taught me. Every day I fail. I struggle as they strap me to the wooden table, stained with blood and marked with needles. I try everything to make them stop; I make my whole body go rigid, I kick and punch them, I cry. Every day I scream for mercy until my throat tears.

"It's for your own good, young man," I'm always told by the one who tightens the straps to stop me hitting them or falling off the table during uncontrollable convulsions of agony, "One day this treatment will make you the strongest person in all the world!"

"Now quit wriggling you little bastard." Says the one who plunges the five inch needle into my flesh.

I scream.

The daily torture seems to last forever but in reality it can't go on for more than about three hours. From the moment the tip of the needle breaks the skin on either one of my shins, each so pitted and pockmarked already with needles that I'm surprised any unscarred sections can be found to scar the pain is unimaginable. My entire body trembles as the agonising fire courses through my veins and waves of nausea sweep over me. Sometimes I vomit but I never cease to scream and the treatment never stops .As the needle slowly sinks further into my body I feel the warm blood splatter my wildly thrashing legs. The agony makes my heart thud its racing march of terror so deafeningly in my ears that I can no longer hear my own cries for it all to be over.

Gradually my entire body is consumed by the pain until it's all I know. I must have been born into this unendurable inferno that makes me feel as if every pore of my body from the follicles of my hair right through to my toes is having an overlarge white hot poker forced into it and twisted. Red ebbs at the edges of my vision before flooding my eye sockets and usually I pass out into the welcoming abyss just after the end of the needle grazes my shinbone and what feels like an electric shook run through me, often causing my straining muscles to pop open the clamps binding me and my chattering teeth to fill my mouth with blood.

Every day I wake in the darkness of my cell, my legs still immovable and stuck to the floor with blood. Semi-congealed blood normally coats the bottom half of my face from the numerous nosebleeds the build-up of pressure and excruciating pain cause or the times my pain has been so acute that my body has bucked and spasemed out of control in protest and I've bitten my tongue or used to be a window here when I first arrived. There was light; and I could see the birds. Now, however, that window had been covered by black dust. All I do is lie on the floor and wait for the next day's treatment. There is nothing but the cold and the darkness and the pain. I am so empty and alone. I'm fifteen years old and this has been my life since I was ten. No birthdays, no Christmases, no school; only the cycle of pain and darkness. I would have given up long ago if it were not for the birds singing, the promise of an outside world only just out of reach.

One day I am strapped down to the table, already screaming in anticipation of the agony to come. As normal the needle plunges into my flesh only this time I do not feel the flames of pain. I'm so shocked I stop screaming. Instead I feel an overwhelming determination and exaltation. I easily break my bonds and break and smash my torturers into the walls. Dimly I realise this must have been what five years of excruciation were for. I am the strongest person in the world.

I don't care. I just want to get outside. No, I need to get outside. A desperation has filled my body, I feel I'll die if I don't finally see the sun again. I run, hardly feeling the rivulets of blood streaming down my legs, knocking out anyone who stands in my way. The corridors flash past me, each one seeming to glow with a brighter light than I can ever remember seeing. The raging need to escape and to breathe fresh air is so huge I don't even see who I'm flinging to the walls.

I'm forced to stop when the next person I run into doesn't fly out of my way. I look up and see a tall man in an immaculate black suit and tailcoat, his symmetrical face framed roughly by swooping layers of black hair. His eyes are a funny shade of brown, almost red and I can tell from looking into them that they are the eyes of an outcast, someone misunderstood, an unloved person. Someone like me.

"Aren't you hurt from me running into you?" I ask.

He sidesteps the question and offers me a job. He says he needs someone with my strength to protect his master, that he'll pay me good wages, give me food and lodgings and hardly even have to do any work. He's strange and I know one should never talk to strangers but he's speaking to be in a deep, soft, noble voice and his eyes are holding me captive. I instinctively know I'm the lesser being in this situation yet this person is treating me almost like an equal. I can't remember the last time that has happened. I open my mouth and for the first time in a few years something other than a scream comes out.

"I don't want any of that." I tell him, "I just want to go outside."

Sebastian, his name is, he's a butler and he leads me outside into a field. Everything is so bright and colourful. I'd forgotten anything this beautiful existed. The flowers are so delicate, the trees are so mighty; the sky is so blue and the sun is so bright it hurts my eyes. I stare into the cloudless bowl above me and see the birds wheeling and singing above me. I find myself on my knees in the sweet dewy grass, crying. I've never been so happy. I can't believe I'm free. For I don't know how long I sob uncontrollably into the grass, smelling it and accidently sifting the soil to the side.

Suddenly I feel myself lifted off the ground into warm and welcoming arms. This only causes me to cry more because nobody has ever touched me in a way not to restrain or inflict pain for the past five years. I press my face into the warm bulk of Sebastian's chest.

"You could be the gardener if you like?" Sebastian suggests.

I have no words, only tears of gratitude as Sebastian seems to stride with me across the sky in his arms towards the sun as he carries me off to my new home.