An Imago of Rust and Crimson

Chapter 1.02

The smell wasn't the worst bit, though it was horrible beyond belief. The darkness wasn't the worst bit, though there was so little light I could barely see what filled my cramped prison. The pain wasn't the worst bit, though rusty nails lined the inside of the locker like some kind of low-budget medieval torture device. The worst bit wasn't even the voices, which whispered just outside of comprehension and only got louder each time I screamed.

The worst bit was what I could feel against my skin.

I can't begin to describe it. I could talk about the damp. The putrid sensation of sticking my hands in filth so that I didn't fall onto nail-lined walls. I could talk about my blood. It crept down my skin whenever I gashed myself, cooling and congealing at it went. I could even talk about the wriggling. The mess under my hands, fermented tampons and worse, seemed to crawl between my fingers, creeping everywhere it could.

But that wouldn't encompass the whole. It wouldn't cover the burning muscles that set my skin on fire, and couldn't stop me from slipping into the foul walls. It wouldn't cover how the smell and the feel combined, so I could taste the blood and rust and piss and shit and menses in every breath, leaving me lightheaded and even weaker. It wouldn't cover how my mind ran in circles, knowing it would get worse if I didn't move and worse if I did, so shuffling was as agonizing as stillness.

Sensory deprivation is meant to be a kind of torture. Somehow, they'd managed to find something worse than that. There was just enough light for me to see the things inside, if I strained. The screaming whispers were horrible to listen to, but I couldn't help but try to understand them. All I could do was concentrate on smell and pain and touch, amplifying the worst things I could think of.

I'd like to claim I found my centre. Discovered some kind of inner resolve that let me withstand it. Spent my time thinking about how to escape the box, how to get revenge. Managed to stay cool, calm and collected, knowing that I'd be found when classes were over.

Of course I didn't. First I screamed to be rescued, and then I just screamed. I cried. I whimpered. I swore and I prayed and I cursed. I begged anyone – anything, everything – for help. I yelled, to drown out the whispers as much as to attract attention.

"Help me," I screamed. "Help! Anyone! Please! No, help, help!"

The distorted echoes washed back to me, deafening whispers made up of my own voice, "No help."

"No anyone."

"No one."

Nothing came. I was alone – utterly alone. The monster wearing my tormentor's faces had gone, and the school was empty. The whispering, moaning, screaming voices were mine. All of them. My own cries, reflected and refracted and distorted, endlessly. Hours? Minutes? Seconds? Days? The only sense of time I had was my own heartbeat, and that beat like an insect's wings, slicing seconds finely into an eternity.

As far as I was concerned, every human being might have been scoured from the face of the earth. Huge gulfs of time and space and the filthy metal walls of my prison separated me from anything else.

I don't know how long I'd been in there until I started seeing things. Not long, I think, but I couldn't be sure. That's what happens to people put in sensory deprivation. The mind starts seeing patterns in the dark. They're not real.

That's what I whispered to myself, at least.

… Emma sneered down at me. I was sprawled down on the floor, against clean tiles, the betrayal cutting through my mind. She was my friend! Why was she acting like this? Contempt and amusement and guilt orbited her, each wearing her face. There was no guilt in the intangible hordes which surrounded the other two. As I watched, Guilt-Emma weakened and sickened before my eyes, Contempt eating her alive.

… my father yelled at my mother. This was the first time they'd argued like this, and the heat of his anger was almost palpable. I could feel it, even through the walls. He screamed at her and she screamed back and everything went wobbly for me. Their words danced around me, burning like magnesium candles. The door slammed shut, bouncing on its hinges, and she screamed one last remark back at him. One final remark because…

… my mother clutched the wheel of her car with whitened knuckles. Her eyes were reddened. There were still tears in the corner of her eyes. She reached for her pockets, pulling out her phone.

"No!" I screamed, and even from my unseen vantage I could hear the mocking echoes from inside the jail-locker. "No! Please, Mum, no! Don't! Put it… no!"

She didn't listen. Perhaps she couldn't. It had already happened, I couldn't do a thing to change it. I was helpless, useless, trapped as a watcher just as much as I was trapped in a stinking locker. She had the power to do it, and I had none to change her decision.

I saw every last moment. I saw her last moments. I'd wondered what had happened, how it had gone down. Just the morbid imaginings of a child who'd lost her mother. It wasn't the same. There had been more blood in my imaginings. A certain edge of the cartoonish. It had been a closed casket funeral, so I hadn't ever seen the body. I knew that meant it had to have been bad. Watching in person, it was almost pathetically simple.

When the hallucinations ended, I wanted them to start again. Wasn't that horrible? I would prefer to endure the betrayal of my best friend, the shouting of my parents, and the death of my mother than I would to be myself. I would rather experience the worst bits of my life up until now, over and over again, than live one more second in my own body.

They didn't just show me those three scenes. They showed me everything. My entire life - or so it felt - reflected in a harsh mirror. Every least cruelty against me and every thoughtless deed I'd done. In its own way, it was almost an offer. This is the world outside this box, it said, and this is what you've made of it. Are you proud?

I screamed, begged and protested when I was seeing the worst days of my life paraded before me. I did just the same when I was trapped in the nightmare-world of my existence.

No help. No end. Nothing.

"What do you want?" I gasped hoarsely.

"What do you want?" echoed back my own voice.

And all the time, the filth on the floor of the locker-jail and on the walls crawled against my skin, as if it was alive. Creeping and squirming against my bare flesh, reminding me of where I was and what had happened to me. The bloody things hanging from the nails in the locker twitched. Their movement was only visible out of the corners of my eye.

Maybe I was already dead. I considered it, accepted it, rejected it several times. If I was dead, I had no idea what I'd done to deserve this. I wanted to die, though, if it would make this stop.

The voices laughed at me. They seemed to be encouraging it.

I raised my hands, staring at my palms. In the dim light, I could see the source of the crawling. Insects, the colour of old dried blood, camouflaged against the filth. Looking closer, they weren't worms. They were caterpillars. Specifically, they were the kind of caterpillar I'd seen on some documentary on the television, from – yes, it had been Hawaii, I thought hysterically.

The only place in the world that had carnivorous caterpillars.

They were under my skin. Burrowing in, another set of stabbing pains in my world of agony. I could see them, bloody red bulges of bruised and torn flesh which worked their way through my arms. Their nibbling sounded, of all things, like woodworm. A thin scratching noise, like fingernails against a wall, only coming from inside my body.

Maybe this was another hallucination. Yes, that was appealing. There was no reason there would be carnivorous caterpillars in my locker. You didn't get them around here. I was just having some kind of traumatic breakdown from, you know, being locked in a filth-filled locker. I could just ignore them, and the pain. If this was another hallucination, I could welcome the other ones, which at least didn't hurt in the same way. I could let Emma betray me, let my parents argue, let my mother die. It wouldn't hurt me the same way. I could just sit back and let it happen.

I could already see the lights flashing before my eyes, the visions waiting for me to sink into them. A surcease from pain of the flesh. The numbness of acceptance was just within reach.

Something inside me rebelled. Maybe it was pig-headedness, a refusal to accept that laying back and accepting it would make anything better. It hadn't before. I couldn't just let things happen to me. Maybe it was a simple survival instinct. I didn't want to be eaten alive by bugs. I'd take pain over death. I screamed all the louder. I didn't care if the demon-monster wearing the faces of my tormenters came back. I wanted to live.

Knife white-pain stabbed through one arm, and I crumpled into one of the walls. The squirming and crawling around the joint told me something had just started eating into my tendon. Once again, the visions welled up, offering a painfully nostalgic relief from pain.

I laughed out loud, a hint of madness in my voice. The bugs didn't want me to stay here? That meant I had something to fight against. Something in all this place which wasn't me. And that meant I had to beat them. I had to get the bugs out of me, and then I'd have won.

A pain in my leg, and I sagged, falling. One of the nails in the walls went clean through my flesh, and I screamed, jerking away. I squinted through the dim light at the dark patch of blood oozing through my clothes, and the caterpillar impaled on the metal barb, skewered like a sausage on a cocktail stick.

So that was it, then? Stab myself with rusty nails to kill the worms inside me and pull them out? It didn't make sense that it had come out so cleanly, but with a sudden cold realisation I knew it would work.

It was the hardest thing I had ever done. After the first one, I was crying. After the third, I had no voice left to scream. I couldn't find them all, so I resorted to scrabbling at my skin with my fingernails, trying to squish them. It was insane, but I had to do it, had to keep going. If I stopped doing it, I'd never start again, and then they'd eat me alive.

When it was done, I was shaking like a leaf, gasping and crying. A mess of locker-filth and my own blood, tears coated my face. I had bitten my tongue, and I welcomed it, because the iron taste of fresh blood blotted out the stench of everything else around me. I leaned against the locker, marking it with two bloody handprints, exhausted. All around me, dead caterpillars hung impaled on nails, not one left wriggling inside me.

The pain was everywhere. I could feel blood tricking - and more than trickling - from each of my wounds, and I think I fainted.

But I must have regained consciousness, because the door gave way, and I staggered forward, out. Light washed over my eyes, leaving me screaming at the brightness. And following me, from out of my stinking jail, tore ten thousand bloody butterflies, their wings marked with the whorls of my fingerprints. I collapsed onto the cold tiles, welcome blackness taking me.