Prisoner

'An Amnesia Fan Fiction'

C.G. Wicks

Where am I? It's so dark… and so cold. Feels like I'm lying on stone. Is there anyone else here? Need to get up… Need to stand… My name is… is… I don't remember…

The man awoke on the floor in a cold, dark prison cell. Stone on all sides, a wooden bed in the far-left corner. The near pitch-black darkness hid everything from him and for a moment he believed himself to be blind. His eyes began to adjust, and he could just make out a faint, flickering glow from behind the small, barred window of a heavy, wooden door in front of him. A torch burned dimly on the other side, jutting out from the stone corridor, offering the prisoners only the dimmest view of their surroundings. Although, as far as he knew, he was the only prisoner there.

He tried to sit up, to stand, to get a feel for his surroundings, and found that his body had been beaten, broken, and trying to move caused him immense pain. He had no memory of anything, and that caused him fear and confusion. What was this place? Where was this place? Why was he here? Questions swirled in his head in a fog as he stumbled, fingers feeling the bed, and climbed himself up onto it. He became aware of a strong taste of rose in his mouth.

My name… my name…

The pain throughout his body became sharper, more in focus as the fog in his head cleared. He laid still on the bed and stared at the dull light beyond the door to his right, listening for any sound. Occasionally, he thought he could hear someone, somewhere nearby in a cell like his, weeping hopelessly. Once or twice, he called out to the man—asked him his name—but the strain of yelling hurt his body, hurt his chest, and the man did not reply. So, he returned to his own thoughts. Why was he in pain? What had been happening to him here?

It was too dark to inspect himself, to look at his injuries. Eventually he became curious about his cell and felt able enough to stand. To walk. Slowly, he stood from the creaking bed with a groan and stepped towards the door to look through the window. Nothing but a stone wall stretching out both ways, illuminated in a yellow glow by the torch which sat just out of view in its stand. He turned back around and faced his cell. Eyes still adjusted to the torchlight; the room was pitch-black. He reached out and touched the wall and began to slowly walk along it, running his hand along the cold stone. His bare feet scuffed something light and hard on the floor and he bent down to pick it up, inspecting it in the light from the window. Bread. Stale, mouldy, half-eaten. Torn apart on one side, the man turned it around in his hands and smelled it. Sour. Old. He turned it over again and noticed small bite marks on it. Rats.

He looked at the door, scanned the edges for any large gaps of light, large enough for a rat to get through, or even a mouse. The door was well-built with no discernable gaps or imperfections. He got down on all fours, painfully, and began to feel along the bottom of the wall. Solid stone. No gaps. The only part of the cell that he hadn't inspected closely was the corner where the bed was. With considerable effort from his tired body, the man was able to pull the bed away from the corner, the legs grating loudly against the ground. Too loud in the overwhelming silence. It was as though he was disturbing a place of worship and contemplation. There was also the gnawing sense that he would be heard by someone. By something. It had been there since he first awoke, the dreaded sense that something was listening out in the dark, somewhere in the corridors, for any summoning disturbance. Was it paranoia? Intuition? Or a buried memory?

The man felt around where the bed had been and gasped when his hands brushed against a small pile of rocks, knocking them. Blindly, he felt over them one by one, cold and smooth, until his hand grasped something soft and rough. He knew immediately what it was. Held together with only thin, stretched skin and sinews, the rat had been dead for quite some time. He felt that it wasn't whole. Holding it in his hand, the man stood and walked towards the cell door. In the faint light from the window, he could see that it had been half eaten. Its underside was ripped open, its intestines gone. Only a hollowed out cavity remained, gaping at him like an obscene maw, teeth of rib cage edges. The man dropped it in disgust and tried not to focus on the creeping realisation that it was he who had eaten it. He thought of the bread that he had found. It no longer seemed so rotten.

Bending back down at the corner of the cell, the man felt along the wall until he found the hole that he had been looking for. It was big, but not big enough to fit through. Silently, he grabbed at the edges and pulled on the stones, feeling them move slightly within his fingers. Unable to see in the thick darkness, the man hoped that the wall would hold sturdy and began the slow, long task of widening the hole, bit by bit. He didn't know what was on the other side; he just had to trust that his former self knew what he was doing. Pulling at the stones felt familiar to him and each one he dislodged from the wall brought a sense of nearing escape, but also a dread at how long he had already been doing this for—finding the bread over and over, noticing the bite marks, looking for a gap that a rat could fit through, then beginning to dig. Over and over. How many times?

The man was tired and weak, and the task had taken its toll on him. He slid the bed back into the corner—lest he be checked on—covered the hole and the pile of stones, and laid down to rest. To sleep. As he had been widening the hole, the incessant dread that something looming in the darkness beyond the door was listening out for any disturbance had shaken his nerves too much. He had pressed his luck enough already. Now it was time to rest. To dream. To remember.

They had grabbed me from my house. A woman was screaming. It was night. I didn't see their faces. There were two of them. Two men. One of them sounded quite young, an apprentice, perhaps. They said I was a criminal as they dragged me away into the darkness. A woman was screaming. My wife… my wife.

He awoke in that same dark cell. Nothing had changed. Still dark. Still that faint light flickering from outside the door. His stomach ached. How long had it been since he had last eaten? How long had he spent in this cell? How long since he had been taken from his house? Slowly, he raised himself up from the hard bed and searched blindly across the ground for the half-eaten loaf of bread. His fingers found it and he got to work pulling a chunk off. It was difficult work, but finally a piece came off. It was solid in his mouth and had very little taste. He tried not to think of the mould that he had seen on it earlier. The piece sat in his stomach like a rock and it took all of his effort not to bring it back up. He had to take his mind off of it. Had to keep busy. The hole. Need to widen the hole. Before they come back for him.

It was almost wide enough to fit through, but the man was wary of getting stuck halfway. Slowly and carefully, he continued to pull on the stones, always fearful of it all coming down on him. Or worse, making too much noise. Need to stay quiet. Need to listen out.

It now felt big enough. This was it. He did not intend on hiding the hole and staying in his cell any longer. Hands first, he squeezed through the hole into the darkness, into the unknown on the other side. He kept his head down as he crawled through the stone and dirt, lifting it only when he emerged out the other side, his hands flailing into empty space until they hit something solid. An overturned chair. His heart leaped as his eyes were drawn towards a rectangle of light to the left side of him. The doorway was open, had been open for some time by some forgotten violence, the door laying in the middle of the room. The man scrambled up onto his feet and crept towards the open doorway, pressing against the wall hidden from the light.

He had to leave the cell, had to make his escape, but a fear gripped him at the thought of stepping out into the darkness of the unknown corridors. It didn't seem like a rational fear—there had been no signs of life aside from the weeping from a fellow prisoner—but something told him that it was dangerous to wander. A learned response, perhaps, from an event forgotten to him now. Seeing no other choice, he stepped out into the exposed corridor beyond the gaping doorway and stood, vulnerable, within the torchlight. Sheer darkness on either side of him, the man felt completely visible to any beings that may be stalking silently in the maze of corridors around him. He picked a direction—left—and crept silently down the corridor, cell doors identical to his own patterned along on either side of him, broken up by repeating sections of stone columns built into the walls. The darkness consumed him and he waited for his eyes to adjust.

Unable to see, it was difficult to walk straight. It was difficult to see any obstacles ahead of him. He brushed along the wall, feeling it change from stone to wood as he passed by the doors of each silent cell. Soon the walls on either side of him gave away and he found himself standing in the middle of a dark crossway, four corridors stretching out away from him, each weakly lit with dim torches partway down except for the one directly ahead of him. He looked at each one, trying to decide which to go down when he heard something from the corridor to his right. A deep, inhuman groan filled the silence along with the sound of dragging metal on the ground.

Quickly, the man crept forwards into the dark corridor ahead of him, keeping out of sight and staying in the shadows. Further into the darkness he stepped as the sound got nearer, and the man had to decide whether to keep going and risk making noise or to press up against the stone wall and hope that he was hidden enough already. His body was too broken to try to run—he would have to hide. Behind the protruding side of a wall column, the man tried to stay calm as the thing got nearer to the crossway that he had just been standing in. He got a glimpse of it as it came into view from behind the corner and he immediately turned away.

Heart pounding, the man tried to make sense of what he had seen. The sound of the dragging metal—the scraping blade along the floor—filled his head and the thing groaned loudly before suddenly falling silent. Unmoving, the thing seemed to pause where it stood and the man had the dreaded feeling that it was looking down the dark corridor towards him. Had it seen him? Did it know he was down there, somewhere? Suddenly, the metallic dragging sound resumed and the creature continued on its path down the corridor ahead of it. The sound faded into silence, but the man suspected that it was closer than it seemed. Listening for him. Knowing. He peeked out from behind the column and saw only the empty corridor that he had already come down. He stepped out and continued on into the dark.

The air was cold on his bare skin, causing him to shiver as he wandered down the corridors, and the thought of that creature being in the dark with him kept his senses on edge. Need to be quiet. Need to listen out. Tension gripped him each time he had to pass by a flickering torch which exposed him to anything that might wait in the surrounding darkness, but the darkness could be concealing much more than just himself. He felt hopelessly lost in a maze of stone corridors and cell doors and becoming certain that he was passing the same sections already. He couldn't stop and rest. He couldn't even find his own cell to hide away and rest in again. He was beaten and broken and didn't know why or how, but he was sure that whatever was being done to him was going to be his death. If they caught him, it would happen again. He needed to escape. This was his chance. He rounded a left corner and saw a heavy door at the end of the corridor. A dead end.

The two men were talking as they strolled down the corridors. One of them spoke with authority to the younger. He called him Daniel. They were heading up above, to the castle… Brennenburg Castle. They were going to take the ascending room back to the top. That's where I have to go.

He approached the door. Locked firm. Through the barred window, the man saw that the corridor continued on into darkness, but he was certain that this was the way to go. He just needed to figure out how to open the door. He looked at the cells on either side of him. They were vacant, doors open. It would be risky, but he had an idea. He would have to lure the guard.

He looked back down at the corridor behind him, dark and empty, seeming to stare back at him. There was no way he could open the door himself. This was the only way he could think to do it. He picked up a stone from the ground and held it tight within his hand. He would have to be quick. He raised the stone and struck the door with it, brushing it back and forth along the bars. The clanging rang out along the stone walls back into the black maze beyond, and he was sure that the guard had heard him. He then reached his arm through the bars and tossed the stone into the corridor. It bounced along the ground, hopefully sounding like quick footsteps.

The deep, throaty groan of the thing responded, angry and alert, followed by the unmistakeable sounds of its movement through the darkness. Towards him. The heavy, metallic dragging pierced the air as the man hid himself in one of the cells, hoping that it would be dark enough to conceal him. The creature moved down the corridor on the other side of the wall, a shambling chaos in the dark, until it was just beyond the open cell doorway. The man closed his eyes and steadied his breathing, trying to be as still as possible, and listened to its movements.

It was breathing hard, agitated, its heavy feet shuffling just by the locked door. It sounded like it was turning slowly on the spot, inspecting the area carefully. It wasn't fooled.

A sound suddenly reverberated through the walls. It came from above. An unnatural, immense roar vibrated through the walls, sending a stab of fear through the man's heart. As bad as the monstrous guard by the open cell doorway was, the thing up above was something else entirely. It was not a physical being, but an all-consuming, cosmic entity not of earth. The roar subsided and a new sound then came into focus. A quiet mechanical rattling coming from up further ahead. The ascending room. Someone was coming down.

The man heard the corridor door unlock with a click and swing open, the guard then lumbering through it. It was drawn by the sound and was going towards the source. The man waited, listening as the sound of its movements faded before daring to leave the cell. This was his chance. The door was open. The ascending room was coming down. It would be waiting for him. He just needed to get past the door and hide before it was locked again. Another immense roar came from above, closer this time, coming down the shaft. It shook the walls, dust falling from the ceiling and pebbles rattling where they lay. Then, a loud screeching sound came suddenly from up ahead followed by a splintering crash. The ascending room had fallen. It was now broken.

No! It was my only way out!

Silence filled the air once again and finally, the man dared to step out into the corridor. Ahead of him was only darkness. Ahead of him was his only chance at a way out. Slowly he crept, hand brushing along the cold stone wall. Quietly, he moved along the cold ground. He could hear something. Something quiet. A man was climbing out from the wreckage. He had survived. Just then, another sound rang out close to him. A long groan from in front of him. The guard stepped into view.

Its movements were slow at first but quickly sped up as the thing saw him, the groan now becoming a horrifying snarl. The man's heart beat in terror so quickly and so suddenly that he felt light-headed. The thing rushed towards him as he stood frozen to the spot and for the instant that he dared to look, the man saw it fully as it entered the glow of a flickering torch.

It was not human—at least, not anymore. Its face had been badly mangled, the only recognisable part of it being the mouth which dominated all other features. It was vertical, as though the skull had been forced sideways within the skin, tearing the mouth wider than was normal, exposing several teeth in places where they shouldn't have been. It appeared to be covered in metal plates that were possibly bolted directly to it and from its left arm it dragged behind it a long blade. It was madness to stare too long at it. It passed through the torchlight quickly and was already a black silhouette when the man turned away and ran down the dark corridor behind him. He ran blindly, his numb mind filled only with the sound of his pursuer's alerted groan.

Not fast enough.

The man's violent scream was cut short as the blade slid downward through his shoulder into his chest. With a hard pull, the blade ripped out through his back leaving his torso split down the centre, the gap widening under his own weight. His body had fallen just past the door and remained there as the guard locked it. The prison block fell into silence once again.

A faint glow from a lantern emerged moments later from the far end of the corridor, from the passage to the ascending room. It was the young man from the prisoner's broken memory. The young man who had accompanied the warden. The one who had helped snatch him away that night.

Daniel.