Chapter 15: Occurences in the Prison
He awoke on a bed that was about as comfortable as a slab of stone. There was a smell of dirt and urine wafting around. The radio was once more crackling. Clanking metallic noises were coming from somewhere above him.
Matt got up to a sitting position, clutched his shotgun, scanned his surroundings. No monsters. No Stu, either.
He got up from the bed, which only consisted of a filthy mattress and an old-looking bedstead. He was in a cramped, rectangular room with the bed, a hole in the ceiling (probably the one he had fallen through), a little yellowish toilet, a wash basin and a shelf filled with magazines. Someone had scratched the words "eAT me" into the wall. An iron bar-door separated the cell from the dark hallway outside.
Matt pulled the door aside – it made a horrible shrill noise - and stepped out. The hallway continued to his right, with more cells at the south wall. "What, is this a prison or something?" To his left, the hallway ended with a single grey door in the wall.
Stepping through that, he ended up in another corridor, going north-south, with water dripping from some broken pipes on the ceiling. Weepers roamed this area, the bandages around their heads drenched in tears, but still refusing to fall off.
There was a large map lying unfolded on a desk at the wall. Matt picked it up and hurried through the nearest door into a deserted cafeteria with pillars and all the tables overturned except one. The double doors in the north wall probably led into the cafeteria's kitchen. The various dishes of this place were written on a green board on the wall – stuff like grilled frankfurters, hot chili and banana pudding. Matt could barely make out the year and month at the top of the board: MARCH 1956. "No wonder this place looks so old."
He sat down on a bench at the only table still standing on its four legs and studied the map. It seemed he was in the southwestern part of a large one-storey building with a small basement. Two words in the map's upper corner confirmed his suspicion about the purpose of this place: Toluca Prison.
Throwing away the maps of Carpenter Library and Brookhaven Hospital to make room, he tucked the prison map into his pocket and explored the rest of the cafeteria.
There was a painting of this very room hanging on the wall. It was remarkably well painted, very detailed. It looked a lot like its real counterpart right now, but a corpse, dotted with gunshot wounds, was sitting hunched up at one of the tables, his bloody back turned to those contemplating the picture. In fact, the mysterious body sat on a bench in the lower right corner of the image, exactly where Matt had been sitting a few seconds ago.
As he continued looking at the solitary dead guy in the painting's version of the cafeteria, Matt felt there was something familiar about it. Those pants, that T-shirt, the brown hair …
"Shit!" He drew back when he realized it was himself sitting there on the canvas. By instinct, he turned around to look back, but there wasn't anyone else in the real cafeteria, neither living people nor his own corpse.
And when he looked back at the painting, the body in the lower corner was gone. It was just an ordinary old painting of this room.
Dumbfounded, he scratched his neck, remembering what Stu had said about this place. Had there ever really been a dead Matt Hardt look-a-like in that picture? Or was it an idea briefly pulled out of his mind and into reality by these so-called Gods?
Still confused, Matt entered the prison's kitchen. It was narrow and dusty, with a strong smell of old cheese and coffee. Empty soup cans lay scattered on the floor and counters.
Matt searched the drawers and fridges, but only found a meat tenderiser and a strange tablet. The tenderiser was a double-head steel hammer, about 12 inches long. It would surely come in handy as a weapon. He stuffed it into his backpack, then examined the tablet.
It was small, brownish and seemed to be made of metal. There was a childish drawing on one side: A pig, walking on two feet, with a sinister grin on its crude face. Two words were written below it: Lascivious Bastard.
Frowning, he placed the tablet in his backpack and left the kitchen. Back in the cafeteria, the painting had changed again. Sophie was now standing in the middle of the canvas, her eyes following the astonished Matt as he staggered through the room to the hallway outside.
---
Drops of water fell from pipes at the ceiling and landed on the floor of the northern cell hallway, making a quiet pattern of dripping sounds, almost like soothing music. In contrast, a few Cerberus were trapped in some of the cells – roaring and screaming, they jumped at the bars and their claws reached out for Matt's flesh as he walked past them. When he found a cell with no monsters inside, he tried to get in, but the doors were usually shut tight.
He did manage to get inside one of the cells at the middle of the hall, though. It was as cramped and cold as all the others. There was a diary lying on the bed – Charley Abramson was written on the front cover. Its pages had grown yellow and the handwriting was kind of odd, but Matt could still read it:
February 16
I got locked up in here yesterday. It's really cold. Can't sleep at night.
February 17
The guard said my execution will take place the day after tomorrow. But what have I done to deserve this? I'm so afraid.
February 18
The guard just came. He asked me how I want them to "snuff out" my "worthless life". What an idiot! But anyway, I chose hanging. Skewering's more painful, right?
I don't get it. I came home from work that day, and there were two … I don't know what to call them. Monsters … with huge red eyes, and claws, running around in my front yard. When they saw me, they tried to attack me! But luckily, there was a shovel lying on the lawn. I snatched it and beat those things up before they got me killed. I can still remember those unearthly laughing sounds they made …
February 19
There's a weird tablet under my bed. I just discovered it. But it's useless to me, so I'm just going to leave it alone. The guard's coming in a few minutes to take me to the big execution yard, where those guys with the white robes are going to hang me. I guess this is it. Time to say goodbye to the world. I feel so tired. Maybe it
The diary ended there for some reason. Matt dropped it on the bed and was about to leave the cell when he remembered something he had read in the last entry. There's a weird tablet under my bed …
He got down on the floor and looked under the bedstead. Sure enough, there was another metal tablet in there. He reached into the darkness, pulled out the tablet and stood. It was just like the "Lascivious" tablet, although this one was more yellowish and the drawing depicted an angry woman-like figure with bloodshot eyes. Avenger was written below her.
---
"So this is the execution yard, I guess," Matt muttered to himself. He had just entered an immense, dark hall. The ghostly sounds of invisible galloping horses regularly emanated from the darkness around him.
At the middle of the hall, he had discovered a relatively small scaffold with three ropes hanging from it. There was a painting on the front of the base. It depicted a hanged man and two people with weird triangle-shaped heads or helmets ("executioners?"). Ten words written above the picture: I give you blood to atone for the Three Sins. Three square depressions carved into the stone below the picture struck him as being the exact same size as the tablets from the kitchen and the cell.
Matt produced the "Avenger" from his backpack and placed it in the middle depression. It fitted perfectly! As did the "Lascivious Bastard", which he placed in the left depression.
But he still needed the third one. Thinking that the missing tablet had to be around here somewhere, he turned around and backtracked through the yard.
---
Back in the north-south hallway to the left of the huge yard on the map, he found some typewritten documents on a desk. They seemed to be about the prisoners. Some were here because of serious crimes such as rape and murder, others had merely been shoplifting. There was also something about the guy who wrote that diary:
Prisoner # C-218
Name: Charley Abramson
Installed in cell S2-6 on February 15
Crime: Was committed on February 14. Abramson murdered his two children, Diane and Mark Abramson, at around 17:00 P.M. According to witnesses, the victims were playing in the front yard of the Abramson house when mr. Abramson came home from work and, for no apparent reason, brutally murdered the victims with a shovel.
Execution date and time: February 19 11.00 A.M.
Matt shuddered. Had Charley really seen any monsters, or was that part of his diary just a delusion of his, an attempt to justify his crime?
When Matt noticed what was written below Charley's record, he simultaneously flinched and gasped:
Prisoner # C-219
Name: Matt Hardt
He couldn't read the rest; the documents were badly stained with black ink. "Maybe it's just a coincidence. Some prisoner around here's got your name … so what? Forget about it. Just a coincidence," an earnest voice in his mind said. Matt chose to heed the voice's advice, even though he knew, deep down, that his name on that paper was anything but a coincidence.
---
After wandering through a couple of dark hallways, Matt found himself in a small room, divided into two parts by a wooden panel and, above that, a filthy pane of glass. This was probably where the prisoners could go to talk with their visitors. There was an uncomfortable chair on either side and a circle of tiny horizontal chinks in the middle of the pane, so that you could hear what the person on the other side was saying.
Of course, there was no one here now, other than Matt. The third tablet was lying on the chair. It was reddish and just as small as the others. The drawing depicted a man's body with a crow's head and wings. The wings appeared to be reaching out for something. "Protector" was written below it.
Matt placed it in his backpack and was about to leave, his hand on the doorknob, when he heard a sound behind him - the sound of another door being opened.
"Hi."
He turned around to see Amanda standing on the other side of the pane. Apparently, she had just entered the visitor's half of the room from the hallway outside. She sat down on the chair opposite Matt and looked at him with a smiling and yet melancholic face, reminiscent of Tommy's just before he had jumped down the hole.
"Uh … hi. So … what happened to you back at the hospital? In room C4? It looked pretty weird," Matt blurted out, sitting down on the chair in his side of the room.
The girl wiped some filth off the pane so she could get a better view of Matt. "Where's Tommy?" she asked.
"I … I don't know. How did you get here, anyway?" Matt said.
The girl just sat there. "You should get back to the scaffold and insert that last tablet," she replied.
"What the … How do you know about that?"
"I know everything you know," Amanda replied. Matt could suddenly sense something was wrong with the girl. There was something ancient behind those innocent eyes. "I know every single thought and memory of yours, every idea and …"
"Amanda, stop that. You're scaring me."
"Oh really? Am I? Well … sorry about that." Her voice had an almost scornful tone.
"Err, it's okay," Matt said. "Anyway, do you know this woman named Sophie? She's …"
Amanda suddenly stood and started to walk away.
"Hey, where are you going? Don't leave me here!" Not getting any answers, Matt got up and pounded the pane. "Goddammit, are you deaf? Amanda, stop …"
The kid left the room and closed the door behind her.
"Ferfucksake, what is the fucking DEAL with that girl?" he said, kicking the chair in frustration.
Then he remembered the short hallway to the north of this room. If he went through that, he'd get to the visitor's part of the building, where Amanda had gone …
He bolted out to the hallway, turned left, ran up the hall to the next door in the left wall and grabbed the knob.
Locked.
"Dammit," he muttered and stepped back. Remembering that undying action-movie cliché, he tried kicking the door open. Of course it didn't work. He tried throwing his body against the door, too, but it only resulted in a sore right shoulder and even more verbal streams of blasphemy.
Amanda was gone, and there was nothing he could do about it. All alone in jail again …
---
Back in the yard, Matt inserted the "Protector" in the last depression.
Nothing happened.
He turned around to lean against the base of the scaffold and drove a hand through his hair. "Well, what had you expected? Some big miracle, just because you placed all three tablets here?" He let out a disappointed sigh.
Suddenly, flickering orange light seemed to be coming from somewhere just behind him. The light of flames? Matt didn't have time to turn around and take a look at the source before a gloved hand grabbed his t-shirt and yanked him up onto the scaffold.
It was Amamet. The light was coming from his fiery sword, which was now piercing his head through the back, sticking out where his upper lip would have been if he had an ordinary face. But this time, the angel didn't need or want to use the two-edged sword. He merely grabbed the right rope and slung it around Matt's neck.
The wooden trapdoor dropped and Matt fell down a few feet until the rope stopped him and the noose tightened, squeezing his throat. There wasn't a floor under the scaffold. His feet dangled above a black pit.
Amamet just stood there, staring at his victim. "Tceruser hturt," the childrens' voices chanted. Matt looked imploringly back at the being while everything began to go black.
Then, rather abruptly, Amamet once more pulled the sword out from his head and used it to cut the rope three feet above Matt's scalp. As he fell into darkness and unconsciousness again, he could barely hear the voices chant something like "Ereht saw on gnitcetorp …"
---
Matt awoke on a strange damp rock-floor. He scrambled to his feet to discover that he was in a dark cavern of sorts. "Jeez, if I fall through any more holes, I swear I'm going to end up at the Earth's core." Moths fluttered around amongst the stalactites at the ceiling. There were crude images drawn on the walls with some sort of faded paint – mostly stick figures hunting the animals of the prairie. "I did read somewhere that there were Native Americans in this part of the US. Maybe this is where they used to live? …"
The encounter with Amamet back in the execution yard seemed like a bad dream now, but the rope from the scaffold was still hanging loosely around his neck. There was only one way forwards. Too tired to bother getting rid of the rope ("well, it does have a certain sentimental value, doesn't it?"), he started wandering through the cave.
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A/N: Don't worry, Shortey, Matt's "twisted story" will be revealed. For the time being, I'm trying to kill you all with the suspense ... TINW, –E.P.O.