Next came the jeers, the tuneful taunts of “new fish” and “you better cry, they’re coming for you,” which punctuated the sobbing like sharp blasts from trumpets. As the callous taunts grew in volume so did the cries, swelling into desperate wails hurled out into the artificial night mixed with calls for help and pleas that were heartbreaking to hear. Somewhere, somebody was singing a song, his deep voice a bizarre bass line to the symphony, a mournful cello that kept the two halves of the orchestra in harmony.
I don’t know how long it went on, rising gradually to a crescendo of screams and whistles and sobs and songs that took hold of me, forcing a cry from my own traitorous throat. For what I knew would be the first time of many, I reluctantly added my voice to that symphony, crying and screaming until, exhausted, the music died and the prison once again found silence.
_____
I KNOW I don’t have to tell you that I didn’t get much sleep that night. I lay in my bed with my eyes open, projecting pictures onto the blank black canvas before me. Images of my home, of my family, of my friends, of television, of school, of birthday cakes and bike rides and trips to the country, of the sea, skimming stones, ice cream on the sand, soccer matches and kickarounds in the playground, building models with my dad, weeding the garden with my mom, of sunshine, of rain, of snowmen and Christmas and playing with new toys in the flickering light of the fire.
But each happy image was smothered by the darkness, vanishing without a trace into the dead night. Furnace was claiming my memories as well as my body, its hold on my life now absolute, unforgiving.
All the time I lay there I expected to hear the siren. I wasn’t sure what Donovan had been talking about when he said they came at night, but my imagination provided plenty of scenarios: the blacksuits appearing at the bars, ready to drag me into the abyss; the gas masks and their pockmark eyes, pointing at me like I was the next delicacy they were going to drop down their sick throats; the skinless dogs, wet to the touch as they pulled me to the warden and his leather face.
Whenever I did manage to drop off to sleep, these terrifying images followed me, making themselves at home in dreams they had no right to be in. In some I was being buried in a grave cut into the rock, the blacksuits covering me with rubble that pressed my body flat and choked my lungs. In others I actually sank into the floor, the stone like red quicksand that sucked me in until I was lost in shadow.
In the worst dreams, though, I was inside a glass prison, on the surface. Through the walls I could see my house, my family going about their life without me. I shouted to them and banged on the glass, but there was a gas mask right in front of me, preventing them from hearing. And I saw the blacksuits approaching my front door, the gas mask freaks closing in on the back of the house, the dogs leaping through the windows, spraying my mom and dad with glass. I tried to smash the walls of my prison but they wouldn’t even crack, the wheezer in front of me blocking my every move, and I could do nothing but watch as they met the same fate as Toby, their blood pooling over the kitchen floor as their killers retreated.
It was only at the end of the dream that I realized the figure before me, on the other side of the glass, wasn’t a gas mask at all. It was my reflection.
AFTER EACH DREAM I’d wake up screaming, sweat pouring from me and my heart in overdrive. Each time it took me ages to drift off again and each time the same thing happened—nightmares that tried to eat me alive.
By the time the lights came on, serenaded in by a short blast from the siren, I felt like I’d been lying on that bed for a thousand years, tormented by every demon possible. My sheet was drenched and my head was pounding, and when I swung my legs over the bunk, every limb was shaking like a leaf. It took only one glance through the bars at the prison beyond to send me stumble-running across the cell to the toilet, throwing up my guts into the dull metal pan. Nothing came out apart from a thin trail of bile, but it made me feel better—like I’d purged myself of some of the thoughts from the previous night.
The sound of my retching had woken Donovan, and by the time I’d pulled my head from the toilet he was sitting up in bed watching me with a sympathetic smile.
“Takes a while for the nightmares to leave,” he said. “But they do. Trust me—that toilet and me were best friends for the first few days I was here.”
I laughed, despite myself. Wiping my mouth with my sleeve, I realized that puking wasn’t the only thing I needed the toilet for. I glanced at Donovan sheepishly.
“Um, do you mind . . . ?”
He raised an eyebrow, then cottoned on to what I meant, his head disappearing as he lay back down.
“Sorry, Alex,” he said as I went about my business. “That’s the other thing you never really get used to. Pooping in public.”
“Well, it would be a lot easier to relax if you’d keep quiet for a second,” I scolded. The bed creaked as he laughed, but fortunately he didn’t say another word until he heard the flush.
“My turn,” he said, jumping from the bunk.
“All yours.”
Doing my best to ignore the noises behind me, I stared through the bars at the cells directly opposite. Inmates were climbing from their bunks, all pasty faces and crumpled uniforms. Judging by some of their expressions, I wasn’t the only one who’d had nightmares.
My eyes fell on one cell, on the next level below. It was pretty far away, and sat at a strange angle, but I thought I could make out Montgomery curled up on the stone next to the bars. I saw a pair of legs on the upper bunk, which no doubt belonged to chief Skull Kevin. From the looks of things, the bottom bunk was stripped bare. I wondered if poor Montgomery had spent the whole night on the floor.
“So, you ready for some hard labor?” asked Donovan, flushing the toilet. He had an apologetic look on his face and was wafting the air with both hands. “That mush plays havoc downstairs, you know?”
“You’re not kidding,” I replied, holding my nose and wishing—not for the last time during my stay in Furnace—that we had separate bathrooms. “Anyway, what do you mean, ‘hard labor’?”
He grinned as he pulled on his shoes, then offered the same infuriating reply I’d already heard so many times.
“You’ll find out soon enough.”
HARD LABOR
TEN MINUTES OR SO after the lights had come back on the siren cut through my head a second time and the cell doors rattled open. With a series of whoops and cheers the inmates on every level crashed along the platforms and down the stairs, filling the prison with the sound of thunder.
“When you’re locked up in here for life, you learn to welcome the little freedoms,” explained Donovan as we made our way from our cell. His face was once again a mask of defiance, challenging anyone to mess with him, but his tone was light enough. “Getting out of our cells every morning feels a little bit like we’re breaking free, if you know what I mean.”
I didn’t. Not then. But I soon came to understand. Part of you soon forgets about the outside world. There is just lockdown and out there, and out there—in the yard, in the trough room, at hard labor—feels a hell of a lot freer than a two-meter-square cell.
As we made our way down to the yard Donovan explained about the jobs. Mornings were spent working. Slopwork was in the kitchen. Greaseup meant cleaning duties, which sometimes included the Stink, or mopping the toilets. Bleaching was in the laundry. According to the duty roster—displayed in crisp white letters on the giant screen above the elevator—Donovan and I were chippers for the day.
“It’s the hardest of hard labors,” he said as we followed the crowd through to the trough room. We picked up a couple of bowls of mush from the canteen and found an empty bench—close enough to the scene of yesterday’s incident that I could make out a weird rust-colored stain on the floor. I focused on my breakfast to try to take my mind off the fight. It was a pile of sawdust-colored paste that looked identical to yesterday’s dinner.
“The same thing?” I asked, feeling my stomach grumble. I wasn’t sure if it
was because I was hungry, or because my gut was warning me not to go near the dish.
“Yeah,” Donovan replied, lifting a heap of paste up with his spoon and eyeing it suspiciously. “Exactly the same. They make it in batches, each lasts a few days. You have it for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.”
“Great,” I muttered. I knew I was going to have to eat something sooner or later, so I scraped a thin layer off the top of my breakfast and touched my tongue to it. I was expecting the flavor of vomit, or crap, or something equally nasty, but to my surprise I couldn’t taste anything. Taking a deep breath, I closed my mouth around the spoon and felt the runny mixture drop onto my tongue. For a second I gagged, but then I managed to control the reflex and noticed that the goo was completely flavorless, except for the pleasant tang of salt.
“The texture is the worst part,” Donovan explained, scooping the last dollop from his bowl. “Just think of it as salty porridge and it isn’t too bad.”
I remembered how my dad always put about a kilo of salt in his porridge—as opposed to honey or sugar or jam like sane people—and the thought made me feel better. My appetite took over and I wolfed down the paste with a passion, almost sucking the plastic from the spoon in my eagerness. The gunk was lukewarm, but it settled in my stomach and radiated a pleasant, comforting heat.
The morning’s third short siren blast saw everybody making their way out of the trough room back into the yard, where the crowd gradually split into a number of groups. I followed Donovan to the other side of the huge space toward a cavernous fissure in the rock guarded by a blacksuit and his shotgun. I felt my legs go weak at the sight of him, but the sheer density of the people around me held me up as we stomped past.
The short tunnel ahead led us to a room filled to bursting with mining equipment—picks, shovels, wheelbarrows, and dozens of hard hats that clung to the walls like yellow fungus. Around the outside of the room were three more cracks: gaping black mouths in the rock. Two were open but a third, in the center, was sealed off with enormous wooden planks bolted into the rock.
Donovan slammed a hard hat onto his head, switching on the lamp fixed to the front, and held another one out for me. I took it as the blacksuit walked to the center of the cluttered space and began to speak.
“You know the drill: dig and clear.” His voice was like the rumbling of some subterranean river muted by the rock. “Shaft props every three meters, hats on at all times—we want you fit to work again tomorrow. Anyone caught smuggling equipment out gets two days in the hole. Any skirmishing gets you three.”
By now most of the hundred or so inmates in the room were kitted up. Some held picks or shovels and others were hoisting the ancient metal wheelbarrows off the ground. Not knowing what to do, I grabbed a pick from the wall. It was so heavy I nearly dropped it, the spike coming worryingly close to the foot of the guy standing next to me. I tensed my muscles and managed to stop its descent, but Donovan was already flashing me a concerned look.
“Levels one through three, you’re through the first door,” the blacksuit went on. “Levels four through six, get in the third door. Room Two is out of bounds. Move it.”
Our huddle of prisoners shuffled forward with about as much enthusiasm as if there had been an electric chair waiting beyond that hole in the wall. I could almost imagine them as old-time miners, singing “Hi ho, hi ho” as they marched into darkness. Only these workers were calling out insults to one another and making threatening gestures with their picks. I kept my head down and trailed Donovan.
“Don’t worry, kid,” he said as we stomped through the tunnel. “Only another twenty thousand or so days of this to go.”
My pick suddenly got a lot heavier, as did my heart.
We emerged into a wide cavern, the ceiling so low that I had to stoop in places to avoid the drooping rock. Everywhere I looked there were long, thin beams propping up the ceiling, a forest of twigs that didn’t look anywhere near strong enough to hold up the million or so tons of stone above our heads. I pictured what would happen if gravity took over, bringing down the roof of the cave and squashing us like a boot crushing a bug. At least it would be quick.
Swallowing hard, I managed to force the claustrophobic panic from my mind.
“Better pray there isn’t a cave-in today,” said Donovan, his words practically turning my stomach inside out.
The rock walls of the cave had been battered and broken into weird shapes. Most looked like curtains in a theater, full of shadowy folds that stood out against the rich red surface. They might be good hiding places, and I stored the information away in the back of my mind in case I ever needed it. Then I remembered the flayed dogs and instantly dismissed the thought. Donovan led the way to a distant section of the cave and rested his pick against the rock.
“Don’t need a degree in rocket science to do this job,” he said. “Just keep whacking until downtime. When you can’t see your feet for rubble, give a shout to one of the wheelies and they’ll come clear up. ’Kay?”
“And to think my mom and dad never thought I’d hold down a job,” I answered. We both fought to hide our grins, then, motioning for me to stand out of the way, Donovan swung his pick to one side and brought it forward with a cry of rage. The metal blade struck the rock with a flash of light and a pistol crack, showering us both with shrapnel.
“Ow!” I yelled, hurriedly pulling down the hard hat’s visor to avoid being blinded.
“Some fun, huh?” Donovan shouted as he swung again.
Making sure there was nobody around me that I could inadvertently injure, I hoisted the pick above my head ready to swing. I’d completely forgotten about the low ceiling, however, and the move generated a shower of rock that drummed off my hat. Donovan frowned through his visor and I felt my cheeks redden. I tensed my arms again and this time swung the pick in a sideways arc. It struck the rock with a deafening clang and a vibration that traveled up my arms and practically dislodged the vertebrae in my spine. Wincing, I waited until the pain had subsided before trying again. This time I gave the rock a delicate tap that barely shaved off a whisker of dust.
“Takes a bit of time to get used to the impact,” said Donovan between strikes. “But that’s okay. In here time is the only thing you’ve got plenty of.”
I tried twice more, ignoring the sensation that my spine was being ripped out with each strike. After a few minutes tiredness set in, but with it came a pleasant numbness that spread through my body.
The lamp on my helmet threw the rock face into a mosaic of light and shadow. I started looking for features in the stone that resembled faces—ridges for foreheads, scratches that might have been noses, pick marks as lips, and loose pebbles like sightless eyes—and pretended they were blacksuits. Each time I swung right for the center of the face, releasing a scream of anger and hatred that lent power to the attack. And when the faces crumpled into fragments, I felt a little shiver of pleasure.
The strength of my feelings was a little unnerving—the knowledge that, at that moment, I could have driven a pick right through the real guard who would appear in the cave every now and again to check that everybody was working. Hatred—real, murderous hatred—was an emotion I’d never really experienced before, and I wasn’t sure whether it excited me or terrified me.
IT’S INCREDIBLE HOW much stamina you can find when you’re fighting an enemy in battle, even if that enemy is just in your imagination. For what must have been three or four hours everyone in that cave swung their picks at the rock relentlessly, like barbarians bringing down the walls of a castle. The sound of picks striking rock, the flash of the sparks, and the screams that powered each swing made my ears ring and my blood pound. It really was like an ancient battle, and I started to wonder just how long the blacksuits would last if all of Furnace’s inmates picked up their tools and turned on their captors.
Donovan and I must have cleared away a good meter of rock by ourselves. It doesn’t sound like much, but we’re not talking about chalk here—these walls wer
e tough. The rubble built up around our feet and was cleared away by the guys with wheelbarrows to be deposited in some unknown place. Probably mixed with our food, I thought, eyeing the piles of dust slumped like fallen soldiers on the ground between us.
I was still pummeling the wall with a passion when the black-suit appeared again and called for us to put down the tools. It was only as we all wove our way back through the ceiling props, dragging our picks behind us, that the pain slowly started to ebb back into my body. It began as a dull throb, but by the time we’d hung up our equipment it felt as though every muscle I had was on fire.
We were told to wait until the other group marched back into the equipment room, then the blacksuit herded us out of the tunnel back into the yard. I wondered why nobody had bothered to search us—the picks may have been impossible to smuggle out, but some of the rock fragments we had chipped away were sharper than scalpels. It soon became clear when we were led through another rough-cut door to a long room full of showers.
“Five minutes,” shouted the blacksuit. I watched as everybody began to strip, heaping their uniforms and underwear into a pile in the corner then drifting out to stand beneath the overhanging showerheads. I did the same, feeling extremely self-conscious as I pulled off my clothes. But we were all in the same big naked boat and nobody seemed the least bit bothered by it. I picked a spot at the far side of the room and to my surprise found that Donovan had followed me.
“Brace yourself,” he said. Seconds later there was an alarming squeal followed by a hiss, then the showerheads all erupted. I flinched as a jet of freezing water hit me square in the back, forcing the air from my lungs, but thankfully the temperature soon adjusted—still cold, just not arctic. I frantically scrubbed myself down, noticing the water turn red from the dust that clung to me, pooling around the drains as if we were all being bled dry. I shook the image from my head as Donovan started talking.
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