by Mark Jeffrey
WHEN SHE arrived, Titus peeked out from beneath his bed sheet. After the guards left, he pulled back his covers, startling her. “Where have you been?” she asked.
“Interrogation,” Titus said, groaning. “They do that now and then.” She could see bruises on his arms.
“Did they torture you? Here. Let me examine you.”
“No, no,” he protested, pushing her away. “I’m fine. Used to it. Really. How about you?”
“I’m okay,” she said. “They beat me pretty hard … or at least I thought they did. I must have been mistaken.”
“Well,” Titus said. “That is a mystery. But here: I have just the thing to take your mind off it.” With that, he rose, limping a little, and approached the chess board Elspeth had noticed when she had first arrived. “This is called Pantheon Chess. It is played more or less like ordinary chess, except the pieces are representations of various gods and goddesses of various cultures.”
“Interesting,” Elspeth muttered, actually thinking it wasn’t very.
But Titus seemed somewhat intense about the subject. He produced several wooden boxes from beneath the expansive wooden chess board. “For example. If you choose the Greek pieces, your King is Zeus; your Queen is Hera, your Rook is Hermes, and so on. If you choose Norse pieces, then your King is Odin, your Queen is Freya, and so on. You see? One pantheon versus another!
“You could think of it as an actual war between the gods — or, at least, the cultures they represent. That’s what ancient peoples thought, you know — when one land fought another, that their gods fought too. What do you say? Want to play?”
Elspeth took one look out of the front of her cell. All of the other cells from top to bottom were completely deserted and empty: all of the other prisoners were at work.
She plopped down into one of the chairs and shrugged. “Sure. What else are we going to do?”
“Pick a pantheon,” Titus said, waving the boxes around.
“Okay … What’s that one? The one with the eye thing on it?”
“You mean the Eye of Ra?”
“Yeah. That one. I’ll be that. What is it, anyway?”
“Egyptian,” Titus said, and then he grinned so widely that Elspeth feared he might smile his own head in half. “You’ve chosen to be Egyptian.”
They played. Elspeth won.
Afterward, she went back to sleep. A new sort of exhaustion took her.
SHE WOKE at dinner time.
Titus was gone. Probably eating. That was fine. She wanted some time alone anyway, some time to acclimate. Looked like she was going to be here for a little while at least.
What intrigued her the most was something she’d only glimpsed earlier: a giant work of art on one of her walls, nearly one thousand hexagons, all neatly the same size, all interlocking and adjacent.
It was like looking at a giant beehive. Only, these hexagons were annotated. There were scribbles and drawings and notes and warnings and icons of all sorts.
It seemed to be a map. But it was incomplete. She felt as if she were looking at a representation of something only partially explored. There were question marks around the edges. And there were question marks inside many of the hexagons.
Near the very top was a hexagon drawn in bold red. Inside of it was etched the hieroglyph of a honeybee.
She scanned the writing associated with certain hexagons, reading at random:
… Water trap. Cannot survive without air.
… Lies grate on the ears, they are palpable. Fighting is likewise impossible here.
… the Heliotrope Hexagon?
… 1882 is where (illegible)
And finally, near one edge of the strange hexagon map, she saw a longish note. It read:
The Glass Prison. You are here.
That took her aback. The Glass Prison? Was that was this place was called? What did that mean? It certainly did not seem to be made of glass. Or perhaps it referred to the Panopticon? The fact that everything could be seen by those inhabiting the center?
And what did this map mean?
THREE: FIRST ITERATION
THE FIRST WEEK was the hardest.
Every day started with a shriek. There was the Panopticon’s howling klaxon and a shout of burning, harsh white floodlight that body-slammed you awake. Then came the groggy morning confusion — where am I? Why I am not in my own bed?
When Oscar had first vanished, she would wake and start talking to him … only to remember all over again that he wasn’t there.
Now, she would recall that she was imprisoned … and only after that, that Oscar was not with her.
Stab, and then stab again. Deep depression soaked her soul.
The prisoners piled out for morning count, all lined up in neat little rows: human latitude lines encircling the innards of a stone moon. Circles going up, circles going down. The guards, in their black armor, ran out of the Panopticon, eager and shouting, quivering with hoo-rah.
This time, Elspeth did as she was told. She stepped out and stood quietly at attention.
The air inside of the hollowed-out moon was suddenly filled with hundreds of squawking parrots and parakeets. They swirled this way and that, disturbed from their slumber by the cacophony of the morning rituals.
Impossible that tropical birds could stay alive in the cold of this place!
The prisoners all did their best to toe the line. To count off loudly, to answer any question that a guard put to them clearly and quickly. Nobody wanted to stand out. But it didn’t matter: somebody got billy-clubbed every morning.
Then, it was off to breakfast.
On that first morning, no one would allow her to sit. So she kept to herself while wolfing down her food, trying to make her oversized body scrunch up into a tinier fraction of itself. An elephant hiding behind a teacup.
Conversation seemed to be permitted: the guards did not stop it. Elspeth was starved for information; she dearly wanted to speak with one of the other prisoners. How long have you been here? Do you know what this place is? Did we commit a crime?
But no one seemed interested in talking to her.
Then it was off to work.
Elspeth’s first few days were spent in laundry. Heaps and piles of foul-smelling canvas or burlap clothing were brought in giant rolling bins. Elspeth was led to a sink. “Here,” a large, fleshy woman with a pin cushion of a face said gruffly. “You wash them — one at a time! Get the soap in there real good. Beat them out on this board here with the grooves in it. Then rinse, rinse, rinse! I don’t want to see any soap left after! Then, wring them out real nice and hand them off to Duffy here, who’ll take it over to drying.
“You quota is two bins a day. Don’t stare at me, stretch! Get washing!”
Elspeth went to work. By lunch, she hadn’t cleared even half of one bin yet. Exhausted, she returned to the canteen with the others.
This time, she was allowed to sit with several men. They made small talk, exchanged names. But when she tried to ask about the prison, they all clammed up and looked suddenly nervous.
“My cellmate told me a few things,” Elspeth whispered, “but I still have no idea why I’m here — or why anyone is here.”
One of the men guffawed. “What cellmate? Nobody here has cellmates.”
And with that they all left.
Nobody here has cellmates …
Then who —?
Titus. Titus was an imposter. Titus had lied to her.
Somebody had been in her cell who didn’t belong there.
THE REST OF THE DAY went much the same. She hadn’t finished her quota by supper, which earned her a tongue-lashing, but surprisingly not much more than that.
Then it was night — or what passed for night in this underground (was it underground?) facility.
And it seemed the men in the lunch canteen had been right: her supposed cellmate Titus was nowhere to be seen. He’d vanished without a trace.
The lights cracked off with a bang. Darkness suffocated her as he
r eyes adjusted. Then, the films started up — those damn films, going all night at all hours, projected on the circular screens, their soundtracks blaring, blaring, blaring …
Sometimes their topic was nature: usually with a ‘red in tooth and claw’ angle, other times it was political re-education material on ‘the role of the citizen in society’.
But Elspeth was so exhausted that she fell asleep immediately.
LATE THAT EVENING, Elspeth heard a voice call out from the cell next to hers.
“Hey! Pity puddle! Keep it down!”
It was the new guy next door. Elspeth had seen the guards bring him up and drop off his unconscious carcass earlier in the day. Presently, he was awake and yelling at his neighbor, another new arrival who was sobbing uncontrollably.
“Leave him alone,” Elspeth yelled back. She could never stand a bully.
“Hey. Who asked you, Stretch Armstrong?”
“Just because you’re a tough guy doesn’t mean everyone here is.”
“How many Twitter followers do you have?”
“What?”
“How many?”
“Oh that. I don’t do that.” Doctors hate anything that can reach us on our off time. Don’t you people know that?
“Good. That means I have more Twitter followers than you, which is what’s important in life. Now come here and say hello,” the voice said.
Oh, what the hell. Allies in here were bound to be useful, even annoying ones. She rolled of her bed and pressed her face against her bars. Her new neighbor was a middle aged guy with sloppy blonde hair and a paunch. He was still in the tattered remains of his business suit, minus the tie, with his dress shirt untucked.
“James. James Card,” he said, slinking a few fingers out. She took them with her own lanky digits and finger-shook.
“Elspeth. Doctor Elspeth Lune.”
“Eh. A doctor. That’s good to know.” He licked his lips and then said, “So what is this place? Where am I? The mother of all drunk tanks?”
“You’re in a prison.”
“Yeah. I can see that.” She shook her head at this Card character. “Well. It’s finally started, then.” When she gave a quizzical expression he said, “The FEMA camps. The Federal Government’s been building them for years. Between that and every branch of the government buying up billions of rounds of ammo — hey. Did you know that even the Post Office is armed to the teeth now? What does the Post Office need with hollow point bullets?”
Elspeth shrugged. “Target practice?”
“Look at this place. Does this look like target practice to you?”
“I dunno. These guys don’t seem like Feds.”
“Of course not. They’re New World Order. You know. NSA spying. Agenda 21. Black helicopters, 9-11 was an inside job. This is it. The end game is here and now they’re rounding people up. Pretty clever, putting the actual FEMA camps underground like this. Just like the Denver Airport, they —”
“No,” Elspeth cut in. “It’s medical. They’re testing out something on us.” She wiggled her pinky, still in denial at the very existence of her digit.
“Medical?” James Card seemed to shrink. That was worse than the New World Order. “Like … what? Germs?”
“How should I know?”
Card suddenly looked like he wanted nothing more than to scrub himself bloody with Purell. “I thought you were a doctor!”
“That doesn’t mean —” She was interrupted by the sound of an iPhone ringing. “Hey. What was that?”
“My alarm,” Card said, fumbling around. “Huh. Weird. If I was home right now, I’d be waking up for a run.”
“You still have a phone? How’d you manage —”
“Oh. There’s a special compartment in my suit, under the arm. Goddamn TSA, no way I’m going to trust them with this. All my contacts and everything are in here! Anyway … this YouTube guy proved it’s pretty easy to defeat the nudie scanners: all you have to do is keep a gun flat against your body and it looks like bodyfat. I figured, hey if a gun … why not a phone? Of course, when I lose this weight in a few weeks, that won’t work any more …”
Never mind that! “Have you tried calling anybody?”
“Yeah,” Card said dejectedly.
“Yeah? What do you mean, yeah? What happened?”
“It was weird.”
“Weird? Like how?”
“I called my brother and he acted like he didn’t know me.”
“But — you got a signal!? You were able to make a call?”
“They got to him, or tapped the line and were listening in …”
“Give it to me!” Elspeth demanded. Her long bony fingers clenched the air in front of their cell. “Give me the goddamn phone!”
“What? No!”
“Card, listen to me. It’s not like you have a charger. We have to keep calling people until we reach someone who can help us. If your brother is out, then let me try.” When he still didn’t hand it over she said, “Card! I’m not going to steal your fucking iPhone.”
“Okay … okay. Wait a sec …” He fumbled around. “Uh oh.”
“Uh oh, what?”
“Um … oh, there we go. Thank Odin, Jesus and Aquaman. For a sec, it didn’t look like we had a signal. Here.” He handed her the iPhone. Elspeth’s eyes clung greedily to the one, thin line of bandwidth.
She had a connection! Somehow, in the bowels of this prison, a signal had managed to escape. Elspeth punched the numbers in frantically. When the phone rang, she nearly cried aloud in delight.
“Hello?” It was her mother’s voice!
“Hi, Mom?” Elspeth said. “It’s me, Mom! I’m okay, I’m not dead!”
Her Mom was silent for a long moment. “Who is this?”
“It’s me! Oh God, Mom, it’s me! Elspeth! I’m okay! But I’m in like … sort of this jail … you have to help me.” But Elspeth’s Mom was not nearly as excited to hear from her or worried as Elspeth had expected. “Mom? Mom. What’s wrong?”
“Who is this?” Her Mom’s tone had suddenly taken a turn for the nasty.
“Mom?”
“I’m not your Mom, and you’re not Elspeth!”
That stung.
“Mom. Don’t you recognize my voice? How could you not recognize my voice? Mom!”
“Don’t call me that!” The woman’s voice dripped with disgust. “You’re not my daughter! How DARE you!”
“Why would you say that? Mom …”
“Why? WHY? Because I’m looking at Elspeth right now!”
Elspeth’s hand flew to her mouth to prevent a torrent of sobs from erupting.
A voice in the background said, Mom? Who’s that?
“Listen. I don’t know who you are, or why you would play such a sick joke,” her Mom said. “I guess you’re in prison, and you’re lonely … so you decided to dial for dollars and see if you could get some sympathy. Well, listen! Don’t ever call here again! Do you hear me? Go away!”
Her mother hung up.
Broken, shocked, Elspeth lowered the iPhone from her ear.
“What happened?” James asked. “What did she say?”
Elspeth shook her head in shock. “I don’t understand. She … she didn’t believe it was me.”
It took a full moment for this to register with Card. When he’d internalized it, he said, “But … but how can that be? Doesn’t she know you’re missing? Isn’t she worried sick?”
“She said I was already there. She could see me,” Elspeth said, numbly repeating what the voice on the phone had said.
“She could … see you?” James repeated.
“Yes,” Elspeth hissed, hiding her head in her hands. Impulsively, she redialed her mother again — it went to voicemail. “What does that mean?”
“Impostors. Maybe they put impostors in our place, when they grabbed us. Clones.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“No. Of course not. Don’t be ridiculous, said the seven foot tall chick in a ridiculous underground p
rison. Give me my phone back. I tried getting web and email, but can’t get data down here. I’m going to shut it off now. Save what little is left of the battery.” There was only 10% left, according to the phone itself.
“Good idea,” Elspeth mumbled. She was about to hand it back to him when she decided on impulse to first snap several pictures of the hexagon map, being sure to include enough resolution so she could zoom in on anything she desired later on.
Only then did she give him the iPhone.
And with that, she stumbled off to bed.
ELSPETH WOKE with a start.
It was the middle of the night still, she was sure of that. Close to 3:00 AM. Even without a clock, her sense of time was impeccable: she could always wake at any hour and know within a minute exactly what time it was.
The Prison was in cacophony. When she reached her bars, she saw that everyone else was already at theirs, hollering and yelling. The howl of the crowd even drowned out the ever-playing movies (this time it was an obscure black-and-white film).
The guards had brought an old man out of his cell — a cell very close, Elspeth saw, on the same level as her own and just where the curvature began, giving her a close up view.
“No!” the man cried out. “I will not! Not this time, not again!”
“No avoiding it, Milton.” the guard snarled at him. “You know that.”
“I’m not going willingly this time!” Milton yelled. “I will not —! I can not!” Then he turned to the guard, pleaded with him: “Maybe this time they won’t notice me. Maybe they’ll let me go!”
The Prison’s parakeets and parrots were in an uproar as well, squawking and circling, not able to stay still. They seemed to sense danger near the old man and had retreated to the far walls.
“It’s an abomination! It’s not natural!” Milton pleaded again. “You can’t throw me over the edge this time!” His eyes stared at the ground far, far, below. The inner south pole of the Prison was lost in shadow: none knew what awaited down there, but it was certainly not good to land on.