by Mark Jeffrey
The guards eyed each other uneasily.
“You’d rather face them, then, would you?”
Milton’s eyes snapped up, wet with fear.
“Either we take care of this, or they do.”
Milton stood then and folded his arms, knees shaking visibly. “I can’t fall again. Not that. Anything but that.”
“So it’s them. Okay then. It’s your choice.”
Milton nodded vigorously. “Yes. Yes! Lock me up, put me in the cell, and lock it! Please!”
The guards looked at each dubiously. They muttered between themselves, and then one of them shrugged. They did as he asked, and then departed.
They were only halfway along the bridge to the Panopticon when the air popped with a new presence.
It came from nowhere: a will-o-wisp, a handful of smokeless, soundless flame. Then it divided in several bobbing, floating tongues of fire.
The crowd roared with approval or terror. Elspeth gasped. The guards ran, closing the door of the Panopticon behind them quickly.
At first, they floated slowly, aimlessly, like balloons lost by a child. They were pretty as Christmas tree ornaments, magical as faery stars descended to earth. They were waiting for something. And then, the clock slipped forward a tick: Elspeth felt it in her scalp. Some threshold was reached, and the things bolted towards Milton’s cell.
Instantly they burned brighter, like a great quantity of halogen set afire. Their mood was went from tinkling and dancing to menacing and vicious: a wronged sprite.
They slipped between the bars of Milton’s cell. He screamed piteously — “Not again! Not again!” — and then fell silent. Splashes of blood and hunks of flesh and cloth rolled out from between the bars.
Milton had been taken apart at the seams. It was like a pack of piraña had devoured him, filleted him while he lived.
THE MORNING brought a dense mist — and an earthquake.
Long before the shriek of the Panopticon rudely sliced through the endless film loops, and the parakeets and parrots skrawked and clawed in the open air, the entire prison shook with a violent wrench.
Instinctively, Elspeth leapt out of bed and headed for her bathroom door frame, screaming for Oscar to follow her. But there was no door frame, and there was no Oscar. At first, she was confused — the thick fog engulfed even the innards of her cell, blinding her with white swirl, masking everything but the shaking stone floor. But soon her hands came to rest upon her bars and she clung to them as the tremors raged on — and it all came back her in a flood.
When the shaking stopped, she stood for a long moment, her heart pounding. The rumbling had ceased, but the tropical birds had been set to a panic. Dark, flapping shapes cawed and zipped in and out of the white nearby, nearly colliding before being enveloped by the mist once again.
“Well, that’ll get you up in the morning,” James Card said. “At least the goddamn films have stopped.” She realized it was true. Good! Maybe the earthquake had cut the Panopticon’s power. “Well, earthquake narrows it down somewhat. That, and the tiki birds. I’ll bet we’re in South America somewhere. All we need are drinks with little umbrellas in them.”
AT BREAKFAST, she sat with James Card. They had arrived early, and she had brought along the Pantheon Chess board so they could take advantage of the extra time. She played the pieces of the Egyptian gods again, while James went for the Greek pantheon.
She told James about Titus and his mysterious appearance and then subsequent disappearance.
“What do you think that was about? And by the way, check.”
“Eh. Mind games. Lunatics in the Panopticon, screwing with your head. Who knows why. Your move.”
The game was a quick one. Elspeth won, just as she had with Titus.
“Huh. That’s weird,” Elspeth said.
“What is?”
“The board. Where the pieces are. It’s exactly the same as where they ended up when I played Titus. I mean, exactly.”
Card shrugged. “Maybe you just played the same strategy and I fell for your tricks, just like the vanishing Titus man did.”
“No. No, this was a completely different game. A totally different set of moves and events. And Titus, Titus I beat easily. But I almost lost to you. And I probably would have too if you hadn’t made that one stupid move with your Queen and let my pawn nail you.”
“I so did not see that,” Card muttered.
“Card. What are the chances of a different game producing the same exact outcome? The probabilities must be lottery-level ridiculous.”
Just then a man slammed into Card as he shuffled by with his breakfast. “Goddammit!” the man cursed. “What are you doing, just standing in the aisle, staring at your bleeding chess board like that?”
Elspeth looked up and was stunned to see that this man was none other than Milton.
Milton?
But Milton was dead. Milton had been ripped to shreds by light-things just the night before. She’d seen it! Everyone had. Milton could not be up and walking around.
But here we was.
Card turned around to retort, but when he realized he was about to tear into Milton, he just stared for a moment, and then finally managed to say, “Sorry.”
THAT DAY, Elspeth and James Card were assigned to the same work detail. They were led to a craft shop very near the bottom of the prison, the place some inmates called the South Pole.
Elspeth and Card were paired off and shown very large wooden blades of some sort. They were given tubs of clear paste to apply with brushes. It was a kind of epoxy that smelled rank and noxious, a chemical fume that waters the eye. Before long, it hardened into a clear shell around the wood.
As they did their assigned work, they kept a watchful eye: Card pointed out the presence of six of the Latin Kings gang members. They were here also, slicing the new, raw wood according to directions from the guards.
“I miss my cat,” Card said. “Most of all, about the real world, I think I miss my cat.”
“Your cat,” Elspeth said, amused. “Really? No girlfriend?”
“Nope,” Card said. “No time. I have too much to do. The tech world moves too fast … or used to. In this place I have an eternity to burn.”
“Not really a fan of cats personally,” Elspeth said.
“No? Well, my cat’s hilarious. You’d like him. I just started to get him catnip. I had no idea how much they love that stuff, they go crazy for it! Gets them baked out of their brains and elsewhere.
“Anyway, I remember the first time I got it for him. It comes in this clear plastic bag full of the powdered green leafy stuff. I actually snuck it up to the counter! I felt like I was scoring a bag of weed for my cat.”
Elspeth snorted out a laugh in between brush strokes. “Yeah I kind of hate cats. But dogs! I love dogs.”
“So what do you give a dog to get them high?”
She blinked. “Nothing. Dogs don’t get high. Dogs are drunk. They’re born drunk. And they stay drunk, all life long.” She laughed uproariously.
“Hey tall señorita,” snapped one of the Kings. “Keep your mouth shut. You’re going to get us all on hard labor duty.” He nodded towards the guards.
But Elspeth didn’t back down. Instead, she seemed to grow even taller. Card hissed a warned, but she wasn’t having it. She stepped towards the Latin Kings. For their part, they seemed more amused than challenged.
“You. What’s your name?” She addressed the apparent alpha of the group.
“You don’t want to know, chica. You’re too tall for me.” They all laughed.
“I’m not looking for a lover. I’m —“
“No? Not even a Latin lover?” His friends guffawed while he air-thrusted.
She smiled patiently. “No. Not even. Beside, we have a more immediate problem on our hands, you and I.”
“What’s that?”
“This prison.”
“Si. It is a problem.” The alpha suddenly grew more serious. “But what is to be done? It
has swallowed us.”
Elspeth responded with a tight grin. “What’s your name?”
“My name? Constancio. What’s yours?”
“Constancio. Yes. I’m Elspeth—”
“You’re going to learn to scream it!” Constancio grabbed her arm and pulled her roughly towards him.
“Has anyone ever died here, Constancio?” She said it suddenly, hoping to throw him off balance. It worked.
His nostrils flared like he’d just smelled something rancid. “Morte! Why do you speak of death?”
“Answer the question. Nobody dies here, do they? Not really …?”
Constancio pushed her away, clearly turned off now. “I never seen it. No.”
“What’s the matter, Constancio?”
“You ruined the mood, man.” The Latin Kings pushed off, clearly annoyed with her.
“That was not smart,” James Card said. “Those guys can get real mean. You got off easy just now. You have no idea.”
THAT NIGHT, she dreamt of the Painted Man in the airport.
This time, he was not wearing a business suit. Instead, he was nearly naked, and dancing around a fire he’d made of newspapers and magazines. But nobody paid any attention to him. Next he smashed an old-style Kodak camera with glee; and then did the same thing with a big vacuum tube powered radio. He looked around for reaction — but got none. This seemed to disappoint him.
She woke up feeling the fire of the plane burning on the runway — the heavier-than-air flying machine that could not fly and never, ever could …
Here’s a kiss from the Dolphin Queen.
FOUR: THE ARBORETUM
THE NEXT DAY Elspeth was separated from James Card. She was grouped with another company of prisoners and led into a narrow chamber that at first appeared to be just another cell. But it quickly opened out into a vast underground arboretum or hothouse of some kind.
The guards handed out wicker baskets with leather straps that could be worn across the body: apparently, they would be gathering fruits and vegetables or something. When it came to her turn, Elspeth accepted her basket silently, as the rest had done, and slung it around herself and followed the company deeper into the neat rows of growing things.
When she reached a patch of cornstalks, the guard barked an order, and immediately everyone began picking the corn, harvesting long, healthy green ears into the baskets. Elspeth watched how it was done and quickly began doing the same.
For long time, she moved like a robot, emotionally exhausted, almost thankful for a mindless repetitive task. Several times, she’d attempted to strike up a conversation in low tones with a fellow prisoner — only to be shushed by the guards, or given a steely-eyed refusal from the inmate. The corn wasn’t high enough to hide a stealthy verbal exchange.
So it was here, she reasoned, that all of the prison’s food was grown.
But as the minutes melted into hours, she couldn’t help but notice something strange.
The ground out of which the corn grew was dry as a cough. It was dust, sand, cobweb and rock. Usually, hothouses like this simulated tropical environments — they were moist and damp. And actually hot. There should have been condensation everywhere. She should have been soaked by now.
But she wasn’t. This place was bone-chattering cold, like the rest of the prison. She had to keep moving to stay warm.
And there were no lights. Oh, sure, there was some ambient flickering in here, just like in the rest of the prison, coming from some vague and undefined source. But there should have been white hot panels of thousand-Watt bulbs everywhere, blasting ultraviolet radiation on the greenery. These plants needed either sunlight or artificial sunlight to grow, and here there was neither.
So how were they growing?
And there was no water, no irrigation of any kind here that she could see. She had figured there would be pipes snaking around the ground in the cornfields — pipes that powered sprinklers that came on at night or something — and that sooner or later she would run into one.
But no. Nothing. Nada, zip.
She looked up. The top of the cavern was merely rock: there was no sprinkler system there either: there would be no moisture raining down from the artificial skies.
Impossible!
This whole place was impossible. It defied her medical knowledge, her scientific knowledge. She refused to accept it.
There was simply no way green plants of any kind should be able to grow in an underground cavern, with no water and no sunlight, period, end of sentence.
AT MID-MORNING, Elspeth was told she and her group would move to different location in the vast underground farm. Along the way, they passed several flower beds that appeared to be tropical orchids. Impossible flowers growing in impossible conditions.
Then, they encountered a group harvesting coconuts. These prisoners were being made to climb the slender palm trees and throw the coconuts down from the top. To her dismay, Elspeth saw that the majority of these prisoners were children. One, in fact, was the same small Indian girl she had seen earlier — the same one that had a cell very near her own.
The girl looked up, adjusting the folds of her garments and headdress. The clear sharp whites of her eyes pierced the gloom, making her momentarily resemble a famous National Geographic magazine cover, her steel gaze driving into Elspeth’s soft moon-blue eyes insistently.
Then she looked away and the circuit was broken.
The Indian girl scampered up the long neck of a palm tree and vanished between its fronds, tossing the coconuts down for the others to collect.
Elspeth turned and made her way along the path.
THE PRISONERS WERE given water, and then shown an apple orchard. New wicker baskets were dispensed, and the hard work of picking apples began. But this time, it was easier to speak in low whispers and hide amongst the twisting gnarled boughs of the trees. In fact, it was another prisoner who first attempted a conversation with her.
“Hey,” said a skinny, soft-spoken man with furry sideburns. He spoke with a thick French accent. “Over here. What’s your name?”
“Elspeth,” she said under her breath, still wary. “Elspeth Lune. Fifteen fifteen. You?”
At the mention of fifteen fifteen, the skinny man flinched. “Huh. Nobody’s been in fifteen fifteen for a long time. Daniel Ogden. Twenty-Five Eleven.”
“Twenty five? So you’re the near the top, then?”
Daniel nodded. “Not exactly. The numbers don’t all go in order.”
“So I don’t suppose you know what this place is or what’s going on?” Elspeth said.
Daniel shrugged. “I’ve only been here a month. But you know what I’ve noticed?”
“What’s that?”
“No bees. There’s no bees in this garden place. How does anything here get pollinated?”
She nodded. He was right. One more impossible thing to add to the file.
“All this … it’s one big biology experiment,” Daniel concluded. “All this food — it grows really fast, and in the worst conditions. No bees, no water, no sunlight — but it all grows anyway. So I think it’s like, genetically modified. Superfood.”
Elspeth nodded. Well, it was a little crazy of a theory. But she was willing to entertain anything at this point.
“Do you mean the whole Glass Prison is an experiment?” Daniel scrunched up his face in non-comprehension at the name. “There was writing on the wall in my cell,” Elspeth explained, lowering her eyes and voice now as a guard loomed near. “It called this place — all of it — the Glass Prison. Does that mean anything to you?”
Daniel shook his head. “No. Never heard it called a Glass Prison. But it would fit my theory — you know, all of this is just a big petri dish.”
“Rats in a maze,” Elspeth said. “And we’re the rats.”
“More like the space monkeys,” Daniel corrected. “We’re the ones they’re experimenting on.”
Right.
“So Daniel. You want to get out of here as badly as I d
o?”
“Of course I do,” Daniel hissed with a new urgency. He looked up with a quick furtive glance, like a starving rat glimpsing hope for the first time in a long while. “I was hoping … well I was wondering if …”
“Yes?”
“You can’t tell anyone I asked you, okay?”
Elspeth nodded. “Of course not.”
“Do you know Sebastian Cone?” He spoke the name with a kind of awe or reverence.
Elspeth shook her head. “No.” The name meant nothing to her. “But I only just got here. Why? Who is that?”
“He’s the guy who can get anyone out,” Daniel said dejectedly, very visibly disappointed with her answer. He rubbed his forehead nervously, like he was trying to dig the flesh off his skull.
Elspeth was suddenly very interested. “Is this Cone guy a prisoner also?”
“Yeah. But I don’t know which one he is — I don’t know what he looks like. You can supposedly cut a deal with him, and you’re gone. So you really don’t know, huh?” Daniel was hoping that she was lying.
“No. No, sorry, I really don’t. I’d like to talk to this Sebastian Cone myself.”
“Well. Okay then. Thanks.” And with that Daniel moved on away from her. Moments later, Elspeth spied him chatting up another prisoner, probably asking the same question.
Sebastian Cone.
She’d have to look into this.
JAMES CARD shook his head when she brought up Cone. “Probably just a wacky rumor. All prisons have them. Everybody needs a fantasy tale to keep them going. Otherwise, everyone here would hang themselves.”
“Oh? What’s your fantasy tale?”
“I’m not telling. But I know what yours is.”
“What’s that?”
“Your husband. You think you’re going to find Oscar somewhere in this place. And then you’re going to escape with him.”