Prisoner of Glass

by Mark Jeffrey

  Interesting, Elspeth mused.

  There was another tunnel system inside the tunnel system.

  Quickly, before someone else came along, she followed. Up close, there was absolutely no trace of the door in the rough-hewn rock. She had expected to see a thin line, something, anything.

  But there was nothing.

  She pushed on the moss-covered nub of rock, as she had seen David do. The portal opened, and she stepped through.

  There was a brightly-lit tunnel here. It was not made of roughly hewn rock: instead, it was constructed of steel and immaculately clean with a textured black rubber floor. She followed it a short distance until it opened up into a wonderland.

  She beheld an underground cavern made of delirium and slices of sheer happiness.

  As her eyes adjusted to the dazzling light, she realized that she was looking upon some kind of luxurious living compound. Bright colors and rich grasses and trees and flowers of every size and shape abounded. Living quarters filled the landscape, each built in one of a number of different architectural styles — Queen Anne cottages, Victorian mansions — each bespeaking long, indulgent hours in the design and construction thereof. The sounds of children playing, their squeals of laughter, were everywhere — she saw packs of them running happily. Fields filled with rich crops of every variety swept the hillsides — she could smell the rich aroma of peat and loam and vegetation.

  She had to blink to believe it. This was what was buried beneath the Glass Prison? This — this Munchkinland? This Genesis Cave, this Garden of Eden?

  She spied a nearby windmill and her breath caught in her throat. The blades. The blades! She recognized them. They had been made in the prison above with prison labor. She herself had worked on those blades, painting them with that smelly epoxy. At the time, she had wondered what the blade was, what such a thing could possibly be for …

  And now, she had her answer.

  Anger swelled within her. What did this place mean? Were these people somehow leeching off the prison above? It was too much. It made her want to scream.

  Before she could stop herself, she marched down the hill, hands bunched into tight fists swinging at her sides.

  A group of children were the first to spot her. They stopped playing, a splash of alarm rippling through them. She studied their faces: she recognized none of them. And they all had modern clothes, almost expensive-looking clothes: not the rags of the prison.

  So. These kids had been hidden here also. And they were nothing like the old-eyed kids she’d run into in the other tunnels. No. These were true children.

  She ignored them and strutted until she reached something that looked like a town square.

  “Hello? Hello! David! Are you here?” She yelled. “No? Okay. What about Sebastian Cone? I’ve seen your little hidden village! You want to come out and explain what the hell’s going on here?”

  Cautious faces peeked out of windows, mostly women. Again, no one she had seen before.

  Ah. Women and children, hidden here beneath the hard prison life above. Men started to appear now — men she had seen before with David. They were clearly shocked at Elspeth’s presence. They drew guns.

  “Oh please! Those guns are just soap and shoe polish made to look like —”

  “Elspeth …” David said. She whirled. David stood there, motioning for everyone else to keep calm.

  “Now,” Elspeth said deliberately, stabbing a finger at him with her voice quaking. “Now you’re going to explain all this.”

  David seemed at a loss for moment. But then a new voice appeared. “Oh, good job, David.” It was Ione, the small Indian girl. “You can stop acting all surprised. I suppose she just happened to stumble on the secret door to the Sanctuary.”

  David turned bright red. “I — I — no, it was —”

  “Right. That’s what I thought. You fell in love with her, didn’t you? And once she knew about this place, I’d have to let her stay. So presto, you make sure she’s following you, and you go through the Sanctuary door, making sure she sees how to open it. Right? Am I missing anything so far?”

  David was silent and blushing for a long moment. Then he said, “Well you’re in love with James Card.”

  “That’s not true,” Ione said, blushing now as well.

  “No? Then why did you give him a record player, just like he asked for? A secret present from little Sebastian, the girl who can’t grow up.”

  “You don’t know what it’s like,” she said darkly, from a place of deep hurt.

  But Elspeth’s eyes only darted between the two of them. Sebastian?

  “Yes,” the child said wearily, answering the unspoken question. “My name’s not really Ione. It’s Sebastian Cone. Well, Sebastienne, really, but nobody pronounces it that way.”

  Elspeth swallowed.

  “And this is Sanctuary. Welcome, Doctor Lune.”

  SEBASTIAN CONE — the child — sat in the front salon of a lavish, well-appointed home. Elspeth sat nearby, while David brought them both tea.

  “Don’t think of me as a child,” Sebastian said. “You can get that out of your head right now.” Elspeth nodded. She believed Sebastian. It wasn’t all that hard, really, especially now that the pretense was dropped. The way Sebastian held herself, the cold intelligence in the eyes … none of it was child-like.

  And then there was the way that everyone deferred to her. Even David.

  “Why?” Elspeth asked. “Is it the medical experiments? The — whatever they did to me — that made my finger grow back?”

  Sebastian laughed. “Ah yes. That. Why, yes, in a way. It’s all related. Why do plants grow — with no water, no bees, no sunlight? Why do dead people come back to life? Why is a forty year old child sitting in front of you right now? How about why your phone calls end up in confusing conversations with your own relatives? Oh yes, I know about James Card’s mobile. Haven’t you guessed at it yet?”

  “Well I was in the Panopticon. I saw it. It’s … some kind of nanotechnology. That’s why they chose me, a doctor, why they —”

  “No. No no no no no. First all of all, there is no they. Who do you you think they are?”

  “The guards. The people in the Panopticon, the ones who keep us here.”

  “The guards, as you call them, are us.”

  Elspeth’s jaw dropped.

  “Well, not me. I’m too short. It’s the men, mostly. Some women. They dress up in those nonsense black armor costumes, come running out of the Panopticon every morning, all gung ho. Make sure everyone stays good and scared. We’ve got an elevator that goes right up from the middle of the village, up into the center of the Panopticon. In fact, you see it from here.” Sebastian pointed out her front window: sure enough, a dark metallic elevator shaft stood not far away, running from the ground all the way up through the ceiling. There was something that glowed orange in front of where the doors should be. To Elspeth’s questioning gaze, she said, “There’s a wall of lava in front of it. Extra protection — just in case any prisoners actually ever are able to get into the Panopticon and take the elevator down — they won’t be able to enter the Sanctuary. It’s a cool Mayan thing, like so much around here …”

  “It was you, wasn’t it?” Elspeth said to David pointedly. “When I was clubbed down at my first morning count, and brought to the Panopticon … I was restrained and couldn’t see who was talking. It was a man’s voice … that was you, wasn’t it?”

  “Yes,” David said, barely a whisper.

  “Oh, and all that with the nanotechnology tanks?” Sebastian continued like this exchange hadn’t just taken place. “That was just a big show, just for you. We had the metal shop make the tanks, then we had another work detail paint them black. We had to stencil the words on ourselves, of course. Couldn’t have anyone else know about that bit of it. But we had no idea you’d run away and then right off the bridge like that! So sorry about that …

  “Where was I? Oh right. There’s usually only like twenty of us up th
ere at any given moment — it’s amazing nobody’s noticed how few and we haven’t had a rebellion. Then we just put the films on at night, make a lot of racket, make sure to keep the pressure up and —”

  “How dare you,” Elspeth growled. At the same time, some part of her screamed, The Vizier knows all of this already. That son of a bitch knew all along. So why was he allowing himself to remain imprisoned?

  “How dare we?” Sebastian growled back, every bit as incensed. “We dare, because it keeps us alive.”

  “No!” Elspeth screamed. “No — and don’t interrupt! Goddamn you people! You’ve imprisoned me — all of us — to keep yourselves alive? That’s your reason? You self-righteous bastards!”

  Sebastian formed her hands into a temple. Then she said quietly, eyes averted. “Yes. That’s our reason. Don’t you want to know how?”

  “Never mind how! It doesn’t matter! You have have no goddamn right to put your own lives above everyone else’s!”

  A slow smile crept across Sebastian’s face. She snapped her fingers. David nodded and left the room. He returned with another little girl — this one perhaps six years old. A glance told Elspeth that this one was not ‘old’ in the same way Sebastian was — this was an actual child.

  “This is my daughter,” David said. “Victoria. Or Vicky.”

  “Hello,” Vicky said shyly, clinging to her father.

  For the girl’s sake, Elspeth held her anger in check. She simply said, “Hello, Vicky.”

  “Vicky was sick — very sick — on the outside. We had a house in Redondo Beach. We took her to a number of doctors, without much luck. Then, we took her to see a certain Doctor Elspeth Lune. Doctor Lune prescribed something called Quaofloxin. Within a week, Vicky was on death’s door. But we were offered a deal. Come here to this place, where Vicky would be cured. Or wait for Vicky to die.”

  “And I got better — a lot better!” Vicky said with a huge grin. Elspeth watched this little girl, feeling like someone just socked her in the gut. At least Vicky didn’t seem to recognize her.

  “Yes. Yes, you did,” David said, eyes misting. “Now go play.” Vicky sprinted away.

  Shock and ice and slashing snakes of gushing terror sizzled Elspeth’s innards. She sobbed uncontrollably.

  “So you see, Dr. Lune,” Sebastian said quietly. “You are not so above us. And you are not the only one who would do anything — anything at all — to save your child.”

  Her mind spun. I gave her Quaofloxin. For money. I gave that girl a drug I knew didn’t work. For money. And now, because of that, for the rest of her life, she’s imprisoned here in this place.

  Oh my God. And so is David.

  OhmyGodOhmyGodOhmyGod.

  I did this.

  How many more people did I do this to?

  “So this is why I’m here,” Elspeth managed to finally say in between sobs. Dear Oscar, forgive me. It makes sense now. “I am guilty, after all. I did commit a crime. I deserve to be in prison. This is my punishment. And that’s why I was chosen.”

  She broke down into uncontrollable sobs.

  When David offered her a shoulder and a hug, she refused. How could she accept? She knew David was in love with her. But now she also knew that she had damned both David and his daughter to an eternity in the Glass Prison.

  She didn’t deserve his shoulder.

  “SO HOW DOES it all work?” Elspeth asked when she regained enough composure to resume the talking. “This place. How does it keep people alive?”

  “Ah, the secret of our little fairyland,” Sebastian smiled. “Well that’s not so hard to explain. I can’t tell you how it works mind you — not the mechanism of it. Something to do with Mayans — they’re nuts about time, as I know David told you. They built this place. Nobody knows how it works. But I can explain it.”

  “Then explain it,” Elspeth said.

  “Well, it’s like this. We’re living the same week, over and over,” Sebastian said. “Inside the Glass Prison — which includes our little village, it’s always the week of July 4th, 2002. That’s a Thursday. George W. Bush is President. And I mean right now, this very second. We keep going until Thursday, July 11th 2002. Then, the earthquake hits — well, it’s not really an earthquake, just us rebounding, snapping back in time again.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense. Are we time-traveling? Or not? I mean, time travel doesn’t explain my pinky re-growing.”

  “Well it does, actually. Time travel isn’t at all like in the movies, at least not this kind. The Mayans always claimed that time was cyclical, that it didn’t go in a straight line from past, present to future …. and boy, were they right about that! There are certain events that have to happen at certain times. They’re written in ink, you can’t change them. For instance: in 2002, you still had your pinky, right?

  “Well … yeah. I was twenty-one.”

  “So here, you still have your pinkie. Because here it’s 2002. So it grew back, so you’d be aligned with your fate in 2002. It had to.”

  “No … that can’t be right. If that were true, I’d turn into a twenty-one-year old again? Right? Wouldn’t I … like, de-age, or something?”

  Sebastian shook her head. “No. It doesn’t work like that. Only major beats of fate are enforced, which means injuries are reversed. But you remain the age you were when you entered the prison, more or less. On the other hand, here’s another example: Milton. Milton, the poor bastard, dies every Sunday, July 7th 2002. No way around it. That’s his fate. So he relives it every week.”

  “What about that — that fire thing that came and killed him?”

  Sebastian shrugged. “Ah. That. That fire thing seems to be time’s way of correcting things, when events don’t quite conspire right — or can’t for some reason. Usually, we just kill old Milton — and believe me, we’re doing him a favor. Because if we don’t, it shows up and kills him. Which is the exact same reason why it healed you, by the way, when you fell from the Panopticon bridge. You weren’t meant to be injured like that in 2002. And there was no other way events could reasonably conspire to ‘correct’ that. That fire thing is nature’s last resort, it seems, when it can’t solve things elegantly and has to resolve to brute force.”

  “Okay. I get that. But what about Vicky? How do you explain here? Vicky wasn’t even born yet.”

  Sebastian shrugged. “That’s right. So in 2002, nothing has happened to Vicky yet. As a result, she is in pristine, actually textbook perfect health — and she always will be, so long as she stays here. Nothing can happen to her. Just like nothing can happen to me — or any of us. Which is why my body never grows older, by the way. I have the mind of an adult, but I will always have the body of a child. The same will be true with Vicky — but at least she’ll be alive. We’re all more or less immortal here. The only thing that can kill us is if we leave — if we re-enter the normal flow of time and events outside of this place.”

  “And the food,” Elspeth said, snapping her fingers. “That also explains the food! That’s why everything grows here — with no heat, no light, no water!”

  Sebastian nodded. “It all just regenerates every week, right on the dot. If it was alive in 2002, it’s alive here — nothing can stop that. And if somebody eats it, it just comes back when the next cycle comes up. Same with the parakeets and parrots — not that anybody eats them, just that it doesn’t matter that the prison isn’t tropical enough for them, that can’t kill them. Nothing can. Nothing is stronger than fate.”

  “Okay. Got that. But one thing I don’t get. Why me? Why did you kidnap me?”

  “Oh,” Sebastian said. “No. You’ve got that wrong. We didn’t kidnap you. We’re just the guards. We don’t decide who enters the prison; that’s not up to us.”

  No?

  “Who, then?”

  Sebastian shrugged. “We don’t know. We talk to them now and then, that’s it.”

  “Who brought you down here?”

  “They did, of course. I was dying from cancer in
2003 … a man asked me if I wanted to live, I said I did and the next thing I knew I was here. I don’t know who the man was. I barely remember it, actually. We all have a similar story. Just like you don’t know much about your abduction.”

  “So you didn’t bring Milton down here …”

  “No. Oh, no. We wouldn’t have done that. I don’t know what his story is or even why he is here.”

  “Okay. But the people who put us all here. You say you talk to them. How?”

  “Notes, usually. Paper. We can’t leave, but we can slip notes out and they can slip notes in. You already know that the door you came in through is up at the top of the ball — there’s a sort of mailbox up there also.”

  “And you have no idea who they are. Or why they keep this place running. Or what the purpose of the prison is?”

  “Not really,” Sebastian said, as if this were a stupid question. “But we don’t care. Why would we? Here, it’s Never Never Land. Here, we live forever.”

  Elspeth nodded. “So long as you keep everyone else imprisoned, you mean.”

  “Yes. That’s the price.”

  “I see.”

  Sebastian jumped up. “Well! Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way … I guess it’s time to show you your new home.”

  “My new …?”

  “You didn’t think we were going to make you go back to your cell, now did you?” Sebastian laughed. “We’re not so heartless, Elspeth. You’ve got a place among us now. The Order of the Black Dove was always real — just not what you thought it was. We’ve got a few new houses up, some real nice ones that …”

  “So you’re not going to let me leave.” She crossed her arms.

  “Well … no.” She blinked as though this were obvious. “We can’t. Even we are still still prisoners, ultimately.”

  “Well, you can’t because you’ll die if you leave. But I can.”

  Sebastian shook her head. “No. We’re not to let anyone out. That’s the deal. The people who slip us the sheets of paper are absolutely clear about that. That’s the price.”