Solitary

by Alexander Gordon Smith

  Alex Sawyer never existed. You are one of us.

  The fingers flexed, as if they were pulling something out of me, and with nothing more than a whimper I fell into the gaping emptiness that had once been my soul.

  * * *

  I WAS STANDING IN A MUDDY TRENCH, and for a moment I thought I was free. Then I glanced up at the sky and saw an endless void of darkness and knew that I was dreaming.

  To my left and right were slick earth walls the color of blood, sheer and too high to climb. Not that I’d have wanted to—beyond I could make out dull explosions that shook the air and caused a fine rain of soil. I was about to take my eyes from the sides of the trench when I noticed a vague shape in the mud. I couldn’t quite see what it was until two slits appeared and a pair of eyes stared back at me.

  By the time a mouth had opened up beneath those eyes and unleashed a groan of desperation I was already running. The ground gripped my feet the way it always does in dreams, slowing my escape. And when I looked down, it was hands I saw pushing from the mud—cracked and broken fingers snatching at my legs. I kicked out at them, trying not to lose my balance, trying not to fall.

  But there were simply too many, dozens of hands and faces emerging from the soil like the living dead. I felt the world spin, saw the ground rush up to meet me. There was no impact. Before I could land, the trench seemed to freeze—all except for a puddle of filth right beneath my face. The muddy water bulged up, then slowly parted to reveal a face beneath, caked in dirt but still familiar.

  “What do you want?” I asked it, although my voice made no sound.

  The mouth opened and moved as though it was speaking, but again I could hear nothing.

  “Who are you?” I asked wordlessly, studying the eyes, the nose, trying to remember where I’d seen the face before. It didn’t stop talking, but there may as well have been a sheet of soundproof glass between us. I focused on its lips, caked in mud but visible.

  Don’t … I made out, reading the way they moved.

  forget … It could have been any of a million words but somehow I knew. Just like I knew what was coming next.

  your name, the figure mimed. I opened my mouth to reply, but before I could do so the face morphed into an expression of pure terror, its eyes like diamonds set into the wet earth. It was only then that I recognized myself in the mud, the face a mirror image of my own. It—I—tried to say something else, but my mirror face was sucked back into the ground, mud filling its mouth and nose, flowing over its still-open eyes until nothing remained.

  “Wait!” I yelled. “Wait!”

  Then the rest of the trench once again found life, zombie hands grabbing my legs and clothes and head and pulling me down into the grave. My heart lurched, the sensation of being buried alive too terrifying for my sleeping mind. The trench exploded into dust, darkness flooding in like water and propelling me back to the surface. I rose from the dream like a drowning man, gasping for air and clutching at the night.

  It didn’t take long for me to remember that the real world was even more horrific than my nightmare.

  But far worse was the fact that, for several seconds after waking, I couldn’t remember who I was.

  BY

  ALEXANDER GORDON SMITH

  ESCAPE FROM FURNACE

  LOCKDOWN

  SOLITARY

  Copyright © 2009 by Alexander Gordon Smith

  All rights reserved

  First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited, 2009

  First American edition, 2010

  www.fsgteen.com

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Smith, Alexander Gordon, 1979–

  Solitary / Alexander Gordon Smith.— 1st American ed.

  p. cm. — (Escape from Furnace 2)

  Summary: Imprisoned for a murder he did not commit, fourteen-year-old Alex Sawyer thinks that he has escaped the hellish Furnace Penitentiary, but instead he winds up in solitary confinement, where new horrors await him.

  ISBN: 978-0-374-32492-6

  [1. Prisons—Fiction. 2. Horror stories. 3. Science fiction.] I. Title.

  PZ7.S6423So 2010

  [Fic]—dc22

  2009030843

  eISBN 978-1-4299-2550-1

  First Farrar Straus Giroux eBook Edition: December 2010

  Table of Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Confession

  The River

  Hunted

  Buried Alive

  The Throat

  Daylight

  Welcoming Party

  The Hole

  Thoughts from the Abyss

  Screams

  Communication

  Visitors

  Snatched

  Recovery

  The War

  Preparation

  The Infirmary

  Specimens

  Abandoned

  Lost Boys

  The Steeple

  Breaking and Entering

  The Charnel House

  In Hiding

  Doubts

  Choices

  The Only Way Is Up

  Retreat

  Bait

  Goodbyes

  The Incinerator

  Excerpt

  By Alexander Gordon Smith

  Copyright