“And with that Salvatore embraced me and said farewell.”
The old man stopped speaking and closed his eyes.
“Was he reported?” Iliff asked. “Was he caught?”
The old man’s eyes startled open. “Mm? Oh, no, young master, no. He made it out.” He smiled faintly. “Ah, I missed my dear Salvatore, missed him greatly. The crevices were far lonelier spaces without him. I would recall the stories we used to tell each other. I thought several times of joining him, but then would only cling to my routines more closely. Then one day I discovered I was an old man.” He chuckled and patted his white hair.
“Did you ever see him again?”
“Yes,” the old man said. “In a dream. Many, many years after his departure. He was standing on a high place, looking down on me. I cannot tell you my joy. ‘Salvatore!’ I called up to him. He smiled. ‘Greetings my dear friend,’ he said. ‘My journey has been long and difficult. It has carried me through deep, dark places and over lands strange and wonderful. But all of that is behind me. I can now see the Sun. I know who I am and where I come from. And now I am free. Come, my friend. It is never too late to go beyond your walls. I will await you here.’ And that was all.”
The dream was at once extraordinary and familiar to Iliff. He felt that if he could just sit still with it for a moment—
“Aha!” the old man exclaimed. “It appears your crew is ready to resume its work. Come, young master.” He labored to his feet and went to retrieve his broom.
Iliff hurried after him. “Tell me, sir,” he said. “Why were you so eager to share your story?”
“Why, to warn you of the crevices, of course.”
And with that the old man leaned over his broom and tottered back to the work site.
* * *
That afternoon a bed became available in the block for the aged and infirm. By the time Iliff returned to his cell, the one opposite his was open, its interior cleaned out.
Chapter 3
In the weeks following the old man’s departure, a deep discontent fell over Iliff. The prison corridors seemed darker, the stone walls closer. His routines felt stale and empty, his work tiresome. And without his playing cards to occupy him at day’s end, he had nothing to do but sit in his cell and turn over the old man’s story in his mind.
“Yuri?” he whispered late one night.
“Hm?”
“That story…”
“It was just a tale.”
“But how do we know?”
“Because none of those things are possible,” Yuri whispered. “I told you.”
Iliff walked to his cell door and grasped the bars. Except for the see-sawing breaths of the prisoners around him, the silence of the cellblock was absolute. The guards did not even patrol at this hour.
“But what if there is something beyond these walls?”
“There isn’t.”
“Some other world?”
“No.”
Iliff heard his friend get up from his cot and make his way to the door. When he spoke again his voice was very close.
“He was just an old man, Iliff. An addle-minded old man. His story is nothing to be losing sleep over.”
Iliff stared out at the dark, at the empty cell he could not see.
“There’s a reason he is where he is now,” Yuri added.
“Yes,” Iliff said. “I know.”
* * *
Some days later, the mixer confronted Iliff during a work break. His face was redder than usual. “For the past two weeks you’ve been slow with the trowel,” he barked. “You keep the porter waiting and hold up the sanders. The men around me grumble that they’re idle with their ingredients while I’m working harder than ever to keep the mortar from turning to rock. What about it?”
“I—I’m sorry.” Iliff fingered his trowel blade. “It’s just that I’ve been feeling poorly these past days. I promise to trowel more quickly.”
“Yes, we must all work with greater urgency. There are more and deeper fissures cropping up every day. If we don’t stay on top of them, this place will fall in on our heads. Now come, come, back to work.” He clapped Iliff on the shoulder, nearly knocking him to the floor, then hurried to round up the others.
Iliff had noticed the new fissures, of course. They had begun to spread shortly after the old man’s departure, tearing along corridors and blooming inside of cellblocks. And where they had once been only a trowel’s blade deep, sometimes two, the new variety were deeper by three to four times. Longer and longer extensions had to be built onto the wooden handles of the trowels.
Iliff stepped up his work as promised, but still the fissures spread. The problem became so great that the men were forced to work more hours. Rest breaks were cut short. Evening duty stretched until lights out and sometimes beyond. Morning call sounded earlier. The size of the repair crew doubled, then tripled. The efficient system under which the men had once labored now gasped and groaned as more and more bodies crowded the work spaces.
One day Iliff’s group was sent to a distant corridor. The men arrived in their largest numbers yet, their supply carts piled high. Iliff looked up at the walls in terror and awe. The mixer summoned the men to gather around him.
“We’ve not seen fissures like these,” he said. “They’re the broadest and deepest so far.”
The men shifted and grumbled.
“But do not despair,” he said, his voice climbing. “We’ll seal them just the same. Listen to me! We are no longer mere pourers and mixers, sanders and trowelers, porters and lantern-bearers. Our work remains our sacred duty, yes, but the stakes are higher now. Listen! An unseen Enemy threatens us. It is this Enemy that splits the stone and tears the walls asunder.”
Iliff started. Angry murmurs rose around him.
“That’s right,” the mixer cried. “We must become like soldiers of a regiment. We must wield our tools like weapons. Our labor will be hard and our fight unrelenting.” The murmurs became shouts. Men brandished their tools overhead. “This is a battle of wills. Never shall we draw back or battle with weak arms. Watch the man beside you, don’t let him falter. Don’t let him say that he is too tired or the effort futile. For should one man fall, the battle will become desperate indeed. There may be no getting it back. But I tell you, together we are mightier than this foe! Together we shall overcome and triumph at last! All stone will be sealed and all walls made solid, and they will endure in this way forever and ever!”
The eruption of cheers and jangles overcame Iliff until he was raising his voice with the others, pumping his trowel overhead.
“Listen!” the mixer called. “To begin we’re going to need four men, the smallest among us, to crawl inside and begin the repair work at the rear. It’s dark, perilous work, but necessary. For the deeper the crevice, the greater the Enemy’s advantage. Now, a show of hands! Who’s up to it?”
Iliff’s hand was among the first to fly up. His heart raced as the mixer looked over each of them. “All right,” the mixer said. “You, you, you, and you.” He pointed to Iliff last. “Good man, Iliff. And courage to you all.”
Iliff scaled the wall and entered the topmost crevice. A porter handed up his trowel and mortarboard. The space was too narrow for a lantern, and because Iliff had not thought to ask for a candle, he made do with what little light seeped in from the corridor. He flattened himself and shimmied to the rear of the narrowing space, pushing his trowel and mortarboard ahead. Once there, he pressed the tip of his blade into the darkest recess. Solid. He peeked toward the entrance, then turned again to the recess. He tapped the stone. Chink, chink, chink. With each sound, a guilty thrill ran through him.
At last he scraped a quantity of mortar from the board and went to work with his trowel.
* * *
In his cot that night Iliff could not sleep. He lay with his taped fingers behind his head, his eyes opened wide to the dark. He could not recall a day when so much had happened: rumors of an unseen Enemy, the mixer’s call to ar
ms, the responding cries of the workers. But it was the crevices that excited him most. Crevices large enough to crawl inside.
“Yuri,” he called.
“Hm?”
“The old man, he was telling the truth about the crevices.”
“So?”
“So, if he was telling the truth about that, more of his story could be true.” Iliff’s mind spun with the possibilities. “Think of it, Yuri. Maybe there was a Salvatore. Maybe he did find a way out of the prison. He might even have made it all the way to the Sun and looked upon it.”
“Nonsense,” Yuri murmured.
“What do you mean, nonsense?” Iliff felt his cheeks starting to burn. “You said his story was just a tale. Not just parts of it, but all of it. And now it turns out that some of it was true after a—”
“Shh, you’re talking too loud.”
Iliff said nothing for several moments. He had never become angry with his friend like this before.
“It’s just that I’m beginning to wonder about things,” Iliff whispered.
“What things?”
“Haven’t you ever wondered where we come from?”
“No. We come from here.”
“But how did we get here?”
“You don’t get to a place you’ve always been.”
“Yes, but how do you know we’ve always been here?” Iliff asked.
“What do you mean?”
“Our memories only go back so far. And then there’s just… nothing.”
“Right,” Yuri whispered. “Nothing.”
* * *
In the weeks that followed, the battle for the walls ground to a stalemate. The crew would repair one section of wall only to return the following day to find a neighboring section succumbing to still larger crevices. New prisoners appeared among the work crew. The mixer’s speeches became louder and more ominous.
“We are laboring hard,” he shouted one morning. “We are giving it everything we have, and still the walls split. Still they threaten to topple around us. Watch your fellows more closely then ever. There is still the Enemy, yes, but now I fear treachery. I’m certain of it!” Sweat flecked from his red face and rained from his pumping, pummeling fists. “Do your duty, I say! Root out this conspirator! Root him out and show him to me!”
Iliff scrambled up to his crevice, determined to work as hard as he could so as not to be mistaken for a conspirator.
He pushed his trowel and board inside the crevice but paused to look over the other workers. There were so many of them now. Most had been brought in from other cellblocks and were strangers to him. He watched them labor, almost on top of one another, their faces dark, their eyes shifting and fearful. Did none of them question the walls? he wondered. Did none of them question the prison and how they had come to be here?
Iliff entered the crevice and took up his trowel. But his arms felt listless, his hands weak. And as the day wore on, even the smallest amounts of mortar came to feel like the largest blocks of stone. Finally, when the act of lifting his trowel became too much—and he was certain that no one was close enough to hear—he shook the mortar from his blade, wedged it inside the very rear of the crevice, and pressed and pried until a small piece of stone clinked away.
Startled, Iliff groped in the dark for the cold shard and covered it with his hands. It was only after several moments that he realized his heart was pumping more vigorously than ever before.
* * *
Some nights later, Iliff awoke with a gasp. In his dream the stone walls of his cell had been edging in on him, closer and closer, until he could no longer move. In another few seconds he would have been crushed. He lay back on his cot, panting and damp with sweat. He was about to get up and light a candle when he heard Yuri clear his throat in the next cell.
“Are you awake?” Iliff whispered.
“Mm…”
“Would… would it be so bad to allow the walls to fail?”
“Fail?” There was a long silence. “How could you even ask such a thing?”
“But why?”
“Why what?”
“Why would it be bad?”
“Because the walls protect. If we allow them to fail, there’s no telling what might become of us.”
“But we don’t know.”
“What are you talking about?”
“We don’t know what would happen.”
“You’re a troweler, Iliff. Your only concern should be how to maintain this place.”
“I… can’t.”
“What?”
Yuri’s cot creaked, as if he were moving to sit up.
“I can’t do it anymore,” Iliff whispered.
“You have to,” Yuri insisted. “It’s your duty. Now more than ever.”
Iliff had no response.
“Go back to sleep and see how you feel in the morning.”
“It won’t help.”
“Please, Iliff, you’re saying very dangerous things.”
* * *
Iliff was right. He did not feel any different the next morning, or the many mornings that followed. In fact, it became harder for him to rise at first call, harder to merge with the mass of marching and chanting prisoners, harder to labor, harder to seal the crevices. He was convinced now that there was a world beyond the walls, one that the prison, with its stone blocks and routines and tales of unseen Enemies and conspirators, was trying to keep hidden. For indeed, thought Iliff, those were the tales. The old man’s story was the truth. The idea that he was being made to labor behind the concealment of this truth angered him, and he began each workday by secretly hacking out a piece of stone from the crevice he was assigned to. It was a harmless, hopeless act on the face of it, but it invigorated him like nothing else.
Then one day it happened.
A porter poked his head into the crevice at the same moment that the piece of stone Iliff had been working on broke away.
“You forgot your mortar—” the porter started to say.
Iliff tried to hide the stone as he turned toward the opening, but the porter had already seen it. His thin mouth gaped and his face began to blanch. Iliff felt the blood drain from his own face.
“N—no,” Iliff stammered, “I’m just preparing the surface…”
But the porter was already outside the crevice, already scuttling down the wall. Iliff hurried to the opening. He watched the man drop into the corridor and then dart his way through the crush of workers to where the mixer leaned into his long-handled spade. Iliff retreated into the shadows. After a moment, he peeked out to see the porter standing at the mixer’s shoulder, making jabbing motions with his hand, his Adam’s apple leaping up and down.
When at last the porter left his side, the mixer turned and stared at Iliff’s crevice. He formed no expression with his red face and made no gesture with his large hands, which unnerved Iliff far more than if he had done either.
Chapter 4
Late that night, after all the other prisoners in the cellblock had fallen asleep, Iliff rose from his bed and dressed in the dark. His fingers trembled as they pushed the buttons through his prison shirt and pulled the laces on his work shoes.
He went to his cell door and listened into the corridor. Nothing. He struck a match and touched it to his candle, cupping his hand around the sudden flare. He moved the small light around the top of his cell door. The bolt appeared on the second pass. It was the one the guards always pulled to let him out. Iliff extended his arm between the bars and tested it. To his surprise, it turned and slid down without a catch. The door eased open on its hinges.
Iliff stood and examined the bolt, marveling that something so simple could have held him, or any of them, for so long. For the briefest moment he forgot his fear. But then he stepped out into the towering darkness, and the great weight of what he was about to do fell over him. He turned back to his cell. From the outside, it looked almost inviting. There were his cot and his table, just inside the brown reach of his light, his personals by the w
ashbasin.
Someone hissed his name.
Iliff started and jerked the candle to his chest, nearly extinguishing it. But the voice was familiar, and when he turned and the flame swelled again, he saw taped fingers holding the bars of the adjoining cell.
“What are you doing?” Yuri whispered.
For half an instant Iliff considered slipping away. He had not wanted anyone to know what he was planning. But it was Yuri, after all. Iliff sidled over until he was almost before him, his hand back around the flame.
“I’m going,” he whispered.
“Going where?”
Iliff glanced all around before speaking. “He said there was a room at the bottom of the prison. A room with a five-pointed crevice and a dirt wall.”
“Who?”
“The old man.”
“The old—? Iliff, this is madness! I’m begging you, get back inside your cell and close the door. Do it before someone sees you.”
Beyond the bars, Iliff could just make out the dim contours of his friend—head craned, eyes bearing glints of the concealed light.
“I can’t.”
“Please, Iliff.”
“You tell me to forget the story, but it won’t go away. All day and all night it’s there. I can’t perform my duties. I can’t sleep. I can’t do anything but wonder”—he lowered his whispered voice even further—“about the places beyond the prison.”
“But it was just a tale, Iliff.”
“I have to find out.”
“A tale.”
“I have to find out.”
“Iliff—”
“Look, if there’s no such room then I’ll know. I’ll know it was just a tale. I’ll know that the prison is all there is. I’ll come back and labor as I did before. Then… then perhaps everything will return to the way it was.”
“You could be reported.”
“I’m in more danger of being reported if I stay,” Iliff whispered. “The mixer suspects me of treachery.” He looked down the dark corridor.
Yuri stood silent for several moments. He adjusted his grip on the bars. “Let’s pretend you do find the room,” he whispered at last. “What will you do then? Huh?”
Escape (The Prisoner and the Sun #1) Page 2