The Book That THEY Do Not Want You To Read, Part 1

by Andy Ritchie

  I was still crying softly, the occasional juddering sob interspersed with sad, repetitive sniffing.

  I was a pathetic, broken man. I was Orwell’s Winston Smith after he had been in Room 101.

  I had been made useless by THEM.

  Then I heard footsteps approaching along the corridor...

  I was almost sick with fear. I could feel my bowels turning to liquid.

  Had I written enough, I wondered? Had I included everything, just like he had said, left nothing out? I looked down at the sheet of paper. There was painfully little on it really, in spite of my efforts...and that terrified me. Would he be angry? Would he hurt me...again?

  Would he kill me this time?

  The footsteps stopped at the door. My breath was held, my heart was pounding.

  The clunk of the disengaging electronic locks.

  I start to cry again.

  The door swung slowly open and a guard, dressing in black, shuffled slowly into the room.

  I noticed, in spite of my terror, that his movements were awkward, his gait uncomfortable...and the front of his uniform appeared to be stained with something wet. There was also some damage to the skin on his left cheek, just below the eye.

  Then I noticed the hand on his right shoulder, a big hand, moving him, guiding him...

  Suddenly, the hand pushed the guard towards me.

  ‘Release him...quietly.’

  It was a harsh, guttural whisper, full of threat, but I recognised it nonetheless.

  Tukaal.

  He looked at me with eyes wide with emotion. Horror, anger, sadness...perhaps guilt. Then he put a finger to his lips, indicating that I should remain quiet.

  I nodded, casting my gaze to the guard who had moved the wheeled table (somewhat noisily I thought) to one side and was now releasing the painfully tight chest strap. As I watched him do so, I remember thinking, quite lucidly considering the situation, two very specific thoughts:

  1. With my hands freed up to enable my to write, why had I not undone the painfully tight chest-strap, or the ankle straps for that matter? The answer, of course, was easy. Because I had nowhere to go if I had, and I was shit-scared that the man who had tortured me would become angry when he returned.

  2. The guard looked just like an ordinary guy; late 20s maybe, average height, average build, blue eyes, brown hair...for some inexplicable reason I had expected...wanted perhaps...no, hoped, hoped that he would be a big, bruising thug who sported a shaven head, a swastika tattoo on his cheek and a vicious scar that ran from above his left eye, over the bridge of his nose and down to the corner of his mouth. But he didn’t. Instead, he looked so plain, so unassuming...so unthreatening, not at all like a guard who works for psychotic torturers who lock people up in dark cells and mercilessly brutalise them. This guy looked like he would be more at home stacking shelves in Tesco!

  As I continued to study him, the guard removed my ankle restraints and, once they were free, I immediately tried to stand.

  Just as immediately, my legs gave way beneath me and I collapsed noisily to the floor, banging my right elbow painfully on the concrete. I say painfully, but all these things are relative. If I had fallen like that at home, I’d have been moaning about it for days, treating the injury with Witchhazel to stop the swelling, popping God-knows how many paracetamol to deaden the incredible discomfort, resting my arm on a pillow as I lounged on a chair, watching television, too racked by pain to move.

  But here, now, in this place, after all that I had endured, this particular pain was already beginning to ease, the blow nothing more than a small trickle of soreness flowing into an ocean of agony, lasting no more than a moment before being absorbed into the greater hurt.

  Tukaal made to help me up, and in so doing, his attention was momentarily distracted. That was when the Tesco Shelf-Stacker made his move...which, in itself, is something I just can’t get my head around.

  Don’t these guards read books or watch films? Haven’t they realised that whenever a character referred to simply as ‘a guard’ tries to do something heroic, they nearly always end up, as a minimum, getting the shit kicked out of them? If it were me, I know what I would be doing, and that is keeping my head down and praying that everyone forgets I’m even there!

  But the Tesco Shelf-Stacker didn’t.

  He decided to act.

  Perhaps he did so out of misplaced loyalty and devotion to duty, or a dream of glory and praise as the one who foiled the escape, or fear of failure and the implications that that may have for his job or his life. Perhaps he simply forget that he was only a guard, probably not on much more than the minimum wage, with no healthcare and no pension...

  I don’t know and, to be brutally honest, I don’t really care!

  All I know is that, for some reason that will only ever be known to him, the guard grabbed the wheeled table and half-rolled, half-threw it towards Tukaal as I flailed around pathetically on the floor. The table never reached Tukaal of course, but not because he nimbly side-stepped the careering object, oh no. It never reached him because I had fallen between the guard and the alien and the hurtling table crashed straight into my back, one leg hitting me on the shoulders, the other hitting the small of my back.

  I let out a cry; pain, anger, despair, all mixed into one.

  Would it never end?!?

  Was my life now destined to be nothing more than a constant barrage of bumps, bangs and bruises? Was I trapped in some kind of galactic pain vortex, destined always now to suffer, forever to endure?

  Of course not. But, believe me, it certainly felt like that at the time!

  Anyway, back to the scuffle with the guard who, having thrown the table, was now making a bee-line for the door. He had no way of getting to it before Tukaal, but I reckon he thought he may be able to use his momentum to somehow barge past the diplomat from outer space.

  Fat chance.

  I had seen what Tukaal was capable of when he had swatted those dark-suits outside the Debenhams restaurant. I knew the guard was in for a nasty surprise.

  Quite how nasty, I couldn’t have predicted.

  As the guard was about to crash his shoulder into Tukaal’s chest, the alien nimbly side-stepped him. As he did so, he placed his right hand on the back of the guard’s neck and, with a power thrust of his arm, propelled the guard’s head into the concrete wall behind him with a sickening thud akin to the sound of a melon being dropped on the tiled floor of a kitchen.

  The guard’s body immediately went limp, slumping awkwardly to the floor, a thick red line of blood charting the path of his shattered and bloody features as they slid slowly down the wall. The body came to rest in a crumpled heap that suddenly seemed small and pathetic, nothing more than a pile of rags.

  It did not take a genius or a medical professional to figure out that the guard was dead. That sound, that terrible, sickening sound, that was not just his nose breaking, it was his forehead, his eye socket, his cheekbone and his jaw all crumbling back into his brain. I guess he died instantly...but that didn’t make the shock of his death any less terrible...

  For the second time in just a few hours I had witnessed death, and each time it had been the particularly horrific sight of mangled faces, complete with oozing blood from smashed noses and lips and eyes...

  Suddenly, I felt anger. A dark, terrible anger. What a waste of a life. Ended. Abruptly. No ceremony, no poignant last words, no dignified last breath. Just finished. Kaput. Finito.

  As had happened often in the last couple of days, another movie scene incongruously entered into my thoughts. This time, it was Kevin Costner in The Untouchables, and Costner is forced to shoot a man he has cornered in the cabin when the man wouldn’t give up his gun. As a result, Costner, in a fit of anguish, cries:

  ‘What is this, some kind of game!?!’

  Was this just a game?

  All this, the cells, the torture, the dark-suits, the guards.

  Was it all just a game?

  If it was, then the guard
had definitely just lost.

  ‘We have very little time, Jeth,’ Tukaal said, reaching down to me, ‘We have to go...now.’

  I took a deep, deep breath, nodded determinedly and, grabbing his hands, allowed myself to be hauled to my feet.

  I felt nauseous, unsteady and incredibly weak.

  But I still felt angry, and that anger began to give me strength. Besides, I wasn’t about to let an alien carry me around under his arm (which I was sure Tukaal was more than capable of). A man, after all, has his pride.

  Having hauled me to my (slightly wobbly) feet, Tukaal placed his big hands on my shoulders and looked deep into my eyes. It was a look which was both comforting and disconcerting at the same time; comforting because there was a look of genuine concern in his gaze; disconcerting because he seemed to look not only into my eyes, but deep into my very soul.

  Then he smiled a big, beaming smile, not exactly the sort of smile you would expect of see on the face of a man that had just killed someone, that’s for sure. But then, of course, Tukaal is not a man.

  ‘How are we going to get out?’ I asked weakly as we moved towards the door.

  ‘Not quite sure yet,’ Tukaal replied, with that broad grin still on his face. He made to say something else, but I interrupted him.

  ‘Don’t tell me, you’re making this up as you go along.’

  It just came out. Another movie cliché, to which he nodded enthusiastically.

  If I didn’t know better, I thought to myself, I’d swear he was enjoying himself.

  That was when a peculiar thought struck me.

  I didn’t know better.

  I didn’t know anything at all.

  There was a very real possibility that Tukaal was enjoying himself, death of the guard included. Perhaps he had been itching to do this sort of thing all of his genetically engineered life; he is, after all, nothing more than a glorified diplomat, so maybe getting into the thick of some action was satisfying an ambition he had had since he was an embryonic sac in a laboratory petri-dish somewhere on planet Weird.

  Then again, it was also a very real possibility that Tukaal was not enjoying himself at all, and that he was, in fact, just as shit-fucking-scared as I was, only he was better at not showing it.

  Frankly, I didn’t really care either way

  All I cared about was whether he was indeed making things up as he went along, or whether he actually had some kind of plan for getting us out of this place safely.

  I really hoped it was the latter.

  Whilst I had been gathering my somewhat chaotic thoughts, Tukaal had been acting. He now had the door fully open and was peering out into the corridor to check the coast was clear. With an expression that was suddenly serious once more, he beckoned me to join him.

  And I did...but not before taking one last look around the cell...the high-backed wooden chair complete with bloodied straps...the slumped body of the guard...the overturned table on wheels...the discarded pen and paper...

  The notes.

  I had bled for those notes, cried for those notes, stared into the oblivion of despair for those notes. I had written them because, amidst the fear and the anguish, they had been my only hope.

  But not now.

  Now there was a different hope...and with it, there was an opportunity, albeit a rather feeble one, to show defiance.

  I shuffled a little awkwardly across to where the papers had been scattered during the table’s final journey. The notes, all heavily creased and one badly torn, were near the wall. I gathered them all up, suddenly ashamed of them, of what they said about me. They screamed of my cowardice, my weakness, my desperation to please someone who had given me nothing but pain...someone who was likely to only ever give me pain.

  And that was when I became angry at myself, at my patheticness...at my naivety.

  Had I really allowed myself to believe that by telling THEM everything I knew, by giving them every last ounce of information I possessed, that THEY were going to treat me any differently?

  Yes. In my fear and my pain and my desperation, I had.

  Only now, when the fear had lessened and the pain had become bearable and the despair had started to lift, did I realise how foolish I had been.

  ‘Jeth. We need to go now.’

  Angrily, I thrust the sheets of paper into my trouser pocket and joined Tukaal at the door. That was when I noticed, for the first time, the faint red light above it.

  ‘It’s a camera,’ Tukaal said softly. ‘It relays pictures back to the central control room at the end of this corridor from where all the cells are monitored.’

  My heart sank. Our escape was being watched and plans to thwart it were being hatched even as we spoke.

  ‘Don’t worry, Jeth. The guard who is based in the control room is...indisposed.’

  ‘Like this one?’ I asked with a tone of voice far more harsh and accusing than I had intended.

  ‘No,’ Tukaal replied, his manner suddenly very subdued, ‘Not like this one.’

  And with that, he turned away...and I felt like a real piece of shit.

  What a thing to say.

  The guy had come to rescue me. He didn’t have to. No doubt he could have escaped quite easily without me, but he hadn’t. Instead, he had risked his freedom, maybe even his own life to find me, set me free and look to take me to safety.

  And what do I do?

  Talk to him as if he was some kind of baby killer, me all high and mighty and judgemental.

  ‘Sorry, that came out all wrong,’ was all I could think of to say.

  He grunted in response, his expression hidden from me. I’m not sure if he was accepting my apology (poor though it was) or whether he was saying ‘Fuck off, you ungrateful little bastard.’

  I guess I’ll never really know. But I have my suspicions. After all, I know what I would have said.

  With no more delay, Tukaal moved silently out into the corridor. I followed, a little less silently.

  ‘Pull the door closed behind you,’ he whispered.

  I did as he requested and, once the door had closed, there was once again the disturbing sound of the door’s electronic locks re-engaging, and the indicator light on the swipe-card reader to the left of the door turned from a welcoming green to a forbidding red.

  The corridor in which we now stood was about twenty-five yards long, lit by six bulbs all hooded by the same type of light shade that had been on the one in the cell. I could see the dull red glow of other swipe-card readers, nine others in total, meaning that there were five cells on each side.

  At one end of the corridor was a door. This, presumably, led to the control room in which the other, non-dead guard resided. This meant that, unfortunately, there was no convenient fire exit through which we could make our escape because the other end of the corridor was a blank, grey concrete wall.

  ‘I’ve got a bit of an idea what’s beyond the control room, including the fact that there are more guards. But that seems to be our only way out.’

  ‘Aren’t there any ventilation ducts, service tunnels, sewer pipes, anything like that. There should be, there always is in the movies when people are trying to escape.’

  Tukaal turned to me and gave me what I can only describe as a withering stare.

  ‘The ventilation system is above the false ceiling that runs along this corridor, along with the electrical and security systems. At its widest point, the ventilation ducts are about 25 centimetres wide. Perhaps, if we were both incredibly thin and flexible, we may be able to use them, but seeing as neither of us are, I suggest they are of little use to us!’

  I think, at this point, I lapsed into a sulky silence. All right, I had been out of order with the comment about the dead guard, but I had apologised. He didn’t need to keep making an issue of it.

  Tukaal hurried down the corridor to the control room door, moving swiftly and with that same unnerving silence. I scuttled along after him, trying hard to be equally without sound and once more failing miserably.
/>
  When we reached the door, Tukaal produced from his pocket a swipe card, presumably the one he had used to open my cell door and which had belonged to the now dead guard with the bloody face.

  A further glance confirmed that it was.

  As Tukaal moved it through the swipe-card reader, I could clearly see the photograph of the guard staring back at me, features sullen and unsmiling, but certainly a lot more intact that they had become.

  Robert Sandford.

  That was his name.

  Guardian Security.

  That was the company he worked for.

  The little indicator light on the swipe-card reader changed to green and the electronic locks clunked open. Tukaal pulled the heavy door open and we both entered the control room, which was uncomfortably bright after the relative gloom of my cell and the corridor.

  It was a simple enough set-up. A curved console which held an array of video screens, in front of which, slumped in his chair, was presumably the guard whom Tukaal had dealt with before coming to my cell.

  As Tukaal made his way across the room to check the corridor beyond through the small window in the other door, I moved behind the chair of the unconscious guard to look at the screens. I have to admit that it was a morbid sense of curiosity that made me do this, a desire to see the chair to which I had been strapped in the cell in which I had been tortured.

  Of the twelve video screens before me, ten of them were labelled with the term ‘Interrogation Room’ followed by a number. Interrogation Room, I noted, not Interview Room like they have in police stations. The word ‘interrogation’ made it very clear that what was going to go on in those cells (because even the word ‘room’ seemed wrong) involved a lot more than raised voices and harsh language. It was also interesting to note that only two of the screens were active, Interrogation Room 1 and Interrogation Room 7. Interrogation Room 7 was obviously mine, as the upturned wheeled table could be clearly seen on the floor. So could one foot of the dead guard.

  I presumed that Interrogation Room 1 was where they had kept Tukaal.

  What must I have looked like to the guard who sat in this chair, I wondered? What must he have thought as he saw my face contorted in agony as I endured that horrific torture? What must he have thought when he saw me sobbing uncontrollably as I desperately scribbled those notes onto that pad?