“Want me to carry them up for you? All I’d ask is a cuppa.”
I remembered don’t let him in. I couldn’t remember why, though. And why should I listen, anyway? And he wasn’t that old, what, mid-forties? And he looked good and sweaty and alive, and seriously I considered taking him up to my room.
But the prisoners.
We unloaded the prisoner and tied her tightly to a trolley. This one was so fresh, she still had pink skin tones and a heavy pulse at the temple.
“Fiery bitch,” the boatman said. “Watch that filthy mouth of hers that she doesn’t bite you. She reckons she’s hungry, wants a bite of meat. I’d give her this, but she doesn’t deserve it,” he said, his hands cupping his genitals.
The woman struggled.
He offered me a cigarette; no thanks, and he lit it and smoked as he rowed away.
I dragged her up the stairs. She tried to talk, and the noise was annoying to listen to. Like my brother trying to talk while he brushed his teeth.
Like the constant crackle of the Time Ball Tower.
I was curious to know what she’d have to say, how she’d say it. The old ones were slow, unbearably so. This one was only in her thirties in the real world, only been preserved two months, so still fairly normal.
“Don’t bite,” I said. Would she actually have anything to say or just abuse?
I took off her gag, but she only whimpered.
“You’ll have to learn to be more interesting than that.” The woman was probably terrified; who wouldn’t be? I didn’t care, much. Perhaps I would have when I’d first arrived. Now, I felt almost nothing.
She’d lost a lot of weight, according to her records. Photos at her trial had her quite hefty, a fast food chip eater, a soft drink guzzler. Now I could pick her up quite easily, although by the second floor she felt heavier.
The most recent man punished in there I’d taken out a week earlier, so the box was aired.
The woman struggled when she saw it.
She’d been in one before.
“You’ll be in here two months. Maybe three. Depends. I’ll bring you something in a while.” I was vague about this because I hadn’t checked the instructions yet.
I stripped her naked. It was cleaner that way. I’d have to come back and pull out the base of the box every now and then, like a birdcage.
They’d given me a CD to play on loop. Children crying at that really annoying pitch. People telling her how much they hated her, how much of a worm she was.
She killed her daughter partly because she hated the crying.
Her one chance to talk and she said, “Mercy. Please. Mercy.”
“No mercy.”
“Put me next to Mussolini. Won’t you?”
So she’d heard the stories, too. I closed the lid. Sat and listened to her whimper for a while. Then went and told the other prisoners about the new arrival.
“She says she wants to sit next to Mussolini. Who wants to be him?”
If they could have raised their hands, they would have.
I returned once a day to take a photo of her.
The Ball dropped.
Sometimes I smelled roses.
The Ball dropped.
They were due to be fed, but they could wait. A week or more, easy.
I swam.
I found an injured seabird and took it inside to nurture. Kept it from the prisoners. They didn’t understand tenderness.
The Ball dropped.
The Ball dropped.
My seabird
recovered, and I set it free, watching it flap away in the wind, winding back once to the tower then away, away. You’d almost think it was symbolic.
My calendar told me it was time to pull the woman out. It was hard to believe, but there it was.
There were flakes of paint, dust on the lid. I found a dustpan and broom and swept them up, the strands of the brush leaving trails in the dust.
I lifted the lid, bracing myself for a possible attack, holding tight to a solid metal torch. You could crack skull or bone easily, they were so brittle.
She had shrunk, definitely. She rested easily in the box, where I had had to shove her down. She was asleep, her eyelids quivering. I poked her.
“Wake up.”
“Not—
“…asleep.”
Her voice had slowed. My own thoughts were slower here, had to be or I’d go crazy with the lack of speed.
She opened her eyes. They were still clear and yellow, although marked with red lines. She smelled like dried shit, the piles you see on a city street on Sunday mornings, even though all the shit dropped through to the tray underneath and I had tipped it out the window. There wasn’t much in the tray. The first week, mere dry pellets, and with no food at all for six weeks, beyond the vitamin pills I’d left on a dish, the prisoner produced even less.
She was sufficiently weak to join the others and so grateful to be out of the box that she panted like a dog wanting to please her master.
“I’ll be your friend, your best friend. I can stop you being lonely,” she said.
“Only the lonely,” they sang to me. They often did it.
“I’m not lonely. I’ve got plenty of friends. A boyfriend.” I’d had one. I would have another.
“You don’t like any of them, though. They all annoy the crap out of you and you know it,” she said.
“They’re all right. It’ll be better once I go back to.” I wasn’t sure why I lied and said it was Uni instead of Tech. Pathetic, really.
Wheedling, sly, yet I knew what this woman had done. The crime so fresh it was still on her breath like bitter almonds.
I lifted one of her arms. It still felt meatier than the other prisoners, but I could carry her without the trolley.
I covered her head with a small black sack because she still had teeth and they’d been known to bite.
I carried her down to the others.
“Get your back into it,” the Abortion Doctor said.
It was astonishing that a human would still have that intense need to survive. The body taking over from the mind, struggling feebly against death.
There was silence as I settled her in. They tried to shift, all of them making room so I’d put her down sit next to them. What did they want from her? Company alone? Or would they victimize her?
“Female,” Wee Willie Winkie said. “A Vagina.”
She struggled slightly.
“It’ll be all right,” I said. “They’ll be gentle. Just like your hero.”
She’d given her baby to a musician, a guy she adored. He was dead, murdered on the street and not a single person cared after what he’d done. She was the one paying the price, but it wasn’t enough.
They got stuck in, talking dirty to her, and she gave as good as she got. But she went too far. It was good in a way; hearing her weasely voice describe just what she’d done made it very clear to me what level of evil she resided in.
The Ball dropped.
I missed
the internet. The isolation was good in many ways, and the separation from all the shit that was transmitted, but still. It would be nice to catch up.
But there was a certain closeness about the Time Ball Tower, a completeness about it that made me lose interest in what went on elsewhere.
My head ached often, and I succumbed to a handful of aspirin.
“Watch your stomach lining,” they said. The painkillers made me sleepy and the prisoners took the chance to ask me questions, prying into my personal life, wanting information about the real world, anything to alleviate the boredom and, in the end perhaps, help themselves to escape.
While I was not in any way charmed by them, I did come to enjoy their long life experience. No “callow youths,” they always had a story. A conversation.
I took aspirin, kept hydrated, doctor’s orders, even though I thought the doctor was an idiot.
The Ball dropped.
As I
drank cold coffee, I found myself i
rritated by them, seeking fault.
I walked the line with a clipboard, adding days for infringements.
“Your hair is looking unkempt, there. Three days added.”
They all believed that somehow, some day, they would be released, that there would be an end to their sentence. Even an hour added hurt them.
The new woman wailed most of the time and the other prisoners tried to drown her out. “Ask us anything,” they said. “Get her out of here, ask us anything, distract us from the bitch.”
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll move her for a while, but you’ll answer lots of questions for me.”
I tied the woman up in a sheet, like a mummy, and carried her downstairs where I stashed her underneath the steps.
“Can you remember my mother? Father? Grandmother?” I asked them.
“Who? You all look the same after a while.”
Was that true? Or would they remember, like people remember presidents or Prime Ministers?
“I’m pretty sure you remember every last one of us.”
“You, we’ll remember. All of us are in love with you,” they said, as if I’d be flattered to be admired by this bunch of murderous, desiccated, malodorous people.
“Worst one was that Burnett Barton. Come out to gloat whenever he could. Look at me, look at you, he’d say. As if he was better than us.”
“Why do you hate Burnett so much?”
“He didn’t stop this,” Grayson said.
The Strongest interrupted him. “He put us in here.”
“Stop what?”
“Stop the process.”
He was interrupted again. “That he started himself.”
“Harriet, too. My ancestor. She was a smarty, they reckon. I was told it was her idea.”
“Oh,” they said, every last one of them fishy as all fuck.
The Ball dropped.
My job list said, “Bath time” and detailed the bathing order as well as the process.
“This is a rewarding chore, which you will discover if you stay alert,” it said.
Grayson was first, moving down the ranks.
Grayson.
Wee Willie Winkie.
Grandfather.
The Executioner.
The Strongest Man.
The Baby Farmer.
The First Black Widow.
The Second Black Widow.
The Scientist.
The Priest.
The Cannibal.
The Washing Machine Salesman.
The Abortion Doctor.
The Councilor
And so on.
Bathing was done downstairs, in the basement, where water gathered. Really it was about pain rather than cleanliness, a reminder of what once was, a memory of being clean. A state they would never truly reach again. They’ll fight it, I was warned. I realized later it was because they knew what came next. They knew what came after the bath.
“We don’t need bathing. Don’t go down to the basement. The troll will know it and step inside. You’ll find all of us sucked clean out,” Grayson said.
“He’s not real,” I said.
“He’s coming in. Do something or you’ll be lost. He’ll take you as his mistress and he keeps them tied under the water. He doesn’t care how they rot. As long as the bones are still together, he’s in love.”
“You’ll do anything to get out of a bath,” I said. I wasn’t scared. I knew what they were up to. Like the Ku Klux Klan, who pretended to be the ghosts of confederate soldiers to terrify the people they vilified, these prisoners wanted me weakened with fear and doubt. I felt none of that. All I felt was curiosity.
Every last one of them fussed and fidgeted about the bath.
“It’ll make you feel human,” I said. “Almost normal.”
They wriggled as much as they were able, as if that would stop it.
“Give us your undies,” Robert Peter Tait, inmate from 1961 said. “Because you think you’re not lovely, but you bloody are.”
They all started in, then, talking about my underwear as if they’d seen it. Desperately, as if taking my mind off something.
I picked up Grayson and carried him downstairs. I’d forgotten about the woman there; I’d have to carry her back up soon.
The front door sat slightly ajar. It did that, swelling and pulsing out of the frame. I didn’t shove it home, concerned I wouldn’t be able to open it again.
“You should pile us against the door, stop that troll from leaking in. Once he finds purchase, you won’t get him out.”
I moved supplies off the trap door. And hefted it open with the aid of a short plank. It was heavy, creaking as it lifted, then falling backward with a thunderclap.
Someone had written on the underside, “Some are born to sweet delight. Some are born to endless night.” I hesitated then. No one would know if I skipped this job. I could just say I’d done it. Nothing was written in stone, or law.
Down to the basement. I hadn’t explored the place after the first quick look. It wasn’t fear, exactly, although the keepers had warned me about it. Haunted by the true evil. The very epitome. It stank far worse than the rest of the tower. Stagnant water, and dark mold, and piss, as if every time they went it oozed down here.
Minimal lighting which was apt to shut down at any time, so I took two flashlights.
I’d worked myself up to believe they’d all be down there; Hitler, Mussolini, Pol Pot. Idi Amin. Or there’d be one left, on a pile of bones, fat, squatting, white, flaccid, hairless; a troll.
“Don’t go down. They’ll haunt you. Possess you. All the ghosts are there. I like you the way you are. Not possessed,” Grayson said.
I headed down the rickety ladder with him over my shoulder.
At the very base, water had flooded in. It worked tidally and was at its highest point now. I peered over, but it seemed bottomless.
I stripped him, tied a rope around his shoulders.
This, I think, was the worst, most disgusting moment. Awful. I had a moment of realization how much my parents must hate me, to send me here.
“Imagine you’re a tea bag,” I said. I set my tiny travel alarm clock to ring in thirty minutes. “I’m going to look for dictators.”
“It’s not them. It’s the ghosts. They’ll bite and never let go.” He wanted to keep me talking. The salt bath was good, although he’d itch for a week afterward. “You strip naked too, go on. Let me get a look at you. Most beautiful woman I’ve ever seen, dead or alive. Then or now. And I saw some beauties.”
I didn’t feel sexy.
He started to moan. “Watch me, oh god, watch me, please, it’s all I ask.” I was almost turned on, to my own disgust. “Let me watch you when you sleep, then. So I can imagine you when you’re gone.”
“Why should I?”
“I can tell you about a hidden prisoner. Like you’re looking for.”
“Who?”
“Let me watch you sleep.”
I dunked him in the water.
He didn’t want his head under, but I dunked him anyway. I was looking forward to the silence.
There were salty deposits around the edges and I photographed those. I photographed the greasy oil bubble that rose to the surface.
I looked around a bit, but it was too cold and damp to venture far. I did notice markings of a broom on the sandy floor but hadn’t seen any mention of sweeping in the job list. I wasn’t doing it if it wasn’t on there. It did say that what I needed was in the wooden box; I found that. Inside was a rough towel and what seemed to be a note. Nothing in my list spoke about that, although with the towel “dry them off before dressing or else mold will form in the creases.”
I understood that this note must be part of the “reward.”
I pulled him back up. He was heavier; perhaps his porous skin had soaked up water, or it was the salt caked on him.
He spluttered, gasped, a deep, wrenching sound.
“You weren’t drowning. It takes a lot longer than that.”
I collected the woman under my other arm.
Upstairs, as I settled them into position, Grayson said, “Do you have any scent? I like that after a bath. A nice smell for me.”
Wee Willie Winkie whispered into my ear when I picked him up. “You watch him, that one. He talks about you when you’re not here. He’s nasty on the inside and out even though he looked like an angel before he was a ghost.”
Grayson’s photo showed him as just this; a gorgeous man who could get away with anything with a bit of flirting.
“Nice of you to tell me.” His tongue lolled sideways, dry, white around the edges, blackened in the center. I dropped some vitamin juice on it.
Wee Willie Winkie was the longest-serving and the oldest there, older even than Burnett, one hundred and seventy-two according to the records. I took my camera close to his eye, snapped the milkiness there. I wanted to see inside, but his eyes were too opaque.
He smelled of wax and of clothes dried too slowly. Standing close to him, I felt nothing. I wondered if I’d somehow “know,” be able to “see” the evil in him. He was nothing but a husk, like Burnett. If I hadn’t read his file, if I didn’t know about him, I might feel pity.
I carried him downstairs.
He told me, “You think it’s your precious keepers write about the whole truth? There is much they leave out. Many dead out there. Oh, those lost women. Oh, so many of them. Did it here, right in front of us sometimes. Didn’t we just love it?”
I dunked him in the water.
I heard insects. A kind of chittering noise. I couldn’t see anything. I thought of things hidden in the walls and didn’t want to know. I wanted to read the note but would save that for later.
Bathing. Was it the worst thing I’ve ever done? Certainly close. Stripping them naked, seeing what remained of them. And the honesty, the begging, as if their souls were stripped bare as well.
Tide of Stone Page 21