The Prisoners

The slender man dangles the key in front of my eyes as though he means to hypnotize me -- and indeed, I begin to drowse. The dark swirl of a nightmare abyss. The brightness and beauty of dreams.

A black rat scampers across the cold dark cell floor with a squeak, snapping me out of my daze. I lunge at the slender man and grab for the key. He is faster by a hair and snatches back his hand half a second before I can grab the key. I demand of him why he can’t leave me be. We are cellmates, not friends, but that doesn’t mean we must become enemies.

But we all need friends, or at least approximations. No one wants to die alone in a cell, he tells me, or even with company such as his. He tells me I need only take the key, and I will be free of this cell. “But not free ,” he adds. “No one can ever be completely free.”

“It will open the door?” I ask.

The slender man fidgets with the key. He flips it from finger to finger with the dexterity of a school-child playing with a pencil. He does seem like a child at times; he has an innocence most people shed as they grow, as snakes shed their skin.

“No,” he says. He brushes aside his dark hair, revealing cold blue eyes. His gaze pierces my soul like icy spears. “Certainly not the cell door.”

“Then what good is it?”

“It will take you away from here -- out of the cold, out of the dark.”

“Where to?”

“Good question,” he tells me with a shrug and a smile. “The key opens a gate, and every gate takes you to a different place,” he says. “Which gate opens… Well, that depends upon you.”

He tells me to beware of the gates -- beware, but not afraid. Not every gate takes you to a good place. Some take you deeper into darkness. I press him for more about these gates, but he only smiles.

“I only pass on what others have told me,” he says.

I’ve been in worse cells with worse cellmates. It’s not so much the cellmates or the darkness which get to me. It’s not even the rats or the slop they call food. These things all become bearable with time. Not pleasant, mind you, but bearable. One can get used to almost anything with enough time and a dearth of choice. The ghosts of the past are what haunt me. The spirits not of the dearly departed, but of those I have departed from – forcibly, but departed from nonetheless. The ones you are separated from are always with you, even though they are at arm’s-length from your soul. But arm’s-length is still too close when you cannot reach back -- when to reach back brings more pain than comfort.

Don’t think of the outside. Forget the past. Kill the past. Kill it. Strangle it. The cell is all there is, all there ever will be from now on until you die.

A daydream can comfort you in the moment, but when it ends and you wake up back in hell, you’ve fallen further down the hole. Dreamless sleep -- nothing but blackness -- is best.

The slender man speaks not only about his past life, but his hopes and dreams for the future. He tells me he’s going to have a garden. “A vegetable garden,” he says. “And flowers. Red, yellow, violet… I won’t have anything dark. I’ll live someplace warm, too. Nowhere cold.” He smiles. He’s going to see his wife again, maybe try for a third kid. I smile and pretend to be happy for him. It’s easier than trying to make him see reason.

Mostly he talks about the key. He never explains it well, and I think it’s because he can’t. “Some things can’t be explained,” he says. “Only experienced.” I smell an excuse.

“Why don’t you use it then? Open the door. Escape.”

“I have used it before,” he says. “This cell is not my first.”

“Then why are you still here? What are you waiting for?”

He smiles. I see the white glint of his teeth in the darkness. I remember when I had teeth like that. The past is dead. The past is pain. The past will kill you. It’s sharper than rats’ teeth.

“This key has opened gates for me before,” he says, “but it’s not for me anymore. I’ll get out of this cell one day -- I know I will. But not with this key.”

“And how the hell are you going to get another one? You think the jailer will just hand you one?”

He chuckles. “Maybe. You never know,” he says. “You never know what’s going to happen next.”

I tell him he’s kidding himself. No one leaves these cells once they arrive.

“There is always hope,” he says. “Always.”

You grow accustomed to the darkness -- so comfortable you never want to climb out again. You want to slip away into the hazy comfort of sleep and self-imposed amnesia. Forget. Forget. Forget the pain and it goes away. You tell yourself again and again. Get used to the darkness, and soon enough the last fear left is that someone might pull you out.

We talk less day by day. I try to put all of the nonsense of keys and gates out of my mind. Maybe life in the cell got to him. It’s understandable; I had similar delusions when I first got here. Once I came to accept my fate, things got easier.

******

I awake in the middle of the night. The slender man still sleeps. He murmurs something I can’t make out. I see the glint of something metallic in his hand -- his much vaunted key.

Standing over him, I see the man I once was. The man I might have been. The man I might have been had things been different. HadI been different. He smiles even in his sleep. What does he dream of? What does he have within that I lack?

I slip the key from between his fingers with the care of a surgeon and hold it up to the window to get a better look in the moonlight. There’s nothing special about it in particular. It’s smooth with the wear of time, made of black iron. There are even a few spots of rust on it. It reminds me of the old skeleton keys my grandfather kept in his desk drawer.

I try it on the door. No dice. What good is it then? I almost toss it out the window, but don’t at the last moment. I have to live with the slender man, I remember. I can’t exactly move out if we stop getting along. I can only imagine how he might react if he wakes up and finds his key gone.

He sleeps as soundly as a baby -- as soundly as a guilty man waiting for the gallows. He is at peace with fate; he is more at peace than I am.

I tighten my fist so hard the key bites into my flesh. I feel a trickle of blood snake down my palm. There are answers without questions and questions without answers. Not every key has a door.

I take the key between thumb and forefinger and fling it at the wall like a throwing knife. It hits the black stone wall with a clink and falls to the floor.

Where the key struck the wall I see a pin-prick of light, like a lone star in an otherwise empty night sky. I rub my eyes several times -- this can’t be real. It has to be my imagination.

But the little “star” on the wall is real. It doesn’t go away, no matter how many times I rub my eyes. Instead, it glows brighter.

I slink towards it. I steal several furtive glances at the slender man as I walk towards it. He is still asleep. I get to the wall and reach out and touch the star. There is warmth to the white light. I push my finger into it.

There is a hand on my shoulder. I look and see the slender man. He’s not smiling now. There is a serious look upon his face I would not have thought him capable of before. He tightens his grip my shoulder.

“It does work for you,” says the slender man. “I knew it would. Take the key. Open the gate.”

I pick up the key and push it into the star. I turn it and the star dilates to the size of the cell door. Through it I see a short passage, on the other side of which is a beautiful meadow. The scent of flowers wafts through into the cell. A cool breeze refreshes me. I see a cabin in the distance. Smoke billows from its chimney.

“Go through,” says the slender man. “This is for you.”

“Come with me,” I say, but he shakes his head.

“It opened for you, not for me. I can’t go through a door not meant for me. It wouldn’t be right.”

I argue with him. I tell him he’s foolish, crazy. This is his opportunity as much as mine, and another one may never come.

“An opportunity willcome again,” he counters. “If I went through, I would only spoil yours.”

I try to reason with him some more, but he is adamant, obstinate, and nothing I say moves him. At last I relent and go through the gate.

******

The grass is like a cloud underfoot. In the distance I see a white cabin with a red roof. White smoke billows from its chimney. As I walk towards it, I breathe deeply of the fresh air and feel my lungs renewed. The sky is blue and clear. The red and orange flowers are so bright it stings my eyes to look upon them, so used am I to the dark. My hands tremble, and my knees buckle. You are like a man who has been lost in the desert; at last you have found an oasis, and the joy of it is almost too much to bear.

The cabin is larger than I had judged it from the distance. I stand before the red front door. My hand hovers before it, but I hesitate to knock. What stranger would allow in such a filthy man?

I knock and no one comes. I shout and no one answers. The doorknob is cold to the touch. The door creaks open slowly when I push it with my fingertips, and I step over the threshold.

Is this a new prison? Am I intruding into another’s space? Could I make this place my new home?

I look down at the key. It’s covered in my blood. I let it fall to the floor. I have no more need of keys, for I see no locks here.

I never see the slender man again. But sometimes on cloudy days or rainy days, on the days when everything is black and gray and I feel the pain swelling up within, I remember the slender man and what he did for me. I wish him well, wherever he is.

THE END

Bio: Jared Buck grew up in Massachusetts. He’s always enjoyed reading all kinds of stories, but especially speculative fiction of all types (the stranger the better). He’s spent most of the last dozen or so years living and working abroad. He currently lives in China.

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