 |
|
|
Post By The Hooded Hood drags out something from his pending file Tue Jan 09, 2007 at 07:19:44 pm EST |
Subject
Obscure Parodyverse Moments #7: Amnesia in the Dark | |
|
|
Next In Thread >> | |
| Obscure Parodyverse Moments #7: Amnesia in the Dark Here’s a historical scene that may not make sense yet, but might find its way into a fuller narrative in due course.  The burly warders wrestled Amnesia down the stairs and tossed her onto the flagstones. They seemed to enjoy pulling off her clothes and her shrieks as they hosed her down from the well pump. At last Rufus tossed her a cheap cotton tabard to put over her wet shivering body, little more than a sheet with tie-strings at the sides. She wasn’t allowed a proper belt, of course.Brain-fever, the piece of paper that had put her here proclaimed. A madwoman had to be confined. Somebody who didn’t even remember who she was, where she came from, whether she had anybody to care about her, had to be insane. Somebody who was being hunted by monsters deserved to be locked away. Amnesia still felt dizzy from the guards’ beating earlier when she’d tried to slip free as they led her through the iron doorway into the holding cellar. It had been an instinctive reaction to the smells and sounds in the dark barrel-roofed dungeons. Rufus and the others had expected it and had been ready with their truncheons and lashes. They dragged Amnesia away from the washpump, through the communal cells where the lunatics were displayed to the paying public for a penny a time. Men and women were crowded together behind the iron bars. For an extra penny the crowds could borrow a stick to poke them. Amnesia saw a pair of men fighting like dogs in their own filth, a naked couple rutting in the corner, an old woman sobbing as she stared at her own left hand, a blank-faced girl holding a bundle of rags to her breast to suckle. The lunatics whooped and gibbered and cowered and screamed. A few just huddled miserably. Amnesia wondered how long before she was like them. Not long, in this place, she feared. Past the public areas there were rows of tiny cells, each with a pallet of rotting straw. Some had a slops bucket as a toilet. Others had a channel down to a fist-sized hole in the floor. Some had doors, others grille gates. The most violent of the inmates were still in their own prisons, chained to the back wall by heavy iron collars. Rufus pointed out the punishment cells too, metal cages no more than four foot cubes that dangled in the guards room. One was occupied by a hairy naked man, his back still slick with blood from his flogging. Another contained a dirty woman with filth-crusted hair. She wore a scold’s cap, a heavy iron face-mask that restrained her tongue and forced her jaws wide open, the punishment for a female who spoke out of turn. “Be a good girl and you’ll never end up there,” Rufus assured Amnesia, stroking his hand across her buttock. “What did she do?” Amnesia ventured, shuddering. “Why is she mad?” “She became pregnant,” Rufus shrugged. “She was unmarried, morally deficient.” “She has a baby?” the new inmate asked, appalled. “In here?” Rufus shook his head. “We cured her of that,” he answered. “Now shut up.” The guards bundled Amnesia into the clerk’s office. This was the only room furnished with anything better than crates and rough stools. There was a proper desk here, and a filing bureau, and a fussy little man with ink-stained fingers and a goose-quill pen. “Name?” he asked her, checking the paper signed by Dr Standish and Dr Blessing that proclaimed the girl non compos mentis and ordered her incarceration. “I… I don’t remember,” Amnesia admitted. “But that’s all that’s wrong with me. I don’t know who I am, how I got here. The rest of me is fine. I can think, I can feel…” “Amnesia,” said the clerk as he wrote the word in the ledger. “Confined at the expense of the public purse.” That meant no special considerations for the inmate. No food except the basic common slops, no protection from the warders, no luxuries like blankets or soap, no privileges like an hour a week in sunlight. “I have to talk to somebody,” Amnesia pleaded. “Someone in charge!” “Dr Morningstar is far too busy to spend time on every lunatic incarcerated in his asylum,” the clerk replied curtly. “The Matron will inspect you tomorrow to check you have no diseases. Restrain your madness and you will not be unduly punished.” Amnesia would have pleaded further but the clerk signed the last column of the register and gestured for her to be taken away. “Wait!” the girl called. “I need help! I need someone to listen to me!” Rufus grabbed her by the hair and pushed her out. “There’s a monster following me!” she screamed, knowing even as she said it how absurd that must sound. Maybe she was insane? The wardens dragged her back past the cells and down a short flight of stairs to the cellar at the end. She was tossed into the unlit space and the door closed before she could scramble from the filth. “Wait!” she called, rushing to the tiny rectangle of light that was the shuttered viewing hole. “Don’t leave me here!” “We’ll be back for you tonight,” Rufus promised her with a chuckle. “When it’s quiet. You might want to think about being a good girl when we come for you.” Then he closed the hatch, plunging Amnesia into absolute darkness. The panic almost overwhelmed her. It was difficult to even rank the fears that crushed her in the stygian blackness. The beating and the harsh scrubbing were starting to seem trivial compared to what the future threatened. Amnesia wanted to scream, wanted to sob. She forced herself not to. “Well done.” The dry voice in the darkness made the new inmate jump. She whirled round but it was impossible to see in the pitch blackness. “Who’s there?” she demanded, trying not to shriek. “Who are you?” There was a clinking of metal. “A lunatic, of course,” came the reply. “A dangerous lunatic.” “Keep away from me!” Again the scraping of chain. “You needn’t fear. I’m shackled to the wall.” “Well… good.” Amnesia had no idea what else to say. There were only so many terrors she could cope with at once. “You’re quite safe in here with me, unless you get too close.” Amnesia’s outstretched hands touched a wet stone wall. She needed to touch something solid in her blind nightmare. “Why did they put me in here with you?” she asked. “To frighten you,” her cellmate replied. “A frightened inmate is an obedient inmate. They’ll beat you and humiliate you and degrade you, in part because they enjoy it as a perk of their positions, but mostly because when you’re broken you won’t cause any trouble.” Amnesia swallowed hard. “I’m not mad,” she protested. “I’m the wrong person to convince. I am mad.” Loneliness and fear were enough to prompt the new inmate to continue this bizarre, chilling conversation. “What did you do?” “Terrible things.” “Murder?” “Yes. And worse. And here I am, locked away with you.” “I didn’t… I don’t think I did anything,” Amnesia confessed. “I just… can’t remember anything.” “You clearly remember language skills,” the madman pointed out. “You have enough context to be able to formulate arguments, to hold expectations of justice and proper treatment, however inaccurate and vain your hopes might be.” “You… don’t sound mad.” A hollow chuckle: “Not all madmen whoop and gibber. Some of us hold our madness deep inside. Where it really counts.” “Are you trying to scare me?” “Are you scared?” Amnesia searched her feelings. “Yes. But not of you. I’m more scared of what’s outside that door than what’s in here with me. I’m terrified of what will happen, but what’s happening now… it feels safe by comparison.” There was a long pause. “If you really don’t fear me, come here,” challenged the unseen lunatic. “Come where I can reach you.” Amnesia’s heart flipped again. “Why?” “Because I dare you.” Amnesia shook her head, then realised how ridiculous that was in the dark. “I’m not insane and I’m not stupid.” “I believe you. Memory loss is not madness. Come to me.” “You are mad. You said so.” “Yes. Come here.” Amnesia backed away, her hands skirting the clammy wall. “There’s something else,” she confessed. “Something I saw. A monster.” “This is a place of monsters,” the lunatic agreed. “Some of them are inmates.” “Before that. The first thing I remember. I was in an old house, or maybe a castle. I was running. That’s my first memory. Running. And there was something chasing me.” “Indeed?” “Yes. Something big and… and dark. Right behind me. Loping. And… I can’t remember the rest. Next I remember being in the doctors office, with them all asking me questions. And I couldn’t tell them anything.” “That sounds like an interesting case,” agreed the lunatic. “Have you seen the monster since?” “I don’t know. I thought maybe I glimpsed it when they put me into the asylum wagon. And again when they dragged me through the gates of this place. But I might have imagined it. I might have imagined all of it.” Amnesia slumped to the dirty floor. “It doesn’t matter now, does it? I’m here, forever. This is the rest of my life, to be abused and enslaved with no rights and no hope. This is all there is.” “Perhaps,” agreed the madman. “Or you could come to me.” “And what? What will you do to me?” “You’d have to trust me to find out.” Amnesia was cold and lonely and holding on by the very barest of threads. “Will you kill me?” “Perhaps. There’s only one way to know.” “Killing me would be a mercy, I think,” she whispered, horrified at the admission. “Yes,” agreed the madman. His chains scraped on the floor. “Come here.” Amnesia’s cheeks were wet with tears as she crawled across the filthy straw towards the unseen voice. She flinched as she felt fingertips reach out for her face and pull her closer. The madman drew her to him in the darkness and held her close in a tender embrace. After a moment Amnesia returned the hug and began to sob. He held her while she racked out her fear and confusion. “You haven’t killed me yet,” she said at last. “No,” agreed the lunatic. “Not yet. There’s something interesting about you. And about your monster. Something that will intrigue Dr Morningstar if ever he bothers to review your case, too. Pray that doesn’t happen.” “Dr Morningstar runs this asylum.” “Yes. You don’t want to become one of his special projects.” Amnesia’s fingers traced thin scars across the madman’s naked back. “Are you a special project?” she ventured. “Oh yes,” the lunatic confessed. He guided her fingers to the electricity burns on his temples and the suture sores on his arms and chest. “You don’t want to be noticed by the good doctor.” Amnesia bit her lip. “Will you kill me?” she asked. “Please? I don’t think I can stand…” The madman pressed a finger to her lips. “Death ends possibilities,” he interrupted. “If you live, if you endure, you might one day do more than live and endure. One day you might be free. One day you might see your enemies ground into bloody mincemeat at your feet. Pain today, torture tomorrow, slavery the day after, they don’t mean pain and torture and slavery forever. Not if you can be strong.” Amnesia held onto the madman as if he was a lifeline. It was strangely intimate there in the darkness, clinging to the stranger. “I don’t know if I can be strong.” “I believe you can,” he told her. “I dare you.” Amnesia took a breath. “You think I could escape? Learn who I really am? Be free of my monster? Be happy and safe?” The madman was silent for a long time. “Anything is possible,” he answered at last. “I have dreams too.” “What dreams?” “Oh, sometimes I’m other people. Sometimes I change worlds. Sometimes I destroy them.” Amnesia didn’t know what to say to that. They held each other until all sense of time had passed, alone yet together. “What’s your name?” Amnesia asked at last. “Sometimes I don’t remember either,” the lunatic confessed. “I’ve had so many.” “Tell me your name,” Amnesia insisted. “I dare you.” She felt the man stiffen, and for a moment she wondered if this was when he snapped her neck. “I am Ioldabaoth,” the lunatic told her. The name sounded familiar. “Ioldabaoth.” Amnesia tested it on her tongue. “Yes.” The madman rattled his chains. “I rule here at Herringcarp Asylum. I will save you from harm.” It was an absurd statement from a naked scarred scarecrow chained in the dark, victim of the unseen Dr Morningstar. It was an impossible promise to offer a pretty, helpless new inmate in the cruellest madhouse in an age of cruel madhouses. Yet somehow Amnesia was comforted; the comfort of the mad. In the darkness outside the ancient sanatorium the monster prowled at the treeline and waited for his chance to find what had happened to Laurie Leyton. The Hooded Hood's Homepage of Doom Who's Who in the Parodyverse Where's Where in the Parodyverse Original concepts, characters, and situations copyright © 2007 reserved by Ian Watson. Other Parodyverse characters copyright © 2007 to their creators. The use of characters and situations reminiscent of other popular works do not constitute a challenge to the copyrights or trademarks of those works. The right of Ian Watson to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. |
| Echo™ v3.0 beta © 2003-2006 Powermad Software |
|
|
