Part One
Maurice.
Alone. Alone in a granite cell with a thousand thoughts of a thousand dreams and then some. It was easiest when he didn’t think, didn’t try to recall his belabored past. But then again, thinking was all he had left.
Maurice.
The nights were the worst, especially those where he could not fall asleep. The cell had an interminable emptiness, and the odd shadows, enigmatic bumps in the night, and other obscurities closed in on him as if the walls themselves were slowly moving toward him and his small mattress. The earthy smell from the rotting heap of straw they had given him as a bed was revolting, and it stunned his old nose each time he fell upon it to rest. It was either tolerate the darkness and smell of the mattress or wake up terribly stiff each morning, something he tried desperately to prevent.
Maurice.
“What!?” he shouted and then erupted into a horrible fit of coughing.
A guard dressed in a dark uniform appeared at the bars carrying a light pod. Its red glow emanated from a silicon shell illuminating Maurice’s face.
“You looking for a beating, old man?”
Maurice simply returned the guard’s stern look.
“Well, you best not be stirring up trouble in here or I’ll get the warden to put you downstairs again.” The man chuckled as he departed. The red light left with him.
Maurice’s head dropped back onto the straw. He knew what that meant. The Piano Room was no place he wanted to be.
“Why don’t you want to go to the Piano Room?”
The voice, which had an assured strength about it, came not from the bars, but from behind him. Even in the darkness he could see a woman lavishly dressed in a stunning emerald gown. He could have stared at her cold obsidian hair and pale skin into the reaches of night.
“What’s in the Piano Room? To me it sounds like a lovely place: chandeliers, ball gowns, sweet music in the air. Am I right?”
“Only about the music,” his rough voice replied. “No chandeliers, no ladies in their silly evening gowns, and certainly no pianos, but there is music.”
“If there are no pianos, then why is it called the Piano Room?”
“The music, my dear. Beethoven, Mozart, Tchaikovsky; the classics. Piano sonatas and concertos. Oh, how the warden loved to listen to his music. But don’t be mistaken. The classics only played while unspeakable horrors were in progress.”
“Unspeakable horrors?”
“Torture mostly. I don’t recall much of what happened while I was in the Piano Room, but I remember enough to know I would rather die than end up there again.”
She neared the rotten straw mattress, bent over and placed a finger on his forehead. She traced the finger down the bridge of his nose and to his lips where she finally hushed him. As she drew her face closer to his, he could no longer smell the putridness of the straw, but the wondrous scent of violets and fuchsias. She kissed him on the cheek and took his head into her shoulder.
“Tell me,” she said. “I must know of the unspeakable horrors you have witnessed.”
As if a door had suddenly been unlocked and opened, a series of images poured into Maurice’s consciousness. He struggled to close that door, to shove all those terrible memories back into the vault he had set for them, bolt them up, and forever rid himself of them.
“No, don’t fight it. You must tell me.”
A tear fell down Maurice’s cheek as he realized he couldn’t shut out these new demons. They had been all but forgotten, and now he had to face them. He panicked, and in the process started hacking out fierce, dry coughs.
“They are abhorrent. Please, release me from them.”
“I cannot.”
He knew his only escape would be to relive them, and give the woman what she wanted.
“The Piano Room,” he sighed, “is a place that any sane man would fear, as well as the insane. At first, they act friendly--”
“Who acts friendly?”
“The men. They are the warden’s pets; men without any semblance of morality. At first they will act with compassion. They want to be your friends. Then they start asking you questions. Some you answer, some you can’t answer, and some you do not wish to answer. The lattermost are where things start to turn sour.”
Maurice swallowed hard and wiped his sweating forehead with his sleeve.
“Their first question was something trivial.”
“What did they want to know?”
“I don’t know. I don’t even remember. I just know that after I didn’t tell them, they broke my index finger. I still would not fold, for whatever reason. They broke two more fingers before I gave up and told.”
“It must have been important for you to suffer like that.”
“No, it wasn’t, I remember that much. More questions kept coming at me, and as I refused each time, a new punishment was inflicted. Once, they placed an odd contraption on a steel table next to my bed. I wondered what they could possibly do with it. After I had refused answering yet another of their questions, they held me down and inserted it into my ear canal. There was a clicking, as if some mechanism snapped into place, and soon after, my ear went hot and blood spilled from my head. They had ruptured my eardrum.”
Maurice looked up at the woman. “That is especially excruciating, my dear.”
She gave him a reassured smile traced with pity.
“They also used a disc sander on my skin. As they applied it to my body, layer upon layer of flesh tore away, and the whole time, the classics were playing in the background. The warden simply listened as if the screams and the music were the same.”
“I am unsure I wish to hear any more.”
He went on, ignoring her plea. “My last punishment was to be infected with some sort of virus. It ate away at my organs, turning them to liquid. Each night I coughed up clots of blood, unsure if the next time, I might expel a piece of a lung or some other part of my insides. And still the music played. I would suffer each fateful breath with a crescendo and my pulse would beat with each note played by those long-dead men. I knew I would soon come to the same fate as them. But then the warden gave me an antidote and I slowly progressed back to health, or at least to my current condition. I’m not exactly the prime example of wellness.” He coughed again as if to prove that very point.
“What they did to you was unforgivable. All of it. I want you to remember that.” She rose then, and let him descend back to the straw mattress. She walked to the corner of the room where Maurice had first seen her. She disappeared into the shadows leaving Maurice once again enveloped by a feeling of utter loneliness.
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