Chapter

1

Another prison guard shuffles past cell sixty-five but hesitates before continuing on. His brows raise as a muted voice slips beneath the heavy metal cell door. He has been told repeatedly not to pay this particular prisoner any mind but curiosity tells him otherwise. He walks up to the door and presses one ear against the steel. He squints but can only make out a pained masculine voice. He sighs and is about to abandon the prisoner when a sharp wail echoes around the cell.

Without thinking, the prison guard slides the door's small window open and peers into the darkness through the bars. Light from the hall casts a dull yellow stream onto the back corner of the stone cell. The prisoner sits on his knees, spine straight, and pulls desperately against thick black chains that attach him to the wall.

"Voices," he wails, "stop the voices," and strains shackled hands to scratch masochistically at his fevered face. He yanks on the taunt shackles, surely digging metal into his wrists. The guard watches as he rolls his head backward, agony clear in his screams.

"No. No," he whimpers. "I won't. I won't."

He continues to utter pleas beneath his breath, now resting painfully on his calves. Even from outside of the cell the prison guard can see fear rippling through the man. The guard watches, horribly entranced, for hours.

"Si-sir," he stutters after a while.

But Prisoner Sixty-Five hears only the voice that plagues him. The voice haunts him, day and night, and has since he was imprisoned. It whispers to him: threats and degradation. It screams at him: promises and demands. The voice's teeth bite at his skull, bloat his mind until it is all that he can think of.

Suddenly the prisoner screams, throwing the prison guard away from the door's window.

"Who are you?" He screams. "Who are you?" He whispers.

Whatever the response, the prison guard cannot hear it. The answer though scares the prisoner and he crumbles to the cell floor.

"Sir?" The frightened prison guard asks again. But the prisoner is enveloped tightly in the voice of his assailant. He mumbles incoherently, tangled in chains.

The prison guard steps back and slowly slides the window closed. Something about the prisoner's agony chills his spine vertebrae after vertebrae; a disturbed shiver crawling up his back.