He had opened up to Jem that day. Had glazed over the crew and Holden, but he didn’t get into all the gory details. He spared me those too.
“Then every so often, when I sat by Dominic, he’d say the same thing,” he whispered, lost in thought as he stroked my shoulder, staring off.
Dominic would say:
“He pleaded to play a different game. Sometimes I ask myself why we didn’t listen to him. He never looked at me or Jem the same way again, but he was always okay with you, Thames. I never understood why. Any clue?”
Conor had no clue.
But he often thought about it.
And then he told me about the horrors of that day. The day he ran from a man in a green raincoat. A man with cold eyes and a smile that was loaded with secrets.
The Hole
There was such a thing as having too much pain, you couldn’t feel it.
After a point, the body refused to respond to emotion. It became…detached.
He couldn’t even cry.
He lay there, dragging the car along the hard ground, his fingers tracing the outline of the toy because he couldn’t see it.
It was blackness most of the time, and when it wasn’t, he prayed for the blackness. He prayed for it because the light brought the hurt.
It left him raw and cold and sick.
It left him like this, lying on the ground, too hurt to move. His soul had been ground down to nothing. He didn’t feel it parting from him, but he woke up one day and it was gone.
And now he was this, a broken little bird, lying on the ground of a hole that people weren’t even looking for.
Or were they?
“Conor,” Max moaned, lips quivering. “Come for me. Please.”
How many times had he prayed for that?
How many times had he wanted the doors to open and for Conor to be there?
But it was never Conor.
It was them.
The monsters.
The monsters in the light.
There was no sense of time in that hole.
Max may have been in there for a day, or a week, or even a year. He wouldn’t know it. It all felt the same.
Time.
A dreaded prison, it was.
He sat with his back against the wall, wincing slightly when his shoulder blades pressed against the stone walls. He was all bones now: sore bones, broken bones, weak bones. Just bones. They’d given him a blanket and a pillow he could have used for support, but it was covered in blood and dirt and other things. He never touched them unless he had to. Like when the temperature dropped and the cold was in his lungs.
Around him was a scattering of toys they had brought down for him. He took them wherever he went in the room. He didn’t have to see them in the dark anymore. He memorized where he placed them, his sense of touch more palpable than all the others.
His favourite toy was the car because, in a fit of rage the first while he’d been down here, he’d thrown it against the wall and shattered the trunk of it. Replacing it was a pointed bit of plastic that he was able to dig into his finger for blood. He would drag his bloodied finger all along the walls of the hole, sometimes writing, sometimes drawing, sometimes just wanting to see how much blood he could let out of him before getting dizzy.
Most of the time, though, he’d sit like this, bones against the wall, staring into nothing. He no longer felt motivated to move. In the start he’d have walked along the hole, hand grazing the walls, praying for the door to open. He’d memorized the steps it took to get from one end to the other.
That was a mindless exercise that usually ended back at the staircase, up the stairs and pounding on the locked doors. The despair when they never opened was soul crushing. He could no longer afford to do it again. He didn’t have it in him to feel the regurgitated agony that hopelessness brought him.
Nowadays he looked up where the door was and tried to remember a certain face.
But it wasn’t coming to him, that face.
Everything was all a blur now. He wondered if he was beginning to forget or if maybe…maybe that life was never real. Maybe it never happened.
But then he’d say their names and remember it did happen. He did