It’s Christmas Eve in our wonderful Christian year of 1801. Snow falls on my Belgian town. The flakes melt as soon as they hit the roofs. I take time to watch them through the bars of my prison cell. A slight wind pushes them, slants them to the left and flutters each star before letting it land. I imagine the wind pushing them is almost quiet, maybe a bit louder than a whisper, more like a hymn a choir of children will sing “Amen” to when it’s done. I take another minute to look at the wet rooftops and white floating in a black sky. The peaceful colors come together to glisten the thin glass of my window. I want to reach out and collect a cold constellation on my palm.
But my partner tells me it’s time to get back to work. His voice snaps my reverie. I look to him a bit envious for thinking up an escape plan before I had. He sits on the gathered straw we have to use as beds because there isn’t a single mattress in the facility. Our faces and arms are dirty from digging. I apologize for taking longer to dream than we had agreed to. He nods, and I go back to work while thinking of snow falling from the sky and landing on roofs still too warm to hold it. We had moved the first block from the wall a while ago. It took us an hour to dig the mortar away so we could pull the stone from its lodging. He was correct in predicting there is nothing behind it, only emptiness and another wall. Cool air whistles up from water rushing through the sewer. I don’t know how far down the chute goes, or how wide it is. I know we are digging a hole big enough to squeeze through. That’s the plan. He says on the other side we’ll climb less than a meter, `punch a hole in the roof, climb through and inhale freedom.
I know I’ll shimmy down the side of the prison, using the worn masonry for holds. Then I’m going to stroll the street, looking into every window I pass and see what I’ve missed the past week. I want to watch families huddle around their tables, bow for grace and eating together from steaming plates. I'm impatient to see pretty girls in their holiday finery waiting to be touched and held.
I need the chill air and warm cooking filling me, lifting and sending me beyond myself, never to bring me back. I’ll be free. My chest so big I could explode.
However, I remember I am still in my cell. That I haven’t finish digging the hole in the wall. That the roof hasn’t been penetrated and my cellmate-turned partner-is watching me do my share of excavating while he takes his turn resting.
I look up to watch him rise to help. He never rests long or sleeps much. Through his efforts the hole grows wider by two, then three blocks. Mortar dust coat our fingers and make me sneeze. I pull the collar of my shirt up over my mouth and nose like my partner has his. We dig at the mortar with the edges of brick flakes he cracked from the window frame earlier in the morning. They're small, no larger than an average man’s thumb. So we use them frugally, scoring the mortar with their sharp edges then scraping it out with their blunt, round ends.
My friend speaks as he digs. “This prison was built thirty years ago. It was a butcher plant then. Hogs, lambs and goats were brought up the receiving ramps in the rear and herded into what is now the cell areas. Back then, all this was an open stage above the river. Parts nobody needed were tossed down into the water where they were carried underground.”
I instinctively look through the hole, it isn’t big enough for all of me to fit through, and too black to see the river. But I can hear the rushing through the channel and water lapping subterranean banks. The foulest odor comes from it. The rot from those tossed parts seems to have lingered. Sulfuric decay rises up and floods our cell. It is almost too much to breathe through. Yet my partner continues speaking as if death and rot has no effect on him.
The smells has the other prisoners coughing. But they don't complain. They hear our scrapping and maybe hope we succeed.
“There was a plague here a few years ago. People of all ages and income became sick and died in vomit. The corpses had twisted pale faces. There was at least one body in every home and every alley. Bloated and fat bellies all of them. The odor from their opened mouths would sicken whoever smelled it and drop them to their knees. It didn’t matter what size or strength they were. They would just fall.”
I nod, dizzy myself from the rising stench. I had heard this story before. A girl running from that same plague sought sanctuary at my parents’ estate. My father let her stay. She was a ruby hair beauty. Skin white as ivory, blue eyes, lips made to give perfect pink kisses. She was grateful for our mercy. Shaking and scared, she said the rest of her family was gone. It was a shame and I couldn’t help but fall in love with her.
One day I watched her weave crowns from plucked flowers with my sister. She was so charming that after dinner, I went into her bedchamber to show my appreciation. I had done it before, to other girls. But none of them were as golden or fought as hard as this one. She actually bit my hand, made me bleed when all I wanted was to love her.
That’s why I punched the life from her throat. Dear mother and father burned her body like they had the others, but they said enough to my hungers. That I had to stop.
So I left home for their sake. I learned later that they brought forgiveness from the magistrate after police found the red head’s hot bones in their oven. I drifted for years, feeding my passions until I came here. The plague had subsided leaving many orphans, widows and fallen divas vying for the mercies of a man with money and no morals.
My friend continues his story. “Low rains had shrank the river, so the butchered parts weren’t going as far downstream as planned. There was so much material that it all clogged and rotted and spoiled the city’s reservoir.”
“Horrible.”
“Very. The plague ended once the river was cleared and the sewer system improved. The town converted this place to a prison to avoid another plague and to house the men and women who lived like tyrants through it.”
We dig for some time, hurrying to clear away before the guard makes his midnight round. All is quiet. I hear the other prisoners twisting for warmth under their rough blankets. Me, my heart is drumming behind my eyes.
Pockets, my friend, talks. The longest and most I’ve heard him speak since he came to the prison three days ago. The guard put him in my cell even though I protested being caged with an African. But Pockets isn’t from Africa, He told me he is from the the Caribbean colonies. “Jamaica.” He showed me his hands, and explained the difference. “Look at the red under my browns. That’s how you can tell a Jamaican from an African.”
He does have burning reds under his earthy brown.
We remove a fourth block which makes the hole large enough for man my size to slip through. Pockets is leaner than me, and stronger in the way a whip is stronger than the bull it cuts. He is all dark, even his eyes. They don’t reflect or emit any sort of light. Dead eyes we called them when I was a child. My friends and I once came upon a squirrel that a hawk had torn in half. Its eyes were still open. I prodded the remains with a stick and no matter how I moved it, no matter what angle the sunlight fell on it, the eyes stayed black.
I ask Pockets why he is staring at me the way the squirrel did. His reply is a simple. “Just want to make sure I remember you, my friend.”
We use bedding to muffle the scraping sound of the blocks moving across the floor. Our work is done with hardly any noise which is remarkable considering the weight of the stones.
Pockets keeps staring at me but is as relaxed as a lost Summer Sunday. He doesn’t even breath heavy from our efforts.
I ask him again. “Why are you staring at me like that?”
This time his response comes with quick movement of his left arm and an explosion against my temple. The universe booms of cracking bone. I spin in it, fall, crash to Earth.
I see Pockets in fluttering lights. The day he first came to the prison. He entered my cell without a word. I asked the guard why put him with me. I got no answer. But we were locked together, him silent and dead eyed. Me wanting freedom.
The second day he started to speak to me. He used my language, talked of things I loved without me telling him. We spoke of crimes without victims, because there is never any victims. Not really. Just prey who refuse to accept their fate and complain against the obvious.
Pockets knows, though we never met before. He made me his kindred because he understands it is my right as a noble man to commit atrocities.
When I wake he is standing over me with one of the blocks in his hands. The warm Caribbean accent that once agreed with me, is now menacing.
“The girls’ families offered me 30 Francs. All the spare money they could collect over the years. I only took 10. The rest, I told them, I would get from you.
“You did what you did because you’re the son of a Duke. Then you tried to run. But a simple drunken brawl in a tavern slowed you down by putting you here. Someone took all your money so you can’t bribe your way out. Someone, I bet the same person, stole your clothes, your jewels, your pistol. Leaving you to rot in this frigid place.”
I hear him and understand. He has my money and must had used some of it to get the guard to pass a half dozen empty and half filled cells to put him with me. I can’t say anything, my neck aches as much as my hands and feet. I can see that he has crushed the ends of my limbs. I can feel bone clogging my throat whenever I try to breathe or speak.
The block in Pockets’ hands drips. I hadn’t noticed it before. He raises it and slams it down over and over until I feel I have no human shape anymore. I can be moved like a sheet with bits of sharp bones floating around the vitals. I close my eyes and dream of crawling through the wall. Then I stick my head through the hole in the roof. A hole I bet Pockets has already dug.
I know he will escape and start new. I bet he has a she devil, dark as him, waiting out there for his return. Her arms ready to circle him in embrace and take him inside her unholiness.
He asks. “Who in this world do you love most?”
Death comes rolling behind my fears. It’s loud. Goodbye father. Goodbye mother. Goodbye little Jeanette, my precious sister. There is a clamor in my ears then all is as peaceful as the snow outside.
“I’m leaving you now. Say your goodbyes. Because you’ll never them again. You know there is no Heaven or Hell. This is it, the end of you.”
I don’t feel like I lost a lot of blood. When I lift my eyes I can see a bit of snowfall past the window, just a slit from this angle. Big flakes of fluff. This world is so beautiful. I think I whiff pastries baking and carolers singing Germanic hymns. I’m sleepy but if I go to sleep I know I won’t wake up. I don’t want to leave yet. Because I’m too afraid there’ll be nothing on the other side. He's taken everything from me; property, pride, faith, shape. I'm left with a body that's become the worst prison imaginable. I'm hopeless and ruined. A sideways glances catches him sliding through the hole. He smiles and winks at me before he disappears.
I'm not going die with him in my mind. I will not give him that victory. I'm going to push him out and leave him freezing under the fluttering gray in black.
It's getting harder to think anyway. I smell open graves and hear the river giggling. I'm going to get lost in them and use their cover to hide from that devil. As the world gets darker and smaller, I'll just watch the black snow and dream.