The Millstone

CHAPTER ONE: "THE ANVIL"

The dust was still on the windowsill. It'd been hours since the window had been closed, as though the men inside the dingy chamber had finally given up on coaxing in the nonexistent breeze. Now – without the faint noise of the morning wildlife – they were truly and completely alone.

Dr. Bennett stared at the ceiling and groaned. His next shift started in fifteen minutes, nearly eighty percent of his designated break time having slipped past in the blink of an eye. There was something special about this room that made time pass very quickly. It wasn't just him either; Dr. Caddell and Dr. Osric agreed that time went by differently here.

It was more frustrating than creepy. Why did the respite have to be so brief?

A tremor shook the floor. Bennett glanced around in a panic, searching the faces of his companions for a sign that they'd felt it too, but their faces suggested no such thing. These odd tremors were the strangest thing of all. Vibrations in the ground that only he could feel? Had he gone mad – already?

Across the room, Dr. Caddell buried his face in his hands and groaned loudly. He appeared similarly drained, and it wasn't just the bags under his eyes. His entire demeanor seemed lethargic. This place had a funny way of draining the people who worked there.

Not that they were paid employees. The three of them – Bennett and his companions, Caddell and Osric – had been deferred here. For bad behavior. It was a hellish place, full of long hallways and ugly shadows and the ever-present demonic thrum of fluorescent lighting. Even so, they were the lucky ones. The more serious defectors were sent to the most distant places in the world, a remote island or a rolling desert or an incredibly dense jungle in the tropical regions. Whether they were given a life there or simply abandoned to die was somewhat unclear. The State liked it better that way.

"What do you think it feels like?"

Osric's deep but shaky voice broke Bennett out of his own self-inflicted trance.

"What does what feel like?" Caddell asked.

He swallowed hard. "You know. The..."

"The Stretching?"

The temperature in the room seemed to drop ten degrees. Bennett wasn't normally one to mention something so vile with such nonchalance. But he'd learned in his time here that there was no use mincing words. That got you nowhere.

"I've heard it's like a dark bath," Caddell suggested. "A fuzzy sort of bliss."

Osric shuffled his feet uncomfortably. "You mean it doesn't hurt?"

"How should I know? They've never done it to me."

The silence grew thicker and thicker – the kind of silence that presses on the ears and makes the head spin. It was suddenly shattered by the chiming of a bell. The rolling of wheels could be heard outside the door, accompanied by a faint groaning noise. These sounds were not new – the men heard them every day in the psychiatric ward of the prison – but that didn't make them any less chilling.

Unconsciously, Bennett leaned toward the door and peered through the glass. A sick fascination took him over as he watched the bed roll down the hallway. Beneath the thick blue blanket was a man writhing and groaning in pain.

It was hard, Bennett thought, not to sympathize with him.

"You know he killed a man, right?" Caddell shouted.

"A hundred years, though?"

"Hope he loves every second of it."

He turned back to the windowsill, where the dust seemed to be growing thicker and thicker by the moment. What, he wondered, could it possibly feel like to be the man on that hospital bed, a victim of the Stretching? To feel every speck of dust on his skin, every strand of hair growing from his head, every heartbeat reverberating through his body like a bass drum? Maybe it was worse than death.