The Vortex: Rectification

Chapter One.

Chapter Forty-One.

Month Eleven, 1978.

If there is one thing that I cling too, it's that the only thing I know for a fact is that as my body tingles and everything spins when I peel open my eyes is that counting will never be lost. Not in the deepest depths of me, no escaping from my pounding head, how could any of it disappear when the stick I keep tucked under my mat is responsible for every line on this wall.

All three-hundred and twenty-six of them. I count it compulsively after they lock my door every day, maybe it's been longer, but I can't imagine they'd leave me without being taunted for more than twenty-four hours. Sometimes a verbal unload is more cathartic than giving me a good zap on the cold concrete of this room.

My room. It can't be classified as a bedroom when it doesn't have a proper bed, an ounce of privacy or even a window but I need the delusional description to feel somewhat like a person. Who knows just how far down the basement really is, but it doesn't seem important when the steel door in front of me will always keep me inside and grant them the power to waltz in and out as they please.

It feels like my bones are creaking as my left-hand rubs against swollen eyes, my right hand is still tucked under the tattered remains of the singlet I had been wearing that day. The jumper atop it, has been lost since strike one hundred and three and as my body shivers, I wish, not for the first time, that the bracelet clasped around my wrist would just fall away and give me back my magic.

An escape should be the first thing my mind jumps too, but it feels like a million hot needles are stabbed along the length of my spine, hot pain spikes from my wrist to my elbow as I push up from the ground. I could say it's a bed, but the thin mat doesn't shield me from the hard ground below it, most nights it feels like hell against all the bruised points of my body.

Agony gurgles up my body, my head pressed against the damp concrete wall as I use the pressure to sit back up, despite the haze that follows each slow minute of my days. In the back of my mind, I can never stop thinking about how much I would hate myself if I just gave up and let all my muscles atrophy.

I've thought about it, more than a normal person would and about as much as a prisoner thinks about finally dying. I think about that too, and the answer is more haunting than I had ever thought I might go.

The sound of more than one pair of footsteps descending the stairs towards my room echoes around my head, the only thing that clues me into its reality is the sound of the first lock unlatching.

The sound haunts me, follows me around in my dreams and frightens me when I give in to pacing around the small expanse of a room, even when my body screams and especially when my mind bleeds for me to stop. For everything to stop, but the darkness of my veins as they peer up at me from beneath scattered bruises, old and new, it's this little flicker of hope that makes me feel like I'm not entirely crazy.

On the inside it mostly feels like I'm intact, hours spent in silence with nothing but memories to keep you company gives me time to explore. Recall passages and spells I would have otherwise let fall into the void, but I know I'm hitting walls, it's a vague sense of registering something that doesn't have a door.

My neck whips to the door too fast, the base of my neck screeches in pain but I don't have time to reach up and rub at the stem when the last lock clangs open and Dracius pushes open the door.

Over the last eleven months he has become the only thing I remember in full form, like every step and every word he says is the only thing my mind want to cling too. A block every time I try and drift away too something else, something happier and less painfilled- and there he appears.