Flashes filled the room while the rain pelted to the ground outside. The window above my head appeared to me as a glass door of the shower I once used, with waves of water rushing down its side. I had sat alone in this dark hell hole for three days now, no food, no water, and no toilet.
Dishes from my once daily meals sat at the edge of my door, waiting by the small hole to be dragged out by a poker. But, I had been forgotten in the solitary holding and no one came to pick them up. They were left to mold and decay like I was.
A bell sounded from the hallway, making me perk up from my restless state on the floor. My eyelids fluttered, trying to adjust to the light seeping through the food hole that was only a few feet from me. I let out a moan of pain as the light grew brighter. The door before me was now open, showing a dark figure in it's center. A giant beat stick swung back and forth in the figure's hand as it took a few steps towards me.
Cringing as the collar of my shirt was ripped upward towards the figure, I found myself being dragged from my room, hearing the shackles around my ankles skidding across the ground in jingles. "I got him," the raspy deep voice bounced off the walls as if they were speakers.
"You got the right one?" Another voice echoed back.
"Number 9742," the number made me feel nauseated.
In this place I was nothing more than a number. My name was long gone from the records they kept of me, and it had been so long since I had heard someone call it out that I myself had forgotten it.
'Where are you taking me?' I thought to myself. 'It couldn't be any worse than the last time they took me out.' I let out a shaky breath of air before gulping in the musty air of this asylum.
Soon my eyes were able to adjust, however once they had, I wished they hadn't. The walls resembling dirt were covered in condensation and the floors were covered in what looked to be the waste of other involuntary residents.
Screams filled my ears as I was brought to my feet and shoved forward. "I'm not crazy," a woman repeated unconvincingly as she paced back and forth behind her iron bars. Skeleton hands reached out towards me through the bars, begging to be released from their dark confinement, but the guards kept their emotionless faces in check and kept me moving forward past the opening of a steel door.
"We've been waiting for you 9742," A gentleman with a suit stood up from the table before me. His hand reached out to mine as it was chained in front of me, "Oh," he scoffed, "I forgot." A hint of sarcasm was in his tone.
I watched his hand move back into the pockets of his trousers and remained silent. "Please," he motioned to the chair at my left, "Take a seat."
The air around me was thick with tension and a silence that even made the dripping pipes of the building go silent.
Click. Click. Click. His pen opened and closed as the papers he flipped through flew back and forth. He looked slightly terrified, of what, I had no clue. However, that didn't matter. What mattered was the constant clicking. Like the arm of a clock, it clicked every second with precise timing. Click. Click. Click.
"Can you please stop that," my voice was hoarse and strained. It had been weeks since I had last spoken, maybe even months, and the feeling of my vibrating vocal chords made my throat quiver with shock.
"T-the," I struggled to find my words, "Pen. The pen. Can you stop?" I pointed to the hand he was still opening and closing with the annoying clicks.
Instead of stopping, he continued. The clicks grew faster by the second and soon I couldn't hold in the anger that was beginning to boil within me. "STOP," I blew up in rage as I jumped up from my seat.
Flinching back into his metal chair, his eyes grew wide with fear. He dropped the pen and put his hands up for me to see, "I-I'll stop." His words were stuttered. "Please sit back down 9742!"
"I have a name," I gritted my teeth.
"What is it?" He looked at me curiously, "It would be easier to interrogate you if we were at a personal level."
I twiddled my thumbs and tried to think of the lost title. "I don't know," I sighed, leaning back into the cool metal.
"Shall we get to it?" A thick pile of papers appeared from beneath the table. "We're already running behind."
"What are you talking about?"
"This is an interrogation, 9742. You're case has been reopened. There is no time to waste."
