The Arrival | The House of Voices #3

Four - The Warden

The Warden

 

Parish:

Parish had discovered that the only time he could sleep in peace was during the afternoon, just a few hours before lunch. At night, he just tossed and turned, unable to catch hold of sleep, even though it danced right under his nose. Sometimes the Voices would decide to visit him and they’d whisper terrible, terrible things in his mind until he found himself screaming for them to leave him alone.

Then the nurses would come; three stocky men whose lack of height was made up for with their bulk. Two of them would restrain him, thick arms wrapping around his middle and looping around his arms, locking Parish in place as he struggled against them, screaming for them to let him go because someone he cared about was in trouble.

“They’re going to hurt her,” he’d spit at them through clenched teeth, wincing in pain after one of them knocked him harshly against the wall of his cell. It wasn’t a padded room. The warden said he wasn’t ready for that yet, wasn’t dangerous enough for a room made of rubber. The walls that made contact with Parish’s cheekbones and shoulders were concrete, and decorated his skin with scratch marks and bruises.

But the nurses would ignore him. The biggest of the three would spit in anger and haul Parish up by the collar of the shirt he’d been supplied with that morning and tell him to get a grip, shaking him so violently that Parish felt that his brain was rattling inside his skull.

“Please,” he’d beg, “they’re trying to hurt her. They told me everything. You have to let me go. She isn’t safe.”

“They told you, eh?” the nurse would repeat, looking over at his friends with a smirk. “Sure kid. Did they also tell you that you’re never getting out of here ‘cause you’re a grade A whackamole? No? Well, I guess they aren’t very truthful then, are they?”

And then the smallest nurse would come forward and stick a needle in Parish’s flesh, sometimes in his neck, sometimes in his arm. He’d start to feel the world fade away, grey washing over his vision and plunging him into darkness.

But unconsciousness wasn’t comforting. It gave the Voices the perfect opportunity to fill his brain with even more nightmares and, because he was sedated and unable to wake himself, he couldn’t stop the agony.

Lying in his cot now, Parish decided to take advantage of the Voices’ absence and tried to sleep. He didn’t know why they left him in peace at this time every day, and really, he tried not to dwell on it too much; because deep down, some part of him already knew that they left him every day to go torment October.

If he had the power, he would have called them back just to give her some peace. But he couldn’t control them. He tried, but he didn’t know how. So instead, used the time to rest, to catch up on much needed sleep, so that he wouldn’t drive himself insane from the lack of sleep.

He curled himself into a ball on his side, pinched his eyes shut, and almost immediately began drifting off.

A minute passed before the thunk thunk sounds of his cell door being opened woke Parish up from his shallow sleep. He opened his eyes and watched as the door swung open, idly wondering why the nurses were coming in. He hadn’t done anything to bring them over, had he?

Parish was surprised when he realized that it wasn’t a nurse who stepped into his cell, but the Warden.

He was a large man, stern looking man, with dark, sleepy eyes and a five o clock shadow. He stood around Parish’s height, about a couple inches shorter, and his girth blocked out most of the light from the hallway outside from entering Parish’s cell.