It took Grayson and three of his Men in White to personally escort me to the Solitary Housing Units. Each grabbed an arm and leg and carried me through the bowels of the building, plowing into one set of control-locked doors after another.

The air quickly grew damp. I could feel the temperature drop, as if we were descending into some subterranean bunker miles below the earth’s surface.

I don’t remember seeing this part of the building on the grand tour….

We stopped at a control station monitoring the corridor. A pale orderly slouched behind a Plexiglas window, dozing, reminding me of a teenage boy working a drive-thru window. Grayson rapped his knuckles against the frame, waking him.

“I’d like a cheeseburger,” I mumbled. “Fries and a milkshake, please.”

At the push of a button, a metallic school bell rat-tat-tatted in my ears as a set of heavy automatic doors opened before me.

“I’ll take my order to go,” I called out as the Men in White carried me away.

The hallway was dimly lit by a series of slender fluorescent tubes. Lining both sides of the corridor were thick metal doors. Each door had a pair of eyes staring out from a miniscule window—haunted eyes drifting lifelessly in their sockets. Looking deep into those peepers, I could’ve sworn there was no soul left within them.

“Sully?!” I shouted. “Sully—are you down here? Where are you?!”

As soon as those dead eyes locked onto mine, I heard the blunt pummeling of fists against the other side of each door, banging to get out.

“Sully—it’s me! Spencer! I’m here to break you out….”

I just didn’t know how quite yet.

The Men in White halted before a door at the farthest end of the hallway.

“Open twenty,” Grayson shouted. A metallic buzz vibrated through the door. I could hear a latch grind free from its bolted position within the lock. He tightened his grip on my arm as he used his free hand to open the door before shoving me in.

The cell, six feet by eight feet, was vacant.

No windows.

A rusted cot was bolted into the wall, a thin mattress with faded stains on top. A dented sink and a steel toilet with no seat were tucked in the far corner.

“Welcome to the Black Hole,” Grayson said.

Nothing, not even light, was capable of escaping these rooms. Once the automatic steel door sealed me in, I might as well not exist anymore.

I rushed for the door, but Grayson swung his arm out and hooked me under the jaw, flipping me onto the floor. I landed on my back with a thud.

I closed my eyes, a dull pain throbbing through my body.

“Sweet dreams, #347678….” Grayson muttered.

I could hear the Men in White chuckle as they stepped over me and out of my cell. The door squealed shut behind them and the latch ground back into place.

I rolled over the floor. The cool concrete soothed my temples.

I heard a fly buzzing about the room.

No, not a fly—it was the lights. The slightest hum from the bulbs droned over my head. It seemed to increase in volume. I couldn’t keep myself from hearing it now, this persistent zzzzzzzzz.

Flipping onto my back, I saw a pair of slender fluorescent bulbs extended along the ceiling, encased behind a thick wire mesh.

The cinder block walls had been painted in an elephant-skin gray. I traced my fingers through the groove between bricks, wondering if I might find a crack.

A miniscule blotch of graffiti sprouted out from the far corner—

Lost Boy

It looked as if it had been painted in a flaking rusty brown. A tiny crescent-shaped sliver clung to the wall.

Is that…?

A fingernail. Somebody had inscribed the graffiti in blood.

“Welcome home.”

I spun around. My cell was empty.

“Who said that?”

“Just the voice inside your head.”

The hazy intonations of a boy’s voice seeped through a rusted iron grate located behind my latrine. I knelt next to the toilet and peered through. The thinnest shaft connected the neighboring cell to my own, about two feet cut into the concrete.

“Sully? Is that you?”

“Do I sound like Sully?”

“Guess not.” I tried to think of what to say. “How long have you been here?”

“Who knows?” The boy’s voice let out a singsong sigh. “A week, a month. Six months. You’ll never know. Not in here. They keep the lights on, twenty-four-seven, so you’ll never know what time it is, whether it’s night or day, winter or spring or summer or fall….Life just becomes one long, never-ending stretch of silence.”

Something about this voice sounded familiar. I couldn’t quite pin it—but the longer he talked, the more I couldn’t shake the feeling that I’d heard it before.

I could see a vague silhouette from the other side of the grate. I squinted in hopes of making out the face, but the rusted grille eclipsed his features.

“My name’s Spencer.”

“I know who you are.”

“At least that makes one of us,” I said.

“Don’t worry. You’ve got enough time on your hands now to do all the soul-searching you want.” After a deep breath, he recited—“I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived.”

My pulse picked up. That was Thoreau. My neighbor knew Thoreau.

I haven’t heard somebody quote Thoreau since…

“Who are you?” I asked.

The question hung in the air. “In another life, my name had been Jason.”

“Jason…?” I asked. “Jason Bowden?”

“Please. Call me Peashooter. It’s been so long since anybody’s called me by my real name down here.”