Garbled conversation filtered through Luke’s hazy brain as he cracked his eyes open. Although the light wasn’t intense, it still stabbed into his eyes. Once they adjusted, he tried to see where he was. Without moving his head too much—he didn’t want to alert his captors that he was awake—he could see a rounded ceiling, like the inside of a jet. Still disoriented from the tranquilizer, he didn’t feel entirely flat. Maybe he was in a deep recline.
He pushed forward, testing to see if he was restrained. Yup. The straps held him firmly in place, chest, legs, and arms. Even his head was strapped down. He couldn’t move, even if he wanted to. Out of the corner of his eye, he thought he could see an IV line in his arm, running up to disappear above and behind him.
“Master, I think he’s awake,” someone said in French. They were somewhere in front of him.
“Give him another dose. We can’t have him waking until after he’s safely stowed away,” replied someone else in a thick, raspy voice. It might have sounded familiar if Luke’s brain wasn’t still hazy from the drugs they’d been pumping into him. The second speaker wasn’t a native French speaker, their words heavily accented, but not in a way Luke could determine.
Someone wearing nondescript black clothes and a mask stepped into Luke’s view, holding a syringe. Luke tried to pull away from the seat, but the straps were too tight and too strong.
“Don’t worry. The needle won’t need to go in your arm. Your IV has a port,” the person with the syringe said.
A few moments later, Luke’s world faded back to black.
* * *
Luke groaned, consciousness drifting toward him. Wrinkling his nose, he coughed at the smell of piss and shit. He rolled over, no longer restrained, and felt the cold hard stone of the floor he’d been left on. The move left his head swimming. After it stopped, he returned to his back. He couldn’t tell if he’d hit his head at some point or if it was the effect of whatever they’d been pumping into his veins to keep him sedated and unconscious while they transported him to whatever hellhole he currently was in.
He could stretch all the way out, though his foot did bump into something solid—probably a wall. He tried to lay patiently, letting his body work to process the drugs from his system. At some point, he dozed off, the drugs still sedating his body. It was an easy solution that would hopefully solve problems—the drugs and his dizziness.
When he woke again, he was able to raise his head and look around the room. Three of the walls were featureless gray stone while the fourth’s monotony was broken up by a solid wooden door with a small wooden flap door near the bottom. On the ground in front of the door, a metal tray and a metal cup sat. At least he wasn’t in an oubliette.
Pushing himself into a sitting position, he took a minute to let his head stop spinning. Once the fog cleared some, he wondered where the light was coming from and looked up. A single bulb dangled through a hole just big enough for a wire to fit through. The light was dim, but it was better than nothing. Not trusting his body enough to stand, he crawled the few feet to the tray and cup.
Starting with the cup, he picked it up and sniffed it, then dipped a finger into it and brought it to his mouth—clean water. He took a tentative sip. The water seemed fine, so he took a bigger drink but forced himself to set it aside so he didn’t chug it all down. The tray was divided into three sections, like a cafeteria tray. A grain porridge filled the largest section, with maybe a few small chunks of meat or fat scattered about in it. In the other sections, there was some mush that looked like it might have started its life as a vegetable of some kind and a slice of bread. Under the slice of bread, a spoon lay hidden. At least they weren’t going to starve him.
He picked up the spoon and scooped a tiny amount of the porridge onto the tip of the spoon and brought it up to his nose. He didn’t smell anything untoward or rotten about the food. His only observation was that it seemed kind of bland, but better bland than poisoned or spoiled. He put the food into his mouth and squished around on his tongue to see if he noticed something he might have missed with the smell. Nothing wrong with the food, just boring.
Next, he took the spoon and stirred around in the porridge to see if there was anything hidden within. It was clean, same with the vegetable mash. Whoever his captors were, they wanted him alive and decently fed for now. He’d been in worse situations and escaped, so he slowly consumed the food and water, taking his time to make sure his stomach didn’t rebel when mixed with whatever they’d used to keep him unconscious. When he was finished, and since there was no one to see his bad manners, he picked up the tray and licked it clean. Every calorie was critical when he had no control over when his next meal would come, so he ensured he left nothing on the tray. Finished, he returned the tray and spoon to the spot where he’d found them.
Leaning against the wall with the remaining half of his water, he looked around to see if he could spot something he might have missed earlier. In the far corner, there was a bucket and a roll of toilet paper. That would explain the stench. He risked standing up, leaning heavily against the wall while his head spun. The dizziness wasn’t as bad as when he first woke, but the weakness was concerning. He hoped it was an aftereffect of the drugs in his system. He doubted whoever put them into his system was a doctor. They’d probably overdosed him fearing he’d wake and take his retribution.
He walked slowly, keeping a hand propped against the stone wall. The bucket was empty, thankfully. The odor must be coming from elsewhere, possibly other cells with other occupants. He completed a circuit of the tiny room; it had to be only seven feet by maybe nine feet. Once he returned to the wall with the door, he inspected it.
It looked heavy and thick. He’d get a better idea just how heavy it was when his jailer came to take his tray. He couldn’t see any hinges. They must be buried in the stone. There was a stone lip that ran around the door on both sides and the top, meaning the door opened out.
With the increasing pressure in his bladder, Luke looked across the room at the bucket with distaste. Sighing, he walked across the room, keeping his hand on the wall for balance. He nudged the toilet paper away from the bucket with his foot, pulled down the baggy cotton pants they’d stuffed him in at some point, and relieved himself into the bucket. He hoped they took the buckets regularly.
He’d lived most of his life without plumbing, except when he lived in the Roman Empire and the modern era. By and large, cities had been a very fragrant place for most of history. Maybe that was one of the reasons he wandered so much, seeking open country where the air was fresh and not tainted by the shit of too many unclean humans.
He toddled back to the other side of the room and sat down, leaning up against the wall next to the door. The bucket, in his line of sight, drew his eye. He scooted to sit against the perpendicular wall so he could look across the space and not into the back of his cell at his bathroom bucket.
As he lay against the wall, he receded into his head trying to figure out what he was going to do or if he even could do anything. Sweeping his eyes over the stone wall absentmindedly, a random pattern or shading drew his attention and pulled him out of his head. It looked like a crescent moon. Selene…
Hope surged through him. Sitting up, he closed his and lifted his face toward the ceiling. “My Mistress, I need you, please.” He waited but felt nothing, no touch of acknowledgement or warmth of her presence. He tried reaching out again, but the result was the same. The flame of hope perished, doused with the reality that he might truly be alone. He returned to staring at the wall, trying to stave off panic and a rising wave of despair.
At some point, sleep and the lingering drugs claimed him again. Besides, he had nothing else to do. Sleep was a safer option instead of focusing on his growing fear and anxiety.
* * *
For days, Luke lived in silence, only broken when the heavy bar was lifted from the outside of the flap door. The bar lifted, the flap opened, and a gun barrel poked into the open space. The empty tray was quickly taken, a new one shoved in. They fed him twice a day at what he guessed was mid-morning and early evening, based on the light switching off a few hours after he ate the second meal. At midday, in between meals, someone would collect the bucket. He’d learned the hard way when he didn’t have his bucket in place and the door opened. The latrine person just shut the door and barred it, forcing Luke to live with the bucket for another twenty-four hours.
So by his reckoning of two meals a day, a bucket pickup, and a cycle of dark and light, he’d been there a week or so with nary a word spoken to him or any change of routine. Three silent visitors every day followed by lights out. All Luke could figure was the visitors were human or werewolf since they didn’t set off his vampire proximity senses.
He tried to keep to a regular sleep schedule as best as he could by trying to avoid napping out of boredom during the day. To keep his mind occupied, he talked to himself in his head in the various languages he’d learned over the years, even delving into long dead languages or older versions of the modern ones just to keep variety alive and to avoid walking down the darker hallways of his imagination. When he stumbled on the debris of his past lives and dug into one of the old languages, his mind wandered to those he’d spoken the language with and his movement through their points in time.
He never considered those times as his, even when he lived in them. He was a traveler through time, where everyone else’s timeline was finite and fixed. They belonged in their times, were products of it. Luke was a product of hundreds of years, with each person only skimming across his psyche with the barest of touches, altering him by means of many tiny drops that built slowly over time. Whereas time flooded the being of humans with their finite lives until it drowned them, carrying them away and ending their sparks.
He’d been through long stretches of time alone with no company but the horse he rode upon, but at least then he had the wind and birds to keep him company and the scenery to stimulate his thoughts. Here, he had dull gray stone walls with only mild variations in coloring and lighting to feed his mind, which at best was a scanty meal. At least his week’s worth of beard growth gave him something to occasionally do, providing an opportunity to scratch at his face.
Periodically, he’d try to reach out to Selene—sometimes he’d try when the light bulb shined and sometimes when it didn’t. He had no idea if his keepers kept the light on during the daytime or not. It didn’t matter. No matter when he tried to reach out to her, she never replied.
By the end of the second week, he was having trouble keeping his mind straight, often drifting wildly without aim or purpose. When the end of the third week approached, Luke found himself napping to avoid the tedium of nothing, losing track of night and day. Once welcome reminders of a schedule, the noise of the caretakers intruding on his silence caused distress—the noise of the bar being lifted raised his heart rate and caused him to scramble away from the door.
The only bright spot in his life became the weekly pair of buckets, one filled with soapy water and one filled with clean water. With the water, he’d carefully bathe himself, then use the soapy water to clean his room, and finally, rinse his bucket. As soon as he finished his tasks, he returned the buckets with their used water to the door to be picked up.
Each day Luke stared at the wall with the scratch marks he’d been making to represent days, and each day his struggle to add the next tally mark grew more difficult. Sometimes he even told himself it didn’t even matter and resolved to stop, but inevitably, he’d scramble to grab the spoon. He used the end of its handle to scrape a mark into the stone next to his other tally marks before dropping it back on the tray.
When he grew tired of staring at the scratches in the stone, he found another patch of stone to gaze at. Cataloging the differences in the various stones forming his cell became his new hobby. If he was lucky, he’d find a pattern or picture to keep his mind occupied for a few more minutes.
After six weeks—or was it five?—Luke could no longer bring himself to count the marks. He began napping most of the day, even missing a meal or bucket stop on occasion. At night, he stared at the ceiling or wall, rolling from back to side to the other side trying to find a hard spot that felt slightly softer, but finding all the stone to be of equal hardness.
It must have been at about eight weeks, or at least Luke thought he remembered eight bathing buckets, when the scratching sounds started. At first, Luke thought he was imagining the noise, his brain finding a way to amuse itself. But after a week of irregular scratching, he came to miss the sound when it wasn’t there, longing for the companionship it brought. After eleven or twelve weeks, the scratches just blended with the routine of his tedium, but they never went away. After an additional four weeks, each scratch stabbed into his brain until he spent minutes and hours with his fingers stuffed into his ears.
One night, after the scratching stopped, Luke lay staring at the ceiling when he thought he heard something new, some sound other than the night sounds of his prison. Beyond the occasional foot fall or scuff of a boot, Luke had never heard another noise. Once he thought he heard a sneeze. Then weeks of scratching made their way into Luke’s mental routine to be cataloged and added. Now there was something new, or at least that’s what Luke hoped.