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Radcliffe Institute, 1989
The shackles on my wrists rattle as I move to sit on the hard, cold floor. I do not mind the noise, however. It fills the otherwise quiet room. I don’t mind the cold either. What I do mind is being locked away in this room day after day. Night after night. The only company I have is that of my own reflection, staring at me from the shiny tiled floor and the shatterproof glass panels that make up the walls.
I see a pair of glowing red eyes and am unable to recognize the man gawking back. I am nothing like the creature I used to be. Long-term imprisonment has deteriorated my inhuman abilities. My body has become a shell. A thing to be studied. A vessel meant to achieve greatness—a greatness that has not come.
I’m surrounded by a madness I cannot escape. However, my purpose is kept alive by my knowledge of the future, which I can see as clearly as the fluorescent bulb illuminating the hallway. In time, I will see the fruits of my sacrifice. Although subjected to unimaginable acts week after week, forced to live out my days in darkness, I will gladly pay whatever price it takes in order to set things straight.
Today, luck shifts in my favor.
It isn’t long before my heightened sense of hearing picks up on the cries of the woman in labor a few floors above. Her strenuous breaths and howls of pain announce the imminent arrival of the key destined to deliver us from evil.
I sit and watch the guards restlessly pacing the hallway outside of my room. Something is about to change. This very amendment is what I have been craving for years and I wait in anticipation of what is to come.
The beginning of a new chapter is but a few hours away.