He is in the darkness.
Unlike the darkness of night, it is enclosed, devoid of depth or expanse.
He hears a heavy door slowly rumbling open.
As shaft of light shoots in, but it is not so well defined as that. To eyes accustomed to nothing but darkness, however, the faint gleam feels like a shower of sparks.
"Stop this! Please, I beg of you! Let me go!"
A young man's screams echo through the emptiness.
No voice answers him.
Crouching in the darkness, Kaim counts the footsteps. Three men have come in.
The disorderly footsteps probably belong to the young man. The other two are perfectly regular.
"Please, I'm begging you. If it's money you want. I'll get you all you could as for on the outside. I promise. I won't forget to show my thanks to you. Please!"
The only reply of the two men who have brought the young one here is the dunk of a iron lock opening.
"No! No! Please. I'm begging you. I'll do anything you want. Anything!"
A dull thud is the sound of flesh tearing, bone wrenching. Someone collapses on the floor. A strangled scream. The dunk of an iron lock closing.
Kaim knows the young man has been thrown into the shell diagonally opposite his own. When you are locked in one of these windowless shells, your hearing becomes acutely sensitive.
"Don't do this! Let me out of here! Please! Let me out of here!"
From the sound of the voice, Kaim can imagine a young man's face with boyish traces: a small-time hoodlum hardly a step above a teenage gang member. When he was still on the streets, no doubt, he used to swagger down the sidewalk, his cunning but cowardly eyes darting every which way.
The two men who brought him here maintain their silence to the end, their footsteps moving off together. The heavy door opens and closes again.
Left along in the darkness, the young man howls his entreaties for a time, but when he realizes they will do no good, he shouts himself hoarse, spitting out one curse after another until he begins to sob.
"Quiet down there," and old man calls out from one of the inner shells.
"It won't do you any good to make a fuss. Time to give up, sonny."
This is the voice of the oldest man living in the dozen or so shells lined up in the darkness.
He was already here when Kaim was sent to this place.
It is always his role to quiet and comfort the obstreperous newcomers.
"If you've got time to bawl like that, keep your eyes closed!"
"Huh...?"
"just make sure you keep sucking on your memories of the outside like a piece of candy!"
Sounds of suppressed laughter come from the surroundig shells.
Kaim joins in with a smile and a sigh.
All the shells in the dark are supposedly full, but few of their inhabitants are laughing.
Most of them have lost the strength to laugh.
"Hey, sonny," the old man continues in his role as advisor to the newcomer.
"no point making a fuss. Just calm down and accept your fate. Otherwise..."
and have an note of intensity enters the old man's voice.
"they'll just drag you out of here feet first."
This is exactly what happened yesterday to the former inhabitant of the young man's shell.
He had been screaming on and off for a day. The came a day of banging his head against the shell wall. Then nothing...
until he was dragged out in silence.
"So get a hold of yourself, sonny. Don't swallow you up. Closer your eyes and imagine nice scenery from the outside, the bigger the better: the ocean, or the sky, or some huge field of grass. Remember! Imagine! That's the only way to survive this place."
This was the advice he always gave to newcomers.
But the young man screamed tearfully.
"Who the hell do you think you're kidding? Survive this place?
And then what? I know what this place is. 'No exit' Prison! They throw the lifers in here, give them just enough food to keep them alive, and in the end they kick they bucket anyway. Am I right? There's nothing left to hope for."
His shouts turn to sobs again.
This is the reaction of most of the newcomers.
Nor are they mistaken. This is a prison.
Each of the "shells" is a solitary cell with bars, and the sun shines on a prisoner only on the day of his funeral.
"Everybody dies, sonny, that's for sure. You can't let your mind go before your body does. Hope doesn't have to fade unless you throw it out yourself." the old man goes on softly.
The he adds with feeling. "This system we live under can't last much longer, either."
The old man is a political prisoner. As leader of the anti-government faction, he long resisted the dictatorship until he finally lost the struggle and was imprisoned.
The young man has no ears for the old man's words, however. HE continues thrashing on the floor and crying.
This fellow won't be in his shell much longer than his predecessor.
In a few days, or in less than a month at best, he will go to pieces.
The darkness is that powerful. Depriving a prisoner of light is far crueler than taking in a instant.
"My my." the old man reflects. "this felow's not going to do su much good in a prison break."
The old revolutionary laughs. It might be a genuine laugh or a bold front, but in any case almost no one laughs in response.
Tomorrow morning---or rather, since there is no clear-cut "morning" in the darkness--after they go to sleep, wake up, and have their next meal, another cold corpse will be dragged out wordlessly from another shell.
"Hey. listen. How many of us are here now?" the old revolutionary asks.
"Answer if you can hear me!"
"I can hear you," Kaim says.
His is the only voice.
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.A Thousand Years of Memories.
.memories are immortal, that much is true. everything that we hold dear to us lives on even as the wielder of those memories die. forgotten memories are what they become. some say the world itself is a forgotten memory.but as long as the their is the
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V-- i b r a n t Memories
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--Can't believe you were once just like everyone else,
then you grew and became the devil himself.})