The boy smiles something that would better be affixed upon a rotting corpse, but it doesn’t matter, because he can’t see it.
‘Let me out.’
The boy is swollen in fear. The winter rolls into his cage, dry, picking at the flakes of his skin, passing in and out in a mocking trance. The familiar confines force him to wonder who next, when, how. Why. Always why.
‘Let me out,’ he says. But the wind steals his plea and scatters it. ‘Let me out.’
He looks across the cage and the bars glare back at him; in the rust he sees his own reflection betraying him, some pale flickers of light in the ember of the candle but nothing else. The candle billows into him, his only friend, sighing whatever heat it can. Unable to relieve any of the ice within him, or to warm the bruises across his ribs that spring out like daggers. Only tempting him, but trying, bless it, trying. The candle seems a little sad, everyday getting closer to the ground like a humble pastor, the slave to a king, only a lot slower and not bowing to the boy at all. The boy’s glad about that.
‘Let me out.’ He doesn’t know what the words mean anymore. He says nothing else. He wants to have faith in the words because he hugs them dearly. He can’t. But he won’t admit that. He hears that there must be some sort of meadow outside, a green field like one his dad used to lead him through when the summer came to him. But the pasture of wheat that glows a sun-drenched gold mine into the sky is not far away. The breeze tells him these things. Once the wind brought him a present from outside the cave, a grain of life due to expire soon without a home, but it was stolen back again and carried off to the walls, out of the cage.
‘Let me out.’
‘Let me out, Dad.’
‘Let me out.’
Once the wind introduced a friend, a murmur of impoverished tendrils that whispered a secret to the boy. The voice left him frozen and then turned and tried to carry the candle away, but the battle fell and victory stained the candle. The whisper became another one, until a crowd of susurrus were arguing in his room. They said:
‘What now?’
‘Food.’
‘Give ‘im some?’
‘Or make some of ‘im?’
‘His brother says we don’t.’
‘Hurt him. Just don’t let him die?’
‘Make him wish for Death.’
‘Make him wish for Death.’
‘Worth every penny.’
Death sounds nice. Death sounds like the kind old man who comes, takes your hand and walks you to the room where there are only candles—a place that blinds you with light and you can wonder forever in a great hallway filled with monsters that serve you and fires that befriend you.
The bars strip him of choice—a spot of light glimmers behind the passageway, a small trust in hope that intrigues him. If he can just call Death, Death will come and unburden him. Might give him food. Clothes. Fight the blackness that bewitches him, embrace the beating lump in his chest with a spell or just cheat his eyes into false reality. Take him away from the world.
‘Let me out...’
He tries to bid him, but the boy’s lips can’t formulate his name, as if the shame of talking it holds more shame than the actual desire.
‘Let me out.’
Then the snatch comes; Death answers in a raging folly that the boy cannot fathom—his friend dies in the tremor and the dark completes its quest. And then pounding feet smash down and the boy shakes in his cage.
‘Shut up! You ain’t going nowhere.’
The next day nowhere reveals itself, because that very man with the angry voice spits at him with a deep voice, spitting fire, as the cage moves out and then, behind the slate of the cave—
light meets him and springs to his eyes and rolls the world into a holy trance. Dark passes in the flight of the wind and the cage opens, and the boy falls out with a thump upon lines of prickly green blades, and then another tune plays; footsteps grow against the hill. He’s dazed, and he turns and he sees the cage roll away down the other side from where he came, and he sits there alone atop the grass, resting against the rock. He shivers and clutches his hands across his body, and the scent of freedom is one of the secrecy that wind keeps to itself. His friend has gone. The candle gone. But the light so bright in the sky that he squints and fiddles around with the pounding in his chest, which beats from the bolt of air that he takes into him. The sun in the sky. A few clouds swirling in the air but nothing else, and his friend is above him offering heat in a warm lullaby. It drifts down to him, and the grass is green and the meadows look at him from afar like a guardian. Not alone. Just wayward as desperado.
Too much. The boy shivers there for a moment. He doesn’t understand. The blacks suddenly passed and an open world moved into his cave. His wonderful cave. His home.
He wants his home back.
Now a tremble in the ground, the footsteps hammer down and he can’t be certain that they are even footsteps, even human, not the monster—
The boy picks himself up, so thin from the lack of food, so tired. But swift. The wind plucks him up and casts his body forward as he dives, and he runs behind a block of stone.
‘Thank you,’ he mutters. And the wind engulfs the words without shame.
A few words float to him from behind the bend and to his surprise; the boy can comprehend most of them:
‘Sure?’
‘Yeah.’
‘… here?’
‘Right here.’
‘Maybe they’re…?’
‘I… not.’
‘I paid good money for him.’
Money. The boy hates money. He overheard some whispers before and many speak of money. Money draws the wonder out of people and crushes it, he thinks. If someone talks about money they can’t be on his side.
‘You paid them?’
‘Yes. My money. How else?’
‘You paid for a boy?’
‘Yes.’
‘A slave-boy.’
‘A slave-boy. Yes.’
‘Not even a fat one? Not even something with a bit of meat on it?’
The voices continue in different chords and tones that compromise the others, some blunt with anger and he dares not look; he defies the temptation of his curiosity the chance to betray him. He could run. The land below him stretches out afar and it takes his breath and there are more hills, more lands, but he cannot see beyond the silhouette of cloud in the far sky and the shadows where his friend does not peer. And there the trees stretch away, crooked and miserable old men leaning down with bent-backs, cold and flaky, sweeping their boughs across the grass in search of a tiny trinket. Like Granddad.
‘Granddad!’ he shouts. ‘Remember me?’
Footsteps stop. The shuffle pauses. They heard him. A first he thought of a blessing—the sound that his pursuers have aroused their defeat and have saddled their horses, turning to leave, but it’s a sound that he got so used to it that there’s an absence with its passing. Like when the winter sky is borne to a blue sheet of haze, and not a cloud to break it. There should be clouds, you think. There should be clouds.
There should be footsteps.
‘Got him.’
******
So, this is the prologue to a new novel I'm writing. It's got similar ideas in it to everything else I've written, but I think it's much better. =)
Thanks for reading! Please let me know what you think.
It gives me a ridiculous mental image, but I love it.
You are repeating the same word over and over again, and, which makes it a tad bit more noticable, they're almost always at the very beginning of the sentence. Perhaps connecting some of these sentences to make them longer can make the flow a bit more...smooth. Uninterrupted. I don't know, but the phrasing here is a bit jarring.
Atmoshpere
