Preston Child - Mystery of the Amber Room

“Gotcha!”

Purdue closed his eyes. Resisting the urge to watch what the screens displayed, he kept his eyes shut and ignored the sounds of screams that shrieked out of the four loud speakers in the corners. What he could not ignore was the elevated temperature, gradually escalating. His body was sweating from the onslaught of the heat, but he tried his best to follow his mother's rule of not panicking. She had always said that Zen was the answer.

‘Once you panic you are theirs. Once you panic your mind will believe it and all emergency reactions will take hold. Keep calm or else you are done for,’ he told himself over and over as he stood still. In other words, Purdue employed upon himself a good old mindfuck that he hoped his brain would buy. Even moving, he feared, would increase his body temperature even more and he did not need that.

The surround sound was tricking his mind into believing that it was all real. Only by keeping himself from looking at the screens could Purdue prevent his brain from consolidating the perceptions and turning them into reality. During his study of basic NLP in the summer of 2007, he had learned small tricks of the mind to influence comprehension and reasoning. He never thought his life would depend on it.

For hours, the deafening sound blared from all sides. Screams of abused children would be replaced by a choir of gunfire before turning into a constant rhythmic clank of steel on steel. The noise of hammer on anvil would slowly morph into the cadence of sexual moans before it was drowned out by the yelps of seal pups being beaten to death. The recordings were played in an endless loop for so long, that Purdue could predict which sound would follow the current.

To his dismay, the billionaire soon realized that the horrible noises no longer sickened him. Instead, he became aware that certain segments aroused him, while others provoked his odium. In his refusal to sit down his feet had begun to ache, and his lower back was killing him, but the floor had started to heat up too. Remembering a table that would provide refuge, Purdue opened his eyes to find it, but while he had had his eyes shut, they had removed it, leaving him nowhere to go.

“Are you trying to kill me already?” he screamed, jumping from one foot to the other to give his feet reprieve from the burning hot surface of the floor. “What do you want from me?”

But no-one answered him. After six hours, Purdue was exhausted. The floor had not grown any hotter, but it was enough to burn his feet if he dared put them down for longer than a second at a time. What was worse than the heat and having to keep moving was the fact that the audio clip kept playing nonstop. Every now and then he couldn't but open his eyes to see what had changed in the time that had elapsed. After the table had disappeared, nothing else had changed. To him, that fact was more unnerving than the other way round.

Purdue's feet started to bleed when the blisters on his soles burst open, but he could not afford to stop for even a moment.

“Oh, Jesus! Please make it stop! Please! I’ll do what you want!” he screamed. Trying not to lose it was no longer an option. Otherwise, they would never buy that he was suffering enough to believe their mission successful. “Klaus! Klaus, for God's sake, please tell them to stop!”

But Klaus did not answer, nor did he stop the torment. The detestable audio-clip was repeated in an endless loop until Purdue screamed over it. Even just the sound of his own words presented some relief over the repetitive noises. It was not long before his voice failed him.

“Well done you idiot!” he uttered in nothing more than a hoarse whisper. “Now you cannot call for help, and you don't even have a voice to surrender with.” His legs buckled under his weight, but he was afraid to fall to the floor. Soon he would not be able to take one more step. Crying like a child, Purdue begged. “Mercy. Please.”

Suddenly the screens died, leaving Purdue in pitch darkness again. The audio stopped instantly, leaving his ears ringing in the sudden silence. The floor was still hot, but within a few seconds, it cooled down, allowing him to finally sit down. His feet throbbed in excruciating pain and every muscle in his body twitched and cramped.

“Oh thank God,” he whispered, grateful that the torture had come to an end. He wiped his tears with the back of his hand and did not even mind the burn of his sweat in his eyes. The silence was sublime. He was finally able to hear his heartbeat, which was racing from the exertion. Purdue took a deep breath of relief, relishing in the blessing of oblivion.

But Klaus did not have oblivion in mind for Purdue.

Exactly five minutes later the screens came back on, and the first shriek blasted through the speakers. Purdue felt his soul shatter. In disbelief he shook his head, feeling the floor heating up once again and his eyes welled up in despair.

“Why?” he grunted, punishing his throat with his attempts at screaming. “What kind of bastard are you? Why don’t you show your face, you son of a whore!” His words — even if they were audible — would have fallen on deaf ears because Klaus was not there. In fact, nobody was there. The torture machine was set on a timer to switch off just long enough to get Purdue's hopes up, a lovely Nazi-era technique to increase the psychological torture.

Never trust hope. It is as fleeting as it is cruel.

When Purdue woke up, he was once more in the lavish castle room with its oil paintings and stained glass windows. For a moment he thought it had all been a nightmare, but then he felt the agonizing sting of burst blisters. He could not see well since they had taken his glasses along with his clothing, but his vision was good enough to examine the details of the ceiling — not the paintings, but the framework.

His eyes were dry from the desperate tears he had shed, but it was nothing compared to the splitting headache he was suffering from the acoustic overload. Trying to move his limbs, he discovered that his muscles held taken the strain better than he had anticipated. Finally, Purdue looked down at his feet, fearing what he would see. As expected his toes and sides of his feet were covered in burst blisters and crusty blood.

“Don't worry about those, Herr Purdue. I promise you will not be forced to stand on them for at least another day,” a snide voice swam through the air from the direction of the door. “You slept like dead, but it is time to wake up. Three hours is enough sleep.”

“Klaus,” Purdue sneered.

The slight-built man strode leisurely toward the table where Purdue was lying with two cups of coffee in his hands. Tempted to chuck it into the German's mousy mug, Purdue elected to resist the urge on to quench his terrible thirst. He sat up and grabbed the cup from his tormentor, only to find that it was empty. Furious, Purdue hurled the cup to the floor where it smashed into smithereens.

“You really have to mind that temper of yours, Herr Purdue,” Klaus advised in his cheerful voice, sounding more amused than surprised.

‘This is what they want, Dave. They want you to act like an animal,’ Purdue thought to himself. ‘Don’t let them win.’

“What do you expect me to do, Klaus?” Purdue sighed, appealing to the German's personable side. “What would you have done in my position? Tell me. I guarantee you would have done the same.”

“Ouch! What happened to your voice? Would you like some water?” Klaus asked cordially.

“So that you can deny me again?” Purdue asked.

“Maybe. But maybe not. Why don’t you give it a try?” he replied.

‘Mind games.’ Purdue knew the game all too well. Instill confusion, and leave your opponent in the dark whether to expect punishment or reward.