John Hawks - The Dark River

“ Oui, madame. Une femme Irlandaise… with a very sharp sword.”

At random intervals, the man with the blond braids and the black man wearing the white lab coat would remove Gabriel from his cell and drag him downstairs to the school gymnasium. The long, narrow room still had bleachers on one side and a wooden floor with red stripes painted on the edge. Instead of basketball and badminton, the room was used for the torture of prisoners.

There were no new forms of torture in hell. All of the techniques used to inflict pain, fear, and humiliation had already been used in Gabriel’s world. At some earlier time, the wolves had learned about the four barriers that separated their own realm from the others; their particular system of torture corresponded to the barriers of air, fire, water, and earth.

For the interrogation inspired by air, Gabriel’s wrists were tied to a rope and his arms twisted behind his back. The rope was attached to a basketball hoop; then he was pulled upward so that he was dangling a few inches off the ground. “Are you flying?” the men asked. “Why don’t you fly a little more.” Then someone would push him, and Gabriel would swing back and forth while his arms were almost pulled from their sockets.

For fire, metal rods were heated up in a gas flare and then pressed against his skin. For water, his head was pushed deep into a tub of water and released only when he had sucked water into his lungs.

The “earth” interrogation was particularly frightening. One day, he was blindfolded and dragged out of his cell to a patch of dirt behind the school. Someone had placed a straight-backed chair at the bottom of a deep pit in the ground. Gabriel was strapped to the chair and then-slowly-his interrogators began to bury him alive.

The cold dirt surrounded his feet first, and then moved up past his legs, waist, and chest. Occasionally, the two wolves stopped and asked the same questions: Where is the passageway? How do we find it? Who knows a way out of this place? Finally the dirt reached Gabriel’s face. He was completely covered, each breath drawing dirt into his nostrils, before the two men dug him out.

During each of these ordeals, Gabriel wondered if his father had also been captured. Maybe another group on the Island was holding him prisoner or maybe Matthew had finally found the passageway home. Gabriel tried to figure out what lesson his father had learned from this place. It wasn’t surprising to discover that hatred and anger had a persistent power, but compassion still survived within his heart.

Gabriel refused to eat the scraps of food brought to his cell, and the hungry guards gobbled down anything left in the bowl. Gradually, he became frail and weak, but his memories of Maya remained. He could see the intense grace of her body as they practiced together in the loft back in New York. He could remember the sadness in her eyes and the way her skin felt against his when they made love in the chapel. These moments were gone-lost forever-but sometimes they seemed more real than anything around him.

THE BLOND MAN called himself Mr. Dewitt, and the black man was Mr. Lewis. They were enormously proud of their names, as if having a name suggested both an elaborate past and a possible future. Perhaps because of the lab coat, Lewis had a quiet, serious manner. Dewitt was like a big boy in a schoolyard. Sometimes, when the two men were dragging their prisoner through the hallways, Dewitt would tell a joke and laugh. Both wolves were terrified of the commissioner of patrols, who held the power of life and death in this section of the city.

Time passed and, once again, he was brought back down to the gymnasium, where the tub of water was waiting for him. The men tied Gabriel’s wrists in front of him with a length of rope, and he suddenly glanced up at them.

“Do you think it’s right to do this?”

Both men looked surprised-as if they had never heard this question before. They glanced at each other, and then Lewis shook his head. “There’s no right or wrong on this island.”

“What did your parents teach you when you were children?”

“Nobody grew up here,” Dewitt growled.

“Were there any books in the school library? A philosophy book or a religious book-like the Bible?”

Both men glanced at each other as if they shared a secret; then Lewis reached into the outside pocket of the lab coat and pulled out a loose-leaf school notebook filled with stained sheets of paper.

“This is what we call a Bible,” he explained. “After the fighting started, certain people realized that they were going to be killed. Before they died, they wrote books describing where weapons were stored and how to destroy their enemies.”

“It’s kind of a textbook explaining how to be powerful next time around,” Dewitt explained. “People hide Bibles around the city so that they can find them at the beginning of the next cycle. Have you seen the words and the numbers painted on the walls? Most of the numbers are clues about finding Bibles and caches of weapons.”

“Of course, some people are really smart,” Lewis said. “They write false Bibles that deliberately give the wrong advice.” Cautiously, he offered the book to Gabriel. “Maybe you could tell us if this is a false Bible.”

Gabriel accepted the notebook and opened the cover. Each page was scrawled with instructions on how to find weapons and where to establish defensive positions. Some pages were filled with meandering explanations about why hell existed and who was supposed to live there.

Gabriel handed the notebook back to Lewis. “I can’t tell you if it’s real or not.”

“Yeah,” Dewitt muttered. “Nobody knows anything.”

“There’s only one rule around here,” Lewis said. “You do what’s good for yourself.”

“You better rethink your strategy,” Gabriel said. “Eventually, you’ll be executed by the commissioner of patrols. He’s going to make sure that he’s the last person alive.”

Dewitt scrunched up his face like a small boy. “Okay. So maybe that’s true. But there’s nothing we can do about it.”

“We could help each other. If I discovered a door out of here, you two could leave with me.”

“You could do that?” Lewis asked.

“I just have to find the passageway. The commissioner said that most of the legends involve the room where they keep the school files.”

The wolves glanced at each other. Their fear of the commissioner almost overwhelmed their desire to escape.

“Maybe…maybe I could take you there for a quick view,” Dewitt said.

“If you’re getting off the Island, then I’m leaving, too,” Lewis said. “Let’s do it now. Everyone is out of the building, doing a sweep for cockroaches…”

The two men untied Gabriel’s wrists and helped him stand up. They held his arms tightly as they left the gymnasium and hurried down an empty hallway to the file room. The wolves appeared cautious and frightened as they opened the door and pulled him inside.

The file room hadn’t changed since his last visit. The only light came from the small flares burning from broken pipes. Although Gabriel was in pain, he felt alert. There was something in this room. A way out. He glanced over his shoulder and saw that Dewitt and Lewis were watching him as if he were a magician about to perform a spectacular trick.

Slowly, he shuffled down the outside aisle past the metal file cabinets. When he and Michael were little boys they used to play a game with their mother on rainy days. She would hide a small object somewhere in the house and they would search for it while she occasionally told them they were “cold” or “warm.” Down one aisle. Up another. There was something near the work area at the center of the room. Warm , he thought. Warmer. No, now you’re going the wrong way .