Mousetrap

“What is this place?!” 

It was a question in name only. Really, it was Vince showing his exasperation at the situation he found himself in.

“A prison of the mind!” said Don theatrically.

“Shut up you wanker!” hissed Vince.

Don looked like he’d been slapped hard in the face, but Vince did not regret his words. Not one bit. They’d been a long time coming. Don could be bloody annoying when he tried, and he could be just as annoying when he didn’t try.

“It was just a bit of bants,” Don chided him.

“Does it look like we should be indulging in a spot of frivolous banter right now, Don?” growled Vince.

Don did not look at all convinced. This was not his fault and all he was trying to do was make the best of a bad situation, but then that was a habit of a lifetime. He’d grown up attempting to do this. He’d quickly sussed that class clown was the best position for him, but even better was when he was the partner to the clown who had been blessed with charisma. That worked even better because he didn’t actually want the limelight, he wanted a quiet life and to be left alone, but he’d learnt long ago that you didn’t always get what you wanted. In fact, it wasn’t all that often that you got what you wanted. Mainly Don got lemons and lemons didn’t agree with him. They did something to his tongue that was deeply unpleasant, so when someone made a quip about making lemonade it really wound him up to a point where he wanted to make something of them. The cheery twats.

“It could be worse”, said Don.

Don knew this was very likely to wind Vince up even more than he already was. Don as has already been established, was the class clown and class clowns push boundaries and they push limits and they nudge and they cajole and they are the most adept of wind-up merchants. They are also known as sods because they do go too far and they do that often. That’s kind of the point to them. They make cheeky forays into land where they have no right of way. Don and Vince were a double act and their chemistry only fizzed when they pushed and challenged each other. This might not have been the time or the place. But there was only one way to find that out and the both of them were constantly trying to find that out.

The problem was that even though Vince was of a similar mind, he could dish it out, but he had trouble taking it. He wasn’t a glass half empty kind of guy, he wanted that glass and its contents, and if he didn’t have them he got really pissy about it.

Vince glowered at Don, “how? You tell me how it could be worse!?”

“It can always be worse,” said Don.

“That’s something that someone says when they know things are really bad and they’ve got nothing useful to say,” growled Vince. 

“That’s a cynical way of looking at it,” said Don, “it’s about perspective and being a dick, moaning and giving up really isn’t a good look on you right now.”

“You what?” Vince really was not happy now. This was not in the script, not his script anyway. This was a challenge to his authority and his leadership, and that was not on.

“You’re better than this,” Don told him, “the Vince White I know is anyway.”

“You’re starting to get on my tits,” Vince said by way of a warning. Quite what he was warning was not clear. Don was more than a head taller than Vince and in good shape. Don was clearly the muscle in the partnership and it would not do to go toe to toe with him. The only way Vince would win that one would be to fight dirty, and he would be best placed to do so on home turf or ground of his choosing. This place did not favour him, it did not favour him at all.

Neither did this ground favour Don, but Vince wasn’t thinking that far. This current, limited thinking of Vince’s worried Don. Vince was the thinker in this partnership, or rather the planner. Right now though, he seemed to be panicking and that was not good. People who panicked were a liability and Don didn’t like people who were liabilities. Often, it was Don who was called upon to deal with people who had become too much of a liability. It had not escaped him that it was Vince who got the call, but Don who did the work. That arrangement had worked for the both of them, especially as Don liked Vince. Right now though, Vince was not being his usual likeable self and that was a problem.

“That’s what they want,” Don said quietly.

“What’s that you said?” Vince said far too loudly, “why are you whispering?”

Don rolled his eyes in the universal display of contempt, “you’re doing exactly what they want.”

“And how would you know that?” Vince responded quickly and venomously. Far too quickly, the venom turned bitter in his mouth.

Now it was Don’s turn to give Vince a dark look. 

Vince should have apologised right there and then. But apologies were not a part of Vince’s lexicon. The predominant reason for the required apology was that Don had done hard time, but Vince had not. Don had done the time for the both of them and to overlook that was not a wise move. In fact it was a dick move. Vince owed Don. Truth was, Vince needed Don more than Don needed Vince. Possibly more so now than ever before.

The dynamic between the two was subject to change thanks to where they now found themselves and found themselves they had. This change had been sudden and unexpected and neither of them had yet recovered from it. If recovery was even possible. They sat in silence for a while. An uneasy truce that avoided the potential for further conflict.

Vince was a talker though and soon enough, he had to break up the silence. For him it was uncomfortable, whereas his interruption was uncomfortable for Don.

“Do you remember anything?” he asked his friend.

Don scowled as though he’d been awakened with a bucket of ice water. Then he softened. He could see two things as he took a look at his friend. Vince was trying. He was also scared. More scared than he would care to admit.

He wanted to say no, he didn’t remember a thing. This was the instant truth available to him. Instead he paused and gave himself over to thought. He had awoken here and his being here had disoriented him. Still was disorienting him. In such circumstances, it would be easy to say he remembered nothing and leave it at that. But that was lazy and it was, in its own way, giving in.

Now he was thinking about it, he was struggling to pinpoint his last memory. Their present predicament and the immediacy of a battalion of marauding emotions had taken over. He had to exert a will of effort to clear the effect this place was having on him. It was a darkness that prevented him being himself. Losing yourself was about as bad as it got. He’d seen that happen when he was inside. Some of the inmates allowed the place to get under their skin and it didn’t just change them. It broke them.

Even as he cleared his head and looked back, no memory presented itself as the last memory he’d had prior to coming here. It wasn’t just that he didn’t know how he’d got here. He didn’t remember a point prior to now that made any sense to him. The memories he did possess were from a long time ago. Too long ago. He ignored them and the haze that lay before them.

Sometimes, when Don had a few pints and then had a few more because why-the-hell-not, he would lose a portion of the night. Mostly it would be the point in the proceedings when he was leaving the pub. The fresh air lay in wait for him and smacked the sense out of him. He’d wake up the next day and not have a clue how he’d got home. Sometimes he’d find the remnants of food in his flat and realise that his trip home had included a stop at a burger van or a kebab house. On one notoriously memorable occasion he’d caught sight of his face as he washed his hands following an early morning visit to the bathroom. He’d screamed at the sight of his damaged flesh. His cheek grazed and badly bruised, he’d panicked about what had occurred the night before, how badly injured he was and what kind of trouble he was in. As he screamed, the damaged flesh peeled away and plopped itself into the sink. This surprised him sufficiently that his screaming stopped. Gingerly, he retrieved the skin from the sink and then, as he raised it level with his eyes, he’d seen it for what it was. Donner kebab meat. He’d fallen asleep in his food whilst he ate it.

Don was no stranger to self-induced memory loss and the fug of stupidity that sometimes accompanied it, and although not a fan of it, he was relatively comfortable with how it went. He could live with it as an occasional cost of a cracking night out. That wasn’t to say that he was happy when he lost portions of his night. That was a shame and it also shamed him because either he had drunk too much, or he was getting old and could no longer take his drink. Either eventuality pained him. Outside imbibing alcohol as an aid to social interaction, he had not experienced memory loss and he certainly hadn’t experienced it on a scale such as this.

Something was missing here. Don could feel it. It ached and threatened to hurt. He probed it the same as he would a mouth ulcer with his tongue. This was wrong and it worried him. His worry brought a suitcase full of fear and told him this was bad. Really bad. Maybe the worst. He didn’t know the full scale of it and the not knowing was already getting to him, but threatening to do a lot worse than just get to him.

“I don’t remember quite a bit,” he said eventually to Vince, “not just how we got here, but I don’t think I remember why we got here. If you know what I mean?”

Vince was nodding, he knew exactly what Don meant, “how is it that we don’t remember a whole bunch of stuff from before we got here? And, how do we know we don’t remember it? It’s like it’s missing, but we’re supposed to know we’re missing it.”

“I’m wishing I didn’t make that joke now,” said Don.

“What joke?” Vince said dryly and for a moment there Don didn’t know whether he was joking about Don failing to be funny, but from the look on Vince’s face, he just didn’t remember what Don had said.

“I said it was a prison of the mind,” Don reminded him.

Vince rolled his eyes, “so you did.” He sighed, “looks like you might, in a way, be right.”

“It had to happen eventually,” said Don. He walked up to one of the mirrored walls and stared deeply into it, “do you think someone’s watching on the other side?”

“On that wall or one of the others,” Vince shrugged, “reckon they could be.”

“What about the ceiling or the floor?” asked Don.

“Less likely,” said Vince, but Don wasn’t convinced by that. Not one bit.

Now Vince walked to the adjacent wall on Don’s left and tried to peer through it. They stood like that for a while and would have stayed like that for much longer if Don hadn’t inexplicably fallen to the floor. Don never fell over. Keeping his feet was a professional standard that he had upheld throughout his career.

Vince span on the mirrored surface of the floor on his bare feet, “what happened?” he asked his prone friend.

Don lay there looking shocked and frightened. Vince didn’t like the look of that. Don didn’t spook easily. Not at all in Vince’s extensive experience of the man, “what’s wrong?” he asked his friend.

“Didn’t you see it?” Don’s voice was strained and fearful and that fear was creeping Vince out. He wanted to tell Don to stop fooling around, but he knew he wasn’t fooling. 

“I…” Vince was about to refute any siting of it. But then he too saw it. From the corner of his eye he saw it, “oh shit!”

He found himself on the floor, the heels of his hands pressed against his eyes, “what the hell was that!?” he whined.

“I can’t quite explain it,” whispered Don, “it was like I saw millions of cubes like ours held together by… I dunno. More glass, but at forty five degree angles. Kinda like small cubes within bigger cubes. And there are people in each and every cube. So many cubes. So many people. Then there was the…”

“Stop!” Vince shouted, “don’t say it! I don’t want you to say it!”

Don scrabbled over to his friend and hugged him. He hugged him for the very first time in their lives, “you gotta keep it together Vince. You can’t let go. You can’t give up. We need each other to get through this, OK?”

Don hoped Vince heard him through his sobbing and his tears. He held him and hoped that his friend would stay with him. He needed Vince now, more than ever. He couldn’t afford for his friend to betray him again. Running away and leaving Don to face the music alone. This was one gig where they stood together, or they fell together. Don couldn’t do this on his own. He didn’t want to face this music on his own.

Only this time it wasn’t music. He’d heard that thing out there in the glass between the cubes, and he’d seen it snaking through the glass as though it was from another dimension, and perhaps it was. Dark and spikey. The spikes moving and shifting as if they had a life all of their own.  A hideous mix of snake and many tentacled squid. There were no eyes, only these open maws at the end of each tentacle. Open and hungry with row after row of sharp teeth that went way back into the thing as though they never ended. There was something terrible hypnotic about that creature. Something flickered along its length as it moved. Something awfully familiar. Don realised that it was fire. Flames licking and dancing as it moved. This was a dragon, but not of the world Vince and Don had lived in. This was far more terrible than those mythical beasts and it patrolled this place. Looking in on the inmates of this infinite prison. Searching and probing. Hungry. Always hungry.

The creature had hissed an announcement of its eternal hunger and he’d heard it in the middle of his brain. Painful tendrils of noise that threatened to undo him. The sound of it was like screaming, only it was far more than a simple scream. It was pain, and it was all the pain and anguish and fear in the universe amped up so that it kept expanding out into the infinite. Always growing. Never ending.

Don threw his hands to his temples as though his head were about to explode, and in a way, it was.

“We have to keep it out, Vince,” Don shook his friend, but Vince wasn’t listening, “Vince! Vince! Listen to me!”

When Vince failed to acknowledge his friend, Don grabbed his chin and pulled his head up so they were facing each other, “look at me right now!” he barked into his friend’s face, flecks of spittle hitting Vince’s cheeks.

In the split second before Vince opened his eyes, Don knew he’d made a terrible mistake and wished that he could take it back. There was no taking this back though. It was too late. Too late for Don and certainly too late for Vince. His eyes opened and to his horror, Don saw a black mist snaking around in the whites of Vince’s eyes.

Don cried out and pushed himself away from the form that had once been his best friend. He pushed back, but there was nowhere to go. Don’s back hit the ice cold wall of their cell and Vince opened his mouth in an idiot grin.

“No!” Don gasped, “please Vince, don’t!”

But Vince did and Don lost his mind as an impossibly long tentacle emerged from that shit-kicker grin of Vince’s and snaked out towards him, the open maw pulsing and the teeth inside undulating as it moved ever closer to Don’s screaming mouth…