#eroding the bars of my cage with my fists i tell you

[kibutsulove]

I ju I just i egh AGH. I. WHAG AT

[skarsgard-daydreams]

Son of Perdition

Description: Henry insists that he is an ordinary man, at least until his mind starts to unravel.

Warnings: angst, false imprisonment, religious abuse, physical and psychological torture, mild blood, threats of gun violence, mild physical violence, kidnapping, brainwashing, smoking

Notes: This story assumes that The Kid is telling the truth about his past in a parallel universe and deals with his imprisonment. It’s dark, and it has a lot of religious themes. Please mind the warnings.

Everything had unraveled so fast. He had tried to seize the threads of his life as it came apart, but they had cracked out of his grasp like a whip and stung him in the process. When the man asked him who he was, a name floated to the surface of his mind. It was limp and lifeless—a corpse bobbing face down in the water after a shipwreck. He slouched against the corner of the cage and watched the man ash a cigarette into an empty coffee tin. The smoke danced in the light of the halogen lamp illuminating the curved walls of the cistern that had been converted into a prison. The man repeated the question.

“Who are you?”

“H-Henry,” the prisoner answered. His throat felt like two pieces of sandpaper rubbing together when he swallowed. He lowered his gaze to the metal tray at the man’s feet. The light glinted off the surface of a tin cup, and Henry swore he could smell the water in the air, something crisp and sweet mixed in with the acrid scent wafting off the cigarette. It was close enough he thought he could reach it if he flattened himself to the floor and stretched out his arm, but his vision blurred every time he moved and his limbs felt like they had turned to stone.

The man heaved a sigh and dropped his cigarette butt into the glass of water. “A false witness will not go unpunished,” he said, rising to his feet. He shifted the tray further from the cage with the toe of his boot. “And he who breathes out lies will not escape.”

Henry rested his forehead against the bars and winced as the metal tray scraped across the floor. “Proverbs,” he mumbled. “Chapter nineteen.” The dull recitation spilled from his lips without conscious thought. He let his eyelids slide shut as his jailor switched off the light and climbed up the ladder. The hatch overhead closed and the locking mechanism groaned and creaked, plunging the room back into pitch darkness.

In the long stretches of time when he was alone, Henry tried to put his memories in order. It seemed essential for him to maintain a timeline, though he could no longer explain why. He started with his name, which would remind him of his father, and from there a universe of memories would expand in his mind while a shrill silence filled his ears, occasionally punctuated by water dripping somewhere out of reach.

He remembered his father’s house—the lingering scent of decay as he treaded the floorboards and flicked on a light. He remembered a thrill fluttering in his stomach when his wife said she was late. He remembered how soft her hair always felt, how her skin smelled like apricots and cream. He remembered wondering if their child would be a girl or a boy. He hoped it was a boy. And then he remembered a boy in a cage, and his stomach turning sour when he heard his father’s voice crackle to life again on the cassette player, reciting the revelations of a madman.

The steady drip of water eroded his stream of thought and Henry found himself laying flat on the floor as the room seemed to spin in the darkness. Something told him this was a symptom, that he needed to find a diagnosis and a treatment. He was supposed to be good at that. He reached for his left hand and searched for his radial pulse with his right, but he could barely feel it under his skin. Every time he tried to count the beats, the sound of dripping water crashed again and made him flinch. He realized after several attempts that he would need a watch to take an accurate measurement, anyway. He couldn’t remember what had happened to it.

Time was a problem. He had tried to measure its passage from the cage, scraping tally marks into the floor with his fingernails each time the man brought him food. If he could keep track of things, maybe he could stay rational. If he could stay rational, maybe he could find a way back. Henry reasoned that two tally marks were equal to one day, except for Sundays, when the man didn’t come at all. On those days, he fasted from food, water, and any belief that he might live to see sunlight again, until he heard the scrape of metal above him and thanked fucking Christ that his jailor had returned. He guessed he had made it two and a half weeks before the man started turning off the lights when he left, leaving Henry in the dark for hours on end.

It was the kind of darkness that existed at the center of a black hole, something that consumed the whole spectrum of color and left him in a vacuum. Soon his mind became unmoored. He groped for the edges of the cage, feeling the cold metal under his hands to remind himself that there was matter around him—that he existed somewhere in this iteration of time and space. He touched his face and his body to make sure that he was still solid. He couldn’t hold onto both thoughts at the same time. When he grasped the metal walls that surrounded him, he felt himself blinking out of existence. By the time the man returned the next day, he had forgotten there ever was a tally.

Henry took a few shallow breaths and tried to ignore the dripping sound nearby. It felt like the water was hammering into his brain each time it fell. The damp, musty aroma in the air was green in color, he thought, but even as the idea formed in his head, he knew it made no sense. He had to find some way to stop his mind from slipping—to keep track of things. He had always been notoriously bad at that. His wife set up apps and reminders on his phone all the time. Didn’t she install an app that counted cycles and days? He slipped his hand into his pocket and dug around for his cell phone, but it wasn’t there, and soon he wasn’t there, falling through a rush of sound and color, into another place and time.

The phone had stopped working, anyway. He was wandering in the woods with blood still on his hands, his dark trousers dragging in the deep snow. He accidentally smeared blood on the touchscreen when he tried to get the device to turn back on, but it didn’t respond. It had been rendered useless as a brick when he’d slipped through to this other place—this other Castle Rock, where it was still 1991 and everything seemed tilted and off balance, like he might lose his footing and start floating in the air. He trudged through the snow, doubling back over his own tracks again and again as he tried to find a way to trigger the strange portal he had come through before.

It was in those woods that he first met the man. Henry was straining to hear the sound his father always spoke of, but he heard the click of a gun at his back instead. Cold fear dropped all the way down to his balls as he went into cardiac arrhythmia. The only reason he imagined someone would hold him at gunpoint was that they had noticed the well-dressed stranger wandering in and out of town and decided to rob him.

“Don’t shoot,” he said, holding his hands up. “Y-you can have my wallet, okay? And my watch.”

“Get on your knees,” the man said.

Adrenaline raced through his veins as his sympathetic nervous system kicked in to a heightened state, but Henry felt frozen. He would be dead before he could run, and he didn’t know how to fight a man with a gun. Hell, he barely knew how to throw a punch. As he lowered himself to his knees, he felt the gun travel up his spine and press against his scalp over the parietal bone. He thought of how his father had claimed to have heard the voice of God in the barrel of a gun, but he heard nothing now except his own ragged breathing and the cawing of crows overhead.

“Please, just take my money,” Henry begged. “My wife might be pregnant,” he added quickly. “She needs me.”

“I don’t want your money,” the man said.

He heard rustling and then the man gripped one of his wrists and twisted his arm behind him. Cold metal circled his wrist. Henry jerked his other arm away from the man and felt the butt of the gun crack against his skull. He fell face down in the white powder and heard a ringing in his ears as the man caught his other wrist and cuffed it behind his back. His heart began to beat even faster, thrumming wildly.

“What the fuck do you want?” he sputtered. A dark shadow bloomed at the edges of his vision as the man grabbed a fistful of hair and pulled his head back to force a piece of cloth between his teeth. The man said nothing, tying the cloth behind his head and gagging him tightly. He grabbed the collar of Henry’s coat and hauled him to his feet. Henry stood four inches taller, but the man was stocky, with a gruff demeanor that suggested he was accustomed to pushing people around. He kept a firm grip on Henry’s arm, propelling him through the snow.

Everything that followed seemed to blur together into one white hot streak of panic. Stumbling through the woods became nosing carpet fibers as he was shoved into a trunk, and then he was kicking and screaming until he heard a siren and then felt the car begin to slow. Relief flooded Henry’s system. Thank God, he thought. He was saved. He shouted as loud as he could and thumped against the roof of the trunk until someone popped it open. Both men peered down at him, and he grew quiet.

As the man talked to the cop, a cold feeling settled in Henry’s stomach. The man spoke of bloodthirsty and evil men, of the son of destruction, of Satan disguising himself as an angel of light. He said he acted in the service of God, that he intended to cast the Devil into a bottomless pit as it is written in Revelation. The cop shined a flashlight in Henry’s eyes and leaned in close to his face, staring at him. He stared back, his words muffled by the gag as he tried to plead for help.

“I’ve never seen a pair of eyes like that,” the cop said. He clicked the flashlight off and slammed the trunk shut. The rest of their conversation was casual, as if there hadn’t been anyone stuffed in the trunk of the car after all, and soon the car was moving again.

The segment of time between the car and the cistern blistered like film melting in a projector. Henry had a vague sense of being in a prison when the man freed him from the handcuffs and told him to climb down the ladder. When he didn’t move except to rub the red marks on his wrists, the pistol came out again. He didn’t know why he obeyed; the gunshot would have been the better alternative. But fear streaked like lightning in his system, and Henry climbed down into the dimly lit reservoir. He followed the man’s instructions, shrugging off his coat and unwinding the scarf from his neck. He kicked off his shoes and handed over his belt, then emptied his pockets of his phone, wallet, and keys. The man gestured for him to step into the sturdy cage against the wall. Henry swallowed.

“I’m not the Devil,” he said.

“You will not deceive me.” The man cocked the gun and leveled it at Henry, staring him down until he backed slowly into the cage. His bare foot collided with the back wall. He wanted to argue that the man was being deceived—that whatever he thought he heard wasn’t the voice of God. It was the voice of his own delusions driving him to do things that were morally reprehensible to any sane person regardless of their creed. But he wasn’t dealing with a sane person. He was dealing with his father.

The cage door creaked as the man closed it and fitted a heavy padlock into the latch. When he was done, he got down on his knees in front of a wooden stool and prayed that God would make him righteous and steadfast as he executed His instructions. Henry wrapped his hands around the bars and tested the strength of the cage, hoping that a man as crazy at this one might have made a mistake. It had no give whatsoever. The man was too caught up in his prayer to hear the metal rattling.

“For we do not wrestle against flesh and blood, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places,” the man said, quoting the Apostle Paul’s letter to the Ephesians. Henry knew the verse well. He had often been expected to recite long passages of scripture from memory when he was a child, and even though he hadn’t set foot in a church in years, the words were still carved indelibly into his memory.

After he finished his prayer, the man sat down on the stool and considered his handiwork as he lit a cigarette and took a pensive drag. He examined Henry’s cell phone with a furrowed brow, then flipped open the wallet and took out his ID, and his business card, which listed him as Associate Professor of Neurology at Johns Hopkins University. The man turned each one over in his hands as he studied them. When he took out the photo of his wife, Henry’s grip on the bars tightened and his heart leapt to his throat.

“Please,” he said, rattling the door to the cage to get the man’s attention. “Let me keep that.”

The man’s gaze flickered back toward Henry. He sniffed the air and took a zippo lighter out of his pocket, lighting the corner of the photo on fire and dropping it into a coffee can on the floor once the flame approached his hand. Henry sank to his knees and watched the only memento he had of his wife in this fucked-up version of reality smolder and disintegrate. His hands were shaking as he pressed his palms against the floor.

“He told me you would use pity as a weapon,” the man said, lighting another cigarette and watching him coolly.

A rush of noise filled Henry’s ears and suddenly he was on his back again in the dark, trying to fill his lungs with short, shallow breaths that never seemed to satisfy him. Another symptom, possibly a dangerous one. He wondered how long it had been since he had a drink of water. Time had become nonlinear. He couldn’t keep track of it anymore. The man would visit, tempting him with food and drink like Satan in the garden of Gethsemane, and ask him who he was. Henry never gave the right answer. If he mumbled “Lucifer” or “The Antichrist,” the man would hear the lack of conviction in Henry’s voice and call him a liar. If he said his own name, he was also a liar. The man seemed determined to turn Henry into a man of honest faith in his twisted beliefs through sheer deprivation or kill him in the process. The latter felt like a very real possibility.

The hatch groaned and a moment later, it was outlined in a dim halo of light cast by the lantern the man carried. Shapes appeared in Henry’s vision, blurring so much they were almost formless as his eyes adjusted. He rolled onto his side and heard his joints cracking as he pushed himself into a sitting position and slumped against the wall of the cage, panting from the effort. The man climbed down into the cistern and turned on the halogen light, blinding Henry with its brightness. He squeezed his eyes shut and saw a riot of color behind his eyelids while he listened to the stool scrape across the floor and the Bible flop open in the man’s hand.

“And I saw an angel coming down out of heaven, having the key to the Abyss and holding in his hand a great chain,” the man read aloud. Without his sight, the voice sounded like his father to Henry. He imagined he was a boy sitting in one of the hard wooden pews, listening to him preach, restless and uncomfortable in his Sunday best. “He seized the dragon, that ancient serpent, who is the devil, or Satan, and bound him for a thousand years,” the man continued. “He threw him into the Abyss, and locked and sealed it over him, to keep him from deceiving the nations anymore until the thousand years were ended.”

“Revelation,” Henry mumbled. “Chapter twenty.”

“Who are you?” the man asked.

Henry licked his chapped lips and searched his mind for the right answer. “The Son of Perdition,” he said, and it felt true for once. If his own father had thought an innocent child was the Devil and locked him in a cage for twenty-seven years, maybe he was the son of hell.

His vision came into focus. He rested his forehead against the bars and stared at the man with resignation, willing to do or say anything his righteous zeal demanded if it meant he could have something to drink. The man stared back for what felt like years. He leaned down and picked up the metal cup, dumping water and ashes onto the floor. Then he reached into his bag and took out a thermos, unscrewing the lid.

The scent of the water was cold and sweet and ice blue as the man poured it into the cup. Henry grasped the bars of the cage and stared at the cup of water like he was watching a man perform a magic trick and trying to figure out how it worked. The man set the cup down and slid the tray across the floor. As it inched toward him, Henry fought the urge to reach out and grab it. He knew this man was another version of his father, just as there was another version of himself in this reality. If Henry wanted to survive, he would have to demonstrate piety and respect. He looked at the man when the tray reached the edge of the cage, and waited for him to say grace.

The man let him have water again, but he still shuttered Henry in the dark in between every other visit, perhaps to simulate the cycle of day and night in this place where the sun couldn’t reach. On Sundays, the lights never came on. Those were the worst days. By the time the man returned, Henry would be flat on the ground, his fingers laced through to bars to keep himself from spinning free of the earth's gravity well and hurtling through outer space.

He thought he could feel the dark energy of the universe calling to him from out there, a low frequency that sometimes transformed into a growl. The metal bars that surrounded him hummed with its vibrations from time to time. Everything did. He felt the man's energy radiating from him like a tremor. It was a sickly green color, with flashes of red that flared around him when he was feeling particularly cruel, or flecks of blue that mixed with the green when he was inclined to think of Henry as his son.

Henry learned to say nothing, or risk his words being interpreted as the whispered lies of the Deceiver. He leaned against the bars and became the man's confessor, listening to him read scripture, or talk about the challenges of running a prison, or the problems in his marriage. Henry parted his lips, trying to arrange the words into the right configuration one day when the man mentioned being married.

"I have a wife," he whispered slowly, as if surprised by his own revelation.

After that, he didn't taste food again for days. When Sunday came, it seemed to stretch on and on, until he felt the measure of eternity in his stomach. He tried to place events on a timeline in his mind, but he never could get further than his name before the dripping of water drilled into his ear and erased the markers he tried to use to find his way home. Still, he was certain he had a wife. He could feel her in his matter, as though particles of her clung to him and reverberated on a quantum level. But he couldn't remember the color of her eyes or the shape of her face anymore.

He was never more pliable than after the fasts imposed on him by his jailor. He would listen to the man's teachings as though he was his sole disciple and the man offered the Bread of Life. When the man asked him who he was, Henry looked at him with bloodshot eyes.

"Tell me," he whispered.

The man told him the story of his life in this world. He told him of every calamity that had ever happened in Castle Rock—how each of them could be traced through invisible spiritual markers back to Henry, how he left an imprint wherever he went in time and space, some kind of radiation or heat signature that made fruit rot on the vine. He told him he still caught Henry leaving his mark on the world, and that he knew he sometimes slipped through the bars of his prison and wandered through time, leaving chaos and pain wherever he went. Henry wanted to know more about how he could slip out of his prison and wander freely, but he remained silent.

"That is why you must be punished," the man said. Henry heard his father speaking. He remembered the verse about sparing the rod, and nodded in agreement. His father’s reasoning was sound.

"I must be punished," he repeated.

Henry sometimes imagined he was one of the anchorites who had allowed themselves to be bricked into the walls of churches during the Middle Ages, leaving only a small hole where they could pass food and excrement back and forth and tell pilgrims the messages they received from God. But he never received any divine revelations, or if he did, they weren't in a language he understood. In the darkness he could hear a sound like a raging fire at the center of the universe, something primal that crackled with life. It was always expanding, and he knew that someday it would consume them all.

There was no way of knowing how much time had passed between his incarceration and the day that the jailor reached inside the cage, tipping Henry’s chin up to better see his face. Henry remained still, staring the man as he studied him and wondering what he saw. His touch was hard and comforting at the same time. It reminded Henry that he was real.

"You haven't aged a day," the man remarked with wonder. He released Henry's face and sat down on the stool, lighting a cigarette. The skin on the man’s face seemed to sag and his hair had a few streaks of grey. Henry wanted to ask how long it had been, but the words stuck in his throat. He couldn’t remember if the man had always looked like this or not. As the man took a drag, something new emanated from him. There had often been moments when Henry tasted the man’s doubt while they sat together in his cell. He tasted it in the air now—something bitter and stale and sour, like a conviction that had gone bad.

“Someday,” the man said to him. “I will have to end this.”

Henry curled his fingers around the bars and peered out at the man. He remembered the verse that came after the one the man liked to cite so often. “When the thousand years are ended,” he said, his voice weak from lack of use. “Satan will be released from his prison.”

The man stared at him in surprise, letting the ash of his cigarette grow long. “Revelation,” he said. “Chapter twenty.”

Henry inclined his head in a slight nod as he listened to the sound of the universe howling in the distance. He spoke in a halting voice, but one which had conviction.

“I know how it will end.”

@scxrsgxrd​ @skrsgardspam​ @loomiz​ @sunshineandskarsgards​

(Also thank you @girlinthecorner​ for taking an early peek at this for me. I appreciate it.)