2. Cell

2019 October 13
Sunday

“I don’t know anything!”

“Don’t lie to us, Stefan Riley.”

“I’m not lying!”

“Tell us what you know about Dorley Hall, Stefan Riley.”

“Nothing! Is that where I am?”

“Tell us what you know, Stefan Riley.”

The voice is crackly and distant, like the hold music when you call a big company over a bad connection. It’s probably a woman’s voice behind the distortion but it’s impossible to be certain. And, God, he wishes she’d stop using his name like that. Like punctuation. Like a club.

“Nothing!” He really yells it this time, breaking his voice and hurting his ears when the tiny concrete box echoes it back to him.

Stefan doesn’t know why he lies. There are good reasons not to tell everything you know to a faceless person interrogating you over a loudspeaker that feeds into the concrete cell they’ve imprisoned you in, but none of them apply: he’s not trying for leverage; he’s not trying to avoid punishment; he’s not trying to outwit his captors. If he were rational, he might make the argument that he doesn’t know who captured him, and that if he reveals the scant information he’s gathered over the years it could threaten the Dorley girls, but he’s too tired and scared to look objectively at his thought process and start making excuses for it.

Simply: he’s overcome with shame. Telling them his suspicions about Dorley inevitably leads to him having to answer searching questions and ends with him confessing to this person that he kind of, perhaps, maybe, possibly wants to be a girl. And he’s never told that to anyone before; not even anonymously online, not even to a private diary. He’s never so much as whispered it to himself.

Anything to avoid making it real.

Because he knows what he looks like. What he sounds like. In his mind, even the most compassionate person would laugh in the face of his confession. Laugh at his face. It’s like a pro wrestler announcing a sudden career change to ballet. It’s ludicrous.

The demands for answers don’t stop coming, so he lies back down on the hard, cold cot and wraps the thin mattress around his head, to block out the voices from without and within.

 

* * *

 

Tap tap tap tap tap.

The sharp, echoing sound intrudes on his dream, incorporates itself, causing Stefan — at that moment, running from an unidentifiable dark shape through the endless corridors of his old school — to react unexpectedly to it: he falls off the bed.

It takes him a few seconds to come back to reality, and when he does, he wishes he hadn’t. He’s still in a concrete box and still wearing an ugly green smock made from some of the itchiest material he’s ever encountered; the only difference between now and this morning — assuming that had even been morning — is that there’s no-one yelling at him over the intercom, and an attractive woman is tapping on the glass door.

Sleeping gave him a chance to reset, to take his shame and self-loathing and cram it back in its box, so all that remains is a persistent discomfort with his embodiment which, perhaps coincidentally, perhaps not, this cell and these horrible clothes have heightened, but which doesn’t usually cause him to clam up in front of strangers. One of those unpleasant things you get used to, like tinnitus or a persistent toothache.

He’s not on show, is he? A quick check: no. The smock is making his genitals feel just as vaguely uncomfortable as the rest of him, but at least he’s not flashing the girl.

Tap tap tap tap tap.

He hauls himself to his feet. Runs the back of his hand across his face; stubble. Ugh. Horrible to be seen with all that shit on his face. He hasn’t seen a mirror since he got here, and can’t help imagining that the late night, the alcohol, the bad sleep, the brief but potent anxiety attack, the inability to access a shower and — most pointedly — the concrete prison have him looking more or less as awful as he’s ever looked.

“Yes?” he says.

The woman looks him up and down, so he looks right back. She’s blonde, the sort of blonde that takes bleach, and wears her hair short, in what Stefan thinks is called a pixie cut. He’d describe her as impish, but that might just be because of the hair. She’s white and doesn’t seem to be wearing makeup, although he’s hardly an expert on that; she might well have £200-worth of products on her face, creating the impression of flawless skin out of cheeks that are as blotchy as, well, his.

“Hello?” he says, after a while. He has the impression she’s evaluating him, but for what, and for what purpose, he can’t even begin to guess. It’s a reasonable bet he’s at Dorley, somewhere, but if that’s true, does that mean this girl is one of the trans women they help? Or has he been wrong about everything the whole time? The way she narrows her eyes, finds fault with him somewhere — Stefan can’t blame her; there’s fault to be found everywhere — further convinces him that, despite his years of research, he may have completely misread the whole situation.

“Was that you this morning?” he asks. “On the intercom?”

“No,” she says. A deeper voice than he was expecting. Somewhere in the low alto. It reminds him of Melissa’s. And, God, about Melissa, is he wrong about her, too? He was so convinced, for so long. Is Mark dead after all? “Who spoke to you on the intercom?” the girl demands, startling Stefan out of his thoughts.

“I don’t know. That’s why I asked.”

He immediately regrets even the slightest bit of impertinence. Whoever this girl is, he needs information out of her, eventually, and the best way to get it is to play along without fuss. All she has to do is let him know, somehow, what game she wants him to play.

“Eat,” she says.

“What?”

She rolls her eyes. Points down. On the floor, by the door, is a metal tray with a banana and a cereal bar on it. Either it came up from under the floor or through the door somehow — unlikely; he can’t see any mechanism by which that could have happened — or she’d simply walked in and left it there while he was asleep.

“Right,” he says, and scoops up the tray. Places it carefully on the cot and starts pulling on the banana skin. “Thank you,” he adds. Keep her happy. Speedrun that Stockholm Syndrome.

She sneers at him, and spins on her heel, starts to walk away down the corridor.

“Wait!” he calls, slightly muffled by banana. When she stops, he swallows as quickly as he can. “What’s happening? How long am I going to be here?”

She doesn’t turn around. “You’ll find out everything, in time.”

“When?”

“Soon.”

“You have to give me something!” he yells, as she takes another step. “Anything!”

She hesitates. “Don’t scratch your stomach,” she says, and keeps walking. It doesn’t take long before she vanishes from his sight, but he can still hear her, even through the thick glass; her footsteps remain evenly spaced until they fade out.

No stairs, then, at least for a good distance. Something to add to the puzzle of this place: one long-ass corridor. Not super helpful in isolation.

He finishes the banana and the cereal bar. It’s nothing like enough food, considering his body is both recovering from a hangover and positively vibrating with anxiety, but it takes the edge off. He puts the tray back on the floor by the door and resolves to keep an eye on it, to find out how they get the food to him. It’s occurred to him that they could have drugged the food, but he doesn’t consider it a serious worry. They’ve got him in a concrete box; why would they need to drug him?

She told him not to scratch his stomach. Why?

He turns away from the glass door and lifts up his smock, runs a hand across his belly. It has that irritated feel skin gets when you wear scratchy fabric for a long time, sure, but nothing seems—

There. Right there. A raised bump, slightly smaller than his pinkie fingernail. A darker spot right in the middle, where the skin has recently healed. He’s familiar with the sight: in the summer of his second year at Saints he got so listless he spent two weeks in bed at one point, only got up when his left leg started hurting, and only left the house when his left leg didn’t stop hurting. The doctor prescribed a course of anticoagulant medication, and told him to move around more and maybe avoid taking all his holiday hours at once in the future.

A red dot in the middle of a raised lump: exactly what it looked like after he injected Heparin, on doctor’s orders, into his stomach for a weekend.

He’s been stuck with a needle.

Stefan doesn’t care about being seen naked any more. Breathing heavily, he lifts the smock over his head and searches his body for any other telltale marks. He doesn’t find any until he pulls the garment all the way off and sees in the crook of his left elbow another red dot, this one in the centre of a flowering bruise. Like from a blood test.

They took some of his blood and they injected him with something.

What the hell are they doing to him?

 

* * *

 

He doesn’t see them take away the tray with the banana peel and the empty wrapper. Must have fallen asleep again. Or been drugged by the food; does it matter? His belly started to itch while he slept, and now he’s awake the urge to scratch it is overwhelming. He decides to distract himself by going over, in his head, what he knows.

What he thinks he knows.

The Royal College of Saint Almsworth has a problem with boys who disappear. It’s passed mostly under the radar because the boys mostly don’t vanish on-campus — and because it turns out that most universities across the country have people who end their lives or simply vanish. Inflection points like going to university are some of the most challenging events in anyone’s life, and it goes double for people who have to survive outside a structure and support system they’ve known all their lives, while enduring the tail end of puberty. If slightly more people vanish from Saints than most other places? Put it down to a quirk of the local area. In his second year at secondary school there was a memorial service for the oldest son of a teacher, who went out for a late-night stroll from his university dorm and didn’t realise he was walking on a frozen lake until suddenly he wasn’t any more. Stefan got his mum to help him make an apple crumble to give to the teacher; he’d hugged him, wept on his shoulder. These things, tragically, happen.

All of that: facts. But Stefan’s having to face that it’s the only genuinely verifiable information he’s got. The girls he’s seen, who look like some of the boys who went missing? They could be relatives. It could be coincidental. Or his memory could have played tricks on him, made him see similarities where none existed because with all his heart he wanted it to be true. He never took photos of the girls, so never actually got to compare properly.

And the barest hints of rumours he picked up about Dorley Hall? They could so easily have been about something else entirely. This, for example: kidnapping random people and doing… what? Psychological experiments? Is there someone out there watching him on a screen, waiting for him to snap, timing him against the last person?

What have they done, so far, really? They’ve put him in uncomfortable clothes, they’ve fed him, they’ve taken a blood test and they’ve (probably) injected something into his belly. He’s supposed to think it’s a tracking chip or an electric shock device or something; likely it’s just saline, and maybe a bit of inert material to make the skin swell. After a couple of days of this, there’ll be a form to sign, a pat on the back and a small cheque.

Stefan relaxes on the cot, pleased with his reasoning. So he was wrong about Dorley, and about them helping trans girls. So what? He’s no worse off than he was yesterday morning, and if he gets paid for his participation, then he’s actually up on the day. The unscheduled days off work might get him fired, but screw it. He hates that place. Maybe he’ll go work at the retail park instead. They have a gym there; he can get in shape, start his new life properly.

Kidnapping? Fake injections? Interrogations by intercom that one of the other grad students pretends to know nothing about? All very cleverly designed, but there’s no sense letting the imagination run wild.

Stefan closes his eyes. Gets some more sleep.

 

* * *

 

Clearly some part of this experiment has to do with enforced boredom — no phone, no books, no TV — and thus Stefan is supposed to be out of his mind by now with nothing to do but stare at the concrete walls, but he couldn’t have survived twenty-one years inside the body randomly gifted to him by chance and genetics without an understanding of how to pass time in difficult circumstances. Meditation’s good. Methodically thinking through the plot of books he’s enjoyed is better. But yoga’s best.

He’s not done it for a while — the last year in particular has been less about self-improvement and more about self-destruction; another effective way to pass time — but the mattress off his cot is thin enough to work as a mat, and there’s enough space in his cell to stretch out in most directions. It’s nice to get back to it. He always liked the way it makes his body feel: not entirely like itself.

The bleach-blonde girl comes back with another tray of food, and because of the position he’s maintaining he gets to watch her go from bored indifference to irritated astonishment.

“Hiya,” he greets her, upside down.

“What the hell are you doing?” she demands, losing control of her voice and wincing when she does so. In Stefan’s mind, he writes another note on the whiteboard: bleached girl’s voice gets deeper when she’s annoyed. Probably useless information, but not definitely.

“Yoga,” he explains, and carefully unfolds himself back into an upright position. Which ends with him facing away from her, so he turns with what he hopes is a gentle smile and adds, “It’s relaxing.”

“It’s time to eat,” she says, her alto lilt returning. “Step away from the door.”

He does so, and she opens it, almost throws the tray on the ground, and closes it again. Looks like a fingerprint reader or something; the locking mechanism is the only opaque thing on the entire front wall, and Stefan hasn’t been able to get a look at the front.

“Thanks,” he says.

“You’re not fooling me, you know,” she says. “Sociopath.”

She’s walking away when she says it, so doesn’t catch Stefan’s frown. ‘Sociopath?’ That’s not proper terminology, is it? He’s no expert — a Psychology A-level and, if you’re generous, one semester of Psycholinguistics is all the relevant education he has in the field — but isn’t that discouraged as a label? He can’t remember what its more appropriate replacement is supposed to be, but whatever it is, he’s pretty sure he doesn’t have it. Maybe part of the study is to treat participants like patients, to be unsympathetic nurses, or to examine how people behave under misdiagnosis.

Shady.

Assuming it is a study, of course. Stefan’s had a pretty good run of being wrong about things; it’s important to remember his supposition is nothing more than a guess with a fancy name.

Well, he can’t do anything about it for now. He looks over the lunch/dinner/breakfast on the tray and decides that a bowl of soup and a glass of orange juice can wait a couple of minutes for him to complete a quick warm down.

 

* * *

 

The fading of the overhead lights brings Stefan back to awareness. Over the past few hours he’s eaten his actually-pretty-good vegetable soup, remembered his way slowly and carefully through the plots of pretty much all his favourite science fiction novels, obligingly stepped to the back of the room so the bleached woman can collect his empty tray, and spent a while fantasising about what his life would be like if he’d been born into Iain Banks’ Culture universe and not the rather more disappointing real world: Culture people can change their sex just by thinking about it, and couples can do terribly romantic things like switch sexes with each other, synchronise their pregnancies and the like; also they have, like, ray guns and live for hundreds of years and stuff.

It takes about half an hour for the lights to dim from their approximation of sunlight to a twilight glow, which brings with it some concerns. If they’re lining up their fake day-night cycle with the real one, it means Stefan’s been in here for about a day; he thought he’d been in here nearly two. Clearly, his time-passing techniques aren’t as good as he hoped.

He’s cooled on his theory that this is all an experiment, but hasn’t come up with anything to replace it yet, and can’t forever block out the voice in the back of his head that’s screaming at him to get really seriously worried, and perhaps even panic. He quiets it for the moment — how would panicking actually help him? — by reminding himself that they’ve still done nothing verifiable but steal his clothes and isolate him. They’ve even fed him, and the hearty soup put paid to his worries that they’re intending to starve him.

The bump on his belly is a concern, though. On cue, it itches. He scratches the back of his neck instead.

The lights in the corridor have dimmed as well, so it takes Stefan a while to realise that someone’s watching him from the other side of the glass door. She’s squatting, hands casually flopping over her knees, and she’s frowning at him. The sudden presence of another person flips a few more of the ‘panic!’ breakers in his head, but he closes his eyes for a second, concentrates on his breathing, calms himself, stands, and as casually as he can, walks the length of the cell to meet the woman.

He squats, imitating her, and as he does so she puts a phone on the floor, torch switched on and pointing up, providing enough light to see her face properly.

It’s Christine. From the party.

“I’ve turned off the cameras,” she says. “We need to talk.”