The Penitentiary

By Cristina Archer

How far is too far? Elena wakes up after her accident with no memory of who she once was. All she knows is that that she feels connected to a child, Gabriel, who is bound to her through a remarkable gift. On the other side of the world, Mikael wakes up alone, his mind lost as well. Yet another wayward spirit, Tennyson, has woken up every morning for over a decade feeling alien in his own body. They all feel like they do not belong, their skins a prison. The soul who put them there to rot watches their punishing isolation hidden behind a veil. The second part of the Panopticonseries explores the length to which some will go to punish crimes of obsession.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lulu.com
• Release date: Oct 5, 2012
• ISBN: 9781300269786

Cristina Archer

CRISTINA ARCHER is an Australian author who has been writing fiction as a creative outlet for a number of years. She lives in Melbourne, one of the most inspiring cities in the world. She has long been fascinated by philosophical musings and has been writing fiction in her spare time since she was a teenager. She writes speculative/fantasy fiction as she believes these genres offer the widest scope to explore many a "what if" question.

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The Penitentiary

The Penitentiary

Cristina Archer

Description: mechantpublishing

Méchant Publishing TM

Copyright

This second edition is copyright © 2012 by Cristina Archer

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

All characters in this publication are fictitious and any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Books in the Panopticon series:

The Recidivist (part 1 of the series)

The Penitentiary (part 2 of the series)

The Crusades (part 3 of the series)

ISBN: 978-1-300-26978-6

Published by Méchant Publishing

ABN: 203 970 88288

www.mechantpublishing.com

assisted by Lulu professional services

www.lulu.com

Dedication

This book is dedicated to my friend Morgana.

Acknowledgements

Several authors whose books on theology, spiritualism and mythology inspired me, especially Robert Wright, C.S. Lewis, and David Adams Leeming. Also, Patrick Lyons, a fellow writer and friend for his timely advice during the drafting process.

Chapter 1

(Re)Birth

Memory is the treasury and guardian of all things.

—Cicero

You should let him go, Doctor Curran said to Marion Cooper. The machines are supporting his body, but without his mind, he will never wake up.

This cold and clinical statement was followed by a matter-of-fact description of what would happen once the machine was turned off. Marion could barely concentrate on any of it. Distracting thoughts flickered among the deafening static of a white noise wave inside her head. She thought that the doctor, as a head trauma specialist, would have had plenty of practice with such speeches. His words felt rehearsed to her.

Can I please take a moment before I make the decision you are now asking of me? Her own voice crackled like scratched vinyl, incoherent stops and starts reverberating through her throbbing eardrums. She needed to escape, just for a moment, now, in the hour of her boy’s looming death. She needed to discover, just for a second, some strength to accept his fate with dignity.

Of course, I understand, take as much time as you need, Doctor Curran murmured delicately so as to avoid aggravating Marion’s already fragile state. But she was beyond unsettled and took no pause to rush out of the room, gulping down breaths of stale air in a desperate attempt to hold back more tears welling up in her eyes.

Marion had already sobbed her way through a few weeks of sleepless nights. Gabriel was her boy, her only son. He was only eight years old. It had been just her and him ever since his father walked out on them for some eastern suburbs strumpet when her boy was barely out of diapers. She needed time to make her final decision. Beyond her love for Gabriel, all those years together alone demanded at least that sliver of a few extra moments before she gave up all hope her boy would ever wake up from his coma.

Marion had not been able to think straight in the early days after the accident. She had spent hours in counsel with her church’s oldest priest, Father Sebastian, a wiry man in his late fifties who had long since lost his hair, and with skin like old shoe leather. He stood out standing against the white washed walls of the small building when he preached. The building, like him, was tarnished by years of southerly summertime winds common to the eastern coastline. Still, he was always willing to offer stalwart support to all his parishioners.

The priest’s premature ageing was no doubt a by-product of his seminary days spent in a charitable outreach mission in some revolution-prone, hot African country. While that country had remained unnamed, not a single sermon uttered from his mouth since then passed without mention of a lesson he had learned from his experiences there.

Father Sebastian’s words had been genuinely sage in those hours immediately after Gabriel’s accident. His gentle words had been focused on encouraging Marion to speak out loud any words that could translate the swell of anger and confusion flooding her mind. There had been no mention of the phrase it is God’s will in the recounting of missionary accidents among the African brethren. She had been grateful for the lack of such religious justification.

She could not understand why her boy had been playing on the path near the escarpment behind their neighbor’s property. She had lost count of the number of times she had told Gabriel to steer clear of there, as well as the number of complaints to the local council that the loose rocks along the path were dangerous, especially if it had been raining. Without proper fencing, the forty-foot sheer drop along the cliff face to the bush land below was destined to entice any person with a death wish and to pose a risk to carefree children, who often played chicken or dared each other along the cliff’s edge.

Her boy had fallen those forty feet, gathering broken bones and severe head trauma as he did so. The emergency room doctors told her that Gabriel would not have survived but for the flexibility of several gum trees lining the base of the cliff. Sticky apricot and olive-toned branches had bent instead of breaking, though a smaller one had snapped and perforated his spleen during the fall.

Several startled teenage rock climbers who had been staring at the cliff face contemplating whether it was safe to climb after a recent deluge, instead circled the boy who had fallen from the sky above them and had landed at their feet.

Only one of the rock climbers had the wherewithal to immediately call for an ambulance. Another had fortuitously recognized the child as one of the boys who lived a few houses down the street from his own home. This was despite the volumes of thick blood pouring from an open skull wound that had covered the boy’s face.

The climber had run to tell Marion while his friends hovered around her injured boy, waiting for help to arrive. Marion had at least been able to ride in the ambulance with her boy, even if he was in no state to know there was someone there to hold his hand. It had been a small mercy.

Father Sebastian had supported Marion’s desire to delay her decision as long as possible, willing her to not give up no matter how much pressure the doctors brought to bear upon her. The priest had asked her to pray for guidance. The priest had promised there would be no last rites for her boy until she stood ready to take her leap of faith and accept that her child would be received with love in the afterlife.

So Marion had prayed, desperate to avoid taking that leap across the precipice. The days became weeks as her boy had lain unconscious. When she had not spent her time sitting quietly with Gabriel, she had alternated her time between her church in counsel with Father Sebastian and the hospital chapel. She had come to prefer the latter with the passing of time, for it provided in large part a relatively peaceful space for solitude.

The chapel was no more than a plain room, devoid of religious symbols to cater to the multidenominational population of relatives and friends of patients, with soft lighting typical of the natural light expected to flow through a small south-facing window. The shade of a tall Japanese maple tree also contributed to the diffuse ambience in the room. She now stood at that window and, much to her surprise, heard a man’s voice beside her.

This seems to be the place where we all come to try and influence the fate of our children, whether we care about religion or not.

The man had silently entered the chapel and, in a trance-like state, had moved to stand next to her, unconsciously seeking out what little glow came in through the window. Without a direct line to the sun, there was no heat in that light.

She had to look up a long way to see his face. He was very tall, several inches more than six feet, with unruly locks of silver hair falling across his face. She noticed that his tear-filled eyes were the most unusual amber green she had ever seen, like the view of a sunset through a glass filled with a dry martini.

She was temporarily distracted by how strikingly distinguished he looked for a man of his years. And his first words about fate, unexpectedly profound, offered Marion an unseen harbor, a place that she could safely moor and delay her decision just a fraction longer.

He introduced himself as Keith Evans. My girl is only seventeen, a forlorn Keith said. She looks like she has been hit by a semi-trailer. Don’t even know what happened. Damn hit and run.

My boy fell off a cliff, eight years old, Marion responded.

She has been unconscious since they found her. The doctors are now asking me about organ donation. She’s a mess. She’s all I have, Keith’s brow was drenched with sweat.

Staring at him unchecked (she was well beyond the niceties of politeness), Marion felt as if she was staring into a mirror, his every staccato movement echoing frustration. He was about to lose his flesh and blood, and was being asked by the doctors to give pieces of his daughter away. The very question was tearing him up inside as his daughter’s life was hanging by a thread. He was not ready to let go just yet. Marion was him.

Two parents stood side by side no longer able to ignore what was being asked of them by people in white coats. It did not stop them from trying, though. Marion and Keith spent the next few hours talking about their experiences with their children, initiating their own private wake. Kindness had been discovered between two strangers as their conversation meandered through the philosophical and spiritual minefield they both faced.

I do not want to let my boy go, but it has been a few weeks now, and the nurses tell me I need to do so to enable my healing to begin. It all sounds so trite to me, Marion said as she stood staring blankly out the window with the tall stranger standing beside her.

Are you religious, Marion? he asked, his voice orotund.

I go to church regularly, but I think it is more for the community than because of any strong faith that we are under the aegis of something higher than ourselves. I pray but I do not expect those prayers to be answered.

And I certainly doubt mine will be, given I do not believe in any god.

So what are we to do? Marion asked.

Watch our children breathe their last breath.

Accept it.

Accept we will outlive them, Keith replied.

Accept that our grief from such a devastating loss will not obliterate us.

Tell me that it will all be okay after I have let my boy go.

Tell me too after the nurses inform me that my daughter’s organs will be giving life to someone else.

They embraced each other in that defining moment when they came close to reaching acceptance. Before parting ways, they agreed to support each other when the time came, sharing ward details and discovering only then that their children were in adjacent rooms. It had been a brief moment of clarity for both of them in the endless hours otherwise filled with dilemma-driven confusion.

Alone again, Marion started heading back to her boy’s room. In the last restless moments of disturbed introspection, she turned back and forth to and from the hospital chapel several times. A few feet from her boy’s room, in yet another obstinate flee to rush away from the place that would house the choice she was about to make, Marion unwittingly bumped into a geriatric man shuffling down the corridor. Even though he had been clutching for balance onto a wooden railing anchored to the wall, the force of her motion knocked him clean off his feet.

Marion had not seen him at all. He remained largely invisible to her now as her mind was elsewhere. The moment she was dreading faced her on the other side of the door to that room. She grabbed for the railing reflexively to avoid crumpling to the floor with the obstacle of her encounter.

Nurse Jackson, one of the senior nurses on the ward, who was also on the other side of the door, there to assist Doctor Curran with switching off the life support machine when the time came, heard the kerfuffle outside the door and came out to investigate.

Triaging the situation on auto-pilot, the nurse then dealt adeptly with the spillage, helping the old man back onto his feet, handling him delicately, careful not to break any of his fragile bones. The pair headed down the corridor to the nearby waiting room, the nurse efficiently extracting information from the man as they moved. The nurse emerged a moment later on her own, the man safely deposited there. Marion watched on in silence, too numb to move.

She had steadfastly refused for weeks to listen to the doctors’ explanations about the lack of brain activity and what that meant for her boy. Night after night, day after day, she had desperately held her boy in her arms hoping for a miracle. Sometimes he had looked normal, like he was sleeping peacefully, but no amount of shaking would wake him up. Nurse Jackson was now again by her side, extending her arm over Marion’s shoulders in an unpretentious gesture to comfort her.

Several seemingly endless minutes passed before Marion finally nodded her head to signal she was ready. They walked slowly through the door, each and every step unsteady with an irregular beat of a funeral processional. Several more minutes passed as Marion perched herself as close to her boy as the machine wiring would allow her, as Doctor Curran and Nurse Jackson waited patiently to begin the carefully constructed ritual that would bring to an end the artificial air supporting the boy’s rhythmic chest movement.

Then it happened. The machine next to the bed whirred with a newfound life, beeping and chirping in an erratic seismic voice that Marion had not heard since her boy had been admitted to the hospital. Gabriel’s eyes fluttered open as his body convulsed on the bed next to her. His arms began to flay about.

Suddenly awake, but not yet lucid, his harried motion appeared as if he was trying to shoo something away, as if he was trying to hold strong against an invisible force, his hands waving through the air as his last shield of protection.

Marion’s heart was racing as fast as the beat drumming out of the machine, mimicking the rush of blood moving through her boy’s body, megaphone loud. Whatever her boy was imagining, perhaps a hallucination at the tail end of a nightmare, he was moving on his own. Gabriel was stirring with life. She fought an overwhelming urge to sweep him into her arms to protect him herself from the powers unknown.

There was fear in his eyes, but he made no effort to pull at the wires that attached him to the life support machine, or pull at the tube rammed down his throat, despite it unequivocally impeding his efforts to breathe naturally. Aware of this impediment, with stealth and speed, Nurse Jackson dismantled the breathing apparatus, and this seemed to calm Gabriel a fraction, his rippling movement beginning to subside.

Gabriel settled naturally as his eyes began to focus on Marion, his awareness of her warmth, her scent, providing a security blanket familiar to him. His breathing became less shallow. He opened his mouth, crinkled his nose, and some barely audible, raspy first words slipped through the dryness. Why did the old man fall down in the waiting room, Mommy?

Tears had begun streaming down Marion’s face. What old man?

The man in the blue jumper, her boy responded slowly. He was asleep on the orange chair. He was alone. He woke up for a second and said his mind was finally only his and free. And then he was asleep on the floor. He fell over.

Her boy whispered as he rubbed his eyes, an instinctive motion as if he had woken up at home in his own bed. Marion had seen it so many times. He had blinked, once, twice, and then looked around the room confused, gradually realizing he was somewhere else, somewhere strange.

The boy had been oblivious to Doctor Curran and Nurse Jackson, who had been standing ready at the life support machines, ready to flick the switches off at Marion’s command, a command that had literally been just moments away. Both were now fussing over the boy in a state of complete disbelief. Yet Nurse Jackson, standing next to Marion, had paused momentarily at the boy’s mention of a blue jumper, as if the nurse had recognized something in his words.

Were you dreaming, sweetie? she had asked him in the confusion.

I saw him. He was very bright, the boy said to her, with a perplexed look on his face. And then I was gone. And then I woke up, here. He had opened his round blue eyes even wider yet struggled to maintain their diameter as he tiredly glanced around the room. He had barely noticed the machines standing to attention next to his bed before his eyelids fell shut again.

*

The whirring overhead fan was set at a pace too slow. It barely made a dent on the oppressive heat of the room. The air was too thick to breathe. She was sucking it in. She gasped like a fish caught, hook in its mouth, piercing the water’s surface for the first time. The air seemed something of a novelty. Her last memory, her only memory, had no measure of breath. She did not know if the oxygen would give her life or kill her.

She sensed it might have been the afternoon. There was a salty smell of an ocean sea breeze wafting through an open window somewhere nearby. It took the edge off sweat beads covering what might have been her skin. But this synthetic sack seemed to bind her together. It felt so alien to her. The skin was stretched so tight. The blood throbbed through her veins. It pushed hard, drumming from the inside out.

Are you awake, Elena? Can you hear me?

Her eyelids seemed welded shut. Her face seemed swollen like a balloon. She suspected there were bruises and cuts splattered across her face. She imagined the slimy green and purple hues of a puffer fish encrusted with barnacles. Her jaw ached as if broken in several places—splinters of bone floating beyond their moorings. Her throat was shredded beyond the cracks of wear and tear, chasms of space in those fissures. It might have been the aftermath of some tube that had just been wrenched out of her mouth.

Are you able to move, Elena? Can you open your eyes for me?

Her mind could perceive through an insidious fog a soft gentle command. But it seemed so far away. Perhaps the female voice was just too far for her to muster any effort to obey the direction. Her head bobbed around and around. It was like the head of a wooden toy half-detached from its body after the incessant overuse by a twelve-year-old boy. A global ache filled the torso space below her head. It was the only obvious signpost that her head and body parts possibly formed one whole.

It is time to wake up, Elena. Can you speak at all?

It looks like she’s finally rousing from her slumber, a different voice echoed in the room.

She was unable to focus on anything as she gingerly opened her eyes. Her body was so sapped of energy. Her limbs were like drifting deadwood beside her torso.

A man with a blurry face was hovering close enough to check her vitals. He blended into the white surrounds, a gecko in his natural habitat. She was momentarily distracted by the movement of a sheer gray curtain behind him floating in the breeze. Her focus on him, on the curtain, was fleeting. Though, like the air wafting around him, she imagined he might slow down again and disappear back into the scenery.

There seemed to be something floating next to him. It was too far away to be his shadow. It moved at a different speed and direction to the man—quite disconnected. This shadow could have been a ghost. It was moving first so fast, then so slow. Its presence was scattered each time it bounced into the solids sharing its space. The whole area her essence currently occupied felt out of kilter to her. The time looped and overlapped and was gapped with no synchronicity.

Do you realize where you are, Elena? Can you tell me what happened?

The thought to shake her head and open her mouth filled her mind. But neither a movement nor a sound could escape. The air choked her vocal cord and scratched across it like a scourer sponge. This damaged vinyl record could not produce any noise.

She mustered a scrap of strength to shrug her shoulders. It made her dizzy as a chemical rush poured through her body. A bucking bronco, she could not settle the ride. A tube drip feeding morphine into her veins did not seem to be the source of the flow. It came at her from every direction, hot and cold. She burned and shivered as the rush fought to break free, escape from the inside out.

Then a wave of nausea washed over her and a mess spilt out of her mouth. The chunks were harder than the air previously flowing through her throat, and did not fill the cracks there like putty but rather rocks too big to fit in the space. As quickly as the mess appeared, a woman in a pale blue tight-fitting pinstripe uniform materialized and swooped down with a stainless steel bowl. The woman scraped the mess away from the bed where she lay and wiped her face with a warm damp cloth. It was soothing.

She had no idea where she was or how she got there.

Do you have any idea how lucky you are to be alive right now, Elena? If that man walking his dog had not stumbled over your body by the side of the highway when he did, your father would not be in the waiting room now praising God for answering his prayers to save you. Instead he would be making arrangements to bury his only daughter.

She realized the woman in the uniform was the source of the questions. The woman was now within focus and stared down at her with bulbous blue eyes. The woman’s face was unpainted, sterile, and expressionless. The woman’s hands, sausage-like fingers, adeptly continued to sponge her face of the remaining debris. The woman was tiny in stature but not in build, a giant round fruit with matching hues across her crab apple cheekbones. Even the woman’s fair hair and eyebrows were short and thick.

I’m Nurse Jackson and this is Doctor Curran. How are you feeling? Can you tell us what happened, Elena?

That name, despite her having heard it several times, felt unfamiliar. While the echo of its sound stung like a slap across her face, it did not register inside her mind. Yet these people seemed to be addressing her.

They were standing on either side of the bed now, two pairs of piercing blues eyes speared down upon her. Doctor Curran continued his gecko-like aspect, his white coat blended with the white cotton bed sheets. He moved to check the surrounding machines whirring away in the background, but not before adjusting one of several tubes that protruded from her body. A viscous yellow-red liquid flowed through it downward beyond her line of sight. She presumed it was being collected in an unseen bag.

Bewildered, she spoke for the first time, Who’s Elena? The words took shape and escaped her mouth, as labored as the bile that preceded it.

Doctor Curran’s large round eyes opened so wide, they appeared as if they would fall out of their eye sockets—they were rimmed with sleep-deprived, pinkish puffiness. He raised his latex-gloved hand to scratch his gel-spiked dark straight hair, and paused to look across to Nurse Jackson, his rosy color cheeks fanning across his alabaster skin-encased bones. The nurse’s face remained expressionless.

It was the first time since she took her first breath that the room was no longer swimming around her. It was the first time she noticed that the doctor had a wide, flat, sallow face and was of similar girth to the nurse, though as much as a foot taller. He still seemed tiny to her.

As the room moved less and less, the ghostly dark shadow that floated in the confined space became more ethereal. She noticed it briefly hovering at the foot her bed. She blinked. A moment later, she noticed it on the far corner of the white ceiling, though it was difficult to see its shape against the ornate cornices. She blinked again. She caught a glimpse of it slipping like smoke through the small gap under the closed door. She felt strangely disconnected following its departure. She felt as if a kindred spirit had abandoned her—her lifeline vanished.

Do you know who you are, Elena? Can you tell us what happened to you?

She shook her head as she continued to stare at the door, her sense of loss weighing upon her. She noticed staring back through the glass panel in the door a weather-wrinkled face of a silver-haired man. The hair sat over his ears, natural curls formed into waviness with age.

When their eyes met, his expression lit up like a beacon, and tears streamed down and through the heavy lines across his face. Large hands moved into view within the glass panel as he rubbed his fingers across his eyes. She did not acknowledge his reaction nor recognized him even though he seemed to be familiar with her. She still had not made sense of her own foreign skin. She wondered how he might know her.

Nurse Jackson’s hand gestured in the direction of the door and ushered the old man to enter the room. The old man was by her bed in less than five strides. He towered above the doctor and the nurse in that instant before he reached down with his arms to gather her in an embrace. Searing pain stabbed into her torso. She caught her breath for only a moment, and then the mess was there again on the bed sheets and on his shoulder. She clutched the old man only as the nausea settled down. Nurse Jackson was again reaching for the stainless steel bowl.

Be careful Mister Evans. Remember your daughter has a few cracked ribs among her many injuries.

Doctor Curran tried to pull the old man off of her, but the enormous difference in their respective sizes made this nearly impossible. The doctor then gently tapped the old man’s shoulder as a compromise and this had the desired effect. The old man cupped her face briefly with his hands, a gesture of tenderness, as he continued the crying she first noticed when he had raced through the door. Then he moved to sit on the edge of a corner at the base of the bed.

I thought I had lost you, the old man said as he blubbered, gasping for air. He seemed to have almost as much difficulty breathing as she had. Maybe he did not belong here, either.

Who are you?

She looked at him blankly, frustrated by the fuss. She was overwhelmed by a feeling that her skin was not her own, bruises or otherwise. She believed that it had somehow wrapped itself around her, choked her, trapped her, and was now her prison. All the while, she felt as if her life’s verve was slowly seeping out of her. And she was surrounded by strangers determined to keep her there under lock and key.

*

In the next ward, Gabriel Cooper was sleeping restlessly, as his wide awake mother clutched his small hand to try and settle him. Marion stroked her child’s fine black hair with her other hand.

She had not been home in the three days since he awoke from his coma. Her shoestring-strapped purple sun dress was starting to show the signs of overwear. Her gray eyes were sullen from her own stretches of interrupted sleep. She had been afraid to leave his bedside. She had been so stricken by the guilt she still felt about the choice she had made just before her boy had opened his eyes for the first time in several weeks—his rousing moment just as she had been ready to give up any hope of his survival.

And she was still haunted by the words her boy had first spoken three days ago, words that had made no sense to her at the time. She had initially thought that he