The Hole: A Gentle Nightmare by Alexander Akhter

Author:Alexander Akhter [Akhter, Alexander]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2017-05-26T05:00:00+00:00

Part 4

Peering closely, I could see the bubbles burst. Sapell’s labored, shallow breathing kept a constant flow of moisture out of his mouth and into the ward. Nurses bustled through its chambers, past the rows of empty beds and through the hallways, tending to no one. A few, openly idle, stood enjoying conversation with each other while Sapell’s donation of water into the air sapped his body. His lips were dry and cracked, creating tiny valleys of sore flesh, throbbing and ready to leak even more fluid.

I could only guess how Sapell came to be treated in the clinic of the elect. Carrying off a rickety, unattended chair to his bedside had resulted in an argument with one of the more officious harpies. Perhaps it was an act of gratuitous kindness by some anonymous preceptor, eager to demonstrate his power to himself and others by ordering protocols to be broken. Or maybe some mistake had been made in the creation of the forms, a hasty functionary letting ink spill into the wrong box. Maybe it was a deliberate, subversive act by some scribe, a reminder to himself that power could be found elsewhere, in the expansive fields of details outside his overseer’s attention.

The walls, floors, beds, tables, and doors of the ward were exactly what I would have expected, but the bedclothes were thin and rough. They covered Sapell’s body up to his collar, but coarse texture spread in craggy peaks and dells that revealed how much weight he’d lost. The abandoned hospital had been ramshackle but its sheets were strong and thick. I imagined the preceptors were healthy enough to avoid the ward until the end. Some might have enough inner reserves to face the truth when they had no other choice. Pull the shroud over their faces and they were gone.

I placed my hand over his wrist, searching for his pulse with one finger. It was barely detectable. His skin felt brittle and I imagined I could hear it crinkling as I pulled my hand away.

There was nothing I could do. I pushed my seat back, gathering up my robes, and walked out of the ward. The shirking nurses watched me as I left the chamber. Their conversation resumed as I entered the hall.

I considered making the downward journey into the lower floors of the tower to see Wallace. When the manhunters had caught up with him, they dressed him in chains and hauled him back to the settlement for punishment. Everyone knew he was guilty of some serious crime, so the trial had been dispensed with and he had been summarily imprisoned on one of the dungeon levels.

When I’d first visited him, he refused to speak to me. He stared with the bulging, bestial eyes of a man imprisoned for years, as though he had embraced his entire fate in the first few days. All that was left to him was a steel bowl and a ragged loincloth. I stared back, conscious of the stitching of my new robes and how unpleasant they felt.

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