Prison Challenge, by templeremus
The room is smaller than you remembered it; nineteen paces end to end, four across, starting in each case with back against the wall. Sometimes, before, there was the corridor; at odd moments you can still feel its drifting shadows, its phone that rang even when off the hook. Now there are only cabinets of dead space, and the television’s flicker to move by.
You spend your nightless days beside that screen. Watch your double, your body with Sam Tyler’s mind, as he battles for control. He dreams visions meant for you, and wakes shouting as they fade.
He lives.
Once, the cell is broken. You start up to the dull whoosh-click of a respirator, as a voice from the corner snarls, Get off the ruddy phone.
Shielded by glass, the otherworld Sam blenches and turns, his mouth shaping words that seem to fall like hammer-strokes, forcing the soul from you. No no. No no no-
Darkness, tinged red behind lidded eyes.
Warm air, moved by others, and gentle hands brushing their disquiet across your forehead.
But straightaway you can feel his protests, more vivid and hot than any cry you can hope to make.
They drown you. You fall.
Not long afterwards you surrender. Sam Tyler rages by your parents’ graves, their names flat and toneless within the barrier. He cleaves a path through time, plunging you into darkness, reducing the world to static. Eyes shut, the only prayer left is for an escape.
Escape declines to appear. Light returns, and the screen, and Tyler is laughing with his stolen mouth, rejoicing in a sunlit kiss. The blonde girl, your old friend, comes to bid goodbye. Then she folds the picture into its solitary dot, and all is safe, and quiet, and complete.
No-one can touch you in here.