Cell Reflection, Part 2
As the guards escorted Leon down the corridor which led to the 'Injection Room', he knew he wasn't ready to die. The warden of Northway Passage Prison stood outside the room with a sick toothless grin on his face. It was obvious he got some sort of sick pleasure out of this. It satisfied him knowing he was about to free up some space in his precious iron hotel. It unnerved Leon. Leon Danika realised he would not feel any human emotion in a few minutes. Even though he knew many people wanted him to die. The room he was being lead into was like a shoebox. It was cold and dirty with a strapped chair in the middle. It reminded Leon of a dentist chair. Next to the chair was a silver table with a collection of needles and syringes on it, but Leon recognised what one was going to kill him. The guards and the warden had disappeared. Leon looked at the mirror in the room and knew it was two-way. That they were watching him face the reaper from behind the glass. The prison doctor lay Leon on the chair and strapped him in. A tear rolled down Leon's cheek.
Leon felt his hand twitch. He became aware of an itch in his back and his eyes shot open. The realisation hit Leon. He wondered, was he dead?
Leon's wrists were lined with red marks from the straps, which made him realise he definitely was strapped in to face the needle. So what was going on now? The only sound in the room was a tick-tock sound from the polished silver clock on the wall. It said it was four-thirty five pm. Leon was scheduled to die at four thirty. The shoebox room was a lot darker than before. The dim lights flickered above head and highlighted the only door in the room. Leon stood, allowing the blood to flow back to his legs and feet before taking his first steps. The doorknob felt cold and rusty and it squeaked when Leon opened the door. The corridor that Leon stepped into was not how he remembered it. It was much gloomier than before. It was like Leon had stepped into a room that had been hit by a bomb years before. At the end of the corridor, Leon spotted a brown teddy bear. As he approached it, he noticed its right eye was missing and there was a tear in its leg. It sent a chill through his body.
The rest of the prison appeared to be abandoned. Leon couldn't explain it, or explain why the prison interior had become completely black. Because of this, Leon couldn't make out where in the prison he was. It felt like he was in an infinite loop. Every corridor seemed to be the same, some had cells, some didn't. He passed one cell which had a cold breeze coming from behind the bars. The cell gave Leon a strange familiar feeling. Was it his? Was it the cell he had spent two and a half years in? A light dripping sound came from the cell next to the one with the breeze. Leon squeezed his skinny arm through the bars and could feel cool water splash into the palm of his hand. The sensation was soothing. He pulled his arm back through and heard a hard scratching sound coming from the next cell. Leon kept his distance from the bars. The pace of the scratching slowed and there was suddenly a beam of light in the centre of the cell. A match. Fire.
The small circle of fire grew bigger. Leon became uneasy. Fire makes everyone uneasy, he thought. As the flame became larger, Leon noticed a face behind the orange. There was a disfigured man standing behind the bars. His nose was replaced by an indent in his face and one eye appeared to be black. His mouth grinned on one side, a grin that reminded Leon of the warden. The man appeared to be in all black. Either that or he was just a floating head, Leon thought. The flame went out and the man disappeared. Leon's mind raced. He couldn't figure out what was going on, but for some reason, he felt kind of calm. Like everything was going to be okay. Leon's optimistic feeling vanished when he heard crying coming from the next cell.
Leon could his feel his heart beat and his hands shake as his fingertips glided across the steel bars. The crying was peculiar. It was obviously a little girl, but it sounded distorted. The sound became louder and closer. Leon stepped back from the bars and felt his spine hit the hard wall. A little girl appeared behind the bars. She had blonde hair and was holding a brown teddy bear. Leon recognised it as the one he'd seen earlier. But the little girl's face struck Leon the most. He recognised it. But he couldn't place it. And then it clicked. It was the girl he was convicted of killing.
Leon never liked to think about what happened that day the girl died. It was at a time of panic. The little girl was an orphan who had watched Leon kill a man who beat up his younger sister the year before. Leon grew to hate the man as it had left his sister traumatized. When he approached that man, he became hostile and violent, but Leon got the better hand and ended up killing him. Unfortunately, a little girl witnessed him stab the man in an alley. Leon panicked and, in a fit of rage, worry and panic accidentally stabbed her, killing her. When the police arrived, Leon was sitting in the alley in the pouring rain next to two bodies.
The little girl's face was pale. It was not how he remembered her. Leon knew this situation never made sense. Since he woke up, things hadn't seemed right but logic never came into Leon's mind until now. He had no idea what was going on. The little girl disappeared into the black abyss the rest of the cell looked like and the crying ceased seconds later. For the first time, he appreciated the silence. A familiar scratching sound came from the next cell. If Leon remembered correctly, this would be the last cell in this corridor. Each corridor had five cells each. Before Leon's eyes adjusted to the image behind the bars, he noticed the flame, but no one was holding it. He gently pressed forward towards the bars to see the source of the flame. HIs feet froze on the spot when he felt a bizarre feeling on his neck. Breathing.
In horror, Leon whipped round as fast as he could to see the same disfigured face, but he could see it more clearly now. An eye was black and the other was bright white with no pupil. There was nothing resembling a nose, only a dent in the face. And the mouth was closer to being vertical that horizontal. His lips were grey like the lips on a corpse. Leon realised he had jumped back into the bars in terror and was breathing heavily. The disfigured man placed a hand in front of him to silence Leon who stared in disbelief. "What is going on?" The man let his hand fall.
"You can put the pieces together. I am only a messenger." The man said, in a deep croaky voice. It scared Leon but the man was right. He could put the pieces together. He was scheduled to die. Maybe he had. That would explain the way Leon felt. Emotionless.
"A messenger for what?" Leon asked, his voice shaken.
"I am only here to ask a question. Do you want to move on or stay?"
"Move on to where?" Leon asked curiously. What was the disfigured man talking about? Leon waited for a reply but the man never opened his mouth. He stared at Leon as though patiently waiting for a response. Leon only had a few pieces of what he assumed was a rather large puzzle. But one thing he knew for sure. Anywhere had to be better than here. "I'll move on."
"Very well."
The man waved his hands in front of him and a strange circle appeared. It was orange. As seconds passed, the circle grew larger and larger until it was the same size as Leon. Leon stared in terror and he realised the orange was really fire. It terrified Leon but he felt drawn to this portal of sorts. The man gestured for Leon to step into it. He had never felt terror like this but he stepped forward into the portal unsure about what was awaiting him. What else he would face in whatever 'life' he was currently experiencing.
"We have now completed the third and final phase of the execution. Time of death, four thirty-four pm. That's it done Warden. Danika is dead."
Bio: Martin is a Scottish student who loves to write