A throbbing headache roused Henry from a deep sleep. He was lying on his back, on a filthy floor. He could barely keep his eyes open, and when he looked around, it was too dim to see anything. Despite his perplexing surroundings, Henry's fatigue was still so strong that he fell back into slumber.
He woke up again – how long after, he did not know. His headache was a little better, and he felt as rested as he was going to be in his current, not exactly comfort-centered, environment. He tried to stand up, but he was rather disoriented, and he fell back onto a wall. A wet wall.
Henry observed his setting as best he could in the darkness once he gained his equilibrium after a few minutes resting against the wall. With excruciating caution, he felt the floor with his feet before taking a step, in case, he decided, he was in a similar situation as the narrator of The Pit and the Pendulum. His hands were outstretched in front of him, feeling for another wall or a trap. His head hit something smooth that bounced off and came back. The back and forth movement of the object only confirmed his thoughts even more that he was in the story, and he ducked in a panic.
Henry rose back up when he decided that the pendulum in Poe's tale was sharp and large, and the one he hit was small and round. He felt the object with his hand, and found a button. His suspicions were verified when, upon pressing the button, his cell was illuminated by the smooth, round object. 'A light bulb!" Henry said out loud, feeling infinitely foolish.
The newly illumed cell warranted him to look again, this time with much more ease. It was not, he observed, unlike his own house's cellar. Its walls were bricks of a few shades of red; the floor was cracked cement. There was a dark puddle in the corner, traveling from a thin line of water trickling from the ceiling down to the floor. Henry's eyes investigated the ceiling, and what he found was what looked very similar to the floor, a fractured gray cement plane. There was a multitude of insects, most notably millipedes, scurrying around the floor and damp walls.
Henry was reminded of when he was in his cellar during the summer after 4th grade. The door was broken, and you had to prop it open with a notched wooden block, or else it would close and lock from the outside. He was looking for papers from kindergarten to reminisce with his older sister, who gave him the idea. She was at the top of the steps. 'Look in that chest next to the window," she told him. When he did, she immediately kicked the wooden notch in and the door slammed closed. He heard her chuckle and walk away. He tried to kick down the door, but, naturally, a nine-year-old is not typically capable of such a feat. He tried yelling, but his parents were gone, he couldn't remember where, and his sister, of course, didn't help him. Henry remembered that there was a key to the locked window hidden in a wooden box on a shelf in some dark corner of the basement. The shelf looked as though it hadn't been touched in a decade. A spider with a thick web lay on the wooden box. Henry used a pole on the ground to move the box, and the spider, in a panic, fled behind the shelf. He carefully opened the box, and the exceedingly rusted hinges broke off. Inside, Henry remembered in repugnant detail, there was another spider, a brown furry one, with long, spindly legs, sucking the being out of a millipede, each of it countless legs twitching on its own in its last, useless, miserable defense. Henry was petrified at the little bright-eyed arachnid, which seemed to be staring at him as it devoured its writhing victim. He ran from the box with such blind fervor that he vaulted on top of the chest under the window and crashed through, landing face down in glass and dirt outside. His sister heard the crash, and she sprinted out. He was bleeding from a number of areas, and since their parents weren't around, she had to help him herself. She never did anything like that to him again.
Henry snapped back into the present once a drop of water landed on his head. Then he saw something he missed before. There was a barred window, maybe a foot from the ceiling, and perhaps two by one feet in area. He became a little more hopeful, and went to inspect it.
It was locked. Looking through the bars, Henry saw another room, maybe half the size of the one he was in. On the wall in the back, there was a door. "A door. This is how I escape! I'm not doomed! If I can somehow get this window unlocked, I can climb through, and get out of here!" He nearly yelled, though no one but he and the millipedes heard him.
Henry though that there would be a key to the window somewhere close by, but he had no idea where it could be, so he started scrutinizing his surroundings with unbearable vigilance.
The bricks in one corner seemed loose; the cement seemed not to grab onto them as much as the other bricks. This was the corner where the puddle collected. He pushed a brick, but it didn't budge. He tried to pull it, but he couldn't get enough of a grasp. He duplicated this ritual with four more bricks until he started to become panicked and began violently kicking the area in question of the wall. He didn't kick it three times before there was a sharp pain from within his shoe. He collapsed from the sudden sting, and he tore off his shoe. Already the front of his sock was doused in blood, and he whipped that off as well. His ring toe of his right foot had been broken, and the nail was squashed back into it. His immediate instinct was to pull the toenail out of him, which he did, and was greeted with another spurt of blood. The pain was so great that he passed out again.
When he woke up, there was no sharp pain, but still quite a throb. His headache, he observed optimistically, had completely vanished, but his toe injury and its accompanying limp was quite enough to make up for it.
To see if the preceding ordeal was in vain or not, Henry checked the kicked wall. Two bricks were cracked, a chunk of one had fallen out, and the cement between two or three of them had been nearly splintered completely off. This gave him the grip he needed to pull the brick away. He did this, and dropped the brick into the black puddle.
Behind the brick there was part of something metal. Henry used the new alcove to pull out more bricks, until he uncovered the whole thing: a metal box with a lock. He tugged it out of its hiding place, and put it in the middle of the room. Just to make sure, he pulled on it to see if it really was locked. The pack rat in him decided the gather all of the bricks he pulled out, and put them next to the metal box.
"A box is nice, but I need to find a key. It might be in there, but then I'd need a key for that," Henry said out loud, without a thought as to why he did so.
Then the idea that someone may be watching dawned on him. Someone brought him there; who it was that did it was impossible to know until he got out, and he could only guess why they did it, but someone must have. He put his hand through the hole he took the metal box out of, but there was just more brick wall.
Henry decided that there was no real way to find out if anyone was watching him at the moment, so he should try his best to put the thought out of his mind. Instead, he occupied himself by continuing his search for the key.
He felt the bottom of the puddle, in case the thing was hidden under the opaque waters. His fingers splashed around the little pool, but he felt a sting on his middle finger, and when he rose, a little nymph of some unknown insect was hanging off of it. Henry let out a howl and ripped it off. He threw it to the other side of his cell, and he began to breath heavily, intensely frightened of that unearthly wriggling thing.
Henry noticed a strange thing once he collected himself. His middle finger, the one the nymph was on, had gone through a key ring, which, not very oddly, had a key on it. It was gold-colored, and Henry decided to try it out on everything he found that was locked. First, he tried the most important thing, the barred window. No such luck. Then the metal box. Nothing. 'This key is useless!" Henry screamed hastily. He threw it back into the puddle, but then when he saw the foolish thing he'd done, immediately fished it out again, this time, without a nymph to boot.
Henry set it onto the metal box. And sat and thought about what to do next, looking for another place to explore.
He drifted into another memory. He had been out of college for a few months, and he had bought a cat. When he came home from his thankless job at 'TeleTech Communications," that filthy pit, he found his cat was very anxious about something. Her paws looked red and swollen, and she was pacing around and yowling and wouldn't leave him alone. After an hour or so of this, Henry followed her into the basement. She walked towards the laundry room, an he followed her. In there, Henry found his cat's hoard of prey. There were at least 4 dead mice. 'You just wanted to show off!" Henry exclaimed. But his cat wouldn't go near them. He bent down to see them clearer, and he found that behind the washing machine there was a puddle of water that had leaked. There were also several other mouse cadavers. He went to clean the puddle and slaughtered mice up, but there was a soft and squashy feeling under the remarkably dirty water. He used a sponge to soak up some of the water, and when most of it was gone, he found the origin of his cat's anxiety. There were a multitude of nymphs thrashing around in the water, all of them drowning in the air. When the mice went there, the nymphs injured them so much that they killed them, and when the cat went to get the mice, her little paws were bitten until they were sore and red. Henry stayed in his room for four hours, until his girlfriend got home. He begged her to take care of the little pool of malformed bugs in the basement. She did.
Again, Henry returned to reality, this time with no external assistance. He, once more, searched for the keys, of whose existence he was progressively more doubtful. His suspicion was that whoever put him there had they key, and he was suffering in vain.
Henry looked at the water trickle that formed the puddle. One brick that it passed through looked much less rough than the others, maybe even smooth. This, he knew, could be an integral step in his eventual escape. There was a tiny gap between the cement and the brick it held, just like those other bricks that were hiding the metal box. But, just like the other bricks, he could not grip it enough to dislodge it from its alcove. A few moments of thought, and the pretty accurate hurl of an already dislodged brick that he placed in the center of the room with the rest of his collection cracked a bit of the cement around the smooth brick. He did this numerous times, missing about three times for every once he hit it, until he finally got enough of the cement to crack off that he could pull the brick out. It was very heavy, some metal, he decided, and Henry accidentally dropped it on his injured foot while he pulled it out. He let out a shriek, and that was followed by about a gallon of water spilling out of the new hole, a little cleaner than that in the puddle. To Henry's horror, therein he saw the repulsive squirming dance of a billion little nymphs. They must have been in the water that came out of the wall.
Henry panicked and went to the opposite corner of his cell. He stared at the wiggling monsters and became paralyzed in that spot for a length of time he didn't count.
Henry was stuck; his disabling phobia included dead bugs, even more so, he thought, than living ones, so killing them would be out of the question entirely. He continued to ponder his dilemma.
The light bulb, really, the only light in his grimy little world, dimmed a little. Henry looked at his one bare foot. He knew that in a place like this, infection for a wounded toe would probably be mandatory. His other, much less painful injury was the nymph bite on his finger of which he still shuddered at the memory.
Henry had been, since he woke up, rather disoriented, he inferred that the probable cause was that he had been tranquilized by whoever it was that brought him to this place to keep him from waking up while they kidnapped him. Sitting for a while, even though his terror had nearly driven him to vomiting from the sight of that insect pool again, he nodded off, still under the spell of the tranquilizers.
Henry dreamed of his job, and his cat, and his girlfriend. He had a dream of a normal day, before he had been captured and thrown into such baffling surroundings. When he woke up, he was surprised to find himself where he was, and took a while to remember that his current reality was not the true dream. He also remembered why he was huddled in that corner, to keep as far away from the bugs as he could. Cautiously, he returned to the watery corner, but whimpered in fear and disgust as he drew near. To his immeasurable relief, the water had stopped trickling from the ceiling, and that meant nothing was feeding the puddle, and that meant that all the water seeped into a crack in the cement floor, and, it looked like, the insects chased it. One thing didn't follow the water, though. Another key.
Of course, Henry didn't get his hopes up, because of the experience he had with the last key, the one that opened neither of the locked entities. He used the new key first on the barred window, and as he expected, it did nothing. Keeping his cool, he tried the metal box. He had shaken the box and heard from within a metallic clink that sounded suspiciously like another key. He tried the key, and sure enough, the lock clicked open.
When Henry opened the box, the exceedingly rusted hinges broke off. Inside, Henry saw in repugnant detail, there was a spider, a brown furry one, with long, spindly legs, sucking the being out of a millipede, each of it countless legs twitching on its own in its last, useless, miserable defense. Henry was petrified at the little bright-eyed arachnid, which seemed to be staring at him as it devoured its writhing victim. He immediately threw it against the metal bars, which made an ear-splitting battering sound, while he screamed and screamed.
The spider, its prey, and the key, all flew into the room behind the window, the room with the door, the only exit Henry had. He ran up to the window in a distraught intensity. Grabbing two bars tightly with his hand, he tried to see where the key was, and to see if the denizens inside had been killed or thrown into oblivion. Unable to see the spider or millipede, he decided it was the latter. The key, on the other hand, was right under the door. If he had a long pole or something like that, he would be able to get it, but this cell seemed so ingeniously planned out for his escape, he didn't think that the consequences of a sudden violent impulse of fear in the form of throwing a metal box into a window would have been anticipated enough. His firm grasp on the bars revealed that the vicious blow loosened the cemented grate. He tried to wrench it all the way out, but his malnourished hands weren't enough to move it. Frustration caused him to make use of repetition, so he threw the metal box at the bars, an honestly good idea, considering his state of mind. Again and again he bashed the thing against the bars. Then, forgetting about the etiquette of throwing it, he just used it like a weapon with his skinny little hands. After he exhausted himself, and the box was dented severely on both sides, the jagged edges forbade him from its further use. The lock had cut through the concrete in which it was lodged partially, and the whole thing was very loose.
Henry screamed again; he could almost taste freedom. He tried to loosen it with all of his rapidly failing strength. A lot the rust from the box and the bars had burrowed into his palms and fingers, and it began to sting. He knew if he didn't get out very presently, his numerous, though not severe, wounds would get the better of him, not to mention his immense hunger and thirst.
Henry walked to the opposite wall of the window. He took a deep breath. Then he barreled towards the nearly dead window and with the great accuracy he demonstrated before he dove through the window, tearing the bars off of their hinges, the lock from its concrete home, and, once again, his mind from consciousness.
A throbbing headache roused Henry from a deep sleep. He was lying on his back, on a filthy floor. He could barely keep his eyes open. His head was very bloody, but he didn't feel like he suffered any brain damage. The bars were thrown to the corner of the room. He got up wearily and breathed a sigh of relief. His relief overcame what should have been unbearable pain, and he enthusiastically opened the door. He was met with a brick wall.