Page 4 of Diary from an Inked Throne

Dear Diary,

Good news…my father died. Bad news…literally everything else.

You got to know a lot about someone when you were locked in a room with them for weeks on end.

For example, I now knew Dax’s favorite color was green, that he’d played trumpet in his high school band, and his kindergarten teacher’s name had either been Mrs. Jones-Buttersworth or Mrs. Buttersworth-Jones.

He had debated the order of her names for what had felt like three days. No one had stopped him because we didn’t have anything better to do.

I also now knew Lynx had a scar on his back from the removal of a skin cancer in his teens, though the scar was so faded it had taken at least an hour for me to identify it in the weak, single bulb light that lit the room. His dad was one of seven kids, so he had a huge slew of cousins. And he’d grown up on Success Street, which he thought ironic since blacking out, murdering people, and going to prison was probably not anyone’s idea of success.

Scruff grew thick on all three of our faces. Dax had been in here the longest, and his had filled out into a full beard. It suited him, as far as I could tell, though who knew what it would look like in the sunlight.

None of us had seen it in weeks.

“You smell about as bad as you would if you had actually died in that car fire,” Lynx said to me idly from where he was sprawled out on the stone floor, staring up at the dingy ceiling.

I twisted my head from my spot beside him. “What makes you think it’s me? You hardly smell like roses.”

Dax sighed from my other side, something in his neck audibly cracking. “I think it’s just the air down here now. The smell of us…and other things…is all just so rank I’ve forgotten what the fresh stuff is like.”

None of us looked over at the corner of the room where our captors had so politely given us a bucket to piss and shit in. Shame they didn’t change it regularly.

I couldn’t remember what the outdoors smelled like either.

But I did remember burying my face in Nyah’s neck and inhaling the sweet scent of her skin and hair.

So that’s what I held on to.

All we had was talk, and we’d talked about her a lot. The one thing we all had in common was how much it fucking hurt to be apart from her. To be worried about where she was and if she was safe. To be racked with guilt over her being alone, thinking we’d all abandoned her when she needed us most.

Every time I thought about any of it for too long, something inside me threatened to break.

Before it could, we changed the subject to generic stuff. First cars, first crushes, or first beers.

There were no conversations about goals or plans. None of us brought up the future.

None of us could see one anymore.

Bells chimed somewhere above our heads, and all three of us sat up, staring at the ceiling like we might be able to see through it if we stared hard enough.

“Must be Sunday,” Dax murmured.

The first week he and I had been here, we’d heard those bells, and the slow, rhythmic chiming had given us the idea we were being held in, or at least very close to, a church. From the cold stone floors, the constant damp, and the lack of natural light, we’d figured we had to be in a basement, and sometime before Lynx was tossed in here with us, we’d decided we were in some sort of crypt beneath a church. Probably one in Providence or Saint View, because we both remembered not driving far after we’d been abducted.

Dax and I had screamed our lungs out every time we heard those bells.

But if there was a church congregation upstairs, worshipping the Lord, they couldn’t hear us. Nobody came.

Except the guards, who only ever opened the door to point guns at us while they passed through food and water.

We still couldn’t work out why they’d kept us alive this whole time, though none of us were hoping for death, so we didn’t speculate on that too much.

The guards always covered their faces. They never spoke to us. I always had the feeling at least two of them sat outside at all times, guarding their prisoners, though we had no real proof of that except for overhearing the odd muffled conversation through the heavy door. We’d tried talking to them, but they never responded, even when we’d grown so sick of each other’s childhood stories we’d resorted to asking the guards about theirs.

Fucking rude if you asked me. Seemed the least they could do was entertain us if they were going to keep us down here for the rest of our miserable lives. Which is what it felt like they were doing.

“Yo, guards!” I crawled over to the door, so I could hear them better. “Is it Sunday already?”