Alex Sawyer never existed. You are one of us.
The fingers flexed, as if they were pulling something out of me, and with nothing more than a whimper I fell into the gaping emptiness that had once been my soul.
* * *
I WAS STANDING IN A MUDDY TRENCH, and for a moment I thought I was free. Then I glanced up at the sky and saw an endless void of darkness and knew that I was dreaming.
To my left and right were slick earth walls the color of blood, sheer and too high to climb. Not that I’d have wanted to—beyond I could make out dull explosions that shook the air and caused a fine rain of soil. I was about to take my eyes from the sides of the trench when I noticed a vague shape in the mud. I couldn’t quite see what it was until two slits appeared and a pair of eyes stared back at me.
By the time a mouth had opened up beneath those eyes and unleashed a groan of desperation I was already running. The ground gripped my feet the way it always does in dreams, slowing my escape. And when I looked down, it was hands I saw pushing from the mud—cracked and broken fingers snatching at my legs. I kicked out at them, trying not to lose my balance, trying not to fall.
But there were simply too many, dozens of hands and faces emerging from the soil like the living dead. I felt the world spin, saw the ground rush up to meet me. There was no impact. Before I could land, the trench seemed to freeze—all except for a puddle of filth right beneath my face. The muddy water bulged up, then slowly parted to reveal a face beneath, caked in dirt but still familiar.
“What do you want?” I asked it, although my voice made no sound.
The mouth opened and moved as though it was speaking, but again I could hear nothing.
“Who are you?” I asked wordlessly, studying the eyes, the nose, trying to remember where I’d seen the face before. It didn’t stop talking, but there may as well have been a sheet of soundproof glass between us. I focused on its lips, caked in mud but visible.
Don’t … I made out, reading the way they moved.
forget … It could have been any of a million words but somehow I knew. Just like I knew what was coming next.
your name, the figure mimed. I opened my mouth to reply, but before I could do so the face morphed into an expression of pure terror, its eyes like diamonds set into the wet earth. It was only then that I recognized myself in the mud, the face a mirror image of my own. It—I—tried to say something else, but my mirror face was sucked back into the ground, mud filling its mouth and nose, flowing over its still-open eyes until nothing remained.
“Wait!” I yelled. “Wait!”
Then the rest of the trench once again found life, zombie hands grabbing my legs and clothes and head and pulling me down into the grave. My heart lurched, the sensation of being buried alive too terrifying for my sleeping mind. The trench exploded into dust, darkness flooding in like water and propelling me back to the surface. I rose from the dream like a drowning man, gasping for air and clutching at the night.
It didn’t take long for me to remember that the real world was even more horrific than my nightmare.
But far worse was the fact that, for several seconds after waking, I couldn’t remember who I was.
BY
ALEXANDER GORDON SMITH
ESCAPE FROM FURNACE
LOCKDOWN
SOLITARY
Copyright © 2009 by Alexander Gordon Smith
All rights reserved
First published in Great Britain by Faber and Faber Limited, 2009
First American edition, 2010
www.fsgteen.com
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Smith, Alexander Gordon, 1979–
Solitary / Alexander Gordon Smith.— 1st American ed.
p. cm. — (Escape from Furnace 2)
Summary: Imprisoned for a murder he did not commit, fourteen-year-old Alex Sawyer thinks that he has escaped the hellish Furnace Penitentiary, but instead he winds up in solitary confinement, where new horrors await him.
ISBN: 978-0-374-32492-6
[1. Prisons—Fiction. 2. Horror stories. 3. Science fiction.] I. Title.
PZ7.S6423So 2010
[Fic]—dc22
2009030843
eISBN 978-1-4299-2550-1
First Farrar Straus Giroux eBook Edition: December 2010
Table of Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Confession
The River
Hunted
Buried Alive
The Throat
Daylight
Welcoming Party
The Hole
Thoughts from the Abyss
Screams
Communication
Visitors
Snatched
Recovery
The War
Preparation
The Infirmary
Specimens
Abandoned
Lost Boys
The Steeple
Breaking and Entering
The Charnel House
In Hiding
Doubts
Choices
The Only Way Is Up
Retreat
Bait
Goodbyes
The Incinerator
Excerpt
By Alexander Gordon Smith
Copyright
Solitary Page 20
