by Tom Becker
The portly fixer took control of the trolley as they followed the shuffling Bookworm back towards the reception area. There was something about the little boy – the way he talked, the way he carried himself – that made Adam feel strangely ill-at-ease, no matter how friendly Doughnut was towards him.
They sat down around one of the reading desks, nursing mugs of black liquid that Bookworm produced from a Thermos. Adam had been looking forward to cocoa, but he was disappointed to find it bitter and thick with coarse granules. Nevertheless, he smiled politely as he sipped it. Doughnut slurped away with relish, coating his upper lip with dark liquid.
“Adam here just arrived yesterday,” he told Bookworm.
The librarian looked over towards him. “Guess you’re feeling pretty strange right now.”
“Strange?” echoed Adam incredulously. “I think I’m going mad.”
“You wouldn’t be the first,” Bookworm said. “The Dial is a lot to get your head around, and not everyone can cope. Some of the kids get so upset they lose their mind. They end up in the infirmary, drugged up to the eyeballs. Not a place you want to end up in.”
“No kidding,” replied Adam.
“How long’s your sentence?”
“Two hundred and seventy-four years.”
Bookworm shrugged. “That’s pretty standard.”
“Standard? What’s a long sentence here?”
Doughnut burst out laughing and clapped Bookworm on the back. “You’re asking the right guy. This here’s one of the oldest nine-year-olds you’re ever likely to see. How many years you been here now, Bookworm?”
The little boy scratched his head. “About six hundred and fifty, give or take a few.”
An incredulous laugh died in Adam’s throat as he saw Bookworm’s serious expression. It couldn’t be true, there was no way it could be true . . . and yet it did explain why the librarian’s manner unsettled him. There was a crushing melancholy to Bookworm’s demeanour at odds with his unlined face, a weight of experience that seemed to press down on the shoulders of his young frame.
“This place. . .” muttered Adam in disbelief. “I don’t understand . . . I mean, how?”
Bookworm took another sip of cocoa, then disappeared into the bookshelves. He returned a couple of minutes later, blowing the dust off a slender dark-blue volume that he showed to Adam. The title of the book had been marked out on the cover in gold lettering: The Inmate’s Handbook.
“Maybe this will help,” Bookworm said. “It was written for new inmates.” He cleared his throat, then began to read aloud, in a thin, faltering voice:
Welcome to the Dial. I imagine you have a lot of questions. Where am I? What is this place? Why am I here? The last one is easy enough: you are here because you betrayed someone. Don’t bother trying to deny it. The sooner you accept it the better. Questions about the prison itself are rather harder to answer, but hopefully this brief introduction will serve as a useful starting point.
The Dial is located in no-time, a place far beyond the outer reaches of the known universe. Although the seasons turn as normal, the Dial’s planet must revolve around a different sun, for a year here lasts as long as a blink of an eye back on Earth. The prison can only be reached through a warphole in the sky, which is activated by the machinery located in the Commandant’s Quarters. If anything or anyone else exists in no-time beyond the prison walls, then it has remained hidden. As far as we know, this world is entirely barren. There is only the Dial.
The prison can hold a thousand prisoners at any one time, and the plentiful supply of traitors from Earth ensures that a bunk is never empty for long. The total number of inmates to have passed through the Docking Port is anyone’s guess. Many thousands? Certainly. Millions? Probably. Given that the Dial exists beyond time, it is possible that everyone has been sent here at one time or another. After all, nobody’s perfect. . .
“But wait!” I hear you say, “if there have been all these prisoners, how come I’ve never heard of the Dial before?” Allow me to explain. At the end of their sentence, inmates are taken to the Re-education Wing, where their minds are wiped of all memories of the prison, save for a flicker on the edge of their consciousness. They are left only with an awareness of the steep price of betrayal, an awareness that prevents them from even thinking about committing the same crime again. Then the inmates are allowed to resume their life on Earth, not looking a day older than when they left, and where barely a second will have passed since their arrest. After that, it is hoped that they will live their lives with a sense of honour and loyalty instilled by countless decades of imprisonment.
Bookworm closed the book and placed it down carefully upon the reading desk.
“Cheery read,” Adam said, rubbing his face with his hands. “Who wrote it?”
“I did,” Bookworm replied quietly. “A couple of centuries ago. Probably only five people apart from me have ever read it. People here would rather listen to rumours and fairy tales than anything I’ve got to say.”
“I still can’t believe you’ve been here for all this time,” Adam breathed.
“You haven’t heard the best of it yet,” said Doughnut. “All of us prisoners were born within a few years of each other. Back on earth, it’s probably only been a week between when Bookworm was taken and when the Quisling came for you. Only for him, that week’s lasted over 600 years.”
“But that’s. . .”
“Impossible?” The librarian laughed. “That word doesn’t very mean much here.”
As Bookworm took another sip of cocoa, Adam gave him a curious look.
“What did you do?”
“Mmm?” said Bookworm.
“I mean – why are you here? Who did you betray?”
Doughnut held up a warning hand. “Dial manners, Adam. Don’t ask anyone that. If they want to tell you, that’s up to them. No one ever does, though.”
“It doesn’t matter what any of us did,” Bookworm said quietly. “We’re all guilty.”
“So that’s it?” Adam said bitterly. “I’m stuck in this place for two hundred years?”
“Not necessarily,” said Doughnut. “If you don’t fancy doing your time quietly, you could always try and do something about it.”
“Like what?”
Doughnut’s eyes twinkled. “Escape, of course.”
Doughnut’s words floated up into the rafters, where they were lost in the darkness. As the silence in the library assumed a meaningful tone, the fixer grinned, finishing off his cocoa with a flourish.
“Escape?” said Adam. “How?”
“Well, that’s the question,” replied Doughnut. “There’ve been all sorts of crazy schemes over the years. There was that time when Sanchez knotted loads of sheets together and tried to climb down from a window in the mess hall, or when Beanpole tried to get on the Quisling dressed as a guard. My personal favourite was when Price and Banjo tried to get over the wall on that ladder of theirs.”
“You’re kidding me!” said Adam. “Did they make it?”
“Make it?” Bookworm emitted a reedy laugh. “They were lucky they didn’t break their necks!”
“Getting out of here is pretty tough,” admitted Doughnut. “This place is a fortress, and the guards are watching you twenty-four-seven. Even if you do make it out of the Dial, what then? Sit around in no-time for the next few thousand years? You’d be better off in here.”
“What about the warphole?” Adam asked. “Can’t you get back that way?”
“That’s the only way you can get back. Problem is, you’ve got to open it first, and that means strolling over to the Commandant’s tower and turning the machine on. And that’s the most secure wing in the prison.”
Adam remembered standing on the landing strip looking up at the whirling mass in the sky, and the beam of light shooting out towards it from a tower on the Dial.
/> “I don’t get it,” he confessed. “Who’s this Commandant?”
“You saw Mr Cooper today in the exercise yard, yeah?” said Doughnut. “Well, he’s the Chief Warder – in charge of all the day-to-day stuff – but it’s the Commandant who’s the main man. He was here at the very beginning. As far as we can tell, the Dial is all his work.”
“What’s he like?”
The fixer scratched his head. “That’s the thing – no one really knows. The only time you ever meet the Commandant is in the Re-education Wing, just before you get taken back to Earth. Apart from that, he doesn’t leave his tower. But he’s the one opening the warphole, all right.”
“And no one’s been able to break in and turn it on themselves?” Adam asked, a note of excitement in his voice. “That’s impossible?”
Doughnut gave him a sly look. “Well, maybe not impossible. . .”
“Don’t encourage him!” Bookworm said sharply. The small librarian wagged a finger at Adam. “Escaping is a fool’s game. I’ve seen enough idiots try over the years, and no one’s ever made it.”
“That’s not true, though, is it?” said Doughnut.
Bookworm pulled a face of disgust. “And you think Adam should use him as an example?”
“Wait!” said Adam. “Who are you talking about? Has someone actually escaped from the Dial?”
If Bookworm replied, it was lost in the deafening keen of a siren. Doughnut brushed his hands together and got to his feet with a sigh.
“Where are you going?” Adam asked.
“Same place as you. Lessons.”
Adam’s face fell. “Lessons?”
“And you thought this place couldn’t get any worse,” Doughnut laughed, patting Adam on the shoulder. “Let’s get it over with. See you later, Bookworm.”
They headed back outside, where the walkway was rumbling through the slanting rain, picking up bedraggled prisoners and depositing them in front of a large building on Wing VII. The classrooms occupied the lower floor, Doughnut informed Adam. Above them was a large theatre space, reserved for special occasions and off-limits for most of the year.
“Don’t worry,” the fixer assured him, as they trooped off the walkway and inside the building. “This isn’t proper school or anything. We don’t have to do it every day. Most of the time the goons leave us alone – they reckon sitting around bored for a few hundred years is worse punishment than breaking rocks or scrubbing floors or anything like that. But, every so often, they like to remind us why we’re here.”
Classes were arranged by grouping different dormitories together, creating a mixture of boys and girls in each room. Relieved not to be separated from his new friend, Adam followed Doughnut to a classroom and took a seat at the back of the orderly regiment of wooden desks. The windows were barred and there were no computers, and a dusty blackboard instead of a whiteboard, but still the atmosphere felt just like every other classroom Adam had been in: a mixture of boredom and a restless desire for mischief; stifled yawns and giggles; whispered secrets and daydreams of freedom. He took a seat beside Doughnut, directly behind two of the fixer’s friends: the hyperactive Mouthwash from their dormitory, who talked as fast he chewed on his ever-present gum; and a serious-looking girl with dark hair and glasses, whose nickname, Adam learned, was Paintpot.
“Quiet!”
Miss Roderick strode to the front of the class, her face like a thundercloud as she handed each inmate a lined exercise book and a thick, leather-bound volume with the title Betrayals: Vol. 653 embossed on the cover in large black letters.
“We’ll start copying out from page one hundred and forty-five today,” Miss Roderick declared. “And in silence!”
When he opened Betrayals, Adam saw that the pages were filled with handwritten testimonies, written in shaky hands, the ink smeared with tears. They were all the same in tone – trembling descriptions of how people had been let down by those closest to them. As he leafed through the book, Adam realized that there had to be hundreds of testimonies inside. And this was volume 653. . .
He made a start on his copying, and was halfway down the page when Doughnut nudged him.
“Check this out,” he whispered.
The fixer flicked to the very front of the book, where the ink was faded and the pages were stained with mildew. Straining to decipher the tangled handwriting, Adam read:
“. . . and even though I was really ashamed I told my best friend, Lydia, making her swear that she wouldn’t tell a soul. But then the next morning I came into school and all the other children were laughing at me and I realized that they all knew, every single one of them. I ran out through the school gates and never went back again.”
“Sad stuff,” said Adam.
“You might not feel quite so sympathetic when you see who wrote it.”
Adam inspected the signature beneath the testimony: Hortensia Roderick. He glanced up at the guard, then back at Doughnut.
“This is hers?”
Doughnut softly tapped the Betrayals. “All the guards are in these books somewhere. See, loads of kids get let down and betrayed. But the guards are the ones who never get over it. So they come back here, as adults, to take it out on us. Why else do you think they’re here? Not much more fun working here than doing time here, if you ask me. And some of them hang around for a while, too. Take Mr Harker – he’s been here longer than Bookworm.”
A sudden thought creased Adam’s brow. “What about Mr Pitt? What happened to him?”
“Now that’s a mystery,” Doughnut admitted. “I’ve been through every page of these books, and I’ve never been able to find it. We reckon he must have torn it out. Wouldn’t want us laughing at him, would he?”
“No talking in class!” Miss Roderick barked. With a roll of his eyes, Doughnut returned to his work.
As much as he tried to concentrate on Betrayals, the silent copying soon bored Adam. Over Paintpot’s shoulder, he saw that she had slipped a sketchpad under her exercise book and was drawing a picture of a boy. Adam watched, fascinated, as Paintpot carefully shaded in dark hair and brought a pair of twinkling, mischievous eyes into life.
Finally the siren put an end to their misery and Miss Roderick abruptly dismissed them. Adam was almost out of the door when a cry made him turn around.
“Hey!”
Mouthwash had snatched Paintpot’s sketchpad from her and was displaying her drawing of the boy to the other prisoners as they walked past.
“Check this masterpiece out!” he laughed.
“Give it back!” Paintpot protested. “It’s just a doodle!”
“Doodle my foot!” crowed Mouthwash. “It’s Lover Boy, isn’t it? It’s Luca D’Annunzio.”
The prisoners around them froze; there was an audible intake of breath. Doughnut glanced over towards Miss Roderick, but she was too busy telling off a girl for wearing lipstick to notice them.
“Shut up, Mouthwash!” Paintpot hissed, her face reddening. “You’re not funny.”
She made another attempt to grab the book, only succeeding in knocking it from Mouthwash’s hands on to the floor – straight at the feet of the girl Adam had met in the Docking Port the previous night.
Tucking a strand of hair behind her ear, the girl knelt down and picked up the sketchpad.
“Ignore him,” she said quietly to Paintpot, handing back the sketchpad. “It’s a lovely picture. You’re really talented.”
The girl hurried away before anyone could reply, disappearing into the busy corridor outside. Adam watched her leave.
“Who is that?” he asked.
“Her name’s Jessica,” Paintpot replied, glaring at Mouthwash as she jammed her sketchpad underneath her arm. “I think so, anyway. It’s the first time she’s ever spoken to me. Why do you want to know?”
Adam shrugged. “No reason,” he lied.
Doughnut
checked to see that Miss Roderick was still looking the other way, then gave Mouthwash a swift dig in the arm.
“Ow! What was that for?”
“Paintpot’s right – that wasn’t funny.”
Mouthwash rubbed his arm, a wounded expression on his face. The two of them began bickering loudly, and Adam decided to leave them to it while he accompanied Paintpot back to the prisoners’ quarters. He waited until they were safely alone on the staircase before asking:
“What was all that about back there? Who’s the boy in the picture?”
Paintpot blushed again and held her sketchpad to her chest. “His name is Luca D’Annunzio. He used to be a prisoner here.”
“But he’s not any more?”
She shook her head. “Not for a long time. Look, we shouldn’t talk about him. If people hear us talking about him, we’ll get into trouble.”
“Trouble?” pressed Adam. “Why?”
“If you really want to find out more, go to the library and read the Codex Treacherous. I’ve said all I should.”
“OK,” said Adam. He gave Paintpot a gentle nudge. “Jessica was right, though. You are a really good artist.”
A smile flickered over the girl’s solemn face. “Thanks. Here.” She handed him the pad.
“Don’t you want to keep it?”
The smile broadened into a grin. “I’ve got others. See you at dinner.”
Paintpot continued up the stairs towards the girls’ quarters, leaving Adam to enter the boys’ corridor on his own . . .
. . . Only to come running back in the opposite direction several seconds later, with Scarecrow and Jonkers hot on his heels.
“Not so hard now, are you?” Jonkers bellowed.
“Get back here!” added Scarecrow.
Adam hurtled down the steps three at a time, just managing to keep out of his pursuers’ grasp. Where were the guards when he needed them? He leapt down to the ground floor and pelted along the empty hallway, heading for the front door and the safety of open ground. Behind him Scarecrow and Jonkers were still yelling threats, but they had lost the element of surprise and Adam was faster on his feet than they were. He yanked open the front door and ran outside.
