Fear becomes me in this dim cell. Imprisoned in darkness, every squeaking mouse or scurrying rat, every distant scraping or soft tinkling of chains, every mad break into laughter and the long, soft weeping of the lost, and worse than these, that terrible thing which is silence beyond silence—all this continually starts me from any sleep, anything like a deep sleep, filling my racing mind with pain and restless imaginings.
I stir, and my broken body rattles the chained hooks I’m strung up on. I can no longer close my gapping mouth and I have no tongue with which to speak. There are things crawling in my perforated flesh, nesting in my blackened corpse. Worms, pale and eyeless, struggle to be born as they eat their way through me. Or so one of my nightmares seems to me; I cannot tell if it is real.
Now a new sound, one of the jailers stomping through the prison, and I am merely another eye, another fearful ear, lost in the darkness. I listen to his coming and going, not knowing where those fading footfalls will end their course. I know not where they began. It is alike to all my dreams, an interruption of an interruption, and there is no beginning nor ending to my tenebrous torment.
Tale Told 