He sat there for a long time. Finally, he stood and turned to me, although he still wasn’t looking at anything, not really.
“You know, people think it’s just a bit of your thumb,” he said. “But it hurt. It hurt.”
He walked out of my cell, then. That was the last time I saw Stumpy Ellis alive.
I woke, staring into the dark. I got the feeling something had woken me, but I didn’t know what. The night was full of noises. Men muttering to themselves; rasping snores; guards’ voices; metal on metal. Prison is never silent, even at night. It was one of the things I missed about the outside – real silence.
Then there was an almighty, shocking bang from the cell next to mine. And a shudder, as though I could feel whatever it was through the walls, the floor, the bunk. The banging noise seemed to hang in the air, echoing.
After that came a wet splatter, like rain, heavy droplets landing on concrete. It seemed to go on for a long time.
Prison was never quiet at night, but it was quiet then, like never before or since. The texture of the air grew heavy with listening, turning to grey speckles before my eyes.
I was the one who broke the silence.
“Stumpy?” I said. “Stumpy? You there?” And there was nothing, not one sound coming back. Not one.
I slipped down from my bunk and went to the bars, looked out into the corridor. There was a wet gleam on the floor outside Stumpy’s cell. I couldn’t see any further, but I heard the footsteps of the guards when they came running. They stopped. Then there was the nearer splatter of one of them losing their lunch outside Stumpy’s cell.
“They say his insides turned to soup,” someone said. “As though he’d taken a dive off a building. Everything smashed up.”
“They say his skull shattered.”
“Every bone in his body, broken, just like that.”
“He must have jumped off his bunk, only they say it wasn’t high enough to do that kind of damage. Even if he’d hung from the ceiling, it wasn’t high enough for that kind of damage.”
It was lunchtime, and it was all anyone could talk about, although I said nothing at all. I just kept replaying those sounds in my head, the bang echoing on and on, and the long splatter that came afterward. The thing Stumpy had said, over and over: “Climb right out. That’s what I’m going to do. Just climb right out.” And the way his eyes had shone when he said it.
I kept glancing around, looking for the librarian, but he was nowhere to be seen.
It was late before they allowed us back to our cells, and when they did there was a black cloth hanging across Stumpy’s bars. It must have been some kind of mess in there if they felt they had to hide it from the likes of us.
I climbed into my bunk and tried not to listen to the silence coming from the next cell, but I did, for a long time.
Something woke me later. It was deep night and my head was thick with the confusion of it, night seeping in through my eyes and ears. Then came a distant snore and I remembered where I was. If there was one thing I wanted on the outside, it was to sleep somewhere out of earshot of other men’s snores.
I looked into the dark, the walls and the bunk taking shape. I looked at the door of my cell. As I watched, the lock pulled back with a loud metallic clang.
After a time, I resumed breathing. The door was unlocked, but no one came to lock it again. It was just there in the dark, an open door, and no one to stop me walking out. Except of course there were guards at the end of the corridor; more locked doors.
All the same, I slipped off the bunk and went to the door. I didn’t touch it, though, not at first. I put out a hand, saw the thick, open bolt, but didn’t touch it. When nothing happened I gave the door a gentle push. It moved easily under my hand, sliding without a sound.
I put my head out into the corridor. I could see a shape further down, a door, more bars, dim light, long shadows. And then I saw the dull mark on the concrete outside Stumpy’s cell, a dark stain where the wet gleam had been. I moved out further and saw the curtain hanging across his cell suddenly fall, billowing as it filled with air, finding its way to the floor.
Stumpy’s cell was much the same as mine. The same bunk, the same box for a wardrobe. But everything was covered in those same dark spatters. The curtain came to rest on the floor, leaving humped whorls and shapes. At first it seemed there was the form of a body beneath it, but then it settled and was only a curtain.
Stumpy’s door, too, was open.
I stood and swallowed for a while. Then I went in, trying not to step on that stain in my shoeless feet.
There was stuff all over the floor, and those little number tags the forensics boys put down before they take pictures. It was like seeing two rooms: the one they had been over, investigated, and underneath it the room where Stumpy lived and slept and shat. Used to, I corrected myself. There was a radio on the floor, and I half expected the little dial to light up and some song to creep into the room, under my feet, and that was when the hairs on my arms started to prickle. But it didn’t light up, it didn’t make a sound. I looked some more. Stumpy’s uniform hanging in the box, just like mine. His stuff underneath that, a couple of pictures, a newspaper, a book.
A book.
I picked my way over there, half expecting to hear the door lock behind me, but nothing happened. I just went over there and nothing happened and I picked up the book. The cover was some kind of cloth, rough under my fingers. I ran my hand over it and felt grooves, lettering I couldn’t make out. A dark sliver of thread was tucked into the pages. I stroked the cover. A stain had soaked into it and I pulled my hand away. My thumb felt damp, just the tip, and I stared at it.
I turned, and that was when I saw the rope. It hung there in the middle of the room. When I looked straight at it, though, it was gone.
I tilted my head. I could feel those prickles again, but this time they ran all the way down my back, like little hands, unwelcome hands.
I started to edge my way back out of the cell, trying not to step in anything that looked wet. All the time I looked at that space in the middle of the room. Looked up. The ceiling was featureless. There was nothing to hang a rope from. Anyway, it had been low down, as though hanging upwards from the floor, just a few of feet of it and then nothing.
As I pieced it together in my mind I thought I saw it again, just for a moment.
My arm pressed up against the cell door and I almost cried out. I tucked the book under my arm and slipped out of Stumpy’s cell, down the corridor and back into my own. I tucked the book under the sheets of the bottom bunk and climbed into bed, pulled the sheets over my body and lay awake, this time trying not to think of the book, somewhere beneath me in the dark.
The book was a joke, it had to be. I turned it over in my hands. There was no stamp inside, nothing to show it belonged to the prison library, no publisher’s mark. The first pages were blank. All of them were yellowed and foxed, the edges rough and uneven. Inside the writing was tiny, and it was in script: handwritten, not printed. The ink had faded to a pale brown.
The pages seemed to be full of magic tricks. There were small, hand-drawn diagrams of cards and dice and coins. Coffin-shaped boxes and saws. Ropes and knots and the means of escaping them. And there, on the page with the bookmark, The Indian Rope Trick and Secrets Thereof.
How to make space where there is no space, rope where there is no rope. How to feel with your mind for what you need, and reach out and take it. There was a lot of stuff about dimensions, about how the things you needed were all there, somewhere. Somewhere there was a rope, somewhere a door. About bending things with your mind, until what’s there is also here.
Think of a reason, it said. Think of a reason and the rope will answer. Hold it in your mind as you climb, and the rope will not fail. Hold it in your mind: not the rope itself, or the journey, but the destination.