Sanctuary

8

THERE ARE TIMES in life when everything a person thinks he knows is challenged. Undercurrents suck him under and threaten to pull him into a bottomless sea. Tsunamis rise up after an unannounced earthquake and sweep away every trace of reason in a matter of seconds. That’s why the wise man builds his house upon a rock.

But what happens if he unwittingly picks the wrong rock with the best of intentions, only to discover that the foundation under that house can crumble?

In Danny’s case, the storm that threatened to test his rock did not roar in like a tsunami in a matter of seconds. It rose slowly over the course of the three days he spent in meditation, and even then it managed only to erode a small part of his foundation.

Personal suffering he could manage, only because he’d faced so much of it through the war. But the suffering of others…​that was another matter.

He didn’t know the names or the crimes of those who suffered in segregation with him, only the odor of their excrement. Inmates came and went during his stay, and the routine became plain.

A code of complete silence was strictly enforced on the meditation floor. Any deviance was handled swiftly. A single loaf of heavily enriched and dreadfully tasting bread was delivered once every day. The water to the faucet ran for five minutes three times a day, signaled only by the hissing in the pipes. The toilet flushed only once a day.

Once every two days, each cell was properly hosed down with the occupant inside. The water and refuse drained through a trap door in the floor, opened during the cleansing. For the day following the bath, the entire wing stank of chlorine and whatever other chemicals they’d put in the water—Pape’s answer to sanitation concerns, which doubled as a mild form of torture, leaving them shivering in the damp cold. There were undoubtedly showers in the wing to meet all requirements set by the Corrections Standards Authority, but Danny guessed they weren’t used except during inspection.

What had the others done to deserve such inhuman treatment? They’d deviated from the rules established by the world in which they lived.

Who made up those rules? A few of them had been established by the warden, the rest of them by the department of corrections. By extension they were all the rules of society.

Why follow the rules? Because the consequence of not following them was painful. They should have all known better. It served them right, people would say. If a law says you stop at a stop sign, and you don’t stop, you are guilty and should pay a price. You run a stop sign, you pay a certain penalty, even if it’s on a deserted road at four in the morning and there isn’t another car within ten miles. Why? It’s the law.

If the law says you cannot look at a guard a certain way and you look at a guard that certain way, you will pay a penalty. Why? Because it’s the law. Looking at a guard wrongly at Basal might be compared to looking at a woman wrongly in some cultures.

Deviant behavior. Do the crime, do the time. Made sense.

After four days of shivering in Basal’s dark hole, however, it made less sense. Not because of Danny’s own suffering, but because of the suffering around him. Still, to maintain order, every society had to establish rules and follow them.

Even then, it wasn’t the plight of those around him that eroded Danny’s rock. It was the face of the young man named Peter Manning.

More specifically, the abuse the boy might suffer at the hands of Randell and his viper, Slane.

Even more specifically, Danny’s own reaction to that abuse. It was clear that any attempt on his part to intervene would constitute a deviation from the established law in this society called Basal. He would be taking the law into his own hands, so to speak, something he’d done before. But by doing so, he’d finally found it lacking. Man did not have the right to subvert society’s laws to enforce his own, even if doing so brought about good.

But therein lay the conundrum eroding his rock. Was it morally right to stand by while another suffered? What of the poor, the diseased, the hungry, the abused, the disadvantaged? Didn’t he have a moral obligation to come to their rescue?

If so, wasn’t he justified in wanting to prevent Randell from harming Peter? If he was required to break the law to save the boy, he would endure Pape’s punishment. At least the boy would be spared his suffering.

And yet this reasoning only delivered him back to the philosophy he’d embraced as a vigilante, saving the abused who were overlooked by the law.

Danny lay on the concrete slab, and he thought of the boy, and he thought about Renee, and he wept because he knew that if it were Renee up there instead of Peter, his wrath would know no bounds. And yet Peter was deserving of as much love as Renee. So, for that matter, was Randell.

But love wasn’t administered by a gun. He knew that. In his very bones he knew that. Randell was a monster because he’d been loved by hard steel instead of a warm heart his entire life, and such love was not love at all.

The facilitators came for him on the evening of the fifth day, the captain, Bostich, and a CO Danny hadn’t had the pleasure of meeting. They asked him to stand outside his cell and dress before cuffing him, which was itself a humiliating show of superiority. But Danny did as they asked, and they led him from the hall of silent, tormented deviants.

“I’ll take it from here,” Bostich said, locking the steel door that led down to the meditation floor.

The other guard nodded and stepped away.

“This way.”

Bostich led Danny to a sparsely furnished office in the administration wing and closed the door behind them. He motioned toward a gray metal chair next to the desk.

“Sit.”

Still cuffed, Danny sat.

Bostich leaned back on the desk, crossed his arms, and returned Danny’s stare. The dark-eyed man with bleached hair looked like he’d come out of the womb angry and hadn’t yet found a way to punish the world for accepting his birth. Danny felt compelled to glance away. A clock on the wall indicated that it was 8:37 p.m. They’d timed his release to coincide with lockdown. Why? Danny didn’t yet know, but he was sure that every detail in Basal was carefully orchestrated for maximum effect.

“Look at me,” Bostich said, then continued when Danny faced him. “I’m going to give you the same speech I give every member after their first stint in meditation. If you think that was hard, think again. If you think that was unfair, you should have thought about that before you did whatever you did to get here. The only one who decides what’s fair is God, and in Basal, the warden is God. Is that clear enough for you?”

“Yes.”

“And if you think opening your mouth about your sacred experience down there’ll bring attorneys running to set things straight, well then you just don’t understand the nature of your predicament, do you? You talk to any member about your time below and you go back down. You talk to anyone on the outside about it, ever, and anything can happen to you. The only thing protecting you in here is the warden. Am I clear?”

Danny had no reasonable choice but to answer in the affirmative.

“Good. I won’t lie. The warden thinks you’re good for this place, that you can somehow be a model citizen headed for early release. Me, I hate you. I don’t trust you. I see you and I see a knucklehead, and the only knuckleheads in my prison are the ones I know I can trust. One more stunt like you pulled back in the cafeteria and you’ll wish you were never born.”

That would make two of us, Danny thought, but he said nothing.

Bostich glared at him. “Now that you know how things work, the warden thinks you should be given a little more freedom. He wants you to keep an eye out. Half the members in this place are snitching on their cellie but no one’s a snitch, if you catch my drift.”

Meaning no one was labeled as a snitch, because it would break the convict code and subject them to hatred, and yet half the members were giving up details when called upon to do so anyway.

“An efficient way to—”

“Shut up. If you see anything that strikes you as out of place, you have permission to inform the warden, but only directly or through me, you got that?”

“Yes.”

The captain stared at him for a full ten seconds without blinking once.

“Fine. You’re going back to your cell. You open your mouth even once before lockdown and you’re going back down. Stand up.”

The hub was deserted except for four privileged members who sat around a table, playing a game of checkers. Most of the inmates would already be in the housing units. Two members were in a discussion with the facilitator on duty in the commons wing when Danny stepped in. Another small group loitered near the top of the staircase. Several dozen stood at their cell doors or on the tier above, leaning on the railing, wasting away their last few minutes before lockdown.

The hall quieted the moment he entered. Heads turned and watched, silenced by his appearance. Danny’s last hose-down had been earlier that day. He still smelled of chlorine. His hair was a mess and his hands were scraped from the concrete, but his clothing covered the bruises that had developed on his hips and shoulders from hours of shifting on the hard bed in an attempt to ease his pain. He’d lost a few pounds since arriving; otherwise there would be no other sign that he was worse off for the wear.

“Up.”

Danny mounted the steel staircase, aware of the surreal silence interrupted by the sound of his feet thudding up the steps. Even if this was a common occurrence, his unearned reputation as the new deviant priest probably had more to do with this audience than his return from the hole. He was still a curiosity, singled out to be crushed with the help of Randell and his thugs.

As such he was a potential enemy to all. The warden expressly reserved the right to impose restrictions on the entire wing due to one person’s deviance. Most of the members were likely far more interested in Danny’s compliance than in his help.

A quick glance at the top of the staircase showed no sign of Randell or Slane. A member with a barbed-wire tattoo on his neck and a crooked grin on his face watched him from his cell door at the top of the staircase.

“Yo, ya priest,” he said with a slight southern accent. “Name’s Kearney.”

“Whoa!” Bostich stopped Danny and looked at the member who’d spoken. “You begging for trouble, boy?”

“No, siree.”

“Then keep your trap shut.” He lifted his chin down the tier. “In your cells, all of you.”

They pulled off the railing and stepped into their cells, some more quickly than others.

Danny headed down the tier, keeping his eyes ahead, but he could see the members in his peripheral vision, making idle use of their last minutes before the ward shut down. At Ironwood a similar hall might be cut with the sounds of a banging locker and loud laughter, punctuated by vehement demands or loud objections.

Danny’s thoughts were cut short as they approached his cell. A man stood inside the cell next to his own, fingers wrapped around the bars, peering out at him, wearing a thin grin. It was Slane. Hair greased back like a wedge on his narrow head.

Danny drew abreast of the cell and stopped. Beyond the grinning Slane sat Peter, rocking back and forth on the lower bunk, staring into oblivion. Bostich didn’t order Danny forward, didn’t shove him toward his own cell, made no effort at all to keep him from seeing what he was meant to see. They had transferred the predator into Peter’s cell with clear intentions.

Danny met Slane’s daring eyes and for a moment rage flooded his veins. He couldn’t seem to pry Peter’s plight from his mind. What kind of savage would place such a boy in the arms of a beast like Slane?

He told himself to move on, there was nothing he could do. He willed his feet to move, but his feet weren’t responding. There was the predator and there was his victim, and here stood Danny, helpless to stop the one or help the other. And even if there was a way to help, could he?

Would he?

A stick in his back finally pushed him forward and Danny moved on, pulling his mind back from that place of fury that had once swallowed him.

Godfrey lay on the bottom bunk, reading Tolstoy’s War and Peace, which he immediately set down. The door crashed shut behind Danny.

“Lights out in two.”

Bostich nodded at Danny. “Sleep tight, Priest.” He retreated down the pier, evidently satisfied that he’d escalated Danny’s misery by setting up Peter in the cell next to his.

Godfrey closed his book and laid it on the mattress beside his head. “So you survived your first opportunity to meditate. That’s good, everyone does.”

“When did they move Slane into Peter’s cell?” Danny kept his voice low.

The older man’s head swiveled toward the bars. “What do you mean?”

“The man’s in the cell next to ours.”

“Now?”

“Now.”

“Peter’s with him?”

Danny shrugged out of his shirt and walked to the sink. “Yes.” He turned on the faucet and splashed his face, ran his wet fingers through his grimy hair. There was no mirror.

“Lockup!” the CO shouted. The electronic locks on the cell doors engaged with a loud clank.

“You see what I mean?” Godfrey muttered. “There’s no end to their games. And there’s nothing you can do, don’t kid yourself. Guaranteed, this is as much about you as Peter. They are begging you to say something. Take my advice, don’t.”

“Lights out!”

Danny grabbed his towel from his locker and wiped his face. The bulb blinked off, leaving only pale light from the tier to reveal the outlines of the room. A faint whimper sounded from the cell on Danny’s right.

He stood still for a moment, unable to move, unwilling to give any more space in his mind to the rage boiling in his gut. For three years he’d methodically steeled himself against the fury directed at the monsters of society, fully aware that he was essentially one himself. His only reasonable course of action now would be to console the boy and provide him with a ray of hope in the morning.

Danny stripped, rolled into his bunk, and prayed for the boy’s safety. But he could not pray to be Peter’s guardian angel. That task would have to be left to higher powers.

The facilitator on duty walked down the tier, checking each cell door.

“Keep to yourself, Priest,” Godfrey muttered.

Why the man thought Danny needed this encouragement was a mystery. Was his indignation so obvious?

For half an hour Danny’s senses remained tuned to the hall’s noises, listening for the slightest sound from the cell next to his. Surely Slane wouldn’t go so far so quickly. Surely there was a limit to what he could do with impunity in Pape’s sanctuary. An eye for an eye, Pape had said, but surely he wouldn’t demand an eye from someone as innocent as Peter. And yet, in Pape’s world, everyone was guilty, whether or not caught and—

A short cry sliced through the dark night. At first Danny couldn’t be sure of what he was hearing. But then the cry came again, this time a whimper that stopped his heart.

“Please! Please…”

Danny sat up.

“Think, man. Get a grip,” Godfrey whispered.

Although the boy’s cries were muffled now, they did not stop. The wing was gripped in perfect silence except for those stifled cries, now accompanied by other sounds of struggle.

Danny sat rigid, overwhelmed by a craving for justice that refused to bow to any calculated reasoning.

No one could help the boy in this moment, Danny. Your only course is to hope that Slane’s sending a message, not carrying it out.

A bead of sweat ran past his temple; his body was already covered in a sheen of it. It was the warden’s willingness to throw the boy away simply to break Danny that stirred up the worst of his anger.

In this world only the warden had true power. He was using terror to ensure compliance as much as some might think God would use a tornado to wake up a sleepy town.

The boy’s stifled cries became louder, and Danny felt his hands begin to tremble. His mind bent to the point of snapping. Peter was that unwitting participant in a grand scheme, lost to the complexities of rules and protocol yet somehow subject to all of it. Peter was in his own hell, suffering punishment while the warden’s message hung over them all: everyone is guilty and everyone suffers and only I can save you.

Beneath Danny, Godfrey’s breathing was heavy. Surely he’d been confronted by similar injustice many times during his incarceration. He knew to keep his offense to himself, no matter how deep it ran.

Danny, on the other hand, wasn’t as practiced, not here, not in Basal. But he could learn. He could suppress his hopeless urge to defend the defenseless. He could refuse to act. Didn’t the whole world do the same? Didn’t everyone turn a blind eye to the plight of others less fortunate?

A muffled scream reached past the cell wall, and for an endless moment that cry belonged to someone else. It was his mother’s.

No, Danny, this isn’t your mother…

But Danny’s mind wasn’t cooperating. He was a boy, hiding in his room in Bosnia. In the next room the Serbs were raping his mother. He was only a boy; he could not stop them. His two sisters were already dead. Now they were going to kill his mother, but he could not stop them, he couldn’t scream, he couldn’t even breathe.

The sounds of his mother screaming stopped. Their house was suddenly quiet. And Danny hid in the corner, shaking violently. This time he could not allow them to kill her. His foundation began to crumble. He was only vaguely aware that he was sliding off the bunk, desperate to stop them this time.

“Stop it!”

Danny’s mind snapped back to his cell. He was on his knees, fists balled like twin hammers.

Silence smothered the echo of his cry.

In the next cell, Slane cackled. His hand must have slipped off the boy’s mouth because a shriek cut through air.

“Help me! Help—” But the cry was stifled once again.

The bulbs suddenly popped bright, flooding the commons hall with light.

“Priest!” Bostich’s voice rang out from the hall below the tier. The electronic lock on their cell door snapped open. “Step out of your cell!”

It took a moment for Danny to reclaim his poise. The heat on his face began to subside. What had he done? But he knew only too well.

“I won’t say it again—step out of your cell!”

“Lord have mercy,” Godfrey breathed.

Danny swung his feet off the bed, dropped to the ground, and exited his cell. His had been the only door opened. He stepped up to the railing and saw that Bostich stood by the guard station on the first floor, hands on hips, staring up at him.

“Do we have a problem?”

Danny had been under the warden’s thumb for less than a week and the man had already fractured his resolve? He took a deep breath and considered the captain’s question, then chose his words carefully.

“I would like to request an audience with the warden, sir.”

The captain hesitated. “There’s protocol for that, and it doesn’t include screaming out in the middle of the night.” But Bostich’s curiosity pushed him further. “Regarding what?”

“Only clarification.”

“You’re confused, is that it? No one else seems to be confused. Are all priests as thickheaded as you?”

“I only need clarification about your latest request.”

There was another pause as Bostich seemed to consider his reference to snitching, surely knowing that Danny had nothing on which to snitch other than what was obvious. But it was enough to pique the man’s interest.

“You’re going back into meditation, you do realize that, don’t you?”

“All I’m asking for is a word with the warden as part of due process before you take me down. Nothing more.”

“Get back in your cell, keep your mouth shut. I hear of one more word in this ward tonight you’re all going on lockdown for three days. That includes you, Slane.” He faced the CO to his right. “Shut it down, Tony.”