The Sanctuary

38

I KEPT TELLING myself the same thing as two guards handcuffed Keith and me and led us through the prison: this was all a misunderstanding. It was a mistake. This was the United States of America. This was California. There were laws, as the warden himself so aptly pointed out, and those laws prohibited the abuse of its citizens, both in and out of prison. As soon as the warden understood that we really hadn’t hurt anyone, his thinking would change. As soon as he reflected on how absurd his intentions were, he would come to his mind and return us to a conference room, where we could sit down like civilized people and discuss each of our mistakes—no foul, no harm.

But I knew that I was wrong. This really was my Jonestown, and there really was a new Jim Jones in town, living out his own twisted vision of good and evil right under America’s nose.

The world had been shocked by the deaths of the nine hundred people who’d died at Jonestown, because no one believed the rumors of abuse leading up to the massacre. It wasn’t possible. It was too much. It was preposterous. Maybe it could happen in the dark ages or in Nazi Germany, but not today. Not in California. Not in the United States of America.

But there I was, like a lamb being led to my own slaughter, and the worst thing about it all was that Keith was right. No one even knew that we were at Basal, not as Renee Gilmore and Keith Hammond. The pieces had fallen almost perfectly into a puzzle of Marshall Pape’s design. But I’d given up trying to figure out exactly how and just faced the fact that they had.

The prison was a ghost town. They’d cleared it before we were led through the domed hub. The inmates were probably locked down in their own cells, a common enough occurrence in most prisons. It was usually a form of restriction following an incident that required investigation, or a preventive measure against exacerbation of the incident.

Today, Keith and I were that incident. Danny was that incident. The warden had cleared the prison so that he could deal with us as he wished.

The captain jabbed his chin at the far side of the room. “This way.”

Keith hesitated. “Where is everyone?”

The captain gave him a little shove without bothering to answer.

Keith’s tie was gone and his white shirt, sleeves rolled up, was smudged along the arms and back where he’d leaned against the wall. He still wore his leather shoes and dark blue slacks.

There were no other guards on duty that I could see. The doors out to the main yard were closed, as were the doors to the housing wings.

Danny, where are you?

We were herded toward the section of Basal that held the infirmary and the cafeteria, but we passed them both and turned into a small hall. It ended at a door under a sign that said Recreation Room.

The captain reached for the door and offered me a twisted grin. “Welcome to the hard yard.” He pulled the door open and stepped aside with the handle still in his hand.

From my vantage, I could see only a gray concrete room—no people. But my mind’s eye saw images of black-and-white pictures from old documentaries. Gas chambers from Auschwitz. Slaughterhouses and abandoned basements.

I glanced up at Keith, who was staring in, face masked in stone. His words from the holding cell returned to me. This isn’t over.

I’d been consumed with Danny and myself, but looking at his stark hazel eyes, I saw a man who’d been pulled into a nightmare because I convinced him to help a damaged woman save the man she loved. Keith was connected through Randell, yes, but as it turned out, Randell had much less to do with the threat against Danny than either of us had thought. Like me, Keith had done what he thought was right. Conscience had only brought him here, to a place called the hard yard, inside of the prison called Basal, which meant core. Hard core.

The captain wagged his head through the open doorway. “Let’s go.”

It was my Jonestown, but it was also the place where I might see Danny, and so it was with a conflicted mind that I stepped inside their hard yard.

The room was concrete on all sides except the ceiling, which was made of a mesh wire supported by several metal beams. The towering concrete walls sent a chill down my back.

It was as if I had just stepped into my own graveyard. This was my tomb. My crypt, my slaughterhouse, the place where I would finally rest at the end of my life’s search for peace.

My eyes flitted over the rest of the room. A sea of faces stared at me, but none of them belonged to Danny. My heart crumbled.

Marshall Pape stood to my left, hands tucked into his blazer pockets, watching me without expression. Ten inmates were seated along the wall, legs cocked up or extended on the floor in front of them. Some were dressed in the common blue-and-tan uniforms of the general population. Some wore street clothes.

Besides the captain and the guard who’d brought us, there were four other COs in the room, one in each corner, all armed with illicit rifles.

Bruce Randell stared at me from the center of the line. I was going to die.

That was how I was thinking of it, but in the most trying times I had a way of letting all of my neurotic tendencies sink into the floor and becoming stronger. I was going to die here—Keith knew that, I knew that, Danny would soon know that—but maybe I was going to take Pape with me.

A low wolf whistle from one of the inmates broke the silence.

“Quiet,” the warden said. “This isn’t a whorehouse.” He returned his stare to me, face still flat.

The captain removed my handcuffs and shoved me from behind. I stumbled forward to the center of the room and was joined by Keith.

For long seconds no one spoke. I scanned the faces of the inmates, trying to guess their intentions or, worse, the warden’s intentions for them. Look at me, my eyes told them. I’m only a skinny woman who needs your sympathy. The real ogre’s over there. He’s the one who we should all fear.

Some were in their twenties, but most were in their thirties or forties, covered in prison tattoos. Just men, like Danny, who’d been sucked into Marshall Pape’s monster factory.

But they didn’t look like monsters. One had whistled, yes, and two or three eyed me with interest, but their eyes weren’t dripping with lust. In fact, most of them looked at me with uncertainty, even sympathy.

An older man sat at the far end, legs crossed underneath him, and on his face I saw a sad regret I might have expected from my own father, if he were still alive and there.

I was desperate, I know, but I really did feel a surprising sense of kinship with my fellow prisoners at that moment. We were all under the same heel.

I knew they were going to hurt me, but as I stared into the prisoners’ eyes I saw Danny. These were the kind of men he’d lived with for the past three years. These were the members of his world now. These were the ones he’d chosen to love. Even Randell, who on closer inspection looked uncertain, not vengeful.

“What we have here, my friends,” the warden said, withdrawing his hands from the pockets, “is a perfect lesson in what’s so wrong with the world. You see a man and a woman in front of you. They came to our institution under false pretenses, pretending to be two people they were not. But isn’t that the way it is with everyone who comes to this place? Isn’t that the way it is with the whole world? No one wants to confess their true nature or the evil thoughts in their minds. Everyone’s guilty. Pretenders, all of them.”

He allowed himself a subtle if insincere smile. “It’s my job to peel back the layers, strip you all down to your naked selves, and reveal the pathetic truth of your nature so that it can be rehabilitated. All things must become new, and sometimes that’s an ugly process.”

The warden wagged his head toward the inmates seated against the wall. “The men you see aren’t here by accident. They cannot and will not run to your law, because they’re under mine now. They know the cost of breaking my law is far too high to endure for very long, much less forever.”

Basal was his religion. The inmates were his flock. It made me sick.

“The question I put to you two today is, who are you underneath it all?” He looked between Keith and me. “Please show them who you really are. Both of you.”

I’d forgotten about my blonde wig, and it took me a moment to understand what he was asking. But then Keith reached up and started peeling off the goatee and mustache he’d glued to his face. I pulled off my wig. I’d left the glasses in the holding room. They were pointless anyway.

“You see? They aren’t Julia and Myles, after all. They broke into my prison with the intention of killing Randell, because they believed Randell intended to kill the priest.”

He walked up to me, and I suppressed a sudden urge to spit in his face, because for a moment he ceased being human in my eyes.

The warden began to pull the pins out of my hair, letting it fall around my shoulders.

“So pretty on the outside,” he said. “But inside no different from Slane.” He continued pulling down my hair. “You’ve abused me,” he said matter-of-factly. “You’ve breached my walls and violated my sanctuary. And that is no less of an offense than the torturing or taking of another human being. So now I have no choice but to return the favor. An eye for an eye, as we all know.”

“You can’t do this,” Keith bit off under his breath.

“Oh, but you’re wrong. I can. This is Basal, and in Basal, I preside.”

It hit me that this might have nothing to do with Danny. The warden was going to let them hurt me and Danny would be nowhere near to stop them. Maybe he was already dead. My breathing thickened.

“Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, let’s get on with the messy business, shall we?”

“How can you stand here and—” It was as far as Keith got before the warden slapped him.

Keith glared, face flushed. I had never seen such a look of hatred from Keith, and seeing him stand up to the devil both scared me and gave me a surge of confidence.

The warden turned to me. “Take off your pants.”

“No—” Keith’s objection earned another slap, this time backhanded, hard enough to startle me.

“Bare yourself!” the warden thundered. “Show us who you really are!”

Danny had worked his way through the underground passages and found his way to the administrative segregation wing. No guards. No attempt to stop him. They knew; they had to know. Why else would they have left the cell open and let him pass?

It was all planned. Danny wasn’t about to execute some clever, eleventh-hour rescue that would sweep Renee from danger without significant collateral damage.

But he could not stop, because he also knew that he had to go to her.

There were other possibilities. He could make an attempt to gain a hostage. He could hole himself up in the warden’s office and threaten to expose the prison. He could find a more suitable weapon, a knife or a gun. He could try to get to a phone and an outside line and call the authorities.

But the warden was no fool. All his bases would be covered. There was only one way to save Renee. There was only one thing that the warden wanted more than Renee, and that was him.

Danny was the key to her survival. Only Danny.

He paused at the bottom of the concrete stairs that led up from ad seg, breathing hard. A single bulb lit the stairwell and exposed the sealed steel door that led into the administration wing. From there he would head down the hall to the guarded door into the main prison.

They wouldn’t stop him, he already knew that. They had all been instructed to let him pass, let him find Renee, let him try to save her. Let him see her die.

His greatest advantage was their underestimation of his skill. They’d seen him take blows and suffer punishment, but they hadn’t seen him fight.

His right leg felt like it was filled with hot lead, and his head pounded with swelling pain, but none of it compared to the rage tearing at his heart. Again, a quiet voice deep within objected to the sudden change in him.

An image of Renee silenced that voice.

There were more ways to kill a person than to save one. A thousand times in the yards and halls of Ironwood, he’d been close enough to kill another inmate, but he’d never given the matter a passing thought. He’d put those days behind him forever.

But now he would put his vow behind him as well. How many would have to die in order for him to save Renee?

A new thought occurred to him as he took his last few calming breaths before ascending into the warden’s trap. If there was a guard stationed near the door, they might see his weapons and react out of fear, even if they’d been instructed to let him pass. They might force a confrontation early. That risk was too great.

He tossed the chair leg into the corner, where it clattered and rolled to a stop, then he pulled out the two pieces of splintered wood from his waistband and dropped them to the ground.

Barefoot and naked now except for his shorts. It was him, it was Renee, and it was the warden. At least one of them would die, and Danny only cared that it wasn’t Renee.

He put his right foot on the first step and began to climb.

I stood in front of the warden, dressed only in my white, short-sleeved blouse and my underwear. Standing there half-naked in my bare feet, staring at Keith because I couldn’t bear to look at the warden, my last strands of hope began to disintegrate.

It was what Pape wanted.

I looked over my shoulder at the door, begging to see something that would give me hope, but the door was closed.

When I turned back, my tears were already snaking down my cheeks. I could feel my naked legs trembling beneath me. I wanted to be strong for Danny, but I couldn’t seem to find any more strength in me.

“All of it,” the warden said. “I prefer that you are yourself, naked in my eyes.”

Keith stepped out, positioning himself between the warden and me. “You’ve made your point.”

“Oh? And here I thought rehabilitating Danny was my point.”

“By holding torture over his head?”

“Sometimes the threat of torture is the only way to get the wayward to confess their depravity. Danny is still pretending to be good.”

“You can’t force this on people. It’s monstrous!”

Marshall Pape arched an eyebrow. “Well then…perhaps she would like to save herself. Would that ease your mind?” He paced to his right. “How about it, Renee, would you like to save yourself?”

I only half-heard their exchange. My mind was cringing in my nakedness. I didn’t know what he meant by saving myself.

“All you would need to do is demonstrate your willingness to follow me. Make just a simple gesture of your love for me. Hmmm? Do that and I’ll save you from all this.”

My mind wasn’t working properly. He’d extended an olive branch to me, that was all I really heard. But he’d also used the word love and that confused me, so I didn’t respond.

“I’ll tell you what,” he said. “I can see you’re terrified, so let’s make this real easy. Don’t bare yourself. Just give me a simple gesture to confess your allegiance to me. Choose me, and I’ll set you free. Be my Judas; give me a kiss.”

The room was perfectly quiet. I could feel all of their eyes on me, some sad, some hardened by too many years in the warden’s sanctuary. All I had to do was kiss him and he would spare me?

It all struck me as a carefully rehearsed drama in which I, the unsuspecting victim, had been led onto the stage.

Nausea was flooding my belly and rising up through my chest. I had to be strong, I knew that. I had to save myself so that I could save Danny.

But I couldn’t move my feet. I couldn’t speak past the lump in my throat.

“No? Not even a simple single expression to be saved?”

“You’re a monster,” Keith growled.

“I’m the monster?” The warden’s words rang through the hard yard. He turned to the members. “Is that how you see me?”

None of the prisoners spoke. How could they? They’d all either come to believe him or were too fearful of their own fate to question his ways. His power over them was absolute.

“You see, Mr. Hammond, I’m not the monster here. She is. You are. You’re two puppets dangling on the end of a rope while the fires burn at your feet.”

The warden slowly walked up to me again, hand in his pocket now, grin screwed on his face.

“What would you do to save yourself, my dear? You won’t remove your clothes and stand naked before me. You won’t even acknowledge me with a kiss. I’ll tell you what…why don’t you kiss Keith here? Show me that you care about someone besides yourself and maybe I’ll reconsider.”

He was playing with us. Manipulating. Leading us down his twisted path, determining just what we would say or do to save ourselves.

“Just kiss him, and I’ll reconsider. It’s a sign of friendship, dear, not betrayal. Prostitutes don’t kiss, you know.”

The thought of doing anything the warden suggested felt like a betrayal of myself. But I was desperate to stay alive. For Danny.

“You can’t even do that, can you?” the warden said.

“What exactly will you reconsider?” Keith demanded.

“Everything. Isn’t that what you want? She can become yours. Isn’t that what you’ve always wanted? And now the choice is hers.”

For a few seconds neither of them spoke, and it was just enough time for me to get hold of myself and make a decision.

I stepped over to Keith, lifted my hand to his neck, pulled his face down toward me, and kissed him. His lips were warm and he was breathing hard.

Something inside of me broke, and I couldn’t let go. He put his arms around me and pulled my head into his shoulder.

“Sh, sh…It’s okay, honey,” he whispered. “It’s going to be okay, I promise.”

I clung to him as if he were my last hope in that insane world.

Keith hushed me again. “It’s okay.”

“Don’t let them hurt me,” I whispered into his shirt. “Please.”

“They won’t.”

Behind me, the door into the hard yard crashed open. Keith lifted his head and stared. I twisted in his arms and saw what he saw.

A man stood at the door, naked except for a pair of black shorts. His dark hair was swept back, wet with sweat. My heart bolted in my chest.

It was Danny. Staring at us with fiery eyes.

I was already halfway across the room, running for him. I was already throwing myself into his arms and curling up in his chest and vowing my undying love. I was doing all of that already, but only in my mind. I hadn’t moved. I was still in Keith’s arms, which were tightening around me.

Then I saw that Danny’s eyes weren’t directed at us, but on the man who held me. On Keith.

And from Danny’s eyes spilled all the rage of hell itself.