Welcome back to Chained Soul, my new serialised novel that I’m releasing right here on my blog, as well as on Tapas and Wattpad. Quick warning: this series does contain strong language, so if that’s not your thing, you’re free to skip this one!
Check out Part One, including a synopsis for the whole series, here!
If you missed Part Sixteen, you can read that here!
Day Seventeen
No psychologist today. That’s not too much of an announcement, I know, since she doesn’t show up every day, but there’s been a whole lot of nothing today. No one’s knocked on the door, obviously, so there’s something. Or nothing, I guess. There’s also been nothing from Helen. I can’t even hear any signs of life from the other side of the wall. No movement, nothing.
But the main thing – the one thing that I’m actually bothered about (not that I’m not bothered about not hearing Helen, but it’s not like it’s unusual for her to go a couple days at a time without making much noise) – is that there’s been no slop today. No salt either, so I guess that privilege is out, but I’m not really that bothered about that. It made the stuff tolerable at best, but I’ve been shovelling it down for a while now, so we’re past the point of tolerable meaning anything.
I don’t know why there’s been none. It’s not like they sent me a letter or anything announcing that my ‘food privilege’ was revoked altogether. Even in here, I don’t think they can do that. I hope not, anyway. Even if they’ve gotten rid of all of my other human rights, food is sort of essential to life and all that. I can chug down water from the sink next to the toilet all I want, but that’s not gonna keep me breathing forever.
How long can someone even last without food anyway? Not that I want to find out. I know it’s longer without water, so I guess I should count myself lucky until they shut that off as well.
Maybe the whole place is finally struggling to sustain itself, and food got reduced first. To be fair, they didn’t even give me any sort of uniform until recently. That would make sense if they don’t have enough money to even clothe the people they kidnap. From what I can tell, this place is pretty big. All the fencing I saw when they let me go outside for a minute must’ve cost something to put there, and I bet there must be at least a hundred staff out there, just counting the ones I’ve seen. Who knows how many other corridors and rooms this place has?
If they spent all the money on building it and putting people in stupid white coats and all that shit they truss up the guards in, then maybe there’s nothing left now. What happens when some freaky facility runs out of money? They’ve gotta release everyone at some point, right?
Or maybe they’ll leave me in here to rot. I can still hear footsteps outside in the corridor, so I know I’ve not been completely abandoned yet. The three-a-days showed up as well, so that’s something else. I guess they still have enough money to medicate me – or maybe that’s more important than feeding me.
Am I really some sort of dangerous criminal being kept in here for everyone else’s good? I wasn’t taking those pills at the start, and I haven’t exactly been tearing up the place, so that must mean something. There again, I guess I did bang on the door and scream a ton at them, so maybe they do think I’m crazy. I couldn’t blame them if they were making that assessment from just seeing me like that.
But how else was I meant to react? I just woke up here. They didn’t exactly have an information booklet or anything like that to tell me why I’d actually been thrown in here. I just woke up to these walls and knew that whatever happened must have been really fucking bad. But surely if it was that bad, then I’d remember it? I could be suppressing it, I guess. Like trauma or something.
I wish that psychologist lady would actually get up to that point in the stupid ‘talking therapy’ if that’s case. Or maybe they’re afraid of me turning into some big fucking monster or something when I find out, like a werewolf or whatever the fuck else does that. It’s not like anything is normal in here. I guess it’s not completely stupid to think that extends to me too.
Still, it’s probably more likely that they’re the nutjobs and I’m just some unlucky bastard that they chose to subject to their stupid fucking treatment. If this was official, I’d see something that I recognised in here, I’m sure of it. Some sort of logo on a lanyard – or a fucking lanyard to begin with! I know what hospitals look like, or at least I think I do. There’d be something normal in here.
Like why didn’t the psychologist lady introduce herself by her name? I’m sure that if this was normal, she’d have been ‘Miss Something’ or ‘Mrs Something’. But that would actually make sense, and nothing in this fucking place makes sense.
The food is like something out of a really bad sci-fi movie, the vagueness is like some weird mystery film that not even the director understands the plot of, and the people are just… I don’t know. Helen doesn’t have a face, the guards are all pretty much silent and the psychologist lady is about as useful as a… I don’t know, as useful as the door slot that only delivers slop.
I don’t know. Maybe I’m just rambling because I’m hungry. When your body gets used to receiving food – if you can even call the slop food – at a certain point every day, even when you have no fucking idea what time of day it is, you can feel the shift instantly. My stomach’s been growling loud enough that I’m sure Helen can hear it, and probably everyone else that they’ve got locked up in here too.
And those stupid people in the corridor outside. If they need a louder alarm clock to tell them to actually do their fucked up jobs, then maybe they’re somehow not even qualified to work in this mess of a place – I don’t know how someone can fall so low in life.
It’s just as unlikely as me ending up here, I guess, so maybe it actually makes a little bit of sense that they’re that bad, when I’m this unlucky.
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Oskar Leonard 
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