Twilight Zone - The Prisoner in the Last Cell

The prisoner sat upright on his cot and looked around his surroundings. It was cold and musty. The acute stink of urine and human excreta stung his nostrils. The hazy stream of light that seeped in from the tiny window indicated that it was nearing dusk but there was no way to tell. He felt light and fresh, in spite of the odd surroundings. He could see a solitary guard patrolling along the opposite corridor. There were books strewn on the floor, some of the pages were yellowed and the bindings were worn out. He wondered where he was.

There must have been some kind of a misunderstanding. He couldn’t recollect how he got there. He couldn’t recollect what he had for dinner the last night. His mind was drawing a blank. It was dawning on him that he couldn’t recollect anything beyond the time that he got up from his bed.

The prisoner was amazed at himself for analyzing the situation so calmly. His self-composure discomfited him.

‘How can I not panic, given the situation that I am in, right now?’, he thought to himself.

He sat quietly on the cot for what seemed like an hour before he decided to question the guard. Nonchalantly, he slipped his feet into the prison slippers that lay beside the cot and walked towards the cell door.

“Excuse me, Sir!”, he addressed the guard who was facing the other direction. The guard stood alarmed and petrified in his promenade, his thoughts disturbed. The cells were not lit; the corridor lights weren’t very helpful either. The guard walked toward the direction of the voice, slinging his gun off the shoulder. He had been positioned on Island Kiev’s 2nd quarters for the past 17 months and he had never heard that particular voice before.

Slowly approaching the last cell, he observed the prisoner who was motionless. The guard was nervous. He had never heard any voice from this particular cell before; nobody had. There was a mysterious force emanating from the cell that made him want to sound the alarm. But there was no act of aggression, au contraire the prisoner seemed calm, composed and still. A tinge of confusion scrawled on the guard’s face.

The guard had not uttered a word. The prisoner observed that he was being looked at as if he were a ghost.

“Who am I? And what am I doing inside a prison, Sir?”, the prisoner questioned matter-of-factly, “I don’t seem to remember much, actually anything.”

The guard continued to maintain his silence. With a keener eye, the prisoner observed that the guard was looking at the bed on which he lay sometime back.

He turned around to find himself in a corn field; a till lay at his feet. Dusk had made it’s way through, and the sky twinkled with the stars. The sudden change of scenario would have been creepy to any normal mortal, but the prisoner seemed to be amazingly composed. He looked back but the prison and the guard seemed to have vanished.

He couldn’t figure out what was happening to him, but the fact that he was not panicking was gnawing at him.

Memories flitted back to him. He remembered the field; this is where he had fallen in love with the mute damsel. There seemed to be a faint murmur in the air.

The entire episode of him granting her the death-wish fell upon his mind’s eye. The memory of that twilight hour seemed to get vivid by the moment. He was still nonplussed about his identity, and what had happened to him in the past, and what in the world was happening to him now. He looked around for the tree where he had first spotted her, sitting quietly, motionless.

The sky had progressively darkened, but he spotted the solitary tree camouflaged with a mountain in the background. With a desultory mind, he ran towards the tree, not knowing what to expect.

And there she was, sitting just as before, with a tear that seemed to have frozen in it’s place. She didn’t look up this time.

He approached her carefully. She didn’t seem to notice. She wasn’t talking to him through his thoughts as before. In fact, she didn’t seem to realize that he was standing by her.

His thoughts were disturbed by the noise of approaching footsteps. They both looked in the direction of the beholder.

For the first time, in the past one hour of his existence, the confounding transition from the prison to the field, his eyes widened in shock.

The prisoner found himself staring at a person clad in cotton robes, who seemed to be him, now uttering, “Are you hurt in anyway, my dear lady?”.

He turned around to look at the damsel, and almost took a step back to find the damsel looking straight at him. He wasn’t sure whether the damsel was looking at him, or his memory-figure who was standing right behind him.

He took a step aside, and her eyes followed him. “I can see you, Brad.”, she spoke gently. The name struck him like thunder, giving rise to a multitude of memories, none of which he could place a finger on. It was confusing and contradicting.

“You are … Cleo?”, Brad stuttered. That was the only other name he could think of at that moment. He had romanced her in 2 worlds, and this one was one of them.

“And you thought we would never meet?”, she mocked him like she used to. Slices of memories came back to him in bits and pieces.

“What exactly is happening to me now? What happened in our past? I can’t seemed to remember anything. I don’t feel good about myself anymore”, his frustration writ large on his face.

She smiled coyly, picked up her veil, and walked to his memory-figure. “Meet me yonder.”, she beckoned. He knew how it was going to end already.

He turned around to stop her, only to find himself staring at the guard at the prison again. He almost took a step back in shock. His mind was slowly churning into frenzy. He still didn’t understand what was happening to him. The guard was opening the door, still looking at the bed.

He turned his head in the direction of his bed. For the first time, he felt fear. His body was lying on the bed. Lifeless.