Free The Ghost of Ben Hargrove by Heather Brewer

Begin Reading
    My dreams are false lullabies. They are lies that I tell myself when I am asleep to get me through the nightmarish truth that faces me when I am awake. Sometimes, when I wake up, I make a conscious choice to keep my eyes closed, to pretend that I’m still sleeping, so that I won’t have to face what awaits me in the day.
    Or the night.
    To be honest, I can’t be certain which is which anymore. The room that I’m kept in has no windows, and I don’t know what lies beyond the door that never opens. Maybe only darkness.
    At first, when I wake up, I don’t recall my name, but then it comes to me in whispers, floating over me until it lands like cobwebs in my mind. Ben. My name is Ben. My age soon follows—seventeen—and then come the scattershot memories of my life before this cell. Mostly, my mind is a blank. A gray, horrible, empty cube—much like the cell that I always wake up in.
    I’m never awake for long before I hear them moving down the hall. Whoever is keeping me here must have cameras hooked up in my room, as they seem to know precisely when I wake, move, blink. . . . They never move unless I do. When I go still, the footsteps stop.
    I know they’re out there, but I haven’t found them yet. Maybe they’re just listening. Through the thin walls, via hidden microphones that I also haven’t located. Or maybe my exhausted, frightened mind echoes that loudly in the chamber of my skull—maybe they just know. Maybe they can sense that I’ve woken, that I’m moving, that I’m thinking about how I came to this place and how I can escape. That I’m thinking . . . and maybe what I’m thinking.
    Maybe they know it all.
    Maybe I am trapped here forever.
    I push that thought away—back into my nightmares, back into the place in my soul that’s convinced there is no hope of ever escaping my captors—and open my eyes. A new day has begun, or perhaps just a new time. “Day” and “night” are meaningless words within the walls of my prisonlike cell. I know only the cycle from one sleep to the next.
    The room I am kept in is small, roughly eight feet by eight feet. Its walls are grim and gray, stained with time and the memory of former prisoners. I use that word—prisoner—with doubt, for where I am doesn’t feel like a prison. There are no bars or guards—at least, none that I’ve seen—and my only daily visitor is of the medical persuasion. But this place cannot be a hospital, either—it’s too filthy, too frightening, to help or heal.
    The walls look as if some sort of liquid once ran down them, especially in the corners, only to dry into elongated shapes that remind me of Halloween ghosts. Long, shapeless. Harmless, really, so long as no one pulls back the sheet.
    My room has only a single door. It was once painted white. I can see flecks of that color here and there through what now covers it. Brief glimpses of its former identity peeking through tiny chipped holes. But the door is gray now. No more bright, clean white. Now dirty. Now gray. Now ruined with age.
    The door has a small slot in its very center. Seven times per cycle, a hand appears through the slot with food—a male hand, much older than my own. On the knuckle of the pointer finger, there is a small freckle. Otherwise, the hand is flawless.
    Sometimes it presents me with pills that I refuse to take. White pills. Flawless, like the door was once. Like the hand is now, apart from that freckle. The owner of the hand never speaks, never says as much as a single word. No “good morning.” No “good evening.” Just gives me my food and shuffles away, leaving me alone once again.
    (I’m convinced that’s the worst part of being here, by the way. The loneliness. The emptiness. The mind-numbing solitude.)
    I can remember them sometimes, my first days in this cell. Not the