Peine Forte et Dure - Day 1
A contemporary horror serial about the burden of truth (Part 1 of 4)
Day 1
When Jordan woke, the room was pitch black.
His arms were outstretched with the palms up, a slight bend in each elbow, but not enough to reach the ground. His fingers were numb from the restriction of blood flow into his hands. He shifted his body to relieve some pressure on his right hand, sending pins and needles into his fingertips. As feeling came back, he tried to make a fist. His fingers felt thick and disconnected, like a puppeteer manipulating movements with strings rather than his own hand. When the feeling returned fully, he shifted his body to relieve the pressure in his other hand.
He lay still after that, breathing shallowly. His head felt wrong; heavy, swollen, as if his thoughts were being pushed through wet sand. The memory of the night before floated just out of reach.
He’d gone out, that much was certain. Taffy’s Lounge, his usual hang, arriving sometime after midnight. Security waved him through to his table behind the velvet rope that separated the VIPs from the crowd. He’d exchanged hellos and fist bumps, the kind of acknowledgment that passed for connection in places like that. Nothing stood out from the haze.
Wait, no; there was something. He had an argument shortly after he arrived. Aaron.
Jordan exhaled slowly through his nose. Aaron was drunk and already irritated about something Jordan hadn’t fully understood at the time. The exchange had escalated quickly, words turning sharp, a shove landing harder than intended. Before security had to intervene, the moment shifted as Aaron’s attention had drifted elsewhere. That was always how it went with him. Heat, then nothing.
Aaron and Jordan weren’t friends, but they were cordial. They kept running into each other, same clubs, same private rooms, places where last names mattered. They made peace over shots of mescal (who bought them was a detail lost in the brain fog). After that, Jordan made his way to the dance floor, where he bumped into the girl.
The girl.
She stuck out in Jordan’s memory the same way she did on the dance floor. Jordan had a thing for women who looked a little surprised by the city, wide-eyed and curious, taking things in as if afraid to miss anything. Or maybe that was the story he told himself.
Jordan shifted and felt the dense, spongy give of the mattress below him. This wasn’t his bed. His mattress at the townhouse was heated smartfoam, absurdly expensive, and worth every dollar.
Is this her place?
When the feeling came back to his fingers, he tugged against the restraints, finding very little give. Did she do this? He thought. He let out a quiet, incredulous laugh. No. That didn’t make sense. Maybe she’d done this as a joke, some elaborate thing he’d misunderstood.
Jordan gave the restraints another pull before relaxing his arms, feeling the throb of his pulse in his fingertips as numbness set in. He wondered what time it was, how long he’d been there. He lifted his head up, feeling the throb in his temples. His tongue stuck to the roof of his mouth like pasty cotton. The mattress reeked of the previous night’s vodka sweat.
“Hello?” Jordan said. His voice was raspy, and his throat felt like it was filled with sawdust. The only response was the echo of his voice off the walls.
A scuffling noise came from above his head. Footsteps. He shifted, craning his neck, at which point he became aware of the shackles around his ankles. When he tried to sit up, he felt something flat and rigid across his chest.
What the hell is going on?
“Hello!” he yelled again, the first hint of fear dripping into his words.
The footsteps stopped, replaced by the sound of a doorknob rattling and the creak of a door opening. A flip of a switch sent white light pouring into the room from the singular bulb over Jordan’s head. The sudden brightness added another wrinkle to the throbbing headache pounding in his temples like a marching band drumline.
Jordan clenched his eyelids shut, the afterimages of the overhead bulb burnt into his vision. When he opened them again, he caught a brief glimpse of someone standing at his feet, a child perhaps? He craned his neck up for a better look but found nothing, only cold gray concrete walls and the shadowy outline of the person standing behind him.
As his eyes adjusted to the light, Jordan surveyed the room. The ceiling was poured concrete, with a manhole in the corner packed with insulation. It’s an old cistern, Jordan thought. His grandparents’ house had a similar room used to store water before the city water lines reached their home. Now it was just an old storage room, like this one.
The mattress was on the floor. The shackles on Jordan’s feet and hands were secured to chains attached to metal posts. Most puzzling was what was pressing down against his chest – a sheet of plywood. Holes on either side of the board were slid down over metal rods jutting up from the floor under his armpits. The board rose up and down with Jordan’s breath, but that was the only direction it moved. He felt like a sandwich in a panini press.
“What the fuck is this?” Jordan yelled, pulling hard against his restraints. “Lady, I don’t know what your problem with me is, but-.”
“Innocent or guilty?” a voice asked, cutting him off. It wasn’t the mousey voice of the woman from last night. It was a man’s voice, deep and graveled with age.
“What?” Jordan asked, dumbfounded.
“How do you plead?” the voice asked. “Innocent or guilty?”
“What are you talking about?” Jordan asked. He paused for a response. When none came, he continued. “Do you know who I am? Who my father is?”
“You’re Jordan Shaeffer, son of Robert Shaeffer,” the voice replied. “Your father is Chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee. I’ll ask again, innocent or guilty?”
Jordan’s eyes widened. Was this political?
“Am I a hostage?” Jordan asked.
No response, only the deep breathing of the man standing out of Jordan’s line of sight.
“I have nothing to do with my father’s politics, if that’s what this is about,” Jordan continued. “But I’ve got a security detail. When they find me, you won’t get a trial. You’ll disappear to a remote CIA black site and never be heard from again. But if you let me go, we can forget this ever happened.”
A bluff. His father didn’t even qualify for a security detail, let alone Jordan. If he had security, Jordan could have avoided that fourth DUI arrest last Halloween when he blacked out behind the wheel, his car wrapped around a stone column at the entrance of a subdivision. His father had flown in from Washington to pick him up from the police station. Jordan’s memory of that night was blurry, a combination of the drugs and the concussion he received when the airbags of his Bentley deployed, breaking his nose. But he remembered the car ride home from the police station, his Dad ranting about how much political capital he’d spent to keep Jordan out of jail and the story from hitting the press. Not to mention the hit Jordan’s trust fund took to cover the damages.
His captor shuffled closer and placed a glass of water with a straw beside Jordan’s face. Jordan turned his head towards the glass and reached for the straw with his tongue. He pulled it to his mouth and drank greedily until the slurp echoed against the concrete. The man dropped again to retrieve the glass; this time, Jordan got a brief glimpse of a bald head, but nothing more.
“Thank you,” Jordan said. “Let me go, okay? I’ll pay you. I can make it worth your while.”
The shuffling footsteps receded towards the back corner of the room in an uneven gait, followed by a low scrape like sidewalk chalk. Dry and resonant, Jordan felt it as much as he heard it, vibrating up his body into the fillings of his teeth. A slight grunt from his captor as his feet shuffled closer.
“What’s going on?”
His captor didn’t answer, but his uneven shuffling and grating chalky sound continued, punctuated by his labored breathing. As he stepped into Jordan’s view, the man was old and thin, with deep wrinkles carved across his forehead down to his bushy white eyebrows, bulbous nose, and scraggly beard. His lips pulled tight against his teeth as he strained to move the objects that dangled from his fingertips.
Jordan’s eyes widened when he saw what they were. Cinder blocks.
“What are you gonna do with those?” Jordan asked, but again received no answer.
The old man’s back curled forward in a pronounced hunch as he lifted the blocks from the ground with a grunt. A droplet of sweat worked its way through the maze of wrinkles on his forehead before dropping onto Jordan’s cheek. The blocks hovered momentarily over Jordan’s head before the old man dropped them onto the plywood board on Jordan’s chest.
The weight of the cinder blocks squeezed air from his lungs like the bellows on a forge. Jordan inhaled sharply, but that breath too was pushed out by the weight against his chest. He took another breath, holding it for a moment before the weight of the blocks forced it from his lungs. His breathing settled into a forced, manual pattern of deep inhales, holding, followed by sharp, punctuated exhales.
The old man stepped to Jordan’s feet, watching him struggle.
“What’s this about?” Jordan rasped. “Why are you doing this to me?”
“In the old days when a man refused to enter a plea, they stacked stones on his chest. More stones every day. Some pled. Others were crushed. The outcome is up to you.”
“Plead to what?” Jordan asked. “What did I do to deserve this?”
The old man leaned in. “You really don’t know?”
“No.”
The old man watched Jordan fight for air.
“You’ll remain here until you do.”
The door closed and Jordan was alone. He tried to scream, but the weight pushed the air from his lungs too quickly for the sound to carry. With each attempt to call out, his breath fell further behind. He stopped trying to scream and focused on manually controlling his breathing process. Deep inhale, hold for a sec, then exhale as slow as his stomach muscles would allow. After a few minutes, his breathing was back under control as long as he didn’t try to talk.
The idea that this was a kidnapping fell away almost as fast as his initial idea that this was an elaborate game with a girl he had severely misread. Was the girl part of this? Jordan shook his head. No. This was personal, targeted.
Who was this guy? Jordan thought. What could I have done to him?
Jordan held his breath and flexed his abdominals, curling against the weight. He didn’t expect to rise all the way up, but he was curious how much weight was on him. At the gym, he’d do stomach crunches with a 45lb plate against his chest, five sets of twenty, then five more sets of alternating trunk twists.
He lifted the board a few inches on the metal support rods before collapsing back to the mattress. The blocks were heavier than a plate, but by how much he wasn’t sure. A hundred pounds? Ninety? Jordan lifted up, trying to tilt the board so he could slide the blocks down from his sternum. Landing on his groin wasn’t ideal, but he’d breathe easier, and he could swivel his hips to drop the blocks onto the floor.
He treated it like a workout, another rep, another set, something he could laugh about later when he got out of here. It was easier than letting his mind wander to how he ended up in this place, or how he would get out.
The blocks had barely shifted before a stitch formed in his side, knotting his abdominal wall like a knife twisting in his midsection. When Jordan cried out in pain, the air gushed from his lungs like releasing the stem of a balloon. He pulled on his restraints, twisting his body as much as he could to try to stretch out his side and relieve the cramp. He held his breath as long as he could, not exhaling until he felt the tingle of oxygen deprivation in his lips, then sucked in a deep breath to replace it. The pain in his side subsided to a dull ache, flaring up with each inhale.
Left alone for the rest of the day, Jordan found himself struggling to catch his breath whenever he lost focus. He’d steady himself with slow, deliberate breaths, counting inhales and exhales until his thoughts drifted and the cycle repeated.
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This is giving "Misery" vibes.
What a brilliant take on peine forte et dure! The physical weight on Jordan's chest mirrors the psychological weight of not knowing what he's acused of. I've always been facinated by how the truth can be both burden and release. Your descriptions of his breathing make me hold my breath too. Can't wait to see what Jordan did.