The Sea Fortress

An ImaRead production · text & illustration by the production line

ImaReadFolio 02 — 02

A small man crouches in a vast stone prison cell lit by a single dim torch. Soot-stained petitions are smeared on the granite behind him; a piece of bread lies uneaten by a heavy bolted door. — The cell is cut from living rock, and the rock drinks the torchlight. He writes petitions in soot and slides them under the door. The bread is taken. The petitions are never read.

A man sits slumped against a stone wall in a prison cell. His blanket is torn to strips beside him; his knuckles are split and stained with dried blood. A faint scar of light climbs the opposite wall. — Time in the dungeon is not measured, it is borne. He beats the wall until his knuckles split, then decides, at last, to be tidy about his own ending.

Close-up of a man's hand pressed flat against rough granite, fingers spread. His face is tilted toward the stone, eyes open and alert. Faint scratch marks show in the rock just below his palm. — A scratching comes from inside the wall — not vermin, not settling stone. He presses his palm to the cold granite and listens, and for the first time in four years feels afraid of what he feels.

The walls of the Château d'If do not merely imprison Edmond Dantès; they perform the sentence. He arrives in a cell cut from living rock, where the granite drinks the torchlight and gives back only a dull, animal cold. Days blur into a smear of identical darkness. He shouts. He begs. He names the magistrates, the captain, the king, the God his mother taught him to love. No voice answers. The guards, if they hear him at all, hear him as the architecture hears a draft — as a thing to be endured, not redressed. He writes petitions in soot and drips of water, slides them beneath doors, ties them to bread. The bread is taken. The petitions are never read. Somewhere above him, a clerk stamps another file. Somewhere above him, the Deputy Procureur of Marseille sleeps soundly, having done nothing that his conscience, in the court he keeps for it, can call murder.

Time, in the dungeon, is not measured. It is borne. He feels it across his shoulders the way a galley-slave feels the oar. At first he counts the sunrises by the faint gold that climbs a crack in the opposite wall; then the crack is mortared shut, and he counts by his own pulse, by the itch of a healing wound, by the slow loss of names he once knew by heart. Hope returns in cycles, like fever. He convinces himself that some error will surface, that an inspector will come, that a bored official will glance at his number and ask a question. Then the bread comes at the same hour as yesterday, and the door stays shut, and the hope retreats to a corner of his chest where it will wait, patient and famished, for the next lying dawn. Rage follows. He tears the blanket. He beats the wall until his knuckles split and the blood, when it dries, looks like another letter no one will read. Rage burns itself to ash, and prayer takes its place, and prayer in turn cools to a gray resignation he does not yet know is the first mask of madness. He resolves, at last, to be tidy about his own ending. He stops eating. He drinks only what they force on him. He rehearses the act of dying the way a clerk rehearses a signature — small, exact, irrevocable.

ImaRead2

On the morning he has chosen — or believes he has chosen — the cell offers him a sound. Faint. Rhythmic. A scratching, somewhere low and far inside the wall, as though a rat had learned the patience of a mason. He lifts his head. He does not breathe. The sound comes again: tap, scrape, tap, pause, tap. It is not vermin. It is not the fortress settling. It is the slow, deliberate pulse of another prisoner, somewhere in the stone, digging with whatever tool has not yet been taken from him. Edmond feels something he has not felt in four years, and the feeling frightens him more than the silence did. It is curiosity. He is not yet saved. He is not yet free. He is simply, for the first time since the warrant was signed, unwilling to be the only living creature left in his own story. He presses his palm to the cold granite and waits, the way a miser waits at a locked door, listening for the tumblers.