I am standing waist-deep in excrement, I feel it moving around under the surface of the water, sloshing up against my chest. I stand as tall as I can to prevent it from making contact with my face. I hold my nose with both hands, can’t keep the other loose just in case it touches the rancid water. The hole is large enough for me to stand, there is no light. I can feel my skin shrieking at me to make it clean. My mind is a thousand voices and a scream that knows its job is pointless. The blackness, now my shadowless enemy seems to be laughing at me.
“Where is she, David? She was here this morning, what have you done with her? I called around all the local hospitals, police stations, nothing! What kind of a place are you running here?”
David rose from behind his desk. His framed self-portrait loomed over his head, asserting its and his authority. Daniel had never liked the picture, he always thought it made him look rather demonic. His visits here were regular and he knew the routines well but today something was seriously wrong, he could feel it. David looked like he had been on the booze the night before, unsteady on his feet he swayed around the desk and placed his arm around Daniel’s shoulder.
“Well…I…don't think I can recall…when I last saw her, when did you last see her?”
“What do you mean when I last saw her, you are supposed to be taking care of her in this institution, this mental institution, which is now making me feel a bit mental, how do you not know where she is, you’re her brother and you are supposed to be an upstanding figure in society looking after patients who aren’t in their right mind, you have a responsibility, we’re relying on you and now you are saying you don’t know where she is?”
“Well, you see David, last night…”
I’m starting to remember now, trying to black out the darkness and think of something else. Dr. David, he had been talking to me about my dead parents and my fiancé’s dead parents, oh god my fiancé, he will be worried sick. David asked me how we both being orphans had affected our relationship and I had got angry and had gone to slap him, oh…I did slap him and yes he put me in a room filled with padded walls and I threatened to expose his drug problem. I had noticed the remains of dried white powder around his nose and had started shouting, worried he would lose his job, he dragged me out of the padded room and put me in the basement and said, “nobody will believe a nut job like you anyway!” He had left me there, now I was here. The hole in the floor had been covered with a large plank of wood and a green plastic wheelbarrow and in my anger, I shoved it up against the wall. There were stairs leading down, so I had decided to investigate. So now I am here, I am missing, but perhaps part of me always was.