The Last Man Underground
A Modern Vampire Tale by Arbogast
The following manuscript represents the transcribed testimony of an unidentified male known only as Prisoner XUF1-11865.[1] Said individual is believed to be somewhere between the ages of thirty-four and thirty-six. His general demeanor is calm, if not slightly paranoiac and “skittish” owing to his long imprisonment by the previous regime. Following a full physical and adequate rest, the subject was interviewed by Dr. Renato Sobral and Dr. Brian Delisle.
I cannot remember my name, my birthday, or anything resembling life before the white walls. White walls. Always white—blindly white and pristine. I used to clean them to pass the time. Water from the standalone toilet and sometimes my own spit as a cleaning solution. So many solitary hours spent like that—hunched over or standing upright in a near-silent room with a handful of toilet paper and a few troublesome stains. My hands always made the same circular motions until my wrists began to burn with overexertion. When that happened, I’d sit on my mattress and try to be as still as possible. There were times when I fell asleep like that. You can absolutely fall asleep standing up, you know. I did it plenty of times.
I’m sorry? No, I don’t remember why I was sentenced there in the first place. Why do people go to jail normally? Drugs. Yeah, maybe I was a drug dealer or user or something. My arms are scabby, don’t you think? Maybe I was injecting heroin into my veins in some back alley and the cops arrested me for that. No, I don’t feel like a political prisoner. I…I don’t have the temperament for that, I think. Not really a strong personality; not a firebrand. Besides, I’ve read some of the books that you both have left me, and none of it seems familiar at all. That big one—The Black Book of Sanitation—it’s supposed to be the foundational manifesto, right? Ok, well I read it for the first time ever last night. I think that alone means that I wasn’t a dissident. A common crook, yeah; that’s the most likely answer. The old government arrested those guys too…
No, I never saw the jailers. Or maybe they were scientists. You said that the room was in a laboratory, right? Scientists work in labs, or at least they used to. Maybe we were all part of some kind of experiment. Maybe the reason I don’t remember anything is because the whitecoats brainwashed me—put their hands into my brain and stole all my memories forever. I hope that DNA test will prove something…[2]
Ok, sorry. I promise to stay on topic. I never saw my jailers. The only evidence of their existence was in the morning and at night. I would find a plate of breakfast food in the morning when I woke up, and late in the evening, after my daily nap, I would find a plate of dinner food. The food always tasted the same—bland, flavorless slop—but those plates were the only things I had to look forward to. I think I slept so much because sleep helped to kill the time between meals.
Yes, there were times I would exercise. Push-ups, sit-ups, and squats mostly. But even those simple exercises began to bore me. Next came the compulsive cleaning. I challenged myself to make those white walls as spotless as possible. In that task I failed, and I have a theory as to why. You see, I started to notice that wherever I cleaned the day before, dirt would reappear in the same spot the following morning. Never excessive dirt, mind you, but tiny specks of brown or black impurities. Seeing those spots drove me insane. Can you imagine cleaning the same wall day after day and the wall never gets cleaner—never becomes perfect? Well, that was me, angry and frustrated and starting to scream at all hours of the day, until it dawned on me: the jailers were doing it on purpose. Somehow, they managed to slip into my room and deliberately spoil my cleanliness. And yes, I mean “cleanliness” because it is next to godliness. I recognize that phrase now that I have said it.
Can I have one of those?[3]
That battle between me and the dirt dragged and dragged. No, I cannot even guess how long. My relationship with time did not extend past the breakfast and dinner plates. And hell, if what the books you gave me are true, then I wouldn’t be surprised if the jailers deliberately gave me breakfast during dinner hours or vice versa.[4] There sure weren’t any clocks on hand. I guess you can say that I was thoroughly cut off from the world.
No, wait. That doesn’t do it justice. I was cut off from everything human—I was just a semi-naked man confined to a small white room with nothing but sleep and his own thoughts for company. And I stopped thinking, too. Eventually, after a certain point, I realized that thinking was an unnecessary luxury, so I quit. I turned myself into an empty and hallow vessel. A jar. Yeah, that’s the word. I was some kind of jar that you can hear your own echo in, except there was nobody, not even myself, interested in screaming. Just rhythmic thumps from my heart and stomach. That was the only noise for so, so long…
Yeah, okay. I can see in your eyes that you want me to talk about him. I really don’t want to, but he was the only interesting part of the confinement. Without him, you’d both die of boredom listening to me ramble about walls and whatnot.
I never learned his name. Know nothing about him. All I remember is that he kind of looked like me but older. Rougher. What little hair he had left clung close to the side of his scalp in small, buzzed strands. His hair? Might have been gray or going gray. As for his face, it was pale and kind of pinched in. He had these beady little black eyes—eyes like a rat or maybe a mole. His eyebrows were these furry rodents that met in the middle. And his breath! It was absolutely foul. Death breath, if you understand. I never wanted the poor guy to talk, but I could never stop him. That stench would fill the room until I gagged, and he would keep babbling even as I dry heaved all across his feet.
He talked about a lot of things. Mostly incoherent babble—assorted clicks and groans and ejaculations that meant and signified nothing. He was crazy, you understand? I figure now, after looking back on it, that the guy was a long-time resident of the place. Maybe he was one of the first dissidents that the old government put away. The book you gave me said that two thousand were arrested and imprisoned the day the old president came to power. A couple hundred are still unaccounted for. Maybe he was one of them…[5] Yeah, maybe he was. But he never yapped about being political. He mostly talked about the Rat Man.
The Rat Man. The Rat Man. The Rat Man. He repeated it all the time. “Rat Man is outside,” he’d whisper while I was trying to sleep. “The Rat Man never sleeps,” and so on and so forth. One time, while I was trying to relieve myself in the toilet, he came up to me and bit me on the arm. Even drew blood. I screamed at him and kicked him, but he never apologized. He said, “The Rat Man shows love,” and then scurried off into a corner.
Ok, so you’re asking about how he got into the room with me? Well, that makes two of us. No, I don’t know how he got in there. He just appeared one morning like a ghost and started rocking back and forth in a corner. It was su…sur…surreal. “Surreal” is the word, right. Ok. Yeah. He just appeared, and that’s how I learned about the Rat Man.
I never saw the Rat Man, but he told me all about him during one of his rare lucid episodes. He said that the Rat Man was a white coat who lived in the halls of the prison. Always just walking slowly up and down the empty halls near the room. His hands were always empty—never held keys, a clipboard, a phone, nothing. Never an indication that the Rat Man did anything but walk. It was like he was the spirit of the place, you know? The possessing ghost of the entire building. A demon or demon-like creature. He was called the Rat Man because he had a long beak for a nose, hairy eyebrows, hairy ears, and a mouth with only two crooked and sharp teeth in the rat. You know, like a rat.[6] Come to think of it, he kind of looked a little bit like the man in my room…
Well, the Rat Man used to harass that guy in the room with me. He said that the Rat Man would sit by his bed at night and just watch him sleep. One night, when the guy woke up unexpectedly, he found the Rat Man naked and leering over him. The empty and black eyes were bad enough, but he said that the worst part of the experience was seeing the Rat Man’s flesh. He was all mottled and piebald skin and patches of hair underneath that white lab coat. A real, honest-to-God monster. He may have been some kind of botched experiment, or maybe an experiment that broke containment and started mimicking the scientists.
They did those, you know. The other guy told me that. He said that the building was full of floors where prisoners were subjected to all kinds of tests. Some prisoners had their rooms flooded for certain hours of the day; some were kept in complete darkness all the time. Other floors had prisoners packed in like sardines, with unwashed bodies writhing on top of each other like ants in colony. Completely disgusting.
How did he know this? He was a subject, of course. He told me that he had been in the building so long that he had experienced every floor, from the Ocean Room to the Hotbox Cells, where sweet-smelling smoke was pumped into the rooms all day long. Really crazy stuff. But the worst was the Rat Man floor because you never knew what the Rat Man would do. Sometimes he would watch you sleep, and sometimes he would suck your blood.
That’s right—the Rat Man drank blood. He told me that the Rat Man loved to suck blood from people’s toes or from their index fingers. He’d use those needle-like teeth to prick the skin and drink little drops of blood for hours. Yes, hours! The sessions would last so long that prisoners would fall asleep in the middle and wake up to find that the Rat Man was still feeding. Can you imagine? I’m glad that I was never put on that floor, and I’m glad I never saw the Rat Man. Hearing about him was bad enough…
After I got my Rat Man education, the crazy man started disappearing during the day. I’d wake up sometimes and he’d be gone, only to return hours later after my midday nap. No, I never saw him come and go. I don’t know how they did it, but near the end he’d disappear for longer stretches at a time. And he always got crazier after he returned. His babbling always got worse until he was no longer speaking at all. Just grunts and farts, and he kept his eyes closed all the time. He refused to open his peepers, even when I tried to physically pry them open.
Oh boy, was he strong! That loon had the strength of ten men. His arms and legs were like steel cords wrapped in barbed wire. It hurt to touch him, and he twitched like electricity. That’s why I gave up trying to study him and just let him be in the corner. We had a kind of tacit agreement at one point—I slept all the time, while he got half of the room to himself. I never crossed the line. I left him alone. But it all ended, of course. You know that. It ended when he started making sense again.
He was gone for a long time. Maybe it was a full month, but it could have been a year. When he returned to the room, he had the posture of a boiled shrimp. All curled up like. Hunched up and over like a half-finished ball. And the smell was worse. Necrotic, I think. The guy was in the process of dying, and he was meant to die in the room with me.
But he didn’t die. I killed him.[7]
***
Yes, I killed him. You never found a body because I consumed him. Ate him all up—bones and all. Why? I dunno. I snapped, right? Went crazy. Too long in that room with the white walls. That’s a reason, but not really the reason.
The real reason is because he started talking about hope. With his ugly face tucked up into his chest, he had the gall to talk about hope. Hope? Can you imagine the torture of that? A shriveled ball of flesh trying to inspire warm feelings in me? How pointless. I hated him for it, but he persisted.
He told me that after his last transfer, when the jailers passed him around between the many floors, he somehow managed to wind up on the first floor. Topside. The ground level where you could see outside. See people, cars, other buildings. Things other than the Rat Man or white walls. He told me that there was a city outside, but that the city was consumed by a great upheaval. Constant thunder and shaking and whizzing sounds all around. He told me that he saw people running away with their hands covering their heads, almost as if something was attacking them from the sky. I know now what he was seeing, but at the time I thought he was filling my head with another Rat Man. You know, more fairy tales. I told him as much, but he kept going. He told me that eventually the jailers forgot about him. He said that he saw some of them leave the building completely after discarding their white coats. They ran away like the others—crying, screaming, completely powerless without their uniforms. Eventually, after seeing the sun rise and set a few times, he realized that the building was unguarded. No more whitecoats to keep us locked in. No more threats. No more Rat Man, I guess.
What did he do? He told me in a quiet, halting voice that he went floor by floor. He went room by room. He waded through mud and extreme heat to set everyone lose. He said he watched as haunted eyes thanked him, and gnarled, twisted hands shook his own. He said that was the reason for his condition. He was exhausted, but he had so much left to do. There were others even deeper in the building than me, and he wanted me to help him. He screamed that the Rat Man was gone, and that pretty soon everything would be good because something was coming to clean the entire city. He spoke about God and tanks, angels and airplanes. None of it registered with me until he reached out and placed a damp palm on my forearm.
“It’s going to be over soon,” he whispered. “We’re going to free.”
That’s all it took. That word “freedom” did something to me. It made me angry—angrier than a spot of dirt on the white walls. I hated that he had said that, and even now I don’t know why. A purely emotionally reaction without a cause or conclusion. Just rage. I let the hate wash over me as I reached out and scratched at the man’s eyes. I throttled his throat and tried to use my teeth to tear out his throat. I never wanted to hear that word “freedom” again, so I chewed and chewed until I reached the voice box. The whole white room became red with blood, and then the red became black. An all-encompassing black—black because of the dark blood covering my eyes, and then the black of a gun barrel. A long black barrel with a hungry mouth interrupted my final dinner. The barrel tapped me on the forehead and said, “Come with me.”
“Come with me,” or rather “Come with us.” I remember looking up with hands caked in blood. I remember smelling copper pennies and feeling my bladder open. I remember looking at the barrel and seeing only it. The world had never made less sense.
“You’re free,” the barrel said at last, and at that point I went to sleep. When I woke up again, I met you for the first time. Now, I’m here and I’m afraid I haven’t been much help.
Have I?
Postscript: Prisoner XUF1-11865 was afterwards quietly transferred to a new mental health facility far away from the central province. He remains there under the direct care of multiple supervisors, one of whom was himself a survivor of the XUF1 facility.
Concerning the validity of this testimony, some of it appears true while other points seem to be either partially true or wholly fabricated. For starters, the XUF1 facility did house thousands of prisoners, including both political dissidents and common criminals. Liberating forces did find elaborate torture rooms, including some that did indeed flood with water. Prisoner XUF1-11865 was himself rescued by elements of the 88th Infantry Regiment on the penultimate day of the Christmas Offensive. It can also be confirmed that prison personnel did flee the facility prior to its liberation. All of this is now a matter of historical record.
The existence of Prisoner XUF1-11865’s cellmate cannot be confirmed. While all the XUF1’s records were destroyed, the 88th Infantry did find corpses throughout the facility. These unfortunate souls were left to die in complete filth. Some were nothing but emaciated skeletons. However, Sergeant R.F. Koehler, who was the first to find Prisoner XUF1-11865, told his unit’s commissar (CSTMC Spinelli) that he found the subject alone in his cell. The evidentiary pictures taken of the cell do not show blood or any signs of a struggle. However, the prisoner’s indoc medical examination did uncover human-like proteins in his digestive system. No satisfactory conclusion has been reached. As for the Rat Man, all involved agree that the figure was the product of multiple fever dreams begat by hunger and multi-year isolation.
The final mystery remains the existence of levels below Prisoner XUF1-11865’s cell. For an entire year post-liberation, the Sanitation Army’s official belief was that the prisoner’s cell represented the absolute bottom of the prison. However, after the 88th were relieved by officers of the New Constabulary, Army Intelligence began receiving frequent reports from constables describing the occurrence of disembodied sounds coming from the ground beneath Prisoner XUF1-11865’s cell. According to these constables, the sounds of scratching or clawing would occur frequently throughout the night, and said noises would usually be accompanied by wails or moans that sounded human-like. The more superstitious constables blamed ghosts, and the issue became so dire that a certain officer (Det.-Lieut. Dyer) began an unauthorized dig. The specific timeframe of this dig is unknown, for Det.-Lieut. Dyer remains Missing in Action. Reports of strange sounds continue to pour in, and it is this article’s hope that the new government takes the reports seriously enough to begin a proper investigation into the possibility of other cells and even living prisoners beneath the cell of Prisoner XUF1-11865.
Signed,
The Office of Doctor Brian Delisle in conjunction with the Association of the Veterans of the 88th (Lightning) Infantry Division, Sanitation Free Army.
[1] Per the reference indexing system of the previous regime, “XUF” indicates that the prisoner was housed in the Experimental Underground Facility Number 1. Said facility was liberated by Sanitation forces on the final day of the offensive. Unlike other regime prisons, which made use of existent facilities (both county jails and federal prisons), XUF1 was located in the sub-basement of a biomedical research laboratory. Said facility was only accessible via a single elevator secured with a biometric lock.
[2] Editor’s note: The DNA Test, which attempted to locate the prisoner’s identity, proved negative, i.e., no positive identity could be found. The prisoner’s PII was most likely discarded by the previous regime during the final days of the offensive.
[3] Editor’s note: Subject requested a cigarette. According to Dr. Delisle, the subject smoked with the proficiency of a longtime enjoyer of tobacco.
[4] Such petty cruelties were normal for the regime.
[5] No evidence exists for this supposition. However, as of this report, 250 Sanitation dissidents are still missing, with most presumed deceased.
[6] It was here that the subject mimicked the face and actions of a rat for an uncomfortably long time.
[7] The initial interview stopped here. The second interview was conducted with two constables present.