Disclaimer:  I do not own any of these characters and am just playing around with them.

Voices

The darkness was familiar to him.  It had consumed him for most of his life.  In his room on SL-27 he’d sat in the dark and thought of ways to escape.  He’d spent hours trying to claw his way out through the door until deep grooves were worn into the wood and his fingertips were torn and bloody.

The dark had never been his friend but it was somehow a part of him.  He still hated it all the same.

He’d first been plunged into the depths of SL-27 after his friendship with Jarod had been discovered.  He was carried away from his room kicking and screaming.  He fought the men all the way to his new ‘home’ where he would remain until it was destroyed in the fire.

“Do you know who you are?”  Jarod had asked him.  He hadn’t known the answer to the boy’s question.  As time passed, what little feeling of identity he’d retained from keeping the flying cross he’d been given had faded once he’d lost it.

Soon he was only Kyle, and he decided who lived or died.

There were others on SL-27.  He rarely saw them.  Mostly their whispers carried in the still night air, as the sweepers dared not tread on this level.  Kyle remembered one sweeper saying once it was eerie and felt like it was haunted.

Kyle wasn’t supposed to hear that comment, but it was true.  SL-27 was haunted by the boys who were kept in isolation in the darkness.  Much as he was now.

He mostly remembered the voice in the air vent.  The one that belonged to Angelo.  Angelo would visit him and the others.  The others he had met were Timmy, Dannie and Alex.

He hadn’t known Timmy for long.  Timmy had vanished and had been replaced by Angelo.  Much as Dannie had Einnad, only unlike them, no trace of Timmy was left behind.

What remained was Angelo who could feel what he felt although he couldn’t express himself as well as the others.  But Kyle could hide nothing from Angelo.  Not even Annie.  When Annie had died it was Angelo who had told him.  Much like he would tell Kyle about Harriet Tashman years later.

He’d been in the dark, although not alone in the dark.  The voices had always been there and they remained still.  They filled his ears with whispers.  They told him what to become next.  They told him what he didn’t see or hear with his eyes and ears alone.

He decided he no longer wished to be a whisper in the darkness of this place or any other.

To Be Continued…

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