Episode 01 – The Cell
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… I can smell the faint stench of decay on her breath, taste notes of it on my lips. Her hair is plastered across her face as my fingers clench. I imagine the soft silkiness of her neck in my hands…
… I can see metal and plastic and leather and glass, all in a thousand different shades of black. My body aches, throbbing in time with the vibrations of finely-tuned machinery…
… I can hear water crashing against the rocks as I watch a white bird spiral into the sun. The water sprays against my face like arterial blood, warm and salty, but I don’t wipe it away…
… I can taste old jellybeans in my mouth, gummy and dusty. I want to spit them out, but I force myself to swallow as a brown dog with one ear sits next to me, hopefully wagging her tail…
… I can feel cold, sticky, gritty stone on the side of my face. An axe splits my skull as my throat suddenly fills up and I start to gag…
I wake up just in time to puke all over the floor, adding to the puddle I’m laying in. Vomit splashes on the concrete floor, and the stench fills my nostrils. My eyes tear up, and for a moment my world is nothing but the smell of puke, the sound of my own gagging cough and the feel of someone trying to cut my skull in half.
A lifetime passes, and I can breathe again. I start to wipe away the tears and the vomit with my hand, but even moving my arm brings a swing of the axe and a wave of nausea. A plastic loop slaps into my cheek, dangling loosely from my wrist. I blink my eyes open to focus on it. It’s one of those hospital bracelets with a little piece of paper in it, neatly filing patients into a system of bruised, bleeding and broken victims. Only I’m not last name, first name, middle initial, not a room number or a case number or any number at all. Two letters in Times New Roman stare up at me — VI. Out of curiosity I spin the bracelet around my wrist, but the only other thing on it is one of those one-way, one-time-use fasteners, a white ring of mockery next to a jagged cut where the excess plastic was snipped off.
I rub my face against the sleeve of my shirt, but I don’t have a sleeve. Or a shirt, for that matter. Looking down, I’m wearing one of those thin backwards gowns that tie closed behind you but never quite cover you in the back, so you feel like you’re always going to fall out of it. Still, at least it matches the bracelet’s story; I’m in some kind of hospital.
The walls don’t fit into the story, though. They’re covered in thick rectangles of foam, each one sheathed in ivory cloth and quilted with thick gray stitches. It looks like someone nailed a couple dozen used motel mattresses to the walls. It’s a shame they didn’t have any left for the canvas cot sitting in the corner next to the metal toilet. I notice that my pool of vomit isn’t anywhere near the toilet, and feel vaguely annoyed about that.
If this is a hospital, I’m guessing it doesn’t get any awards for customer care.
The axe takes another swing, and my brain is about to explode out of my ears. My eyes water up again as I press my hands to my skull, trying to keep it from splitting apart. Somewhere in the distance I can hear one of the mattresses open up, and I can barely make out a man coming in before it closes again. He’s wearing a white shirt and black slacks and he’s saying something, but all I can hear is my skull creaking from the pressure.
I just want it to end. I want to curl up on the floor and beg for release. I want to scream that I’ll do anything to make it stop. I want to get the fuck away from this concrete box covered in mattresses.
And suddenly, I know that this unknown jailer with his mysterious mumbling is the one that’s keeping me here. I don’t know why, but I understand that everything he does is designed to make me stay in this room, in the same way that I understand that my own puke is still dripping off my face. This man, this thing in business-casual dress is keeping me caged.
I close my eyes, and I want him to hurt. I want him to scream and bleed and fall to pieces so I can walk over his broken body and reclaim my life. I can see myself taking the axe out of my head and chopping at his throat; once, twice, until his head flips back like a candy dispenser. In my mind I feel my arm pumping as I slash open his stomach, his chest, his sides. Every time I cut him, more of the pain bleeds out of me, and my mind becomes a little clearer. Every slash makes me feel more human, more powerful, more everything.
I hear something fall to the ground with a wet thud, and I realize that it’s not in my head.
I open my eyes. Blood quickly spreads all over the corpse’s white shirt and black slacks. His neck is nearly severed, and his chest is a mess of flesh and nylon scraps. I look at the floor, at my hands, but there’s no axe anywhere to be seen, no gore-covered blade to explain how my captor is lying in bloody chunks at my feet. There’s no way I could have done this, but I know, I know that I’m responsible. He’s dead and I’m not, and it’s because of me.
I look at the wall where he came from, and I’m pissed. The fucker couldn’t even keep the door open or leave it unlocked before he died. I check the bloody mess of my former captor, and manage to fish out a plastic card attached to a chain. I try to ignore the sticky warmth covering my hands as I yank hard on the flimsy chain, breaking it. A quick look at the door, and I find a discreet slot and a tiny red light hidden behind a quilted flap. I have to keep smearing the blood off the card and swiping it before I can see the light change from red to green. The mattress swings open, less than an inch.
What the hell is going on? What kind of person can cut someone into pieces in his dreams? How can I casually search a pile of gore that used to be a man and be more irritated at the blood on my hands than the loss of a human life?
The bracelet slips down my arm, and I see the letters VI looking up at me through a smear of blood. I realize that I don’t know what kind of person I am, and I don’t know why I can do the things I just did. I don’t even know what these letters represent.
Do the letters VI stand for my initials?
Is it the roman numeral for six?
Or am I not the person they think I am?
The choice is yours.
What do the letters VI mean?
- It's the roman numeral for six. (52%, 24 Votes)
- I'm not the person they think I am. (39%, 18 Votes)
- They stand for my initials. (9%, 4 Votes)
Total Voters: 46
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August 5th, 2009 at 7:35 am
[...] Good. Goooood. Now you’ll want to ping Eddy Webb’s The Whitechapel Project. Episode 1, The Cell, is up. You can read it, or, by the magical voodoo wonders of technology, you can listen to it. I [...]
August 5th, 2009 at 8:48 am
“I’m not the person they think I am,” is, for me, the most curious option, the one with the greatest potential for inbuilt story and conflict.
August 5th, 2009 at 9:20 am
Interesting. I hadn’t considered that when I put the option in, but that’s very true!
August 5th, 2009 at 9:37 am
While Chuck makes a strong point, I’m a sucker for the classics: It’s the Roman numeral six to this cat right here.
Does that mean at least five more “subjects” are out there?
Could be, rabbit, could be.
August 5th, 2009 at 10:39 am
To be honest, part of why I avoided “VI” as Roman numeral — I’m so used to “VII” being a part of Requiem’s canon that I wanted to juke left. :D
– c.
August 5th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
Bleh, Roman numerals are beaten to death in fiction, exacerbated by V for Vendetta.
“I’m not the person they think I am” is oh so much tastier. Imagine the intrigue as their carefully laid plans fall apart – they planned for the wrong man!
August 5th, 2009 at 2:51 pm
“They stand for my initials.” seems to mundane and logical for the tag. Doesn’t feel like an interesting direction to me, to obvious maybe. As a viewer I don’t think voting for this option would push the plot forward in a meaningful way.
“I’m not the person they think I am” seems to vague and open. If I’m going to vote I want to feel like I’m voting for something, this phrase doesn’t feel like I’m lending the story any direction. There is already a lot to the story that reflects this statement so I want to vote for something different.
“It’s the roman numeral for six.” was honestly my first thought when he read the tag. Of all the options it seems to be the one that gives me the most say over the direction of the plot and still feeling like my vote is important. Its not something as mundane as a name and it must have some significance.
All of the options seem rather directionless right now but I suppose we won’t really see what our votes do until the rest of the story is reveled.
So far, so good.
August 5th, 2009 at 3:06 pm
That’s a very interesting and insightful breakdown, Rob. Thanks for that!
On feeling like you’re voting for something, I do want to point out something from the FAQ (http://whitechapelproject.com/?page_id=5):
“That isn’t to say that votes will always be obviously meaningful – sometimes a fairly trivial choice will have larger repercussions, either through a string of associated elements in my mind as I write, or as part of the plot at some point in the future.”
I do have very different story options for all three choices, but I realize that it doesn’t appear that way from the choice alone. In a way, it’s an homage to the old “Choose Your Own Adventure” stories from the 80s, which sometimes had very mundane choices that led in the most bizarre of directions. I’m trying to make my choices a little more fair than that on the backend, but sometimes the choices will seem arbitrary at face value. I just wanted to mention that it’s intentional, and not an attempt to put out bullshit choices.
All that being said, I’m hoping to do more obvious choices than sneaky choices overall. :)
August 5th, 2009 at 3:50 pm
Ah, but if he is 6… leaves great options for 5 other characters. Who are they? Why are they in here too?
August 8th, 2009 at 8:18 pm
[...] 40 votes already on episode one! Kick ass! Share this post with your [...]
August 10th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
I agree with Satyr69. A number could designate a person or an iteration; the narrator could even be an allegory tortured by a numerologist for knowledge, exploitation and power.
August 13th, 2009 at 6:11 pm
Well done. Very impressed and yes, the last option is the one I would choose, without a doubt.
August 18th, 2009 at 9:02 pm
[...] Back to episode one Share this post with your friends: [...]
August 26th, 2009 at 12:25 am
[...] Previously on Whitechapel A hospital patient wakes up in a padded room with a massive headache. The only clue he has to his identity is a plastic bracelet with the letters “VI” printed on it. As he tries to figure out who he is and what’s happened to him, a man dressed in business casual clothing steps into the cell. The patient realizes that the well-dressed man is his captor and imagines slashing at him, only to find the jailer in a bloody mess at his feet. The patient steals a card key from the corpse and opens the cell door, all the time trying to understand this ability to kill with his mind. [...]