Dimiter

Dimiter

Ninety three million miles from the sun, in the damp of a windowless concrete room in a maze of other rooms and cells and passageways where grace and hope had never touched, the Interrogator sat behind a tight wooden table with a mind gone blank as the notepad before him. The Prisoner radiated mystery. After seven days of torture he had yet to utter a word. Silent, his head bowed down, hands manacled, he stood beneath the blinding grip of the spotlight in the middle of the room like a barrier to comfort.

‘”Who are you?”

The Interrogator’s voice was straw. All the questions had been asked. None had been answered. Now they all had worn away to this single probe as if locked within the Prisoner’s name were his nature.

“Who are you?”

Drained, the Interrogator waited, squinting at the sweat‑blurred lines on the pad. In the hush of the chamber he could hear his own breathing and the desultory faint sharp clicks of his pen point tapping at the table’s stained dark oak. For a moment his ears twitched up minutely, straining toward a sound heard dimly through the walls: the scuffing of shoes, a body being dragged. He could not tell if the sounds were real or imagined. Here even the dust in the air was heard shrieking. Another odd sound intruded. What was it? The Interrogator rested his pen on the table and lifted a haunted gaze to the the Prisoner, silent and motionless yet so vivid that he seemed a disturbance embedded in time. Drops of blood were falling softly to the mottled stone floor from the ends of his fingers, now one, now another, where the nails had been wrenched from their sockets.

The Interrogator shifted his weight uneasily.

He looked down at the quiet pen.

“Who are you?”

The silence held its breath.

The Interrogator’s thumb probed under his spectacles, dislodging them a little as he rubbed at the corner of a watery eye. He carefully removed them and polished each small, round gold‑rimmed lens with a frayed and faded white cotton handkerchief that faintly smelled of naphtha. Finished, he fitted the glasses back on with slender hands the color of parchment, then nodded a command to a burly torturer.

“Go ahead,” he quietly ordered.

DIMITER by William Peter Blatty, copyright © 2010 by the author and reprinted by permission of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC