I have been falsely imprisoned and have lost my good sock

A psychological horror short story.

I have been falsely imprisoned and have lost my good sock. I’m not sure which is worse. The sock seems more immediate.

They don’t let me wear shoes; it’s a permanent state of sleepy Sunday mornings. That makes comfortable socks important, particularly when the floor is always cold but the air is stifling. A contradiction, which sums this place up perfectly.

My missing sock is Barbie pink like the tables in the cafeteria. It’s not my colour; I stole them off a former roommate. She’s gone but that’s not my doing. People like to blame me for a lot of things but they can’t pin that one on me. She did it to herself.

I wiggle my bare foot and stare at the toes. I used to paint them black and green for Halloween, gold and silver for Christmas. Never my hands, just the feet; my fingernails are too small and bitten. Painting my toenails was my little secret to myself.

Now my foot looks ugly and bare, the big toe fat, the nails gnarly. I place my bare foot on the floor and, with great reluctance, pull off my other sock and lay both feet on the hard linoleum. The bed creaks beneath me. I hear something and look up, but it’s only a pipe. It sounds like someone breathing.

It’s been six weeks since my roommate Rosanna left. I started wearing her socks three weeks ago and they slipped on so easily, like they’d always been mine.

But now someone’s repaid the favour and I don’t like it.

I pad out of the room and into the empty corridor. They let you move around the place freely – supposedly, to encourage independence. My personal theory is that they put trackers under your skin when you arrive, so they always know your whereabouts. It’s impossible to prove the truth. I don’t remember much about my arrival, and it’s best to not to dredge up the past.

Anyhow, it doesn’t really matter where you go or who knows about it, because you can never find the exit. Believe me, I have looked. It’s as if the staff appear and reappear out of thin air, underpaid time travellers hopping from one plane of existence to the next. I can’t see any of them now, but there will be some milling around, eyes glazed over with eternal boredom. Despite what’s been said about people like me, we are tedious in reality.

I look both ways up the corridor, just in case, and slip through the semi darkness into the communal area. There’s several but this is the one I like to use, though it’s the coldest and my feet feel like ice. Stale air wafts over me and I am once again convinced that they pump it in to keep us docile, or at least to give us all a constant slight headache.

I hear footsteps and freeze, hands instinctively balling into fists, but it’s only Debbie. She rubs her sleepy eyes and asks me if I want to watch anything. I tell her no and she plugs herself into the unit, piling her eyeballs with whatever rubbish might bore her into going back to sleep again. Being an insomniac is painful, I know that better than anyone, but the trick is to not fall prey to the hope that if you simply follow the right magic formula, you will learn to sleep like a normal human being. Debbie, slouched on the sofa, face tilted towards the ceiling as the glasses mask her eyes, hasn’t given up yet. That saddens me, which apparently does not prove that I am not what they say I am.

‘See you Debs,’ I say, though she cannot hear a word. Then I slink around the living room looking for something I could use to locate my missing sock.

There’s a gap in the sofa that they haven’t fixed, and that might possess an opportunity. I sit down, pretending to be exhausted, and my hand drifts behind my back to the hole in the fabric I know is there. Any passing staff member would see a tired woman trying to take a nap, but I am feverishly awake, hunting for a loose spring. My hand finds something far sharper and it takes all my willpower not to wince. Dropping my head to my chest, I seek out the shape of the metal, and my fingers encloses round the handle of a knife.

I prise the blade out and drop it down my sleeve. Even in my wildest dreams, I could not have hoped to find something so perfect.

It must be Rosanna’s. How the hell she smuggled it in in the first place, I have no idea. She did say she needed protection, you couldn’t trust anyone. After she went, I’d assumed they’d taken the thing away but someone must have hidden it out here.

Or they left the knife there on purpose.

Suddenly I can’t pretend to be dozing. Chill sweat soaks my back and the thin, shiny fabric of my plastic pyjamas. I have never been paranoid, not like some people in here, but I feel the sensation freezing my muscles and choking my throat. By stealing this knife, some trap has already been set in motion and it’s too late to escape. I could put the knife back, pretend it never happened, but they will still know and that could be enough to scupper my appeal and land me here forever.

No. Best to take the knife, put it away and never use it. That in itself would be some sort of proof, wouldn’t it? To have temptation yet never fall? It’s an argument that makes sense in my sleepless state, so I keep the metal close to my skin. It feels good to have it there. Exciting, despite the danger.

Debbie stirs. ‘Where’s your socks gone?’ she mumbles without removing her goggles, half drowsy, though still not sleeping.

‘Someone took one.’

Debbie removes the goggles to look at me. Red marks trace around her forehead and eye sockets. She’s feigning disinterest but she’s calculating something. Her bloodshot eyes focus on me.

‘Who?’ she asks.

‘I don’t know yet. But I will find out.’

Debbie shrugs and puts the glasses back on again. I fight the urge to rip them from her face. Best to let people make their own mistakes.

I leave the communal room quietly, the knife slipping down my sleeve. I feel certain that any moment, staff will leap from the shadows and push me to the floor. But no one comes. It’s as if they want to see what I’ll do. I’m a trapped spider and they’d like to see me crawl around before the boot comes down.

I slip into another room; it takes me a minute to realise it’s Debbie’s. You can tell by the way she’s attempted to personalise the impersonal, sticking pages from ancient magazines to the wall with some sort of gum. She has accepted her imprisonment as permanent and that makes me sadder than ever. I sit on her bed, which somehow doesn’t feel like a violation, and a sudden urge to lie down consumes me. I fight it off.

‘You shouldn’t be here.’

Debbie’s blocking the doorway. For an ordinary sized woman, she seems impossibly large. ‘You shouldn’t enter other people’s rooms without asking,’ she says, her shadow expanding as she approaches.

‘I’m sorry,’ I say, though I’m not sorry at all. My eyes drift to the little grey cabinet against the wall. One of the drawers isn’t fully closed, as if there’s too much stuff in there to shut it. She sees me looking at it and her lip curls.

‘Out,’ she hisses, and there’s violence in the way she annunciates the T. She stands between me and the chest of drawers, as if admitting her guilt and defying me to do something about it.

The knife knocks against my arm inside my sleeve, reminding me of its presence.

This has gone beyond reclaiming my stolen item. There’s something in there, something important. I have to know.

‘I’m going now,’ I tell her, and to show I mean it, I get up, slowly this time, smiling as wide as my face can manage. My arms remain behind my back, and the knife slips down towards my hand. It’s a strange posture but if she suspects anything, she doesn’t say it.

‘Out,’ she says again, though this time she’s more uncertain. My face hurts from smiling. The knife is now fully gripped in my right hand, readying itself.

We look at each other. Then, before I can attack, Debbie kicks me in the stomach, knocking me backwards. I stagger, then lunge forwards, desperately swinging the knife, but she bats my hand away with ease. She’s used to fighting and I’m not; when I try to swing again, she dodges and lands another blow, this time to my side. She’s got a fevered, frightened look on her face when she hits me, like she’s scared of her own power.

I try to kick her in the crotch but miss, the knife hanging uselessly at my side. In response, Debbie kicks me in the stomach with full force, winding me. I collapse on the floor, utterly spent. We don’t make much noise when we’re fighting but I’m surprised no one heard the thump when I fell. She towers over me, and I shrink back, afraid she might pull out a knife twice the size. Instead, she crouches down to my level.

‘If you wanted to look in here, you only had to ask me,’ she says, twirling a strand of her sweat slicked hair. Her cheeks are flushed, as I suppose mine must be too. She pauses, head cocked slightly. If I was very quick, I could try and stab her in the neck, but I’m too bruised and battered, and what would be the point? It wouldn’t change what’s about to happen.

Debbie crunches another tip of a hair strand between her fingers. ‘I can show you what’s in there, if you want.’

Suddenly I don’t want to know. I want to be in bed, pretending to sleep. The reality of what I’ve done hits me and I reel from it. I came in here with a knife. If Debbie ever tells…

‘Yes please,’ I say, bowing my head a little in submission. If I can play her games, maybe she’ll let me go and we can pretend this didn’t happen.

Debbie yanks the drawer open. It’s full of Barbie pink socks, dozens and dozens of them. They’re all bundled up into little balls, except for one, which lies loose on top. Debbie picks it up.

‘I hate odd socks,’ she says. ‘Don’t you?’

I nod slowly, staring at the bright pink sock. It flops in her hand like a dead worm.

‘Rosanna always used to borrow my things,’ she says. ‘Without asking. But I got them back, in the end.’

The lightbulb above us flickers. I remember seeing Rosanna’s body in the communal bathroom, how they said it was an accident, that she’d slipped and bashed her head open. I remember not believing them. But then they dragged me away and interrogated me for hours, until my own memories became my words and the cause of death was written down and that made it real.

Debbie’s watching me. I grip the knife tighter. I must pretend now. I have to.

‘I found a spare sock in my room,’ I say aloud, and it’s surprising how ordinary my voice sounds. ‘You can have it, if you want.’

A smile spreads slowly over Debbie’s small lips, a smile without teeth, and her face remains still. Only the bloodshot eyes show animation.

‘I think I will,’ she says, and she grabs my throat with one hand, the other bending back my fingers till I drop the knife. I struggle, but she’s too strong. I’m going to die now, I realise, and the thought is too big to be real. The world swims. I see pink and suddenly wish I had the breath to laugh.

If anything proves I’m not what they say I am, it’s this. I went into a woman’s bedroom with a knife, yet I am the one who’s going to end up dying. It’s pathetic, when you think about it. But I’ve always been weak. That’s why I pretended not to care about anything, why I ended up here, but to tell you the truth, I’m no tough cookie. I’m a fragile soul.

The pressure vanishes. I must be slipping into the darkness that they call death. Strange, how it feels like living.

#

My feet feel heavy. There’s something touching my cheeks; wind. I remember wind. I look down and see brown leather boots. They feel leaden and constrictive. I shuffle experimentally, testing one heel and then the other.

I’m lucky to be here. The staff managed to pull Debbie off me in the nick of time. I thought they were going to punish me but they seemed anxious rather than angry. I was given a cup of cheap coffee and told the chief executive wished to see me, in person. I have to say, he was very polite. He couldn’t do enough for me. In fact, he seemed so concerned about my wellbeing that when he mentioned not speaking to my lawyer about Rosanna and Debbie, I willingly obliged. At a price, of course. My appeal was granted this morning.

In my right hand, I hold the handle of a wheelie suitcase that’s light as air; my worldly possessions could be picked up by a child with one finger. It contains a few clothes, a little money and the necessary paperwork to prove that I am not a menace to society. To some, it might seem pitiful. But I was never very materialistic.

A car rushes past and the noise hits me smack in the face. Part of me wants to turn round and run back to where I came from. Instead, I reach into the pocket of my shiny new red jacket and find the knife I’d managed to steal. It’s important to be prepared for every eventuality. For all I know, the world is full of Debbies, and Rosannas are few and far between.

Poor Debbie. She screamed when they carted her sock collection away, bawling like a little baby. She’ll never leave now.

I lean down towards my feet and touch my second prize, the one I didn’t have to take. They gave my odd sock back to me as a parting gift. It feels warm and comfortable. Like an old friend.