Here's an excerpt of the prison scene:

[Here's an excerpt of the prison scene, sorry in advance if it's a little long:](#s "When I came back to the world, I wished I hadn’t. The smell was awful. Piss and vomit and shit and fear. The stench of bodies that had forgotten what clean water was, much less soap. To draw breath was to gag. I couldn’t see anything. The darkness was absolute. I felt rough straw and filth-slick stone under my cheek, heard distant screams echoing along stone corridors. Somewhere not far away a hoarse, gravelly voice kept moaning ‘Mother? Mother?’ in such a monotonous way that I could hear the madness behind it.

I groaned and began the slow, torturous process of levering myself up off the floor. Everything hurt. When I put my hand out to work myself into a sitting position, I planted it squarely into a pile of cold, runny feces.

“Welcome to Havelock Prison,” I whispered to myself. “Mind the turds.”

~ ~ ~

In the darkness it was impossible to gauge the passing of time. My cell was three paces by four, and the ceiling higher than I could reach with outstretched arms. The door was oak banded in iron, and had been gouged futilely by unknown numbers of former occupants. All the stonework was tight; there were no chinks that I could find by fingertip, though someone at some time had made a concerted if futile effort to loosen a stone in the back right corner. The stones around it were gouged and rough. A thin layer of fouled, louse-ridden straw lined the floor. I kicked it all into a corner. After a time, I stopped noticing the stench, and started noticing the lice. All my knives were gone, of course. In the darkness I felt carefully in my boot, and came up with a single strand of Bosch’s hair. I didn’t see how it would do me any good now, but I wound it carefully around the back of a button on my shirt, just in case. The wound on my shoulder ached abominably. Nothing I could do about that, or the fact that it would probably become infected in such a foul environment. Not that it mattered, really; if they had me this far down in the bowels of Havelock, I probably wasn't coming back up for anything other than a dance with the noose.

~ ~ ~

Mother-man, as I came to think of him, was never truly quiet. Even in his sleep he would moan for her. I assume he was sleeping. And when he woke, he’d scream “Mother! I’m blind! Moooother!” On and on until they came to beat him quiet. Then, at most a few hours later, he’d start again with that monotonous call for maternal comfort.

Eventually I couldn’t stand it anymore. I screamed at him, “Your whore of a mother is dead, shit brain. Shut it!” It only made him go on louder. Which made me invent ever more gruesome ends for her. Run over by a carriage. Gored by bulls, made into meat pies. Drowned in a cesspit. Gnawed to death by rats, face first. Dead of syphilis. It only made him carry on the louder, which made the guards come. They beat us both.

I found myself hoping they’d come to hang either him or me soon. I started not to care which. ")