Terror of Constantinople by Richard Blake

whispered with the Tall Man, another darted a hand inside my robe. He squeezed hard on a nipple, all the time looking up at me with the bright, panting smile of a mad dog.
        ‘Tomorrow!’ he whispered triumphantly – ‘And tomorrow and tomorrow, and all for us!’
        I cut him short with a smart head-butt to the face. ‘Fuck you!’ I snarled. The others danced back out of my reach.
        I was in the Ministry where I’d earlier visited Theophanes. No – I was in the basement that ran far beneath the Ministry. Once unloaded from the carriage, we had been dragged in through a small side entrance, and then taken down worn steps that had twisted round and round and round on their course into a subterranean world of endless corridors lined every few yards with iron doors.
        At first, all down there had seemed quiet. As my ears began to adjust, though, I could hear a chorus of low, despairing moans. They came from behind the closed doors of the cells. They came from all directions. They came from as far as the ears could reach, and from further than the eyes could see in the dim glow of the lamps hung at every junction in that labyrinth of horror.
        As the one I’d butted lay grovelling on the floor, the Tall Man pushed his own face close to mine. ‘Tomorrow, indeed, my fine young barbarian,’ he crooned, ‘but not for these trash. You belong to me.’
        He stood back and took a deep breath to savour the endless despair of our surroundings before continuing in a tone of eager intensity: ‘I will show you how pain is very like pleasure. It too has its rituals and instruments. It too has its orgasms. It too can be prolonged by those who have studied the responses of the body.’
        ‘Fuck you!’ I snarled again, though I’d not felt inclined to try anything physical with this living image of Satan. He was on his home territory, and had seemed to grow taller and more substantial with every breath of that foul air.
        ‘We shall see how long your courage holds up under my personal ministrations,’ he said, turning to rap a few orders to his minions. ‘You will give me the answers to my questions, and much else before the end.’
        Still cuffed, we were pushed into separate cells spaced far apart. I don’t know how long I sat in darkness on that damp, stinking floor once the door had swung shut on me.
        Few definite sounds now reached me through those stone walls and the heavy door. But I felt aware of continual movement outside, and perhaps the occasional low moan.
        ‘I’m a guest of the Emperor,’ I shouted in the darkness. ‘I demand immediate release.’
        No answer. Instead, the sound of my voice within the invisible walls of that blackness chilled me more than the dank air. The wine fumes that had so far buoyed me up were now dispersing like a morning fog, and I was beginning to realise the full horror of my situation.
        Once I did hear voices. Though muffled by the close-fitting iron door, they’d come from just outside my cell.
        ‘So is this one Justinus?’ one had asked.
        ‘Nah!’ another had replied. ‘That’s the one back there. We’ll see what we can get out of him come the morning. I don’t think, though, there’s much left for us to do. He’s all smashed up now.’
        ‘Shame,’ had come the answer. ‘I suppose it is the right Justinus this time. I said the other one was telling us the truth.’
        The voices had drifted away, leaving me in a silence broken only by a steady dripping of water somewhere in the dark.
        I’ve seen people go mad in prisons. Even a short stay is unnerving. The blackness and the silence are bad enough. Far worse is the uncertainty of how long the stay there will be. Will you be taken out and tortured or killed? Or will you just be left there to rot to death?
        I kept my nerve in that cell by refusing to think about what might happen next, and by instead reciting in my