Tag Archives: Lovecraftian short stories

Blackpool Bay, General Fiction, Horror & Dark Fiction

The Benjamin Tree

“Oh, the tree comes with the apartment,” the Estate Agent mentioned waving at it as they moved through the lounge area, “The previous owner considers it part of 307’s furnishings.”

The tree was small–head-height–and had a trunk that was made up of what looked like thick, gray, twirling vines that held a clump of large, bright-green, oblong leaves. It sat in a knee-high pot decorated with intricate carvings and strange oriental-looking letters cut finely into it.

“It’s called a Benjamin Tree,” he said, “It’s the official tree of Bangkok, actually.”

“Oh,” the Estate Agent paused in her sales pitch, “I thought it was a Weeping Fig?”

“Yes,” he nodded before moving on with her, “That’s another name for it. I prefer the former name. Say, why is the previous owner selling here? Ocean View seems so quaint.”

“Oh, he used to work at the docks. Import-export or something, I believe. He won the lottery last week so he is returning to his family in New York,” the Estate Agent said, “It’s a pity the money doesn’t ever stay in Blackpool Bay, really. We could use it here. Why are you moving all the way out here?”

The furnished apartment was not massive. They had walked through most of it and were standing back in the lounge by now. It had a window that overlooked the gray ocean with the dingy docks below. He could see a twitchy-looking man loading what looked like diving gear into a small fishing boat and he watched intently for a moment wondering what this man was doing.

“I’m a writer,” he muttered back and then turned and faced the Estate Agent, “I’m a writer and I need a place to disappear to and write. This one looks perfect. The Benajim Tree can stay.”

***

A year and a bit later, he was sipping his morning coffee and staring out of the lounge window. The local morning newspaper lay on his lap. The ocean in Blackpool Bay never changed; it was always gray and stormy with dark, distrusting waters under a brooding near-storm sky. It all just reflected this town’s forgotten place and constantly surprising secrets.

They had even tried to build a highway through the mountains to connect Blackpool Bay to civilization, but a worker had died under questionable circumstances and the funders had pulled out.

The writing had gone brilliantly and his new book had only just been published. He remained here, though, as he liked the solitude of the place. Although he considered himself a city person, something about Blackpool Bay made it hard to leave.

Perhaps born out curiosity or a little boredom, he had begun researching the previous owner. Talking to the neighbors he had found a full name and the Internet had provided the rest: born in New York, Nathan Midlane had moved out to Blackpool Bay for work and then won the lottery and moved back.

It was a simple story, but the newspaper in his lap told a darker ending than he would have expected. He would never have guessed that Nathan Midlane’s story was a tragedy but the newspaper loudly declared it: “Blackpool Bay Man Wins Lottery & Dies“.

It had happened a week ago but only been reported here this morning. Time moved differently out here in Blackpool Bay. The line in the story that surprised him was the opening line: “Another former-resident in Apartment 307, Ocean View, has met a tragic end…”

He found himself looking at the Benjamin Tree deep in thought. The spidery oriental writing on its pot looked faintly sinister. He wondered when Nathan Midlane had acquired the thing? He wondered from whom he had done so? He wondered what the strange language or symbols on its pot meant?

Just then his phone rang. He snapped out of it and finished his coffee. It was now cold but he gulped it down, stood up and walked across to his phone.

“Hello?” he answered, not looking at who was calling.

“How’s the writing?” his Agent’s familiar voice crackled on the other side of the line. It sounded really far away. The reception was not great out here in Blackpool Bay and it just added to this place’s isolation. Sometimes the phones all just went dead and no one knew why.

“Uh, it’s fine, I suppose,” he mumbled, unsure how to respond, “What else is up?”

“That’s not why I am calling,” his Agent started talking, the sheer excitement audible in his faint, crackling voice, “Some major blogger read your book. She wrote about it and tweeted. A bunch more picked up on this and did the same. It’s trending. Your book is trending. They love it. They all love it! Your book is now front shelf and ranked in top ten on Amazon. Go check it out! Rolling Stones want an interview and the BBC has asked for a quote…”

***

He put down the phone and leaned back on the couch in Apartment 307, Ocean View. Even the name had started sounding ominous to him. The twisted trunk of the Benjamin Tree in its sinister pot cover with spidery runes looked back at him. The ocean remained gray under the foreboding sky.

All the rest was silence. It was so quiet out here. It was like man and the entirety of his little civilization was just a brief flicker of light in a cosmic darkness that reached across time and space in crushing size and scope and, far out here, Blackpool Bay was surrounded by endless amounts of it…

While his book continued to reach highs out there in the world, he felt a million miles away from it. Perhaps he was a million miles away living out here in eerie Blackpool Bay.

But none of this consumed his thoughts these days. He had been investigating Apartment 307, Ocean View. He had been digging for the truth and it was far darker than he had ever imagined.

He had reached out to the journalist at the local paper. The journalist had sent him a number of other clippings going back some years.

A couple year ago, before Nathan Midlane had moved into Apartment 307, the previous owners–a certain, Miley and Marc Cohen–had died shortly after moving into a fancy house in Main Road here. Speaking to some locals down at the pub, the best he could piece together was that the Cohens had made a large amount of money from investments. Unfortunately, a strange fire in their new house in Main Road had seen them burnt to death. Strangely, most of the house had escaped unscathed.

Before the Cohen’s, though, a lesser known, Catherine McDougle, had lived a quiet, spinster life here for many decades. Little seemed to be known about her, except that she had died shortly after moving to live with family in Washington. She was old and the coroner had ruled her death natural, or so the article had claimed.

Upon her death, though, to the Blackpool Bay residents’ surprise, McDougle’s fortune had been donated to the Masonic Museum in London. It had been the largest public donation ever on record. The Museum had gone on record thanking her for it. Everyone was flabbergasted at the fortune McDougle had quietly amassed while living in the modest Apartment 307, Ocean View.

He could not find any older records of any earlier owners of Apartment 307, Ocean View. But what he did find in one of the earliest articles of McDougle was quite disturbing: “We will all fondly remember McDougle. My personal memory will always be her sitting in her favorite seat next to her special Weeping Fig tree and recounting her days in the Society abroad where she collected many such wonders…”

He had sat upright when he had read that. He found himself looking more and more at the inconspicuous Benjamin Tree and its sinister pot that quietly stood in the corner of his modest lounge.

***

“So you can interpret it then?” he asked, trying to sound calm, but instead a near-feverish eagerness came through in his voice, “Can you understand it then?”

An old, scholarly Chinese man was in Apartment 307, Ocean View, and looking at the Benjamin Tree. More specifically, the man was bending down and attempting to read the spidery runes cut finely into its pot.

“The writing is a version of Archaic Mandarin from the First or Second Imperial Dynasty. Yes, probably from the Han Dynasty. It is strangely phrased with ambiguity,” the scholar paused, chuckling to himself, “It is actually quite witty if I am correct.”

With that, the scholar stood up and turned to him. He felt his heart pounding and his palms sweaty. Within his clenched fists at his side, he dug his nails into his palms. It was all he could do to stay calm. Outside the gray, foreboding sky and its ominous clouds seemed to be holding their breath as they peered inside the gloomy Apartment 307.

“Could–could you please,” he took a deep breath and tried to continue calmly, “please tell me what you read?”

The scholar smiled and motioned at the pot and its twisted, green Benjamin Tree.

“Old Chinese folktales talk of a Money Tree,” the scholar began slowly, picking up the pace as he spoke, the tree and its pot just sat there listening, “Literally, a tree on which money grows. A woodcutter once tricked a village into cutting down a tree that he wanted. He did this by sticking money on it. But, once the tree had been cut down and taken back to the village, it had regrown, twisting its hacked stem back and pushing out its sickly green leaves. The woodcutter had been angry and had tried to cut down the tree but the villages–still believing the tree to magical–attacked and killed the woodcutter. The village was prosperous for years thereafter, until a stranger had stolen it in the night. Shortly after then, a plague had wiped out all the villagers. It is said that this Money Tree brought luck to those that had it and misfortune to those that lost it.”

The scholar finished his tale with a smile, seeming quite satisfied with himself.

“Yes,” he said abruptly, feeling anger and frustration rising inside himself, “But what does the writing say?”

The scholar nodded and pointed at the pot again, moving his finger as he read it out loud.

“I believe that this is an old Hang Dynasty artifact–probably worth a tidy sum of money!–but it seems to keep referencing the Money Tree folktale with a simple palindrome that repeats across the design here and here and over there too. It simply says: ‘Dead lucky or lucky dead‘.”

Far away, he could almost hear the noise of civilization and his book shooting up the rankings with the steady clink of money flowing in. And, trapped all the way out in Blackpool Bay that distant metallic sound just sounded like chains being tightened around him. One by one, inch by inch and moment by moment, he was suffocating in Apartment 307, Ocean View.

The Benjamin Tree in its sinister pot with spidery runes carried on standing there. It was taunting him, its prisoner, and just daring him to leave…

Horror & Dark Fiction

The Ladies of Llewelyn Library

My research has taken me to some strange places, but none more so than the old colonial Llewelyn Library in Rhodesia. I boarded a ship from London that rounded the Cape and dropped me off in a tropical Durban. From there I caught a lift up to a dusty Johannesburg and across the border to the outskirts of hot Harare in north-east Rhodesia.

The Llewelyn Library claimed it held original scrolls from the Library of Alexandria. I was studying ancient fertility rites and–if authentic–some of these scrolls were of great interest to me. Such ancient papyrus scrolls would be too fragile to travel and so I set out to travel to them.

I arrived at the doorstep of the Llewelyn Library as night fell. It was a dark, imposing building with the dramatic air of a wartime monument rather than that of a library. The Head Librarian was waiting for me outside and, after a few pleasantries, ushered me inside. She was an old, wispy South African woman and seemed to always talk in loud whispers. My research quarters were set up, I unpacked my gear and was left to my own devices that first night.

I was too exhausted to do much else other than climb into bed, yet I struggled to fall asleep. I awoke in the pale light of morning with fleeting memories of a soon-forgotten dream. I shook off the sleep, had a cup of tea, and began what I had travelled so far to do: my work.

The Chief Librarian showed me to the entrance to Llewelyn Library’s vaults. She also assigned to me a young, native girl; in heavily accented English, the helper introduced herself as ‘Tanaka‘. I could not help noticing that she was quite beautiful with dark eyes and generous proportions.

The vaults were cavernous and packed with countless weird and wonderful African artefacts. Numerous painted rocks, masks, spears and other bizarre items littering the bowels of Llewelyn Library with many barely-discovered mysteries tucked into every nook and cranny down there. The collection seemed to have been gathered from all corners of the Dark Continent. Dust covered most things down there and the soft, flickering central light cast deep shadows everywhere.

While Tanaka went off to locate the fertility scrolls, my gaze was drawn to a collection of knee-high fertility statues carved out of an intense black rock of some sort. As far as I could see, there a number of female ones with large bosoms, round buttocks and accentuated feminine curves, and only one male one with a large, erect phallus. I reached out and touched the male statue. Its stone was cool to the touch. When I pulled my hand back, I was surprised to see that it was clean. Everything else in that vault was covered with thick layer of dust.

Tanaka arrived with the fragile fertility scrolls and I put the strange statues out of my mind. The rest of the day I spent delicately deciphering the ancient scrolls while Tanaka patiently sat at my side, answering the odd question and occasionally fetching me more tea and biscuits.

The scrolls did indeed appear genuine and, in my excitement, I lost track of time. Tanaka eventually told me how late it was and I conceded that it was time to retire. On the way back, we passed the collection of fertility statues and I was surprised to see that there was, in fact, no male statue in their midst. I definitely remembered seeing a male statue with an erect phallus, and I asked Tanaka about it. She dismissed it in broken English. She said it was too late to be working this hard, and she picked up her pace to walk me to my chambers.

That night I recalled broken snippets of lustful dreams that made me blush. It was a dream involving a dark room full of naked, lustful native girls that tore at me, kissing and laughing, their soft skin touching mine in loving, primal embraces… The next morning I awoke tired, almost as if I had not slept a wink.

Later that morning, after we had descended into the vault, Tanaka popped off to fetch the scrolls for our day’s work. During this pause, I glanced at the black rock fertility statues. Something made me get up and take a closer look. There were twelve individual female statues carved in some pure black stone. I now noticed that one of them appeared pregnant.

When Tanaka returned with the scrolls, I again asked her about the statues. And, again, she mumbled something indistinct and avoided my gaze. She placed the scrolls in front of me and my attention was diverted. I decided that it was not important and I sank deep into my reverent study of the rare scrolls for the rest of the day and into the early evening.

That evening, heading back to my quarters in the Library, I ran into the Head Librarian. I asked her about the statues in the vault, but she said she did not know about them. She said that it was a large vault and an old collection that pre-dated her, but that she would dig into the records and get back to me.

The lustful dream came again that night, but it was far more vivid. I remember walking from my quarters through an absolutely silent library. It was dark and very late, but I knew where I was going. I was being called by a longing deep inside me. I went down the spiral staircases into the shadowy gloom of the vault. As I walked entered the place, thirteen naked, native ladies of generous proportions gently tore off my clothes and embraced me again and again…

The next morning, I awoke in bed naked. It was strange because I did not recall going to sleep naked. I did so occasionally when it was hot–and Africa is almost always so!–and, thus, it was also not the strangest thing to awake like this. What bothered me was that I could not remember stripping.

I skipped breakfast–except for the tea–and headed straight to the Head Librarian’s office to enquire about the statues. The Head Librarian was not there, but I ran into Tanaka on the way. I had never noticed it before, but Tanaka had the soft roundness of an early pregnancy and I commented on it. She flashed a smile at me, but said nothing and carried on walking to the vault.

I inspected the black rock fertility statues again while Tanaka went off to retrieve the scrolls. It might have been the shadows and half-light that made me miss it the first time, but it seemed that one of the statues was not pregnant. Rather, all of the statues appeared that way, with soft roundness in the lower-central belly indicating a child. Off to the side was a male statue; its erect phallus almost comical in size and girth. I reached out and touch its head. The stone was surprisingly warm to the touch and I suddenly thought of the embarrassingly primal dream that I had had the night before; all flesh and sensual desires made earthly.

It was at this point that the Head Librarian poked her head into the vault and asked if I would come with her. I could not locate Tanaka, so I wrote her a note–assuming she could read English–and followed the wispy form of the Head Librarian back to her office.

She was silent the whole walk back, but the moment the door closed and she sat down in her old, red leather chair, she began to talk. She told how late one night Tanaka had turned up on the Library’s doorsteps and, given human decency and her grasp of the ancient local dialects, the Head Librarian–a man at the time–had taken her in. She had also brought with her the ancient fertility statues from her hometown that she had donated to the Library, or so the previous Head Librarian had noted in the ledgers.

The previous Head Librarian, though, had subsequently disappeared, thus leading to the eventual hiring of the present Head Librarian. She had then simply kept the same staff contingent–including Tanaka–in the employ of the Library.

“Now,” I recall the Head Librarian explaining in her characteristically loud whisper, “I have found a more detailed listing of the statues you asked about and there are discrepancies. Not only have none gone missing, but it was logged by my predecessor as only being twelve female fertility statues. There is no mention of a male one, and twelve, not thirteen is listed. Despite being a bit of a nasty drunk and pervert to the native girls, my predecessor was thorough and quite pedantic as to detail in these records. Besides, the risk around here is always for relics to be smuggled out and into our vaults.”

At this point, a scream rang out in the Library and we rushed off to find its source. We ended up in the vault, where Tanaka was softly weeping over the shattered remains of the male statue. Somehow, it had fallen and shattered to splintered pieces. I knelt down and picked up one of the pieces and was surprised to find the inside of the stone a dark red colour.

The Head Librarian tried comforting Tanaka, but to little avail. She was terribly shaken by the destruction of this statue. I took my leave then and retired for the day back to my quarters. There, after a quiet day of reading my books and sipping on the sherry they had provided for the room, I slipped into a troubled sleep.

Later that night, I jolted awake and sat upright in my bed. Somehow I knew I had to be somewhere else. I put on my dressing gown and wandered out of my quarters. I did not wander to the vault. Rather, I felt myself being drawn to the front door of the Llewelyn Library.

Approaching the front door, despite the time of the night, I saw that it was slightly ajar. I slipped out into the cool night with the quiet town flickering around me and the looming presence of the Library behind me.

At the foot of the stairs there stood Tanaka, surrounded by a number of other native girls. Many of them babies in their hands. They were all standing there looking up at me, so I began to walk down to them. As I descended, I counted twelve girls in total and Tanaka.

It was eerily silent as I stepped off the last Library step. My foot crunched softly on the gravel of the road, and I stood before this strange huddle of beautiful native girls.

“Mubatani, oneka,” said Tanaka, leaning forward and kissing me gently on my cheek. I caught plenty of very friendly looks from the other native girls around us, and then they all turned around and walked off into the night leaving me standing there flabbergasted.

The next morning, the Head Librarian would alert me to the fact that Tanaka had left during the night. Her fertility statues were also gone, save the single shattered male one. Despite a pang missing her, I would struggle on and finish my research in a matter of weeks. But I would also never again be visited by the strange dreams of earlier nights.

Only when I was packed to go and saying my farewells to the Head Librarian, did I ask her about the other girls that I had seen with Tanaka and what she had said to me.

“Other girls?” the Head Librarian had replied, “No, it was just Tanaka that had been employed here and just Tanaka that left. The English translation for what she said was simply ‘goodbye, sir‘, though the more direct translation is where ‘mubatani‘ is ‘man‘ or–forgive me here–it can also literally mean ‘mate’.”

Horror & Dark Fiction

Shadow of Nobbs Road

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There was something off about that part of Nobbs Road. When I stood there in the day, it felt like home. Yes. Indeed, I had lived there for a number of years in a creaky old house with beautifully kept wooden floors and a large, ornate, green gate made of twisted iron. I was very happy living there and only had good things to say about the place, at first.

But, like creeping damp in a wall or fine hairline cracks in a beautiful portrait, there was something else. There a disquiet about the road or the land that grew on me over time.

When I stayed awake at my house on the Nobbs Road late at night, I felt the tug of something strange there. As the hour grew later, my thoughts would grow darker. It took me a while to recognise this, but there was a sense of foreboding that permeated my sleep and seeped into my waking mind. I only became aware of this in moments of idle thought or when a cloud passes by on a sunny day.

At first, it was just a feeling of unease, but then over the years it became its own entity and I began trying to avoid the shadow of Nobbs Road. I would make sure I was inside before dark, tucked into the safe illusion that domestic comforts project. I would lock my front door and make sure my curtains were closed. I would make sure I was fast asleep long before the midnight. I stopped inviting friends around and began to consciously ponder why I felt like this.

Insanity is incremental, and so is obsession. At face value, they are pretty similar, but with a key difference is the ability to distinguish between reality and fantasy.

So one day I decided that I would investigate it. Being unattached and financially secure, I had both the time and the means to plough into such a pursuit. And so I would investigate the quaintly-named Nobbs Road, that part of that road and what happened there long ago. If nothing else, I would find out something of the history of where I live. And, at best, I would dispel my ghost with a dose of benign reality.

Over months of scouring the Internet, old library paper clippings and, eventually, the city and the police’s public records I had a story. Actually, I had many stories from the civil war shelter in the old farm building to the retired couple who died in a fire there that destroyed the second incarnation of the house (excluding the original gate that still stood there now). There was even a bootlegger that lived there for a while and a moderately successful author who had been born there before moving inland.

All these lives and their related stories were scattered over centuries, but there was one that stood out. I found vague references to it online, so I went to the library and found a key part of it as a tiny fifth-page article in a now-forgotten newspaper. Then I went to the public records and found some of the legal records evidencing this narrative.

Interestingly, I could find no record of who designed and installed the same twisted, iron green gate that stands in front of my house now. It just seems to have always been there, but I suppose that is another story entirely.

And that is how this story begins, as one day about two centuries ago an old lady was banging on that gate. The recently married couple that had just moved into the house–the wife’s father owned it, but he was off in Germany–came out to see her. They had their newborn in their arms when this strange, wild-haired old lady had warned of where they were living.

I could find no record of exactly what that warning had been, but the man the next day had reported it at the police station. The entry into the police records had just said: “Residents at 2 Nobbs Road receive another warning. Woman not located.”

There is a gap in the records, but in Winter that year the poor couple buried their firstborn. The grave is still there on the hill at the old cemetery overlooking the bay. I went and visited it and through the moss and cracked, weathered rock I could just make out the words, “…taken tragically before his time.”

The police records showed that an investigation into the child’s death was opened, but the couple refused to co-operate and their statements are not on record. The case was closed and marked as “Cot Death“.

It was at this point that the story took a strange turn.

The tiny fifth-page article in the now-forgotten newspaper speaks about the mysterious gatherings taking place at 2 Nobbs Road. Neighbours reported dark-dressed strangers coming and going from the house late at night. They also spoke of strange sounds and smells coming from the property. And then there was one naked, terrified man seen jumping the gate and running from the property late at night. When the police found him, he was screaming uttering incomprehensible gibberish about falling stars and the “the darkness below that speaks“. By the time the journalist from the newspaper got to interview him in the mental hospital, he was unresponsive. Given those type of clinic’s treatments, the latter was no surprise to me. The journalist, though, did note in his article the deep cuts and scratch marks that covered his body, before concluding that “…in the interest of public good, the men of the law should investigate the unseemly goings-on at 2 Nobbs Road.”

But, I suspect that without a coherent statement from the man committed to the mental hospital, the police could not legally act nor issue a warrant for searching 2 Nobbs Road. Either that or they did not care for it. Either way, the police do not appear to have done anything at this stage and, thus, it not surprising to see that a later seventh-page article talks about a group of neighbours that had had enough. They had been complaining about strange sounds and smells coming from that house at night and a number of them had now also reported missing pets.

The final pieces of evidence that I have points to a terrible climax late one Winter’s night. That fateful night, the police were called out to settle the peace as a neighbourhood crowd apparently stormed 2 Nobbs Road. What they found, though, was a raging fire that had broken out across the property. The police report spoke about how the strange fire raging through the property was impossible to put out, but it did not travel to adjacent property and its flames touched nothing outside of 2 Nobbs Road, stopping at the twisted iron gate. But, this raging fire was also the least of their worries, or so spoke the third-page article I found.

The couple that had lost their child were at the front of a gang of black-robed people standing on the properties lawn before the burning house. The lead policeman on the scene describes the couple’s faces as being dark and unrecognisable. The police found no sign of the neighbours that had apparently stormed the property (and they never would find signs, as no less than seven unsolved Missing Person cases are filed at that date from Nobbs Road). But there was a caucus of screams coming from inside the burning house and, thus, some of the policemen attempted to charge into the flames and save whoever was trapped in there (the firemen, busy with a fire across town at the time, would only turn up later and extinguish much of the blaze).

The police that charged into house would never come out. Part of the house collapsed and a lot of the property–except the green, twisted iron gate–was consumed in the fire. Neither the policemen who charged towards the screams nor any neighbours came out of the blaze. Heat of the blaze must of been intense, as no bodies–not even charred ones–were found. The police report noted that the screaming quickly died out and the lead investigator noted that he believed the fire had simply consumed everyone trapped in that house.

The remaining police had rounded up the black-robed gang, after a brief skirmish, pulled them from the raging inferno of 2 Nobbs Road, and marched them down to the police station for questioning. At this point, the firemen had turned up and begun dealing with the fire. The firemen of the day did not keep any records that I could locate, but the police report noted in a post-note that one of the firemen had also been killed fighting the fire that night.

The next morning, the officer on duty at the police station had walked into the jail and found that all the black-robed strangers were gone, save for the young couple. But the couple were hanging, dead from the ceiling with the words, “SORRY, WAS NOT ME” scratched into the husband’s chest.

The police noted the suicide and their files were empty from there. The wife’s father had come back from Germany and auctioned what was left of the house and the couple had been buried in two separate graves. The wife’s grave is somewhere in Germany with the rest of her family. Her husband, though, is in a tangled, overgrown part of the old graveyard overlooking the bay with no stone or name to mark it.

Pondering this twisted tale, a strange thought occurred to me and I checked the lunar calendar of the day. The date recorded for this bizarre climax was over a three-night lunar eclipse occurring on the longest night of the year.

There is one final event that may or may not be related to this story, but a year later the new residents of this address–after building the third and, so far, final house that now stands at 2 Nobbs Road–reported a strange, old woman threatening them at their self-same green, twisted iron gate. This time the police records note what the old woman said by the following note: “New residents at 2 Nobbs Road receive warning against living there. Told to leave or else they never will, as ‘beast is hungry’. Parks Dept. report no animals in vicinity. Woman not located.”

I sold that house and moved far away. And, although life has moved on for me, sometimes when a shadow of a cloud passes or the full moon dips behind dark clouds, I can still feel something tugging at me. I can still sense something old and evil with a hunger whispering about a twisted, iron gate that holds it tied to that its accursed prison.