Buried Alive In Poo
He woke up in darkness, lying slumped up against a concrete wall. The last thing he could remember was browbeating someone at the pub to buy him another drink. He smacked his lips; the odd taste lingered. Reminiscent of cough syrup. Some bastard had drugged him!
He wasn´t in his room at the hotel; he wasn´t in the back room of the pub (where he´d so often ended up after drinking binges in the past), so where the hell was he? He managed to crawl to his knees despite the dizziness from whatever sedative they´d put in his drink. As soon as he could remember who´d done it, he´d vow to get them, but good.
He reached out and touched the nearest wall, also of concrete. His eyes should have been used to the darkness by now, but he still couldn´t see anything, not even a hint of light creeping in around curtain edges. “Hello?” he called. The faint echo revealed that he was in an enclosed space, concrete walls, narrow and short – just over a meter square - but deep. How deep? He took off a shoe and tossed it up as hard as he could; it didn´t hit the ceiling but instead fell back and almost knocked him on the head. Some more careful groping informed him that there were no doors, windows or openings on any of the walls, and only a small grate set into the floor. It was about the size of a dinner plate and covered with strong, very fine mesh. He tried to bash it out with the heel of his shoe, but it resisted. It didn´t even bend.
He shouted himself hoarse, but there was no answer. He couldn´t tell how much time had passed (his watch was gone) but after what seemed like hours, a distant grinding sound came from somewhere above and a trickle of water fell, just enough for him to slake his thirst. He tried to ignore the feeling, but he needed to take a shit in the worst way so after an eternity of bowel clenching, he ripped his pants down and crapped in a corner. The smell was dreadful in the enclosed space, more so after he tried to push the shit through the grate with his shoe. It didn´t work; it smeared over the gr ate instead.
That was the first day.
The second day was different only in that after he´d gone to sleep, someone had thrown two rather stale loaves of bread down into the hole. He ate them both except for the end of one loaf, which had fallen in the shit. He spend most of that day throwing his shoes up in attempts to hit the ceiling and trying to wash the shit off the grate with hands-ful of the tiny amount of water they were giving him.
The third day was taken up with attempts to scratch away the concrete floor around the grate with his belt buckle. It broke after a while (it was getting harder to judge time down here), and he sat back with a curse. Just then, another faint grinding sound came from overhead and a torrent of sewage dropped into the room, splattering off his head and down his back. “Jesus Christ!” he shouted, wiping as much of the filth off as he could. He tried to force the vile mess down the grate, but as before, the shit just wouldn´t go down; he had to pack it up against the walls, otherwise it blocked up the grate and the room started to fill with piss.
The fourth day (or rather, the fourth time he´d woken up down here) was uneventful. There was no bread, but there was another torrent of shit, piss, vomit and filthy water. He learned quickly that if he didn´t keep the grate clear, the fluids didn´t drain away. He had a vague notion of making some kind of a platform out of dried shit and climbing out, but it was just that: a notion.
The fifth day was relatively exciting, compared to the others. He was woken by another loaf of stale bread bouncing off his head. It fell into the shit and got dirty all along one side, but he scraped most of it off and ate it anyway. He had a drink of water and a few minutes after that, almost as if his insides had started working again after being fed, he had to shit. He left his trousers off, using them to form a kind of barrier around the grate to keep the shit from covering it. He was pretty much used to the smell by then.
He had started scratching his initials – HR – into the walls, for no better reason than that he could, when another gush of sewage fell from above. Shortly after that, yet another deluge of waste arrived. Perhaps he was turning into a connoisseur, but it smelled different, as if the first and second flushes were from different toilets. Perhaps he was locked in the basement of a hotel and they were piping the output from the toilets on each floor into his cell. The semi-solid mounds of shit that he´d packed up against the walls were starting to melt down into a single puddle; he spent hours scraping them away from the grate. Trickles of acidic urine, some of it provided by him, helped to keep the mesh clear.
He had scratched seven deep gouges into the wall to represent seven days. He didn´t bother after that, because he realised that he couldn´t tell if it had been seven days or if he´d just fallen asleep and awoken seven times.
Some time after this, the sewage started arriving more often. Three revolting sluices in a row, then five, then six, each one slightly different. His theory of being trapped in a hotel firmed up; he could almost tell the difference between the economy-class shit which smelled of onions and beer, and the upper-class shit which also contained vomit, champagne and half-digested after-dinner mints. By now, his attempts at keeping the grate clear were futile, and the chamber had started to fill up. He tried to clear a passage by stomping the shit through the grate – like he was pressing grapes at a vineyard – but the turds just squelched out to either side. Fortunately, the buckets of piss and other fluids that arrived from above tended to float the worst of the shit to the top. The liquids then drained out through the grate, leaving a layer of slimy excrement underneath a crust of half-dry shit.
It would have been the ninth day when waste began arriving faster than it seeped out of the grate. The level of shit had been rising slowly, but now it rose up to knee-height within a matter of hours. He sat down against the wall and went to sleep; he awoke to find himself up to his chin in shit, vomit, sawdust, mud, large clumps of some kind of stringy yellow-green mucus (like the yolks of weeks-old eggs) and pieces of uncooked meat. He almost vomited, but instead got to his feet and started stamping the muck down into the grate. It wasn´t working; the layer of liquid that usually drained away was still there, ureic acid and waste digestive juices burning his feet. Had the drain clogged up? Another gurgle from above, another river of shit and cistern water. This time the flow didn´t stop but diminished to a trickle, occasional lumps blocking the pipe for a few seconds then spurting out with a muffled plop noise.
He panicked and started jumping up and down on the grate, driving first his left heel then his right down onto the mesh. Surprisingly, he felt it give way slightly. He shouted in triumph and renewed his efforts; the mesh bent further with each kick and then suddenly gave way. His left leg slid half a meter into the hole and wedged itself tightly. He was stuck!
He shouted as the effluent rained down on his head, and tried vainly to dodge out of the way of the stream, but his leg was trapped in the drain hole, and the level of shit was rising rapidly now that it had no way out. He thrashed about, grabbing some of the larger turds and throwing them up against the walls in a futile attempt to give himself more time, but inevitably the level rose up to his chin, up to his nose and slowly over his eyes. The lumpy surface – which would have looked something like a bowl of large Coco-Pops, if there had been any light – was briefly disturbed by his flailing arms, and once by a choked sucking sound as he tried to inhale the revolting semi-solid wastes. He threw them up immediately, but didn´t have any other option apart from inhaling it again. He went through the inhale-retch-puke-cough-inhale cycle four times before he lost the strength to vomit again. He sank beneath the surface.
A few days afterward, a small hatch in the ceiling opened up and someone began tossing rubbish – empty cans, food packaging, egg shells, half-bricks, loose bails of wire, sawn-off lengths of wood, old phone books, a twenty-gallon drum of used motor oil – into the sewerage. Bags of cement powder were dropped in as well; they broke open and spilled their contents into the dirty water. A month later, the mess still hadn´t set but instead formed a revolting kind of sludge that would never settle down into a solid or a liquid, but remained something in-between, a kind of tribute to indecisiveness.
