story of the Death Dungeon, written by Ahmed Mahmoud Sharqawi
I know the feeling of being buried alive. I experienced this feeling before. This is my feeling when I am riding in a deportation car and being transported to prison. You feel that you are inside a grave that takes you away and you are going to hell, a miniature version of death and the grave that takes you to the other side, and I am one of those sentenced to ten years in prison. I mean, world, will I see the world again or not?
I looked out of the small window of the deportation car as if I was bidding farewell to the world and what was in it, as if I were on the stake of death and going to the grave. My life is over or what is left of it I will live in torment, and God knows if there will be greater torment after the torment of prison or not.
We arrived at the prison and got out of the car. We met the warden and an officer, and they introduced us to the prison regulations well, and then they distributed us to the wards. From the first time I entered the ward and saw the evil eyes, I knew that I would pay a very high price.
Life began to reveal the other side: working all day long, eating on time and sleeping on time, a very cruel life that destroys any heart and turns you into a monster who eats and drinks...
Unfortunately, the films revealed a lot about prison life, because each ward is big, and even the prison itself is big, and after days of silence, friction began between the prisoners to know what color I was, so they could see whether I would hear what was being said or not.
One morning I found myself being assigned to clean bathrooms. I found myself holding a bathroom brush and cleaner and cleaning all the prison bathrooms. I felt a terrible humiliation as I sat on my knees and cleaned filthy bathrooms. The animals themselves were disgusted to enter them.
I saw bitterness for a whole day in order to finish the sunset and enter the ward, dead from fatigue, but before I entered my bed, I found the head of the ward telling me to go to the bathroom and he would clean the ward as well..
At that time, I looked at him angrily and saw anticipation in his eyes. I was impatiently waiting for him to object so that he could prove to me that he was the big one in the ward. He forced me to clean the entire ward before the prisoners went to sleep, and I woke up from my sleep, my body broken and unable to do so, and I was surprised that I was also assigned to clean the bathrooms.
At that time, I spoke to the head of the ward, who is responsible for distributing prisoners, angrily, and told him that I had been distributed behind some bathroom cleaners for two days. He prayed coldly and said:
- This is what I have
I suppressed my anger with good health and spent another bad day in the bathrooms, which were almost destroyed after the prisoners entered them after breakfast only, and I spent a very, very difficult time between cleaning, wiping, and removing the dirt..
At the end of the day, I returned to the ward and found the old man looking at me coldly, and I understood that I had to clean the ward, and I was left between the fire that I was revolting in it and the fire that I did not want to start my days here with hostilities with anyone, so I got the broom and started sweeping and cleaning the ward..
Then I was thrown on the bed like a dead man, but before I went to sleep, I woke up in shock when I found an old man waking me up and holding my breath. I looked at him with fear as he put his finger on a bug, meaning to be silent so that no one would hear us, and I found him approaching me and saying:
- Don't cause any problems here because you are not the burden of the solitary confinement cell, my son
Then he went back to his bed, covered himself up, and disappeared from my sight. I said to myself, “She’s missing Jannah” in the evening, and I continued my sleep. I woke up in a fit of awakening, and it was a shock. The toilets were distributed again. At that time, I couldn’t control my nerves and started screaming in the big ward. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the old man and saw in his eyes. Big warning, but I was excited and angry:
"See also"
Short Story Titled 'The Morgue Worker' by Ahmed Mahmoud Sharqawi
- There is no one else in this dirty ward, so I clean the bathrooms every day
I met the head of the ward, whose name was Fathi Basali, angrily and said:
- Oh, there is nothing but your mother's face that can clean bathrooms
The word made my blood boil. With the psychological pressure and fatigue, I found myself attacking him with all my might and hitting him, but not at all. In less than a moment, I was content with three more while he was coming down to hit me with his elbow and fist with all violence. I felt the taste of blood in the rest and saw my teeth being broken. My eyes sank when He went down on it with his fist, and my stomach screamed when he hit me with his knee on it.
He was huge and slanderous. He was incomplete, but he broke my bones so that the leech could continue. At that moment, a responsible officer entered and I spoke angrily:
- What is happening here, Fathi?
I found Fathi claiming innocence and saying:
- This new boy causes problems and fights with Shawqi
He looked at someone next to him and said:
- That's right, Shawqi
I found Shawqi saying submissively:
- It happened, Pasha
The officer called the sergeant and said:
- Take Shawqi and Al-Wad Al-Jadeed to the solitary confinement so that they can learn literature
At that time, I saw a look of horror in Shawqi’s eyes as Fathi spoke after the officer walked away:
- Shawqi followed us, Sergeant Abdel Muti, do not enter the cell
From the blood that was coming from my nostrils, I understood that I would be thrown into the cell from which the old man had locked me. Two soldiers housed me and they dragged me behind the sergeant in a narrow corridor. We went down a flight of stairs and they opened an iron door so that I would find myself in a place similar to a cave. To my right and left were small iron doors. They opened a door and put in it Shawqi, who was fixated on the topic of quarreling.
They dragged me to the end of the corridor, opened a door, threw me inside and locked it again. I found myself in a small cell, very narrow, like a coffin, with black and scratchy walls, and only a small mat...
I sat on the mat, it was very difficult for me. A simple mistake wasted my whole life. I wish I had not done anything that day. I lay on the mat and bent down on my knees because the cell was too narrow to accommodate me while I was lying down.
I closed my eyes and tried to sleep, and I actually fell asleep for a while, but while I was sleeping I heard someone’s voice whispering inside me, very strange whispers, as if I was falling into a strange vortex and the whispering was coming from everywhere, then my body started to get very cold as if we were inside a refrigerator or a cold morgue..
And from the heart of this vortex, I saw a very white man attacking me and screaming, and I woke up from my sleep while my heart was beating violently. I kept breathing in peace while my whole body was shivering from the cold that descended on my body like these bullets..
At that time, we were at night and the cell was dark. The door was closed to any ray of light that could enter me, and I heard the sound of something scratching in the guard, I meant it. There was about a meter and a half between me and her. I curled my body into the corner of the cell and my heart continued to beat violently.
I hope it was a mouse or an insect, because the sound was very clear, but I started to feel fingers touching my legs from underneath. My body shivered more and more and I shrank in on myself while speaking in a terrified voice:
- Who is here to answer me?
But the fingers touched my legs again, wow
My whole body shook and I felt a terrible terror wracking my entire body. Then the sound of someone sniffling began to reach me, as if it were someone in the throes of death, with their soul clinging to their body and refusing to come out.
My body shrank even more and I started shaking like a small family, especially since I felt someone breathing in front of me and something in the darkness, breathing loudly. I was paralyzed, unable to scream, and so cold that I could not even stand still..
And then I saw her, a bright eye in the heart of the darkness of the cell, terrifying white eyes, which were staring at me with frightening persistence, my body was writhing as if I was in a state of epilepsy, my tongue was tied and my lips were pressed together, the hair on my entire body stood still and my arms were twisting in a strange way..
I kept looking at this curse until it came close to me and was right in front of me, and even though the cell was very dark, I saw a blue face that was swollen in a terrifying way in front of me. At that time, I was unable to resist and fell unconscious.
I woke up with the feeling that I was dying. The cell door was opening and a soldier other than the first entered to take me out. I was unable to stand, whispering. I entered the ward like a dead man and fell from my height onto the bed.
At that time, I saw the old man. He approached me after the ward was silver, and the soldier asked permission to enter me. As soon as he saw me, he gasped. I looked at him with wide eyes so he could take a small mirror out of his pocket and show me myself.
I was shocked when I saw my hair was all white and my skin was wrinkled, as if I had aged forty years all at once. I took him by the hand and looked into his eyes and said:
- Tell me
He prayed with compassion, took a deep breath and said:
This cell was for punishment like any solitary confinement cell, until an officer named Talal came to the prison. He was a truly and truly slanderous officer, to the point that there was a prisoner who caused a major riot, so Officer Talal took him to this cell and preferred to beat him until they were killed.
The man who died was innocent inside the prison, and all of us prisoners here know who is innocent and who is not. At that time, Officer Talal will be tried, dismissed from his service, and sentenced to imprisonment in this same prison.
It was as if the son of the cell kept calling him, because he remained very fierce and caused a thousand problems until he was thrown into solitary confinement, in the same cell, the second day we heard that he had died inside, and it was said that the cause of death was a severe drop in blood circulation..
But what was frightening after that was that every prisoner who entered that cell would come out out of his mind, crazy. Some of them would continue, and some of them would remain as lost and cause problems in order to return to the cell again, and then we would find him dead in the same way as the officer.
It's just me, my son, who knows why people leave it and don't come back, and why people return it and die, and this, my son, is because we have people here who were killed, and everyone who went to prison for murder enters the cell once and comes out lost, crazy, and has to make trouble in order to return it again and die, as if it were an execution chamber for murderers. With its own law...
When he died, three of them were closed completely, but when the new warden came back, he did not believe this story of the goblins and opened them again. You are the first person to enter them, my son, after they were opened. Tell me, what are you coming here for?
I looked at him with the horror of the universe and said:
- I raped a woman, and when her brother fought with me, I killed him. But I paid a lot of money, and the lawyer found loopholes, and when I was sentenced to death in the first session, the sentence was overturned, and I served 10 years.
At that time, the old man came back to Laura in horror and said
"We belong to Allah and to Him we shall return"
The new prisoner's condition continued to get worse and worse. He would wake up screaming and say, "I can't come. I can't come." I went to the prison doctor and he was told that his condition was stable, but I knew that the cell was calling for him, and that he had to answer the call. He was unable, turning into a terrifying monster. Not on the day he attacked Fathi when he ordered him to clean the ward..
At that time, no one was able to keep him away from Fathi, as if he had turned into a ravenous monster, and had it not been for the soldiers, Fathi would have been killed, and the matter reached the warden because Fathi was almost going to die, and the warden ordered that the prisoner be thrown into solitary confinement, and he was the one who asked the soldier to put him in the cell there..
The second day, we heard that he had died. The soldier told me that they found him stiff, his body blue, and his eyes bulging out as if they were going to pop out of their place. I knew that the cell had carried out its sentence, as if it had become a court from another world, executing its sentence on the killers. I don’t know what to pray for mercy or what to do, my son.