Confessions...Part 3

In addition to our primal fear of the Dark, there is another fear of ours that is as ancient as our species, the fear of being alone.

You see, humans are social creatures. While there have always been plenty of people that others would consider ‘anti-social’, even those people usually feel more comfortable with other like-minded people with them. Even chronic loners or ‘lone-wolf’ types who prefer to spend large chunks of their time by themselves can grow nervous and scared when isolation and loneliness is thrust upon them rather than being a state of their own choosing. That is why the threat of solitary confinement, or the ‘hole’ as it is often called, is one of the most valuable tools that prison adminstrators have to keep control of the most volatile prisoners.

Extremely rare is the man who can withstand strict solitary confinement with no human contact whatsoever for more than a few days without breaking down in some fashion.

We are hardwired as a species to seek out other humans, to communicate with each other through speech and body language, to feel the loving touch of other humans we care about, to find our place within the larger group with which we interact. This hardwiring begins when we are just infants, we fuss and cry until a familiar face comes to bestow coos and smiles, stroking of the cheek, and often a warm bottle or breast to quench our thirst and our hunger.

As a cop, I found that many of my ‘customers’ that I dealt with, especially the most violent and desperate criminals, had been in some way cut off from the social fabric that the rest of us have built up. Either they had been abused as children by uncaring parents, who themselves may have been cast-off from society, or they had lost crucial jobs or suffered the loss of someone extremely close to them who mght even have kept them from committing the crimes that I was arresting them for.

The group dynamic is so strong that weak men can feel strong and powerful in the midst of a like-minded group, while a tremendously strong, independent man will often back down from a confrontation if he is alone and without a support network. This is why our culture reveres the solitary hero who does win a conflict with groups of small-minded villains. Almost all boys imagine themselves as being one of those solitary hero-types, while the reality is likely to be that they will grow up to become one of those followers in that group that gets defeated in all of those action movies.

Another thing I learned as a cop was that when you are interrogating a prisoner, it is often useful to use these primal fears that are inherent to almost all people to your best advantage. Indeed, if you wanted to get fast results, it was often necessry to compound the effects of one such fear by adding in others in measured doses. It was rare to find anyone who could resist such pressure for long. And when you found someone who could ignore such pressures, you had found yourself a real fucking sociopath, and likely as not, a serious suspect for any unsolved murders in the vicinity.

I knew Dr. Geek was not a sociopath. He was more or less a normal guy, your average Joe Blow scientist who was swept up in the potentialities of the research that Drake was willing to organize and fund. He was fascinated with-- and lacked any real understanding of the spirituality of-- the magick that the others like Papa Locks and El Diablito possessed. I am also sure he had no fucking clue about Drake’s true nature. But I was relatively sure that he did have some key knowledge about projects that Drake had started, perhaps without even involving the others in the group. Drake was sure to have secrets that he shared with each of his team members, making sure that each knew of projects and plans that the others didn’t. It was a perfect strategy to keep control of things, making sure that each team member felt he was special and in possession of knowledge that the others didn’t have access to.

I needed to find out what Dr. Geek knew about, and I needed to make sure that he was fully aware that his fate rested solely in my hands. I couldn’t take any chances that he would be willing to hold back even the smallest little detail of the secret stuff that Drake had entrusted him to do, and I needed to do it quickly.

That is why I dragged his ass to this place and compounded the various primal fears that most men carry deep inside--fear of the Dark, fear of being alone, and the real big one, the fear of Death. That is also why I created the story about the shadow creatures below and the flying things above that reacted to sound. I didn’t want him to have any possible outlets for his fears, he needed to believe that there was no possibility of escape, and there could be no outlet of emotional energy by screaming and throwing a tantrum. The glowsticks, with their limited light and their even more limited durations, served as a timing device that set into place a defined period of time in his mind where he had some small measure of security and safety. But the fact that he only had three of them to last him for an unknown duration of time was my way of forcing him to wrap his mind around the finality of his situation.

It was a cruel, evil torture inflicted upon a man who had no power to escape. It was also a very effective way of breaking down all of his resistance and his willpower within a few short hours.

Unfortunately for the small part of me that was still human and had sympathy for a fellow human in distress, it was also torture to watch a grown man come to the realizations that I needed him to come to and break down as they dawned upon him. It is not a pleasant sight to see such pain, such distress, such fear, come to fruition within such a short, concentrated time.

That is as close to a description of his ordeal as you are going to get in this space. I found no pleasure in his pain, and I don’t imagine that any of you would either.

My next post will detail our conversation after his ordeal, or at least as much of it as I will be able to reveal at this time...