The Girl in the Dungeon
By Cheryl M.
I had an old friend. The girl in the dungeon. She was my only friend for years, and before her I never had a soul.
There’s being shy, and there’s being so deathly afraid of people that you’d rather bury yourself in toxic waste than approach them. There’s being picked on, and there’s being treated like a leper that ought to be burned at the stake. There is no diagnosis and no prescription for such terrible predicaments. I wish I could say I endured it all and paint myself the beautifully tragic heroine, but that would be a lie. I was lonely and miserable. And also kind of ugly.
When I was eleven I learned the word anxiety, and it became my favourite word. It’s not a good word, but it was a word that knew me. I had been in a hospital waiting for my mother to “clean up her belly”, when I found a little pamphlet that had a picture of a teenage girl scowling on the front.
What is anxiety? The title read. Are you always feeling blue? Do you feel impending doom? Do you have a fear of people? With every question, I felt something soft and warm blooming inside my chest. Yes. Yes. Yes! I wondered if this was the euphoria of making a friend who perfectly understood me.
I did have a fear of people. That was why I hated school. They were full of them. I had always divided the world into two—there were people and then there was me.
One day though, I found a person.
She was the girl in the dungeon. She would eventually become bigger than the world I knew, overriding that jagged line between people and me.
At first we simply stood across each other with the chained bars in between us. But I carried a lot of conversation baggage with me, piled up over the years of not having anyone to unload them on. She listened with the greatest care to all my stories. Even if it was just about my P.E. shorts getting stolen at school or finding curses scratched across my desk, she acted like they were the gravest injustices in our society as we knew it. The world was wrong, and I was its victim. She was a most excellent listener, always telling me what I wanted to hear and perfectly mirroring my feelings.
From the very beginning the girl in the dungeon saved me.
It was around that time I learned about the word anxiety. I had found my anxiety, but still no friends. A day soon came when I was desperately searching for something—solid ground, comfort, a solution to my endless problems. And most of all new clothes to replace my urine-soaked uniform.
I must clarify that I had wet myself not out of incontinence, but because the stupid school prefects had refused to let me go to the bathroom during assembly. Students they disliked did not deserve the privilege of a bathroom pass, or just basic human needs in general.
It should have been an ordinary day and I should have been accustomed to this tyranny. But there was only so much one could contain, both pee and the subsequent shame of pissing yourself in the middle of a school assembly. There was not one person to gain sympathy from, but plenty to hold their noses and sneer at me. As the warm yellow puddle slowly spread out from beneath my pinafore, it bloomed into a giant ocean. I was flailing and thrashing about, drowning in the middle of that foul yellow ocean all alone.
It should have been common sense, but it took an entire public disgrace to finally get me up and out of that hall. In fact I ran straight out of school, the laughter and stares propelling me all six blocks back to the dingy flat I lived in.
In that sodden state I tumbled straight into bed and threw myself under the covers.
And then a peculiar thing happened. A black hole opened and swallowed me whole. I was hurtling down, down, down into an abyss until I landed somewhere. Confusion cushioned my fall, and for a long time I lay there in a daze. Eventually I got up, and there I was in a strange place. A dungeon. A stairwell lay at my toes, so close that one inch more and I would’ve fallen further down again into a dark chasm. How inviting! So I pushed myself over and tumbled on down.
At the very bottom was a small cell enshrouded by a black hole, and within that cell was a girl. The girl sat behind bars, and her eyes gleamed brightly out of the shadows. She had blue hair and wore a cloud around her body as a dress. As she moved towards me, the cloud rippled in mesmerizing waves.
“Who are you?”
“I’m your friend,” the girl said with a smile.
I had never seen her in my life, but I wasn’t about to give up the only chance of friendship in my life for logic.
“Won’t you let me out?” She said, pressing her face against the bolted iron bars. Her skin was so fair and smooth they looked like fluffy white marshmallows bulging out between the gaps. I reached out to touch her, and as I raised my arm I noticed a key swinging from a chain between my fingers. Since when had I been holding a key in my hand?
I inserted it into the lock. The door sprung open and there she was with nothing in between us. Even her face had a nice smell, of something sweet and powdery. I smelled like piss, but she pulled me and my entire soggy state through the open bars and into her arms. I sunk straight into the cloud that swathed her body and it felt like home.
Suddenly, water rushed into the cell. Buckets and buckets, and then gallons and gallons, and then a whole ocean of water swept us off our feet. Before I knew it I was sailing out to sea with the girl’s hand tightly around mine. The water was a kaleidoscope of blues—it shimmered between shades from a pale celestine to a deep navy night to the beautiful blue of the girl’s hair. Her cloud dress seemed like it would dissolve like candyfloss in water, but astonishingly it stayed full and wispy.
The ocean breeze came and gently blew the stench of shame away, off my clothes and far into the distance. That nasty yellow vapour, now a little storm cloud, flapped and faded away forever. Who knows where—maybe my school. I hoped it’d rain down on everyone there. All I could smell now was the cool ocean waves and the sweetness of the girl’s marshmallow skin. All I could feel were the tender waves lapping against my skin, washing me clean, and the girl’s soft hand in mine.
It was heavenly, floating in this ocean with her. I didn’t want to return to where I came from.
“You can come back anytime,” the girl promised. “I’ll always be here, waiting for you to unlock the chains.”
Her eyes twinkled at me, and the promise settled like snowflakes on my skin.
So I came back lots of times.
She was always in the cell, waiting for me to unlock the chain with the key that always appeared in my hand. The two of us were synchronized in our solitude. I didn’t know her name or where she came from or why I found an affinity with her, but in the dungeon there were no questions or answers. Sometimes she brought me to the ocean for a swim. Sometimes we just sat and talked. She always spoke with a gentleness that coaxed the conversation out of me, but when the occasion called for it she could spit curses like venom upon my adversaries.
I rambled at length about the prefects, the school leaders who had the entire student body under their rule. The teachers wanted to train the student leaders to be independent, but in reality all they had done was breed a group of precocious control freaks. A group of girls who shunned me and used their power to torment me.
“They put themselves on top of the food chain,” I explained.
The girl in the dungeon did her best to recreate this picture. She stuffed her hands into her cloud dress and began pulling out lines, drawing them out and stitching them together until they formed a pyramid. Taking more lines, she stacked them up so that the pyramid was divided into several levels. She drew creatures too, filling up the spaces with them.
“That’s where I might go,” I said, pointing to the deck where an assortment of weak-looking rodents and amphibians were scuttling about. So she drew me into that group.
Then she came to the top of the pyramid, where the school prefects went. But she didn’t know what their faces looked like or how to recreate them, so in their place she drew snarling lions and snickering hyenas. They were fearsome, towering over me and the little rats. By this point I was amazed after the whole process of bringing my food chain to life, but the girl in the dungeon did not like this. She glared at the lions and hyenas.
“They may be at the top of the food chain, but even those beasts can’t always protect themselves.” And then a long hunting rifle materialized in her hand. “We have to hunt them.” She cocked the rifle. The dark, heavy weapon jarred against her billowy blue hair, and it disconcerted me. I imagined her shooting them, and blood splattering all over her cloud dress and marshmallow skin.
“Stop!” I cried. “Don’t shoot the gun.”
She lowered the rifle and gave me that benign smile of hers. “I won’t, if you don’t want me to.”
I decided to move away from nasty territory and steer us into a nicer subject for once. But it was hard, because there was nothing nice in my life. I took a long while to think about something, and during that time the pyramid slowly dissolved back into nothing.
I finally thought of something I liked. The cream buns in the school cafeteria. I always bought them at recess time; they cost only fifty cents and were soft as a pillow, with a sweet, thick custard tucked inside.
“If I were to burn my school down one day, I’d only leave the cream bun stall behind,” I said.
“That delicious, are they?” she said.
“Well, it’d be nice to have someone to eat them with.”
I never ate in the cafeteria. The students ate in clusters designated by clique, and there was never any place for me in such an arrangement. Everyone always brought a lunchbox made by their mother, and every day it was a contest to see who had the most delicious-looking lunch. I was automatically disqualified, because my mother never made me any.
So the cream buns were my only option, but they were my saviour. They were small enough that I could stuff three of them into my pinafore pockets and steal away to the bathroom.
The bathroom at the far end of the school compound was entirely ideal; I could eat my buns in the privacy of my own cubicle.
“I eat in my own private room,” I said to the girl.
“That sounds amazing,” she enthused.
No one ever came all to that bathroom during recess time. It smelled a little but all I had to do was submerge my face deep into the plastic wrappers of my cream buns and breathe in the wonderful scent of custard. I was content to be trapped in this sweet-smelling confinement. Perhaps that was how the girl in the dungeon felt when I wasn’t there to visit her.
“Enjoy your cream buns tomorrow too,” she waved goodbye as I locked up her cell for the night.
I didn’t enjoy my cream buns the next day. One of the prefects had spotted me slinking out of the cafeteria. She discovered my private lunch spot and forced open the door of my cubicle. The prefect looked at me like I was a sewer rat, a sadly accurate likeness as I sat on the toilet bowl with two half-eaten cream buns in my hand. The sweet morsels in my mouth crumbled into dryness, replaced by a numbing acidity. By the next period, everyone was whispering about the rat who ate cream buns in the toilet. After that I couldn’t bring myself to buy my favourite buns again.
The next time I met the girl in the dungeon she was surprised at how hungry I looked. I told her I hadn’t been able to eat my cream buns for a while. I didn’t want to, but I missed them. As always, she had something for me hidden inside her cell. I unlocked the bars, and followed her as she led me by my hand into the darkness. The darkness continued for a long time—it was a long tunnel. It was quiet and pitch black, but I could just about make out the shimmer of her cloud dress as it bounced along with her. Gradually, slivers of faint light begin to seep in. They were coming from behind a door, which we stopped at.
“After you,” she said.
I pushed open the door, and walked into a vast room. The door was elevated at the top of the room. At our feet was a springboard, and below the springboard was a mountain of cream buns. Everywhere I looked I saw those golden brown buns, filling up the entire room from wall to wall like water in a swimming pool. There must have been thousands of them, stacked up into one massive mountain. Rising in hot puffs of steam from the buns was that lovely custard smell that I had forgotten in the wake of everything. They wafted back into my nose and suddenly I was very, very hungry. I wanted to dive into those cream buns.
The girl from the dungeon laughed.
“That’s what the springboard is for, silly!” With that she raised her arms above her head and bounced once, launching herself in a beautiful dive straight into the pool of buns. From high above I peered at her, a little blue cloud in the pile of buns. She called out for me to jump. Immediately I did the same, albeit a lot less graceful. But the cream buns were as soft as could be, and I fell on them as if they were pillows. Surrounded by buns, the sweet scent had now completely diffused into my senses.
Together we fanned out our arms and scooped cream buns towards us, picking them up and biting into them. I chomped through the bun and the cream inside exploded on, an oasis unfolding right there inside my mouth. The girl in the dungeon had led me into pure, creamy bliss. I could eat as much of my beloved treat as I wanted to away from the prying eyes of nosy prefects. We ate and ate and ate, but the cream buns never decreased. The room remained full of them.
“You can have all the cream buns in the world for as long as you come to see me,” the girl said.
“I’ll be with you forever,” I promised.
I’d decided I would be with her forever. She understood me and gave me everything I wanted, brought me to places that filled me with wonder. The real world was nothing compared to the one that was connected to the dungeon. So for years I would escape down to the dungeon, always eager to free the girl so she could free me from the shackles of school and bullies and ignorant parents. It had begun with her blue hair and the big blue ocean, but as the years went she showed me more and more colours and tastes and smells.
At some point however, things changed. Not in the dungeon, but in the real world. Simply put, I grew up. I left school eventually, and found a job. At my workplace there were no prefects nor mindless students, but people who just paid attention to making food and serving it to customers. They were adults who minded their own business, not cruel children who whispered behind backs and cooked up schemes for others. I imagined they had their own share of problems. They weren’t necessarily kind people, but I took well to their straightforward nature.
If they were paid, they did their job. If a customer yelled at them, they yelled at someone else in the kitchen in turn. If they were upset, they banged around the counters and cursed. If they were feeling stressed, they took pills to make themselves happier. I appreciated this simplicity. They absorbed me into their group, and it was even louder and more three-dimensional than my adventures with the girl in the dungeon had ever been. I no longer visited her.
My attention was taken by my newfound community and fuelled by their generosity. They started sharing those pills with me, and I took them because I wanted to be happy too. They never ran out of those either, just like the endless pool of cream buns in the dungeon. But these were solid and real, a tangible solution to my problems that I could hold in my hand. Hadn’t that been what I’d searched for as a child?
It turned out that the happiness I found was surprisingly similar to my time in the dungeon. Things changed colours and shapes and morphed from object to object. Loud music whistled and blared loudly in my ears, sending me swaying and floating in pleasure. Entire landscapes opened up and sucked me in, just like the blue ocean from years ago. Multiple heavens shape-shifted in and out of my senses. It was all very familiar. But it wasn’t the same as before. I got tired.
At some point I recalled the girl in the dungeon, and then I began to think about her more and more. I pictured her blue hair and the cloud that enveloped her and the warmth of her hand. Where was she? As I dove further and further into the pills, I found myself searching for her once more. My old friend. Would she recognise me when she saw me?
One day we reunited. After years of staying away from the dungeon, I fell into that black chasm again. Inside that chasm was the cell, and inside that cell was a girl who had been waiting patiently for a long time. Her hair was still blue and her dress was still a perfectly formed cloud. On the other hand, I had wilted considerably.
“You’ve done well without me for a long time,” she called to me. “But it’s time you take a rest and let me take over.”
This time when I unlocked the bars, the girl stepped out of her cell. She took my hand and as she did so, took the key out of it. It was now firmly tucked within her fingers. She wasn’t going to return it.
And then she pushed me into the cell and locked it.
I was too exhausted to do anything but take a rest as directed. The girl ascended the stairs to take my place in the world and left me behind in the dungeon, a pathetic shadow in the dark.