Tourists

This is a short story submitted for an anthology of work by Wrexham group Voicebox https://www.facebook.com/VBWXM/?fref=ts

 

Tourists.

497 words, excluding title.

“You’re in the torture chamber”, our tour guide intones.  She is young, enthusiastic; graduate of a recent university I guess.

“Life was tough in here”.

I suppress a splutter.  Disembowelment, eye-gouging, burning and racking dismissed in a sentence.  This was the playroom of some psychopath from distant France and our forebears were his toys.

Then, a flick of the hair, a wave of the hand and we move on.  We are taken to the tea-room where we buy our cakes.  Our guide comes over to sit at our table.  She is pretty.  Her degree is in Media History and this is her first job, reminding the disinterested of a history they never knew and will forget by the time they walk through the next historic door.  

We continue our tour, soon reaching a window where captured archers were flung to their death on bad days.

We stop to admire the view. 

“The gardens were designed by a student of Capability Brown”, our guide chirrups.  I wonder what the archers thought of the view as they descended somewhat rapidly towards the undesigned ground far below.

We walk on and out into the castle yard.

“In this courtyard”, our guide trills, “The gallows used to stand.”  She points to the middle where a small Italian is selling ice cream and fizzy drinks from a small handcart.  I want to shout at the queue of impatient children,

“Stop playing about and show some respect!  You are running around on people’s souls”. But then our guide, whose name is Chloe, smiles at me.

“If you want to buy a cornet, feel free.  We will be in the old oubliette.”

I forego the delights of a Mr Whippy or a Tutti Frutti to follow Chloe down to the tiny room below.  I try to imagine what it was like to be dragged there, crying, wrists raw from rope burns, to be tipped into the blackness and forgotten.

Chloe’s perfume fills the tiny cell.  It is something by Armani.  I wonder what the true smell of this damned place must have been.  Time and the Tourist Board have obliterated the stink of the shit and piss of the Forgotten.

Next, Chloe pours us effortlessly into the gift shop. On these shiny flags men once grunted and strained in terror as doors broke and walls cracked and other terrified men screamed in, all hoping they were gruntier and luckier on the day lest they fell, slipping on their own slime and innards where the cashpoint now stands.  I buy a fridge magnet, my wonder downgraded to the purchase of a trinket made in China.

Later, we sit on a wooden bench, Chloe and I, masticating our locally made brie and cranberry ciabattas.  We arrange to meet again at an ancient mill pond just down the road.

It’s where they used to drown people’s grandmothers because they didn’t like their cats. Apparently their parmesan crusted sea bass fillet is to die for.