PART TWO:

AN ORPHANAGE ON A HILL

A PAST REVISITED

2005

Once, there was a boy who lived in a castle.

It was a rather modern castle, with wide windows and sleek polished floors. It had wide open kitchen spaces and a living room filled with expensive leather furniture and even more expensive paintings held in equally expensive frames.

 And like many castles, it held many secrets.

 On some days, the biggest secret was cook stealing tiny slithers of chocolate from the pantry. On other days, the secret was the boy itself.

There was a room – barely bigger than a closet – tucked away in the basement of the castle. And when the boy had been naughty, or sometimes for no reason at all, his father would lock him inside.

It was dark and it was cold and there was nowhere to sit and nothing on the walls. Sometimes the boy would be locked in there minutes. Sometimes hours. And on occasion, full days at a time.

When he was very young, he would curl up and make himself tiny and cry himself into a state. As he got older, he learnt to school his expression into one of complete calm. He learnt to always keep a torch in his pocket and a book tucked in his shirt.

And when the walls felt as though they were closing in, the boy would open a book and let the pages carry him to lands elsewhere.

Yet no matter how many books he read – the castle remained dark and the room in the basement remained small.