Caleb collected himself, with a deep, heaving breath. He could have given the man his name, but what would the man have said? What name could he have given? None of his names were right, and none of his words were correct. All he was, every part of his being was just a collection of mistakes and phrases that when repeated, meant nothing to the rest of the world. But every word, every phrase had grave importance to him. he supposed that some of his words were meaningul, some of them meant something. If he had said his name was Arthur Prince, maybe that phrase would have evoked a response in the Doctor - but he hadn't said that was his name. It wasn't because Caleb didn't believe it to be true, but there was still such shame and anxiety that came with saying that was his name, and that he was the one who should have died but hadn't - the one who had been riddled with bullets, but had not died. He had seen death. He had looked into the afterlife, and seen what came after, and he found himself afraid. Fear was ever present. He had lived a life that had been founded on fear - fear of an unknowable enemy, fear of a concept; Terror. He was afraid of Fear itself. What was a soldier supposed to do then?
He knew what comes after. He had died.
Caleb walked through the halls of the asylum unhindered, unharrassed by orderlies. He was in a haze, and he was a ghost - they would not have seen him even if he wanted them too. He was lost in his thoughts. He didn't have a very good memory, but he remembered that he stood in the centre of the void and the solar radiation from a faraway black sun cooked his lungs from the inside, the blood boiling around this volcanic gap where something important was, once. His teeth, when he returns to that place, will begin to dissolve into latticeworks of carbon and calcium, his fingernails will turn yellow and curl, before they fall off into the infinite void like scales off of a fish; flensed beyond recognition. If he had a heart instead of scars, he'd feel. But when he had died, all his emotions seemed capable of was ice and sea-water. Were there anything there, he would have turned feral and gorge on their hearts. But there was nothing there, just blackness; and himself, opened up for a chaplain's quest to find the premature source of death. The darkness goes on forever in all directions, and no amount of blonde hair and blue eyes will change the fact that he was alone, and he was small, and he was in the darkness without any light. There was nothing, nothing but the darkness and eventually, it began to creep into his core as well; making his fingers turn black from rigor mortis, deprived of the nails they sought in life. In that desolate void, the place where all souls go when they die, his knucklebones had just begun to erode when he heard a voice, a voice in the darkness. In the murklins, he had rowed to the center in a ribcage with no heart; all the bacteria of his gut rising up to sing.
The bacteria had sung their song - worthy, worthy, worthy, repeating the words endlessly in his head. But the Other had said something else. It had been a quote from the Bible, what he had said. He remembered the movements of his mouth, and the way he had smelled. It was like summer on the wind, and it seemed like the nuclear winter that had descended on Caleb's soul would finally have ended. But such hopes were ended swiftly, with the Bible verse the man had chosen to recite. "He will wipe every tear from their eyes. There will be no more death or mourning or crying or pain, for the old order of things has passed away." The quote was from Revelations, Caleb knew. He had loved the Bible, and the good Lord too, when he had lived. But he was dead now. But perhaps, now that Caleb was dead that quote was more important. He had no death left in him, and no more mourning. He only had to rid himself of tears and pain, and then, the old order of things would go away, as readily as his calendar and significantly more easily. He dreamt of that place, that void. he could recall it so well. It had been like an underground sea cave, with the surface of the water as black as night. They said that they would find their enemies in caves, but the truth was, there was nothing but old boxes and unused bombshells from an attack that never happened. It was his refuge.
The patient who was Caleb and Not Caleb- Arthur and the Other opened the door to his cell. His room. It was always unlocked - they had forgotten that a person lived there, and they had most certainly forgotten that a dangerous, unstable man with a violent past lived in there. Caleb could have wandered the halls if he had so chosen- but he did not choose. What he did instead was sit in his cell, back to the door, staring at the calendar. The smell of filth and decay greeted his nostrils when he opened the door. The calendar stood in stark, bloody glory on the far wall. The red marks on the wall were all created from the blood from his veins, and the marks that were made on the wall were perfect, short smears. They were all uniform. There were one thousand, ninety five marks on the wall. Today was his anniversary. He had been in this place for three years, and they had all forgotten about him. Nobody survived that long. Nobody but him.
And so, like always, Caleb sat on the floor, with his back to the wall. He watched the calendar. He dreamed of the cave.
