In the prison, time did not pass. It folded.
That was what Harland Bixby told himself each morning as he passed through the final checkpoint. His shoes squeaked across the waxed linoleum, and his ID badge hung just slightly crooked, no matter how carefully he clipped it.
His job title was vague: “Compliance Observation Specialist.” Mostly, it meant he stared at monitors and filled out forms, pretending not to hear the things he heard or see the things he saw. The walls were too thick for echo, yet whispers still moved through the vents, trailing along the ducts like rumors that had teeth.
On Tuesday, or what claimed to be Tuesday, Harland entered Unit Nine and discovered a mime in Cell 13.
Not a prisoner.
A mime.
He wasn’t dressed as one, not in the theatrical sense. He simply was one. And not the cheery type you might find juggling in a park. This mime stood motionless, cloaked in silence that felt aggressive. His gloves were gray with age. His face was an unbroken mask, blank and unblinking. His shadow moved when he did not.
Harland checked the records. No inmate was listed in Cell 13. The cell had been sealed off for years after the east wall caved in and took three men with it. There should have been nothing there. And yet, the lights above it buzzed, and inside stood the mime, eating what appeared to be an invisible apple.
It made no noise. Still, Harland heard the crunch.
He tried to file a report. The form rejected the cell number, flashing a polite error message: Invalid unit. He rebooted the system. It crashed before he could try again.
The next morning, Cell 13 was gone. Between 12 and 14, only a blank concrete wall remained. Harland knocked on it, lightly, without much hope.
Something knocked back.
***
They moved him to the night shift.
At exactly 3:33 a.m., the monitors began to flicker. Always the same pattern. Always static. Always the same camera angle: Cell 13, which officially no longer existed.
One night, every screen went dark and then lit up at once. Each showed a silent video of a man miming escape from a box. Harland watched it loop for several minutes before noticing something terrifying. The man on the screen was him. Same badge. Same clothes. Same twitch in the left eye when under stress. He pounded on the imaginary glass, eyes wide, mouth open.
Harland pulled the power cables. The screens stayed on.
He reported it to Warden Gentry. She listened while buttering dry toast in the staff cafeteria.
“There is no Cell 13,” she said calmly, spreading nothing across the bread. “And you’ve been working too many doubles.”
Harland stared. The knife in her hand never touched the toast. The butter never left the wrapper.
That night, he found his name missing from the duty log. In its place, just a blank space and a timestamp: 00:00.
***
The next time he entered Unit Nine, the hallway seemed longer. His boots echoed louder than usual. The air felt heavier, not with humidity, but with expectation.
The concrete wall where Cell 13 had once stood now had a door. Unmarked. Half open.
Inside, the mime waited.
No bars. No bed. Just a room made of silence and a floor that didn’t reflect light.
Harland stepped forward. His hands moved without permission. He reached for his badge, for his radio, for something that might tether him to reality.
The mime raised one hand. His fingers curled inward, slowly, as if grasping a string.
Harland’s mouth snapped shut. Not physically. Not yet. But it felt sealed from the inside out.
The mime tugged gently at the air.
Harland felt it: a tightness in his chest, then his limbs, then his thoughts.
A performance was beginning, and he was the only one who had not rehearsed.
He turned to run.
The door was gone.
***
In his final report, scrawled on the back of an outdated shift schedule, Harland wrote the only thing that made sense anymore:
“This is not a prison. This is a stage.”
At the bottom, below his signature, someone had added another line. The handwriting was unfamiliar, careful, and impossibly neat.
It read: “Applause.”
***
No one remembers seeing Harland leave. But his badge still scans. His chair still swivels. And sometimes, when the lights flicker near Cell 13, something knocks. Only once. Always once.
No one answers. Not anymore.