In a matter of minutes, Iestyn was once again alone.
For a while, he stood and breathed, just trying to hold together his frayed edges. Henry was dead. Lucifer wasn't going to let Iestyn die. Nobody was coming. He envisioned the years stretching out in front of him, in the dark, alone, a shell of a man in a rough jumpsuit, and he felt the bleakness of it all set in.
With wooden movements, he eventually picked up the food on the paper plate, cold and grey as it was, and choked down a mouthful. It only stayed a moment before he was vomiting up watery yellow bile into the toilet, sobbing from the pain.
He'd never felt as bad as he did in this prison, in this moment. He tried to reach out to Henry through the bars, just to be able to touch him, but he could only just brush the side of his head. He slept the first night like that, strands of hair wrapped around his fingers.
Iestyn might not have been being assaulted, but to be left totally alone, without a glimpse of daylight, with nothing to occupy his mind and no break in the monotony except for the twice daily meal delivery- that was still torture. And the air was cool, but it wasn't dry. And Henry, well-
The smell of the blood was first, since nobody had cleaned it up. Fresh with that metallic tang turned old and thick, as Henry's body began to slowly decompose. After a few days, the smell was horrific. And Iestyn had nothing else to do but sit in the corner of his cell and watch as the skin started to slip off his flesh, turning grey and green and brown. The light wasn't bright enough to see everything so the shadows added further horrors, giving shapes that weren't there, turning Henry's face into a bloated, twisted mask. In later years, the slightest smell of decay would trigger Iestyn into intense vomiting spells and visit him with screaming night terrors.
He did try not to look at first, but there was nothing else to look at. He began talking to Henry, just for the sound of a voice, and worse was when he began thinking he could hear someone talking back when he wasn't looking. He didn't try to reach out anymore. It was almost a relief when flies managed to get in, because the smell lessened as maggots ate the rotting flesh. There would be a cloud of black flies wanting to escape soon. Iestyn forgot Lucifer's threat against Evie and stopped trying to eat. He didn't know how long it had been. Maybe he was dead too, and this was Hell.