Duggan had just begun to slide into a half-sleep when they brought the man into the cell. He pushed his head up and watched the constables haul his new roommate in just as they had done to him hours earlier. In the dim light that fell through from the corridor into the open room, Duggan could see that the man being carried in was exceptionally thin and looked a good way smaller than the average man. The two constables, each with an arm in their hands, carried him so that his feet were hovering just above the floor, with no sound of exertion or strained labour. To Duggan, it at first looked as if they were escorting in a waxwork figurine or a wooden statue. Some religious sculpture, perhaps. It was only when they set the man on the bed opposite and he raised his arms for them to remove his cuffs that it was assured he was a living, breathing man. One of the constables turned on the timed light as they left, and the two men threw up their hands at the sudden fluorescence that filled the cell room.
“Jesus, Randell, I was just nodding off,” Duggan said. The constable who’d turned on the light smiled wryly at them before slamming the door shut and locking it.
Duggan sat up and let his eyes adjust. The alcohol still very much ran through him, and he swayed for a moment, allowing the bile that had risen to sink back into him. He looked at the man opposite him in the stark light. He was, undoubtedly, one of the most spindly and emaciated men he had ever laid eyes on. Under a greased-back head of hair, his cheekbones protruded like knife handles from under his face, and his neck was some strained, elongated bridge of flesh down to whatever lay under his shirt. The man’s eyes were well sunken in, and their distant beadiness seemed to create some great valley between them.
“What they get you for?” Duggan asked.
The man appeared slightly startled by the sudden conversation. He looked to the door for a second before speaking, and when he did, the voice came dry and withered. “Stealing.”
“What’d you steal? You rob a petrol station or something?”
“Nuh. A bottle bank.”
“You were stealing from a bottle bank? How’d you do that? You put a fishing rod through the little hole or something? Pull ‘em out one by one?”
The man didn’t answer.. He looked at the small window that was on the opposite side of the room to the door he’d been brought in through. He craned his neck to look up at it and twisted his head as if examining what could lie beyond the bars and the glass, like he’d already forgotten the outside world.
“What’s your name?” Duggan asked.
The man kept studying the window. “Me?”
“No, the other bloke in with us. Yes, you.”
“Felch.”
Duggan gave his new compatriot another look up and down. “Duggan,” he said. His eyes followed Felch’s to the window. “Already dreaming of escape? Don’t like these small spaces?”
“Oh, I don’t mind them really. Just don’t like being put in them against my will.”
“Yeah, me neither. But if you’re like me, you get used to boxes like this. If you like the drink as much as me, they stick you in ‘em every weekend.” Duggan laughed drowsily.
He watched as Felch got up. When he did, Duggan could see that the man’s stature probably didn’t even reach five feet tall. Perhaps he could be classed as a dwarf, he thought. Perhaps I share my cell with a little person who makes his trade diving into bottle banks and selling their contents back to breweries and wineries in some below-the-books recycling scheme.
The small man was now studying the door, following its outside edge with his eyes, reaching to touch the frame with pale fingers like sickle moons rendered in staccato.
“You’re a small fella ain’t you?”
Felch did not sound offended. “You’re a big man.”
“Ah, I’m only as big as I need to be,” Duggan smiled and put a hand on his large gut. “This body’s built for two things, and that’s drinkin’ and pissin’ off police. I don’t mean any harm, though, that Randell knows me well enough by now. He’ll let me out in the morning when I’m less, well, like this.”
When he looked up again, Felch was studying Duggan in the same way he had the different parts of the room. His eyes, hollowed and haggard as they were, seemed to trace his entire body without moving. It felt as though, while those eyes sat within the sockets of the man on the bed opposite, wherever they watched from was a place beyond this cell, beyond sunshine and beyond humanity. It was as if sitting opposite him was a porcelain doll or puppet ready for show, the kind with the lifeless eyes. They were dark things, and Duggan did not want them to look at him. The timer clicked, and the lights shut off.
“Well, there’s our cue,” Duggan said, his voice quiet. He lay back down on the bed. “Tomorrow’s a new day and all that.”
Duggan could feel, even in the pitch darkness of the cell, that Felch’s eyes were still on him. But after a little while, the alcohol took hold and his eyes grew heavy. As he felt himself being lulled into sleep, he heard the soft sounds of movement from across the room. He thought to remain awake, try to stay conscious, but the lustre of rest had gripped him so tightly he could do little else but allow himself to drift off.
The nightmare came soon after. In it, Duggan was lying back on a grass verge overlooking a serene valley. He was taking in the last of the sun, letting his face feel its warmth. He had a large bottle in his hand, and when he brought it to his lips, he felt the cool wine pour down his throat. Just as he’d had his fill, however, the hand he was holding the bottle in began to push it further into his mouth. Against his will, his own arm forced the bottle so that the wider belly of it reached his teeth. He began to gag. The sounds from within him were not coming out, as the bottle had completely cut off his breathing. To his horror, his jaw began to widen. Wider than any man’s jaw should be without breaking off completely. But it did, and the accommodated bottle scraped against his teeth as it was engorged further and further by his throat until, as his eyes looked down, he could see in some blurry and panicked vision the end of it slide out of sight. Duggan was screaming now, but the bottle was lodged in his oesophagus so that all that came out were muffled drones. He thrashed around on that grass verge and clawed at his chest, and his lungs reached for air, and before long, black clouds closed in from the edge of his vision. “What he saw fell away into darkness, and he into a deeper abyss of sleep where dreams did not reach.

Duggan awoke to a violent rattle of the bed. His vision was blurred, and his head pounded. His mouth was as dry as bone.
“Where is he?” It was Randell, standing over him. The policeman’s hand was over his mouth and nose, and the words came out muffled.
“What?”
“Your cellmate, the fuckin’ midget thing we brought in. Where is he?”
Duggan looked across to the bed opposite and saw that no one was lying there. He went to say something, but instead he retched at the smell that met his nose. Dried vomit lay in an unmoving trail down from his mouth, across the bed and onto the floor.
“Jesus Christ,” Duggan managed to say before quickly retching again.
“No, not him. Felch. You telling me you slept through him somehow escaping from this room?”
Duggan remembered the horror of the dream, remembered how he’d seemed to slip off the edge of the verge and into darkness. He reckoned an air raid siren wouldn’t have pulled him out of that kind of sleep.
Randell turned and spat onto the cell floor, then walked back to the open door. “Fuck it. Get out of here, Duggan. I’m sending you a bill for this clean-up job, too. I thought you could handle your drink better than this.”
“So did I,” Duggan groaned. He sat up. His stomach ached, and it felt as though some poison lay deep within him, one that had taken root and poured out its spores into his every muscle. He put his hands to his gut and winced at the pain. He’d never had a hangover like this.
He got up, and the pain worsened. Slowly, achingly, he limped across the room and turned back once to look at the bed on which Felch had watched him from. Where the hell had he gone? Had he really been some escape artist, had he really squeezed out of the door and into the night?
Duggan made his way down the corridor and out into the station reception. He could hear Randell, his voice panicked. He was talking to another constable in one of the backrooms.
“How are we gonna tell the chief inspector we lost the guy we caught trying to crawl through that poor girl’s letterbox? That he just vanished into thin air? What are we gonna tell her?”
The pain in his stomach reared up and Duggan squeezed his eyes tight to weather it. As he pulled open the front door, he had one thing on his mind: go home, sleep it off, and laugh about it next week at the pub with everyone else. He trudged out into the new day, swearing to himself he’d never touch white wine again.

Randell was picking at the loose skin around his cuticles later that morning when one of his associates, a younger constable by the name of Farrigham, knocked on his office door and stood at the opening with a notebook in one hand. He was frowning.
“Yeah?”
Farringham took a moment to look over the contents of the notebook, some amateur actor trying to learn his lines. “Sir, we, er, got a call from Mr. Gilford who lives out on Broadend.”
“This is the bloke who keeps complaining about the noise the kids next door to him make?”
“Yeah, but it’s not about that. He says he was looking out his window and saw Duggan walking across the park.”
“Duggan doesn’t live far from there.”
“Mr. Gilford said he watched him for a while. He looked in a bad way. Said he keeled over and started heaving like—” Farringham looked at his notes quickly. “Like a cat does or something.”
Randell pushed his fingers to his temple. “Farringham, I’ve got more pressing matters than a town drunk who throws up in public.”
“Well, that’s not it, sir. Mr. Gilford said he watched Duggan bring up this great big mass of something. Like he’d swallowed a Christmas jumper and it was all coming out slowly. He said he watched him throw this thing up until it was all out, and then he just collapsed afterwards,” Farrigham said. He looked at his notes one more time and took a breath. “And then he said, er, that the thing he’d vomited up got up and ran out into the bushes.”
Randell sat stunned, his bottom lip moving as if to protest whatever fiction this kid had been fed by a senile old man, but nothing came out. Eventually, he asked, “And where’s Duggan? What’s happened to him?”
Farringham let the hand carrying the notepad drop to his side. “He’s still there. Just lying in the middle of the park. He hasn’t moved.”