by Maguire, Ily
The Hollow
By Ily Maguire
SUN ROSE TEXT © 2014 ILY MAGUIRE
Cover Design © 2014 Saffie Design & Illustration
All Rights Reserved
For Tracy. Thank you.
“Tithonus”
By Alfred Lord Tennyson
(1809-1892)
Verse 1
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white hair’d shadow roaming like a dream
The ever silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
1
The room is grey. I’m naked and lying on cold metal, skin numb from a million pinpricks.
My eyes are open, but I’m unable to move. Dead bodies lie beside me, piled one on top of the other, invading the periphery without turning my head. My eyes burn. It smells like antiseptic syrup. This must be the smell of death.
Someone else is in the room. Talking. Not as loud as the fans whirring in the background. It’s all just humming in my ears until they get closer. Laughing. Two people, now three. Standing over me. Looking down.
“Are you sure there’s nothing?” One of them says. It’s a man. He’s tall. Wears a suit. Grey. Another man beside him is almost identical. I’d feel embarrassed if I felt anything at all.
“No pulse. She was dead on arrival,” a third person says. A woman. Wearing a long, white coat. A doctor.
“No!” I scream! “I’m not dead!” I scream even louder! Only in my head. No one reacts. No one hears me. The light in the room gets brighter. Warmer. My body is becoming lighter. Weightless. Am I floating? A pearly-white mist surrounds me. I’m elevating within the room, above the two men and the woman. They don’t notice, keeping their gaze on my still body below.
“But I’m right here!” I yell. “Why can’t you see me?”
Seeing through the gauze shroud that covers me, my hands are folded across my midsection. My arms and legs are an unnatural white color. Too white. Glowing white. I am a ghost looking upon a corpse.
One man lifts my cover and anger surges, wells up inside me above, while I remain still below. The doctor takes the sheet and taps it down with a gentle hand.
“Respect for the dead, please,” she says. Her voice is soft, but detached-sounding. Like it isn’t coming from her body.
“I’m not dead!” I yell. “I’m! Not! Dead!” Again, I’m the only one who hears me. The doctor turns, her hand indicating the door.
I suppress the panic long enough to use all potential energy to move. To make anything move. Slowly, my eyes shift, once left and back to center. Right. Center.
“Did you see that?” One suited man touches the other man’s arm to stop his retreat toward the exit. “I think her eyes moved.”
“Yes! Yes they did!” I scream, happiness filling my chest. I lower back down to my body.
“Reflex action, gentlemen. Shall we?” Her hand once again points toward the door. I can see the doctor scowl as she looks straight at me. Her eyes boring holes into my own. With one swift move, she pushes me on my rack, back into an icebox. The door slams with a loud and hollow click.
“Hello?” I’m back in my body, stuck inside this wall. My voice echoes in my head. I’m cold. It’s cold. Not like the warmth that was left behind. Where was I back there? Where am I now?
I’m in a dark metal box. Metal walls. Metal door. All around. My eyes are open and unseeing. There is ice on my eyelashes. I can feel them stick to my eyelids. My lips are parted, I can feel the cold inside my mouth. My nose is frozen.
I still can’t move. I can’t speak, but I’m not restrained. I’m contained and overtaken by exhaustion. My physical eyes stay open while my acuity shuts down.
When I wake up, I’ve been removed from the freezer. I’m in the main room, the same bodies are piled up as before, but this time I’m one of them. I’m about to go crazy when someone walks into the room. An attendant wearing navy-blue clothes, a V-neck shirt that matches long pants tied with a string.
He walks over to me, pulling me out of the pile and onto a gurney. I still can’t move. My eyes won’t close. They are dry and there’s a stabbing pain behind them. I wish he would close them for me. I wish they would close forever.
Instead, I muster up all my strength to move my eyes again, to get his attention. They roll to the side, then my eyelids close.
I can blink!
I blink again, only once. I feel sick.
“I know, I know,” the attendant says. He’s young with brown hair and brown eyes. His voice is hushed. “I see you seeing me.”
A tear rolls down my cheek and he wipes it away with his thumb. He knows I’m not dead.
“This will give us just enough time to get you to your room,” he says, sticking the side of my neck with a needle. He injects something cold. Burning cold. Almost hot.
He moves his hand up to my eyes and closes them. I exhale, relief washes over me. I have no choice but to drift back to sleep.
2
My eyes are open again. I opened them. I thought I would’ve been out of this place by now. The attendant said I would be in my room, but I’m not. Lying on the same gurney, another attendant wearing the same clothes is standing beside me. Hovering over me. Waiting for something.
I don’t hear anything and then I do. Like the volume in my head is being turned up, someone else is talking. About me. What to do with me.
“Second floor. Female ward. Let’s go.” I can’t see who’s talking, but it’s a man’s voice behind me. He clicks something by my head and starts to push me to the exit. Two double doors. Blue, I think. Rusty. A crack in one of the windows spiders out in all directions.
I am wheeled out of the icebox and across a hallway, into an elevator.
The doors close. It’s cool inside, but not cold like the room I just left.
“Look at her eyes,” the voice at my head says. He’s still out of my range of vision so I can’t see him.
“What about ’em?” The man at my feet replies. He is short with black hair. His voice is higher than I would’ve expected.
“There’s no color. Have you ever seen that before?”
“Frostbite.” The man by my feet answers. He glances at me, but doesn’t stare.
“There’s still ice in the corners,” the man I can’t see laughs. He reaches a finger down and touches my open eye. I can’t move my head out of the way, or even blink.
“Leave it alone. Don’t stare and don’t touch!” The second man says as the opposite door opens and he pulls me out of the elevator.
“It’s not like she can do anything about it. What’s she gonna do? Tattle on me?” Again he laughs. I try my hardest to close my eyes, but it’s no use. I’ve lost it. My emotions are locked into my body.
“Let’s just get her where we need to get her. Female ward, room B143.”
“What is she in for service or experiments?” The laughing man pushes harder.
“Does it matter?” The second man says and his voice implies sympathy. Or is it sadness.
I’m rolled past metal bars outside each room. No windows. No natural light. I hear the wheels slap through water on the floor.
We stop at a room and the door is opened. It’s dark inside. The gurney is pushed in and locked into place, parallel to another bed already in the room. Lights turn on with th
e movement. The blinds are closed. The attendant at my feet picks up the sheet while the other rolls me off the gurney and onto a bed. I land on my stomach, my face buried in a flat pillow that smells musty.
Pike.
Aegis.
My pillow.
The attendant that I can see rolls me onto my back, pushing me over so I don’t drop off the bed. My head is against my chest and it’s difficult to breathe.
“C’mon, let’s get outta here. She’s freakin’ me out,” the laughing attendant says. My eyes are filling with thawing water and he’s a bit blurry. He’s big and very tall with a blur of red, wavy hair. He moves away from the bed toward the door.
The second attendant lowers the sheet back over me and takes care to tuck in my feet and around my sides. He takes my head in his hands and gently aligns it with my spine. I’m now staring up at the ceiling, but I’m able to catch my breath. My eyes are slowly warming. I try to blink and I can close them about halfway. Better than nothing.
Before he leaves the room, he clicks something on a panel. The room gets warm. Almost hot. As he leaves, the light goes with him and I’m left in a dim room.
I try to focus on moving, otherwise, I may just panic. I can’t let myself panic. Not yet.
Glancing around the room, the walls are a dingy-white, paint chipping off from the top. A tin ceiling, ornate in its design is rusting. My eyes flood. I’m able to blink the water away. The vision is gone. I’m hallucinating. But what am I really seeing?
The room is not dingy at all, but stark-white. Shiny and new. Floor-to-ceiling windows are hidden by long panels of dark cloth, not allowing any light to get in. All around the base of the angular room are tiny lights, illuminating the floor. There isn’t much in the room for decoration, but there are touch screens mounted around the room. Off.
Tucked into bed and still unable to move. My neck is sore from the dull ache of an injection. I feel it and other things. Blood flows out to my fingers and toes. It’s faint, but it’s there. I open my mouth. I can open my mouth! I’m able to move my lips. Air shushes out. Warm. Stale.
“P-P—” Air presses through my lips. There’s a lump in my throat and I’m unable to -
“Please?” I push out. I tremble and then shake. Something is sinking in. Fear, maybe. Panic. I’m scared.
“Ssss-ssommme-one?” Someone has to be out there. Where are you? My voice is so small in this room. I can’t get any more words out, I almost choke on the terror. Where are the attendants? Are they coming back? What’s going to happen to me?
Suddenly a screen lights up and at first I think it’s voice activated, until a heavy drape across the room slides back and a nurse walks in. She clicks the same control pad the attendant did and the temperature immediately drops. Not much, though. It’s still warm. Her hand swipes across the screens as she passes them. One after the other lighting up. Everything about me is there on the walls: name, age, gender, height, weight, birthdate, birthweight, shoe size, waist, chest, and hip measurements. Even a recent picture of me is up on the wall. I’m surprised. I look pretty.
The door behind her shuts slowly, as if weighted. I didn’t hear it open in the first place. She has on a white jumper and white tights, white clogs and a white bow in her black hair.
“Good afternoon, Miss Campbell,” she says, putting a clipboard down on the small bedside table. I see a checklist and scribbled notes, but it doesn’t look like any writing or language I’ve ever seen. Why does she need this when she has everything up on the wall?
She leans over me, takes my arm, and pushes back the gown’s sleeve. I’m wearing a gown. I must have been dressed. When? The nurse presses something to my arm, something hard, and stamps something into my skin. I don’t feel anything other than the pressure. The nurse then takes another device and scans the mark she made on my arm. The screen is updated with current vitals such as oxygen and blood pressure.
The nurse walks to the curtains over the windows and open each one with a flick of an invisible switch. The room turns a brighter shade of grey. There is chain-linked metal over the windows, creating a criss-crossed shadow on the floor and on the bed. I see it and then it’s gone. Where did it go? Am I going crazy?
A million questions run through my head, and two make it out of my mouth.
“W-where? H-how long?”
The nurse doesn’t look up, just clicks a mechanical pencil and writes notes on the white clipboard. “You have got a lot of questions. Do not tax yourself. They will all be answered in time.”
I swallow hard. It’s like an egg is stuck in my throat. I try to force it down. If I can, I might be able to get out something that makes sense.
“Who am I?”
The nurse doesn’t react. I didn’t mean to say that. Not that way. I want to know how she knows who I am. Where did all this information come from?
“I-im – im –” I stutter.
Try again.
“Imm - b-b- bead?”
“No, Dear, this is not the Imperial Bead Hospital.”
I exhale. That was hard and I’m getting tired again. Then where am I? I want to know.
The nurse doesn’t smile. She writes notes slowly and deliberately after examining every part of my body. Then putting the pencil and clipboard down on a white side table, she opens a drawer and prepares a bandage by unrolling it and then rolling it tighter than before.
I’ve been hurt. It’s coming back to me. Why won’t she tell me more?
“I will have to change your dressing.” She puts down the gauze and pulls on rubber-like gloves.
My dressing? What dressing? For what?
My eyes widen and it shows up on one of the screens. The nurse glances up at it. She doesn’t look at me, but rather speaks to the wall.
“If you are anxious, I can sedate you.”
“N-no.” I shake my head and it feels like it is filled with thick, thawing liquid. And when I move my head from side to side, the center of mass shifts with it.
“Your bandages need changing and your wound needs to be cleaned from the gunshot.”I remember. Running. JJ.
“You sustained damage to your lower back. The shot did not go clean through and the doctor had to remove it before you were cleared for transport. I am going to flip you on your side now.”
The nurse folds back my sheets and turns them down. They are just as neat as if she had left them alone.
“You’ll feel my hand on your back with some pressure.”
I feel nothing.
I can see her lean into the bed.
She stabs me with something and I squeal. Pain shoots through my back, radiating up and down my legs. My arms shiver in pain and then it dulls.
“That is good. The IES injection is wearing off.”
I furrow my brow. It takes quite a bit of energy to do so and it surprises me when it shows up on the screen. I don’t know what she’s talking about.
“The interlaminar epidural steroid. Epidural. Pain relief for your back.”
“Shot?”
“Yes. Lower back. We had to inject the drugs directly to your spine through the space between your vertebrae. When you can feel we will know whether you sustained permanent neurological damage.”
I hear the sound of tape ripping off skin. I can’t feel it. It must not hurt enough.
“I am pulling off the bandage to clean and sanitize the wound. I am going to replace the gauze pads for fresh ones.”
She talks like a robot. But at least she’s talking. There’s strange comfort in that.
I can hear her rubber gloves skid over my skin.
“You are all set. Your dressings are fresh and they will not need redressing until this evening.”
“N-no! No!” I shout. My voice loud and choppy. I don’t want her to leave. Don’t leave!
“I will be back this evening to change your bandages. I will bring you something to eat. Do you have any requests?” Bile rises in my throat and I feel sick.
She turns and swipes at the screen
. A scan of my brain appears on the screen. The word inconclusive is reported on the bottom. She swipes again and my most recent food intake comes up on the wall. She clicks and scrolls. The light changing so quickly, I think my headache might return. Even the weight of my recent evacuation is there. In plain daylight.
“You have been given nutrients osmotically and intravenously.” She doesn’t look at me, but points to a large bag of clear fluid below one of the screens. I hadn’t noticed it, being so small compared to the wall of technology. The bag drips out the fluid into the clear tubing attached to the port on my hand.
I still don’t feel anything.
The nurse closes the screens. “You should get some feeling back soon. Time will tell, of course, but it should not be too much longer. I will come back and give you something for the pain when it does. When the epidural wears off, you will feel the wound, though it is almost completely healed,” her voice drifts.
“N-nurse,”
“Yes?” She stops.
“How… long h-here?”
“A few days,” she states.
Without the screens, the room goes back to grey. She walks over to the curtains and draws them again. The little lights on the floor illuminate.
“The kind of wound you had,” she stands beside my bed and puts the bandages back into the drawer. She picks up her clipboard and writes as she continues, “would normally take months to fully heal. Your body has done it in a fraction of the time.” She walks to the door and opens it.
“Will…I…leave?” I yell.
She stops and turns.
“No one knows you are here. No one is coming to get you. If you think about leaving, you will get stopped. They will come after you.”
A screen lights up as if reacting to the horror of her statement. Leaving the door open, she walks back over to me and takes my hand, palm up. She stamps it with a pronged shot.
“Ouch!” I yelp. I feel that. The pain is severe enough to bring back my voice. The screen goes black. Something is still there in my hand. I can feel the pressure in my palm. The nurse then leans down, her face beside mine.
