by Amy Cross
"Fucking chaos," he continues. "Sorry, kid. Didn't mean to use foul language." He stares at me for a moment. "You know who you remind me of? I used to go to a school run by nuns. You remind me of 'em. All of 'em, actually. All kinda rolled into one. You've just got that kind of face. Kinda... nun-like."
"Huh," I say, trying to work out if he's complimenting me or not.
"You like nuns?" he asks.
"Do I like nuns?" I stare at him for a moment. "I suppose so, but I really need to be getting to school. I don't want to be late."
"Pretty old-fashioned kinda girl, are you?"
"I don't think so."
"Sure you are. You seem like you were born a few decades too late. You're not like most kids these days. They're always racing around, daubing graffiti everywhere. It's good to see a kid who's got a level head on her shoulders."
"I have to go," I say, stepping past him, "but I hope you find Bryce Avenue."
"God willing," the guy says.
After I've walked a couple of paces along the sidewalk, I feel a sharp pain in my shoulder. Instinctively, I turn and reach up to make sure that there's not a bee or a wasp nearby. The pain is still there, though, and after a moment I notice that the thin-faced man is staring at me. He's holding something in his hand, and it takes a few seconds before I realize that it's a syringe.
"Are you okay?" he asks, glancing back along the road, as if he's checking to make sure that no-one has spotted us.
"I'm..." I start to say, just as I feel myself start to weaken. My brain seems to be getting heavier and heavier, to the point that I can only stagger a few meters away before dropping to my knees. I try to call out for help, but it's as if I've completely forgotten how to speak. Finally, I feel someone grab me by the shoulders and start dragging me along the sidewalk, and after a moment I'm roughly manhandled into the trunk of a car. Everything goes black and I'm struck by the most powerful sense of nausea, before my heavy head pulls me into a deep sleep. The last thing I remember thinking is that I dropped my lunch on the sidewalk.
Elizabeth
15 years ago
"Hey Lizzie," says Holly as she comes over to join me at the sink. She's smiling nervously, and it's clear that she hasn't simply come over to pass the time of day. She wants something. She's got an agenda.
"Don't call me that," I reply, focusing on the task at hand: I'm rewashing all the cups and saucers, trying to get them to really shine. It's a task I've been putting off for too long.
"You prefer Elizabeth?" she asks.
"It's my name."
"So's Lizzie."
"I prefer Elizabeth."
She stares at me for a moment. "Sorry Elizabeth. I didn't mean to get your back up."
"It's fine," I say. "There's really no reason to apologize, just... Just call me Elizabeth."
"So do you mind if I ask you a question?" she continues.
"Of course," I say, smiling politely. I'd prefer it if she'd just leave me alone, but Holly seems like the kind of girl who can't stop digging. I admire her in a way, but I wish she'd stop poking her nose in affairs that don't concern her.
"Those bones -" she starts to say.
"I've already told you," I say quickly, hoping to deflect the question, "we don't know why he takes them. He just -"
"Not those bones," she says, interrupting me. "The other ones. The ones you've got down here."
I take a moment to scrub a particularly difficult stain off the side of one of the cups. "They're nothing really," I tell her, feeling as if my mouth is starting to dry up. "Just some small bird bones I found. Quite interesting to study. I was hoping to see if I could put them in order, but of course that's impossible. I don't have any reference books, and the bones themselves are old and brittle so..." I set the cup on the rack to dry. "Sometimes it's hard filling the days down here, Holly. You end up with the strangest little hobbies."
"Like... collecting bones?"
"You think I should throw them away?"
As I continue to wash the cups, I can't help but notice that Holly seems to be observing me. I wish she'd go and do something else - anything else - but for some reason, I seem to have really caught her attention this morning. Pulling a plate from the water, I intentionally bang it against the side of the sink, hoping to wake Natalie. Unfortunately, when I glance across the room, I see that she's still sleeping soundly.
"You find me interesting?" I ask eventually.
"Kind of," Holly replies.
"You think I should be screaming all the time, trying to bash the door down and get out of here?"
"Have you ever tried?"
"You don't know anything about me."
"So tell me."
Sighing, I look over at her. "You really won't stop asking questions, will you?"
"What were you like when you first arrived here?" she asks. "How much has this place changed you?"
"A lot."
"Did you ever scream and bang on the door?"
I pause for a moment. "It's been ten years since I arrived. For the first five years, I was completely alone. The only other person I ever saw was him." I take a deep breath. I hate lying, but I have no choice. "Before Natalie came, I had to spend every day alone. Sometimes I just stared at the wall. Sometimes I tried to find a way out. Sometimes I cleaned and tidied. Sometimes I cried. Of course it changed me."
I continue to wash some cups, hoping desperately that I might have shut her up, at least for a few hours. After all, even someone as precocious and tenacious as Holly has to realize eventually that she's hit a brick wall. I'm certainly not going to open up and have some kind of big heart-to-heart discussion with her. I've learned over the years that it's better to keep damaging emotions locked up inside; in fact, that's something I learned long before I came to the basement.
"We're going to try something today," Holly says after a moment. "Are you in?"
"Try something?"
She nods.
"What are you going to try?"
She smiles. "I think you know."
I shake my head.
"The stuff Natalie's been talking about. The power."
"There's no such thing."
"Prove it."
"Holly..." I pause, trying to work out what fresh complication Holly's planning to introduce to our lives. I've spent years working carefully to keep a lid on Natalie's wildest fantasies, and now Holly seems determined to bring everything back out into the open. I know she means well, but she doesn't understand the damage she could cause. "I don't know," I say, stalling for time while I try to come up with a convincing way to stop her from pushing on with this insane idea. "I suppose it all depends on -"
"Natalie thinks we can do things," she continues. "I know it sounds crazy, and maybe I've lost my mind since I came down here, but I think it's worth a try. You saw what she did with that light bulb, and the bars on the window. She thinks we can do other things if we work together. It's better than sitting around here just waiting for him to come and drag one of us back upstairs, isn't it? What if she's right? What if there's something we can do to get out of this place?"
"Natalie has a lot of ideas," I reply. "They rarely turn out to be anything more than the fantasies of a fragile mind. It's best not to encourage her."
"So you're saying there isn't any kind of power down here?"
"I'm saying that it sounds like a total waste of time," I reply, finishing the last of the cups. I look down at the soapy water and realize that I've got nothing left to wash.
"Everything's a waste of time down here," Holly replies. "Even breathing. Come on, if you're so sure that it's a load of bullshit, what's the harm in joining in? Give it an hour and if nothing happens, nothing happens. You haven't lost anything. If you really think there's nothing going on, then prove it. We want to try something really big, something that'll settle it one way or the other." She waits for me to say something. "Or do you want to wash those dishes for the tenth time in a week?"
"I need to wash the sheets," I
say, "and I need to mop the -"
"You're not our mother," she says suddenly. "We're going to do this anyway, with or without you."
"You don't understand," I say firmly. "Some things can't be undone."
"You already know about it, don't you?" she asks. "I can tell from the look in your eyes. Why are you so desperate to keep it hidden?"
Sighing, I try to work out what to say next. Holly's so enthusiastic, and so determined, I feel she'll push Natalie to keep testing the power. Perhaps I should join them after all; given that I know more about the power than either of them, I can probably block anything they try to do.
"One hour," Holly says after a moment. "Just one hour. If nothing comes of it, we can forget the whole thing. Please, Elizabeth. Let's just give it a try."
"Fine," I say, flustered by her constant antagonism. "We'll do whatever stupid thing you want to do, but after it's finished, you'll shut up about the whole thing. Is that understood?"
She nods.
"I need to clean up here," I continue, "and then I need to go to the bathroom, but then I'll be with you. Just... Promise me that you'll agree to stop if Natalie starts suffering too much. I don't want that poor girl to go through any more trauma."
"Sure."
"And promise me that you'll give up on these ridiculous ideas after they've been proved wrong."
"Sure."
Sighing, I remove my apron and hang it on the hook next to the sink. "I'll be with you in a few minutes," I say, unable to shake a feeling of impending disaster.
"Sounds great," she says. "By the way, I know those aren't bird bones. I don't know what they are, but they're not from birds."
Before I have a chance to reply, she turns and walks across the basement, making her way to the other side where Natalie is slowly starting to wake up. I turn and look over at the little pile of bones by my bedsheets. If only they were bird bones, I'd have been able to throw them out a long time ago.
Ben Lawler
Today
Huge spotlights blaze through the rain as a helicopter hovers above the hospital. Half a dozen police cars are parked nearby, while patrols use torches to search the grounds inch by inch. It seems the local cops are out in force tonight, all in aid of the search for Samantha Briggs. Still, I can't shake the feeling that she's long gone by now. This isn't a case of a girl wandering out of a hospital; this is something else, something that's connected to the house. Somewhere, Elizabeth and Natalie are involved.
"You're really pulling out all the stops," I say as I step out of the back of the car. "You think she's still gonna be here?"
"You'd better hope so," Detective Regan says, leading my by the arm toward the hospital's main door. Even though it's just twenty meters or so, we're soaked by the time we get under cover. "If she dies tonight, Mr. Lawler, I'm still treating this as a murder investigation, so if you know who these two women are, now's the time to come clean. I don't care why you arranged this, but there's a girl's life at stake."
"I don't know where she is," I reply. Although I'm technically telling the truth, and I don't know the identity of the women who apparently came and took Samantha out of the hospital, I've definitely got my suspicions. After all, can it really be a coincidence that all this is happening just after I went to visit Elizabeth Torbett and Natalie Day? Then again, what would they want with Samantha?
"This place is fucking chaos," Regan mutters as he leads me into the building.
"You need to get some men out to the house," I say.
"She won't get that far."
"She might, if she's determined."
"Why would she go there?" he asks, turning to me. "After what you did to her, why the fuck would she ever want to go back?"
"I didn't do anything to her," I say firmly, "and I'm not saying she wants to go back. Just send a couple of men out there to take a look. What harm could it do?"
He stares at me for a moment, and then finally he calls over to a couple of nearby cops. "Get out to Willow Road! Make sure there's no sign of the girl!"
As we make our way past reception, I can't help but notice that there are an awful lot of police here. It's almost as if units from other counties have been pressed into service as part of the search for Samantha, which in turn suggests that maybe some high-level political pressure has been applied to the situation. I guess it was very convenient for Mayor Jones when Samantha was dying and the case could be pinned on me; now that she seems to be up and about, and missing, the situation has been thrown into chaos. If Samantha's awake, she can explain what really happened to her back in the house; she can exonerate me and say who put her into the ice bath. First, though, we need to find her. Or rather, I need to find her. At least with his men heading out to the house on Willow Road, Regan should be well off the scent. There's no way Elizabeth and Natalie would take her there.
"Police!" Regan shouts as we push our way through a gaggle of nurses. "Out of the way!"
Eventually we reach a small hospital room, where an empty bed is all that remains of Samantha Briggs' brief stay. Various pieces of equipment have been pushed aside, their wires dangling down to the floor, while the creased bed is conspicuously empty.
"Who's in charge here?" Regan asks.
"That would be me," replies a doctor, turning from one of the monitors. "Before you ask, I don't have an explanation for you right now. One minute she was in a coma, the next minute she's walking out the front door." He grabs a bloodied tube that's hanging from a bag of chemicals. "Looks like she took out her feeding tube and catheter. Disconnected herself from the machines, even removed her hospital bracelet. She really wanted to get out of here."
"I was told she was in a coma," Regan continues. "I was told categorically that she couldn't even talk!"
"She was."
"So what the hell happened?"
"That's what we're trying to figure out."
"You didn't have security on her room?" Regan replies, clearly annoyed.
"We're a hospital," the doctor says. "Security is your job. To us, she was just a patient."
"So she woke up," Regan continues, walking over to the bed. "She was in a coma, but she woke up. People do wake up, don't they? That's the whole idea of her being here. You're trying to get her to wake up. So it's not that unusual."
"Are you kidding?" the doctor replies. "Coma patients don't just wake up like they've been napping. She was in a scale four coma, down from five this afternoon and six this morning. She was barely responding to stimuli. Her body was shutting down. I'm going over the data, but it's not possible for the human body to just fire up and recover so quickly. There's got to be something we missed. People don't get up and walk out of a hospital like this."
"Did she talk to anyone while she was going out?"
"Not as far as we know," the doctor says.
"Didn't anyone see her?" I ask.
"Only in reception," the doctor continues, "and by that point she was past any of the spots where she might have been recognized. To them, she was just a patient going outside with two friends. Sure, it's a little strange this late at night while there's a storm brewing, but they had no reason to stop them. This is a hospital, not a prison camp."
"And then?" Regan asks.
The doctor shrugs. "They walked out into the night, and they haven't been seen since. About fifteen minutes later a nurse came in to check on her, and found that she was missing. That's when we called you."
"You got cameras outside this place?"
"We're checking them now, but it was dark. I doubt they'll have picked much up."
"What about these women?" Regan asks. "Someone must have seen them."
The doctor nods. "I spoke to the receptionist. Apparently none of them were talking. The two women were walking a little way behind Samantha, as if they were letting her lead the way. We've got some footage from the cameras down by the main door. I'm having it sent up now." He pauses for a moment. "You have to find her. In her current state, and with so much rain, I can't e
ven begin to list all the possible dangers she's facing right now."
"You need to check the house on Willow Road," I say. "I'll go and -"
"You're not going anywhere," Regan says, grabbing my arm. As he speaks, the lights start to flicker and buzz, momentarily shrouding us in darkness. "What the fuck's going on with this place?"
"The storm's hitting our power supply," the doctor replies, looking up at the ceiling as the lights flicker again. "Don't worry about us. We've got back-up generators. Worry about Samantha. She needs to be here. The storm's getting worse and worse, and she's only wearing a hospital gown. Even if she was fully healthy, she'd be at risk from exposure. In her current state, I doubt she can last more than a couple of hours."
"Am I still under arrest?" I ask, turning to Regan.
He stares at me, and for a moment it's clear that he's not sure what to do with me. "You're not in the clear yet, Mr. Lawler. You can go home, but don't leave town."
As he hurries out of the room to answer his phone, I find myself left with just the doctor and a couple of nurses. They're still checking all the equipment, and it's clear that they're genuinely panicking about the latest developments.
"So there's no way she could have just woken up?" I ask. "Even if it'd take a miracle, isn't it at least possible?"
The doctor shakes his head. "It's not how the human body works. The only explanation I can come up with so far is that the equipment was faulty. Somehow we were fooled into believing she was in a coma, but in reality she was just..." He pauses for a moment. "Even then, it doesn't make sense. Half a dozen different machines would have had to malfunction simultaneously, without being detected..." He steps back from the monitors. "The odds are so ridiculously small, it's insane to even consider the possibility."
"So there has to be an explanation," he replies, interrupting me. "That's why we're going to take these machines apart until we find the fault. Whatever happened, it's not witchcraft. There's an explanation. We just haven't found it yet."
Heading over to the window, I look out at the rain-battered parking lot and see another car pulling up. It takes a moment before I realize that the figure stepping out of the back is none other than Maury Potts, Mayor Jones' go-to man for emergencies. As I watch Potts hurry into the building, I can't help but wonder why Jones would be so interested in the disappearance of a girl from the local hospital. I guess maybe Joe Kukil was right when he said that the plan was to frame me for the recent incidents involving the house, and Samantha's disappearance has disrupted that plan. I need to find Samantha before Jones gets his hands on her again. Fortunately, I have one advantage over the police, which is that I'm pretty sure I know the identity of the two women who led her out of the hospital tonight. I just need to work out where they've taken her.
