Sceptic

by Lilliana Rose

  The pinpricks continue down my spine as I try to process what I’m seeing. I step forward, my boots create a dull echo on the wooden floor. The noise makes me feel secure like I’m not about to fall down a level. An odd thought to have, but I remember it. Clearly.

  There’s a bed up against the wall. Bloody hell. If you call it a bed. It’s narrow and low off the ground, a metal frame, weird metal hoops on the top, middle and end. The mattress looks thin, and I swear I can smell hay or something grass-like. There are white sheets, and a thick grey blanket folded very clinically. The pillow looks lumpy and flat.

  I immediately miss my double bed, extra springs, thick quilt and many pillows and I hadn’t even sat on this pathetic bed. Nope, hell isn’t working out too well for me.

  I’m not giving up. My reasoning is that like any place there’s a hierarchy and this must be the bottom level, all I have to do is work my way upwards or downwards.

  How pathetically naïve of me to think it would be so simple.

  I didn’t want to think rationally.

  This isn’t right.

  Clearly.

  But better to ignore what you don’t want to see, right?

  What made things worse are the features. Gothic. Old. Dirty. I’d read enough, seen photos online to begin to worry that this isn’t present day. I’d been researching insane asylums with a morbid fascination. The depravity drew me in. The lack of rights these people had. It was a sick obsession. I even found a local asylum here in Adelaide, in the suburb of Glenside. This is bound to be what’s happening. My research was leaking into my active imagination way too much. Or not?

  Maybe this is the devil’s sick humour? He’d have a sense of humour for sure. The thought gave me a sense of calm, well at least enough so I don’t pound the door and see my arm disappear into the hardened wood.

  I mean if the devil is going to decorate a cell in hell, he’d draw from the Victorian Era for sure. That’s when everything happened. When people were exploring the supernatural and trying to find scientific reasoning to attach to everything. It’s the time when monsters walked the streets like Jack the Ripper. When Frankenstein filled imaginations. And when there were séances held in earnest, and hysteria that led to the development of vibrators—I don’t know about that shit—and Spiritualism was the new religion. Bloody hell, there was so much goodness going on in the dark and dirty streets I read about, I’d dreamt many times of living back in them. Shame there wasn’t ever a Victorian Era in Australia, but hey, I can always imagine, and when I daydreamed with the darkness, I made my own version anyway. I wasn’t happy, it was more of a distraction, which made it even better.

  For a moment excitement rippled up from inside of me. It didn’t happen very often. Finally, things are looking up for me.

  Naturally, that didn’t last long.

  Feeling somewhat dizzy with the bubbles of excitement bouncing through my being, which I wasn’t used to, a confidence roars loud inside of me. I am in hell, in a waiting cell for the devil, and it’s the Victorian Era.

  Fantastic.

  My dreams were sort of coming true, not exactly, but close enough for me not to get down and out like I normally had been when living on the surface.

  I forgot about the window. I didn’t need a window to go through. I’m a fucking ghost. I can walk through doors. And walls.

  Why bother with the door then?

  I take a deep breath. Realising that in this ghostly form I don’t actually need to breathe. But it’s an action I’m compelled to do, not one I have to, I just haven’t lost that habit yet. That thought knots in my stomach. I’m just made up of gas or some shit. I still feel pain. More habits? I dunno.

  Best I move on, not think about that and I’ve got to work out very quickly how the fuck to do that.

  I square my shoulders and lift my chin. I’m going to meet the devil and become one with the darkness once and for all.

  Except I don’t.

  I slam into the wall.

  Or halfway in the wall or something. Either way, my head snaps back, my body or form or whatever I should bloody call it, rebounds off something very solid and I bounce back into the cell.

  Not one to give up, I try again.

  And again.

  And again.

  I even do a fantastic run-up.

  Each time the wall spits me back into the cell.

  At least I don’t pass out. Though, even in this ghostly form, I’m starting to buzz with a heaviness of throbbing agony.

  The fear returns.

  I don’t think this is hell.

  I don’t reckon I’m going to meet the devil.

  My mind, thumping from banging up against the wall is confused. I shiver. Go through the motions of throwing up, before clamping on the floor, wishing for the darkness to return, wishing for my mum, my dad, and to be alive. Not stuck in between. In a different world where I’m a ghost imprisoned in a cell. There’s no fun in that.

  Something has gone seriously wrong, and I don’t want to know about it.

  I curl up into a ball. Sobbing. My arms wrap tight around my legs, my knees are hard on my chest. How can this be?

  With a sinking feeling, I don’t think I’m even in my own timeline, and I’m not in hell. Well, perhaps a different sort of hell, but that wasn’t what I signed on for when I’d pressed the letter opener into my wrist.

  ‘I want to go back.’ But I don’t hear my voice in the small room. Something’s happening with my memories. I’m changing. I don’t want to change. I like how I was. I didn’t mind the darkness so much, the fog, the snake, the monsters. Frank.

  Now you know why I haven’t told anyone this. They would lock me up for sure in the mental ward and throw away the key. Bloody hell, I would do the same thing too. I wouldn’t let me see the light of day ever again. I don’t deserve to, spinning such stories, but I haven’t. This is what happened to me. It’s only the beginning which scared the fuck out of me.

  I realise I’m worse off than a boat lost at sea without an anchor.

  I’m a bird trapped in a cage.

  Okay, so maybe I’m a monster trapped in a cage. Where I should be. Because of the darkness and the thoughts that I have. Because of the monsters who live inside my mind.

  Frank’s been silent since I’ve been in this cell. I don’t miss his voice.

  For the first time, since taking this form, I start to really think this isn’t where I belong.

  I don’t know how long I stay on the floor. The vibrations, more like thumping, in my mind from banging up against the wall, keep me from trying something like that again. I tried so much, I don’t even think there may be weak points in the wall.

  I just stay on the floor.

  At some point, I stop sobbing.

  With nothing better to do, I start remembering.

  The first time. When this probably began for me. Least that’s the option, which has come up in the countless therapy sessions over the years. Though I reckon I was made this way, I was born into life with a heavy darkness in my mind. It was just this event which weakened my mind enough to let it out, and for me to lose what hold I might have had on it.

  I was four.

  I quiver as the memory begins to take hold in my mind. It’s so vivid that I’m transported from the cell. One of my fears has come true, where I’m absorbed, consumed, just for a moment, until I realise I’m an observer. While I watch the vision for things to start happening, I can feel the hard floor against my ghostly form, connecting me to the real world, well the closest thing I have now to the real world. Funny how you miss something you never really connected to when it’s taken away from you.

  My young self is running around in the backyard. My hair is bleach blonde. I’m a skinny thing, just legs and bones with innocent skin.

  My older sister, Ashla, tells me to stay out of the wading pool. ‘Don’t you dare.’ She points her finger at me. She’s wearing bright yellow bathers, a full piece, and her skin is damp from the water we’
ve been squirting at each other from the super soakers.

  ‘I won’t,’ I lied. Of course. I was four. I was daring. I was young. Naïve. I was an idiot.

  When Ashla slipped inside to pinch some ice blocks from the freezer, I took my chance. I was just going to sit in the water, it wasn’t deep, it came up to my hips if I sat crossed legged. I ran over to the edge of the wading pool, the blown up plastic waving in the afternoon breeze.

  Tippy, our dog followed me, revved up from being shot at with water for the last hour, she got under my feet as I went to climb in. I fell. I don’t really remember what happened next, and the memory morphs into blurred images, and my body, even in its ghostly form, is reminded of the feelings, the pain, the loss, the fear. I’m quivering, the wooden floor vibrates to my tune back in the cell, but the memory hasn’t finished playing out. There’s a little more to go.

  A stunning pain fills my head and takes over my mind. I can’t move. I can’t breathe. I fight. I scream. My voice lost in bubbles that float to the surface and pop in silence.

  Then the darkness finds me. I feel its comfort. Well, more like the fog envelops around me. You know it was fluoro green. My favourite colour. Just for a second. And only for that first time, it escaped from the confines of whatever was holding it in my mind. Then it deepened in colour and thickened. The pain faded from my mind and my body. The fog became black. I was curious. I was attracted to the darkness, it didn’t feel wrong, or if it did, I was too young to know any better. I opened up my heart, and it moved down through me, taking away my pain.

  Then a shadow, in the form of a small figure formed in front of me. I smiled. Held out my hand. This was something that was a part of me. I didn’t need to feel afraid. Awareness beyond my years flooded through me. His form sharpened. Four legs. I’d drawn something like that so many times already. Mum didn’t like me to make those drawings, but I couldn’t work out why. It scared her. It didn’t scare me. It scared Ashla too.

  Frank.

  He smiled back at me.

  We’ve been friends ever since.

  Then I woke to see my mum crying, and dad, and Ashla. My grandparents were there too, standing around my hospital bed. They all moved in to hug me. I gasped for air, my throat painful even to breathe, my chest sore from breathing water. Instead of feeling their hugs, I was enveloped in pain. I couldn’t get them to stop.

  It was all too much, and I didn’t want to feel anymore. I didn’t want to feel ever again. And Frank helped me, taking away the pain. But it fed him. Made him stronger and bigger. He could look after me and protect me from the pains of life. Frank was my saviour. I just didn’t know it until I was older. By then Frank wouldn’t let me forget that was the case. His constant reminder a white noise in my mind I couldn’t ignore. Frank breathed the thickening black fog into my mind. Everything unfolded slowly. I’d been changed on the inside, it took much longer for that change to show itself to the world, that part of me which had been locked away was now free to make havoc.

  It wasn’t until I was much older that I realised there had never been any tunnel of light for me to walk towards. I wasn’t on the side of light, but darkness. That was my side. That’s where I liked to walk. In the dark.

  It might have been an accident that opened my heart to the darkness, but I know it was something that would’ve always happened no matter what.

  The door of the cell opens.

  I jump up. Wobble on my feet. Fuck. I wasn’t ready.

  Two men enter dragging a young man between them. I don’t care about them. This isn’t my cell, they can bring in whoever they want to. I see the open door. The gap is my chance to get the fuck out of this room.

  Moving my form as if it were my real corporeal body, I launch myself at the open space. I run towards the slim chance of escape. My arms extend forward trying to get myself there quicker. It’s only a small distance for me to travel. Maybe I do get through, but there’s that barrier that keeps me here, or perhaps I’m just too slow. I’m no athlete. I was skinny back when I was four. Not after that. I grew to have curves and bumps I didn’t think we’re at all attractive. I know some girls think they are attractive. Ashla would always tell me they are and that someday a guy would enjoy them.

  Blah! What nonsense. I don’t have a future. I always knew that. There’s no point even wasting my time on boys. I can’t connect to life, so therefore there’s no future to be bothered with.

  Either way, not for the first time, I slam into something hard and unmoving, and bounce back into the room, landing heavily on my arse. The door is closed. I’m not sure how I manage to land so abruptly, but whether a memory or not, pain shoots up my tailbone right up my spine and rattles around in my skull. It hurts so much I can’t move. All I can do is watch as the men push the young man onto the bed. They don’t even bother pulling back the blanket and sheet. Odd.

  My mouth falls open. This isn’t the way to treat a person. The men standing are wearing long plain blue shirts that hang down over the pockets of their loose navy slacks, in a cut that is very much a past era style, bit like the differences between the clothes Mum and I wear. The cuts are similar, but our styles are poles apart and what I’m looking at is something back further about two generations. I know from the countless photos I viewed online. And they have very shiny black boots. No one shines boots that much back home.

  Back home.

  I’ve never used that word before since I never felt at home with my family.

  ‘Stay there, or we will tie you up again,’ says one of the men whose head is shaved bald. He’s overweight, scary to look at even by my standards with heavy wrinkles on his face which look more like scars.

  ‘Don’t leave me here,’ the man on the bed yells. I can hear the panic in his voice and almost see the fear shimming around his body. It’s so dense it unsettles me. The vibrations reach out to me. I have enough of my own shit to deal with I don’t need this complication of having to deal with a stranger. Come to think of it. I don’t need to be sharing my cell with anyone either.

  ‘Hey, get the fuck out of here,’ I say still sitting on my backside on the floor.

  ‘You know the routine, Bertie,’ says the other man. He’s skinny, but his arms are thick with muscles that speak of a high protein diet and every day at the gym. Somehow I don’t think that’s how he got those muscles.

  ‘Will you be good tonight, Bertie?’ asks the bald man.

  ‘Just don’t leave me here,’ says Bertie.

  ‘How about we tie you up then?’

  ‘No. No. No.’

  ‘Then settle down,’ grumbles the skinny man.

  For orderlies, or nurses, or whatever they are meant to be they aren’t very caring.

  Bertie goes silent. The sort of silence that causes shivers to flow down your spine gently like ants crawling on skin. The sort of shiver I know all too well. The sort that has nothing to do with the living.

  ‘No!’ Bertie sits upright with a force that pushes the bald guy back into the opposite wall. He smacks into the covered part of the window.

  Bang.

  The metal across the window is secure and solid.

  ‘Fucking hell.’ The bald guy glares at Bertie. ‘You’ll regret that, Bertie.’

  Bertie stares at the bald guy. Frozen in time. Sitting on his bed.

  I shimmy out of the way, closer to the wall opposite the door from these men.

  In two long strides, the bald guy has made it to the side of the bed. I know what he’s going to do. I don’t want to watch. A sickening knot pulls tight within me, and I can’t manage to look away.

  He backhands Bertie.

  Bertie’s head snaps away from me, small droplets of blood spray over the wall. I’m pretty sure I see a tooth fly through the air and hit the bricks. Bertie falls backwards.

  ‘Told you.’ The bald man shakes his hand.

  ‘Bastard.’ But the skinny man is looking at Bertie, not the other man who hit Bertie. ‘All you had to do was lay down on your be
d tonight, and we wouldn’t have to tie you up.’ He pulls out leather straps from the pockets of his pants.

  ‘I don’t understand the likes of him. That’s why he’s here.’ The bald man takes out his own set of leather straps. ‘Not natural to do those sort of things to yourself.’

  ‘Get out. Get out. Get out,’ I shout. It’s not right how they’re treating this man. It’s wrong. The wrongness wraps around me trying to trap me into doing nothing. I can’t move, and my throat is dry. I force myself to speak, but they don’t turn towards me. ‘This is my fucking cell. Get out.’ My voice screams with desperateness. The orderlies don’t even turn to acknowledge I’m here, on the floor, near the door, watching how they treat this man, who doesn’t deserve to be treated this way, no matter what unnatural things he might have done to himself.

  It’s all too much for me. My heart, or the place in my chest where my heart would be if I weren’t a ghost, hurts. Like a sponge being twisted and twisted on itself, the fibrous material tearing with each additional turn.

  I can’t take this anymore.

  I cower my head in my lap, covering my hands over my ears, but I still hear them. Buckling the straps. Walking out. Swearing.

  Finally, the door slams shut. The heavy lock slides into place. The metal echo reverberates around the room as I stare into the grey light of the cell.

  I feel physically ill. The taste of bile in my mouth is heavy even though I know I’m a ghost and can’t taste anymore. This time I don’t go through the motions of vomiting.

  It isn’t just about what I’ve seen.

  With a shudder I realise the bald guy stepped through me and I can taste his soul on my tongue, it stings with a foul bitterness.

  I can’t move. I can’t even look at Bertie. A rattling breathing noise from his bloody nose echoes in the cell. My mind takes stock of what I know.