Eyes Wide Open

by Ted Dekker

  The thought cut a deep rut through her mind.

  Austin’s face turned red.

  “You haven’t suffered like I have. You spend thirteen years locked in a dungeon with bars, knowing you’re too ugly to see the light of day, and then you can Christy me! Until then, keep your thoughts to yourself. They never did me any good before and they aren’t helping now.”

  “What are you talking about?” he said. “They’re filling your head full of psychobabble!”

  “They’re not doing anything to me! If I look in a mirror and see something, that’s me doing it, not them. If I go into hypnosis and see where I grew up, that’s me, not them.”

  “You’re seeing what they want you to see,” he snapped.

  He’d dropped whatever walls he’d erected to protect himself, and for some reason that felt good to Christy. If she could see herself for who she was, he could too, never mind that he was Mr. Brain.

  “Is that right? By what, putting mirrors in my bathroom? By asking me what I remember from my childhood. I was a victim, Scott. I was horribly mistreated and that’s why I’m screwed up. Don’t you dare try to gloss over thirteen years of suffering just so you can feel good about your little theories.”

  She was breathing hard now. Shaking. It was all bubbling over, she knew that, but she let it spill because it felt good, like the draining of a boil full of puss.

  Austin wasn’t liking it, but that was his problem, not hers. He was as delusional as she was. He had to be.

  Christy shoved out her hand. “Tell me what you see.”

  He glanced at her trembling fingers. “What do you mean? Your hand.”

  “Stubby fingers,” she snapped. “And my face. How many times have you told me I look pretty? But I’m not. I’m fat and thick and gross. But you can’t see that, can you?”

  “You’re not fat—”

  “No, because you’re as delusional as me.” She withdrew her hand. “Have you ever thought, just for second in that brilliant skull of yours, that maybe they’re right about you too? Have you ever wondered why you can’t remember your childhood? Why all the evidence here points to you being a patient named Scott, not Austin?”

  Christy let it sit for a moment, aware that she’d struck a chord.

  She jabbed a finger at her head. “You think I’m the only one who’s whacked out?”

  “I didn’t say that. We all have our issues.”

  “Oh great. We all have our issues. Too bad mine are the kind that makes everyone cringe every time I walk into the room. I can hardly look at myself.”

  “Stop this!” he shouted.

  She felt slapped. He’d never yelled at her.

  “You’re losing it!”

  His words reached deep into her mind and flipped a little switch of awareness that wanted desperately to be flipped.

  How she suddenly knew, she didn’t know, but she did. Austin or Scott or whoever he was could do what he wanted. She wanted only one thing.

  To be free. At any cost, for any reason, to whatever end. She wasn’t going to live with her old self anymore. Not even one more day.

  Christy, flushed with anger from head to toe, turned to Nancy.

  “I want to talk to the doctor.”

  Nancy was the perfect picture of control but her face was a shade lighter.

  “I don’t think we’re done—”

  “Yes, we are. We’re done. Call him!”

  The psychiatrist made no move for the phone on her desk.

  “You’re in an agitated state, Alice. I think you should take a deep breath and—”

  “Call him!” she shouted, shoving a finger at the phone. “Now!”

  Nancy grew very still.

  “Are you sure you want to do this?”

  “Call him!”

  Nancy nodded, stepped to her desk, lifted the black phone, and punched three digits into the base.

  “She wants to talk to you,” she said. Then nodded and held the phone out.

  Still drowning in self-hatred and anger, Christy rose from the couch, snatched the phone from Nancy’s hand, and spoke into the receiver without any preliminaries.

  “I want to do it,” she snapped. “I want to do it now.”

  AUSTIN’S UNSTEADY fingers raked through his hair, as if doing so would calm the angry swarm of thoughts that hummed inside his head. Now back in his room, he stood in the spill of light coming from the bathroom.

  It was all unraveling. Everything. The bitter notion burrowed into his psyche, sinking deeper with each passing moment. It wasn’t simply a notion, though. It was a hard fact, judging by what he’d just witnessed.

  Christy, the Christy he knew, was slipping away. Whatever they’d done to her had sent her careening off the thin rails of her mind. He’d heard it in her voice. Seen it in her eyes.

  Lawson had force-fed her an illusion, and she was choking on it.

  Christy was gone. Even worse, she believed he was too.

  Have you ever wondered why you can’t remember your childhood?

  Austin shoved the thought aside, but it doubled back and sank its hooks into his mind.

  He wasn’t delusional. He didn’t believe that. He couldn’t believe that. Stressed? Yes. Traumatized? Likely. Suffering from a tumor in his brain? Likely. All together, it was enough to split more fragile minds wide open. If anything, it was his rational grasp of the situation that kept him from crumbling like Christy had.

  Have you ever thought, just for second in that brilliant skull of yours, that maybe they’re right about you too?

  What if Christy was right?

  No, she wasn’t right. She couldn’t be.

  He circled the room once before he realized he was pacing again. Lost in thought, turning the problem over in his mind.

  If there was any hope of getting out of this place, he had to go now. Escaping with Christy was no longer an option. If anything, she was now a liability.

  There was no other choice that he could see. No other path.

  He had to go alone and he had to do it now. Soon, they would reach a point from which there was no return. No rescue. No escape. There was a dead body with a hole in its head and a sliced wrist where a security chip had once been.

  The security chip that was now his ticket out of the hospital.

  It was now or not at all.

  Crossing to the door, Austin shoved a hand into his pocket and fingered the microchip. The door unlocked with a wave of his hand. He cracked it open and peered into the hall.

  Vacant.

  Now, Austin. One step at a time. Go now.

  Moving at an even pace, he retraced his steps to the elevator at the far end of the hall. His mind seemed strangely untethered, as if his body were moving on its own, animated by an unseen hand.

  He rode the hum in his mind all the way to the brushed-steel elevator doors. With a push of a button, they opened and he stepped in. Felt it shudder and begin to drop.

  His plan was simple: Get to the front door and use Fisher’s chip to get out. If that didn’t work, he would resort to plan B.

  He wouldn’t run. He wouldn’t panic. The last thing he needed was to draw attention to himself.

  One step at a time, Austin.

  The minute he made it out, he would alert the authorities. Before the sun set on Saint Matthew’s, it would be crawling with federal agents. Lawson would be arrested and, most importantly, Christy would be free. They would get their lives back and everything would return to normal, whatever that meant now.

  That’s what he had to tell himself, because he knew that if he couldn’t get out, something very wrong was going to happen.

  The elevator doors opened and he tentatively pushed through them.

  No guards, no alarm, no sign of any threat.

  Walk, just walk, as if nothing is wrong. He could barely feel his feet.

  He entered the hall and turned down the corridor.

  An attendant pushing a patient in a wheelchair was walking toward him, talking to a wom
an who rocked back and forth. The attendant’s lips were moving, but Austin heard only the thrumming drone in his head, low and heavy.

  One step at a time. Just one step at a time.

  He walked as if in a dream, aware of distant voices and doors and walls on either side, but only as moving scenery. They had no bearing on his objective, which was ahead, then down the long hall to the main entrance.

  The corner came within ten seconds, and Austin veered to his left, pulse quickening. No pursuit. He’d told himself that there would be none. Even if they were monitoring the chip, they would only see that Fisher was walking down the hall. But he was still surprised he’d made it this far without even a questioning glance.

  But that was good.

  He could see the main doors at the end of the hall, like a glowing light at the end of a tunnel.

  One step at a time. Just walk, Austin. Keep walking.

  So he did. Past the doors on either side. Past two more patients who saw him and quickly retreated into their rooms with worried looks. They’d been in the recreation hall when he’d taken Jacob captive. That was okay. They hadn’t cried out, right?

  Just walk.

  He walked.

  And then he was there, standing directly in front of the double doors that led into the reception area. He tried the door to see if it was unlocked as it had been before, knowing it wouldn’t be—Lawson had made that much clear.

  The door was locked.

  Which was why he had the chip.

  He lifted it to the security pad. Waited for the clack of metal as it unlocked.

  Nothing happened.

  He swiped it a second time. A small red light blinked in the corner of the black square. Once. Twice.

  His chest tightened. A signal.

  Okay… That was okay. He couldn’t panic, not now. He simply had to switch to plan B. He’d known this might be the case.

  One step at a time, Austin. Don’t think about the fact that the chip didn’t work. Just go.

  He dropped the small chip to the floor and retraced his steps, pulse now pounding in his ears. His thoughts thundered like massive toppling dominoes. Someone had discovered Fisher’s body upstairs and deactivated his chip.

  They would’ve immediately begun tracking the chip’s electronic signature. A quick search would verify that it had been in his room and that he was now missing from it. They would have known exactly where he had been. Where he was now.

  Over the din of his mind, a singular voice arose. Alice’s.

  Where I was… I’ve seen it.

  Lawson had already sealed off the passageway in the boiler room. He’d said so and Austin believed it to be true. It was a loose end, and Lawson was the type to tie up loose ends.

  It’s okay, Austin. One foot in front of the other.

  But he no longer resisted the booming voice in his mind that demanded he run.

  Run, Austin. Run!

  He ran.

  Not in a sprint, but in fast jog, rolling his feet so that they wouldn’t slap on the tile floors. As fast as he could without looking like a patient who’d gone berserk.

  To the corner. Down the western hall, which was now empty. Past the admissions wing, where the elevator was located, doors still shut.

  All the way to the stairwell that led to the basement where he and Christy had first entered the hospital. Dead ahead, the administrator’s office was shut.

  Breathing hard, Austin pulled up at the door into the stairwell and glanced back down the hall from where he’d come. The recreation room, the patient rooms, the admissions offices—closed. All of them. He could hear the distant voices of two patients arguing in the recreation room, but he’d managed to navigate the halls without raising any alarm.

  And with Fisher’s chip no longer in his possession, they could not track him.

  He tested the door. Unlocked. Shoved through, ran to the staircase, and took the steps two at a time. The sound of his feet slapping the cold floor echoed off the cinderblock walls. A loud click chased him as the stairwell door closed.

  When he reached the basement entrance, he banged through the door and sprinted to the supply room.

  Where I was, she said. There was only place that made any sense to him.

  A few strides carried him to the supply room door. Moving with reckless abandon, he bolted into the darkened room. Snapped the light on.

  Images of his first glimpse of Alice with mouth taped shut filled his mind.

  He swept aside the curtain that divided the room.

  He pushed forward and spun into the space, panting. The stretcher he had first seen Alice on that first day was gone. White walls hemmed in the narrow space. A squat metal desk sat against the back wall. A swiveling chair with peeling paint and torn vinyl upholstery was shoved under it.

  He was looking for a key. What door that key opened was still a mystery, but if Alice had found a way out, so could he. Maybe it was labeled. Opened a door to an old passage that led to the surface. A coal shoot or something. He was grasping for straws, but straws were all he had left.

  There was no sign of any such door here, but he hadn’t expected any. This was where the key was, she said. Assuming that when she’d said “where I was” she meant here.

  Austin went to the desk and pulled out the chair. Sent it sliding across the floor on clattering wheels. Except for an old Underwood typewriter covered in a skin of dust, the desktop was clear.

  He dropped to one knee next to the three narrow stacked drawers and jerked the bottom one out. It was empty.

  The next one had some newspaper clippings and what appeared to be old paperwork, which he rifled through and tossed to the floor. Nothing beneath them.

  Heart banging against his ribcage, Austin tugged the handle of the last drawer. It caught and he pulled harder until it slid out.

  The contents looked typical: a plastic tray with small compartments filled with paperclips, pencils, pens, some thumbtacks, pads of Post-it notes, a green ruler, staples, and a stapler. One roll of gray duct tape.

  In the compartment closest to the handle lay three shiny keys held together by a piece of wire that had been formed into a rudimentary ring.

  Small keys. Not door keys.

  Austin scooped them up and stared at them in his palm. The simple truth quickly became all too apparent to him. Alice had seen the keys in the drawer, probably when Fisher had opened it to withdraw the same duct tape he’d placed over her mouth. Her fragile mind had embraced a fantasy that these keys were some magical way out of her predicament.

  But they weren’t. They were just simple office keys, likely for this very desk.

  Which left him with what? With nothing. Nothing at all.

  “Find anything interesting?”

  Austin bolted upright. The words reached into his world like icy fingers. Not because he’d actually heard them, but because they had sounded so real, as if actually, audibly spoken, which was impossible, because he knew that voice.

  It belonged to a man who was dead. Which, in turn, meant that he was hearing things.

  Not Christy, or Alice, but him.

  “There’s nothing to find, Scott.”

  This time the voice was so real that Austin cried out, spinning with his fingers folded over the keys.

  Douglas Fisher stepped into the light, arms hanging loose at his sides.

  Austin stared, dumbfounded.

  Fisher pushed the chair to the side and took a step forward. “You’re quite the persistent one, aren’t you?”

  Austin backpedaled. Bumped against the desk.

  “I killed you.”

  Fisher offered a shallow smile. “Is that what you believe? Just like you believe that your name is Austin? And that you’re not delusional? Tell me, do I look dead to you?”

  The room began to blur.

  “I can assure you that I’m quite alive,” Fisher said. “I personally transported you to your room after discovering that you’d managed to break out of your restraints in the mo
rgue. You don’t remember that?”

  “I… I killed you in the operating room.”

  “The operating room? You weren’t in the operating room.”

  “Then…” His mind was stalling. “Then how do I know about it?”

  “Because you’ve been there before.”

  His eyes met Fisher’s. There he stood, not six feet away, without a scratch. The hum in Austin’s head swallowed him whole.

  Fisher walked up and placed a hand on Austin’s shoulder. “You’re ill. The problem is, you don’t know that. You’re trapped in your mind, Austin.”

  Austin? Fisher had just called him Austin.

  “Austin?”

  Fisher removed his hand and offered him a plastic grin.

  “See, now you have me confused.”

  The man was here, in the flesh. Alive. So even if Austin was Austin, he had to be delusional, because he clearly remembered killing this man.

  Unless this was the delusion and Fisher was really dead.

  Austin’s mind began to shut down.

  “We’re trying to make progress, Scott, but ultimately, only you can control your mind. If you let us in, we can help you. Would you like that?”

  “I don’t know.” His eyes searched the ground.

  “We’ll take the first step together. Just one. Okay?”

  One step at a time.

  He saw no other choice. His mind was too exhausted to consider any other argument.

  Austin nodded, just once.

  “Good. The administrator wants to see you.”

  Fisher led him out of the room and down the hall. Austin didn’t remember climbing the stairs to the first floor or entering the administration wing or walking into Lawson’s office, yet that’s where he found himself. Staggered. Dazed.

  Lawson sat on the other side of the desk, watching Austin over steepled fingers. He removed his reading glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose.

  “Dr. Fisher tells me we’ve reached a roadblock in your treatment, Scott.”

  Austin said nothing.

  He smiled. “But where some see an impasse, I see a gateway to the next level. Nothing really begins until the time is ripe. Some things cannot be rushed, you see.” He leaned back. “I think the time for more aggressive therapy is upon us, wouldn’t you say? Christy’s making such progress and yet you’re only just beginning. A late bloomer, just now discovering that you have some pimples in your head that need attention, among other things.”