by Tara Brown
“Why am I here?” I can’t tell her that I followed a ghostly version of me, but my eyes dart around, looking for me.
She opens her mouth, but the song comes from her lips instead of an explanation. My scientific mind tries to explain it all, and I haven’t got the fancy words I expect. I should have theories as to what’s wrong with me. I am a therapist after all.
Binx purrs and snakes my legs, weaving in and out of them as Mrs. Starling sings softly, as if doing an acoustic version of the song that has been plaguing me all day.
I’m having a dream. I need to go with it. The dream will lead me to the answers.
My head jerks to the right, as I notice the stairs to the second floor. Binx runs to them, standing on the landing and meowing at me. I follow him without asking her. I know I’ve cat-sat for her more times than I can count, but I don’t ever recall going up the stairs before this moment.
They creak with an unfamiliar sound. When I get to the top of the stairs, only a small night-light plugged in near the floor illuminates the landing. I creep past the closed doors, inwardly telling myself I need to go home.
When I open the door to the bathroom, it matches the one from the memory I had, just before I saw the ghostly version of me. This is the bathroom I was searching.
In the dark shadows I cast, I miss her at first, but when I step back, the light catches her—me. She’s kneeling on the floor in the dark. She lifts a finger to her lips and pulls the grate off the heating vent at the bottom of the cabinet. She puts the box, which I now see was the item in her hands, into the vent and puts the grate back over the top. She smiles at me and even in the dark I can see that her eyes don’t match in color.
She puts her finger back up to her lips and vanishes. I jump, looking around, but she isn’t there. I turn, jumping again when I see Mrs. Starling in the hallway, casting a shadow over me. She smiles, still whispering the friggin’ song.
Binx rubs himself against her bare ankles, getting lost every couple of seconds in her nightgown.
I panic as I look around and the light flickers. Finally I can’t take it anymore and I scream.
I blink and realize I’m in my bed naked and covered in sweat.
Rory is gone.
This was easily the worst dream I have ever had.
“Rory!” I call out, but no one answers.
My heart is racing and my mouth is dry, but my mind is reeling.
I get up, flinging the covers and skidding along the floor to the bathroom, slamming the door when I get inside. My back is pressed against the cold wood, but I’m still coated in sweat—cool sweat—the worst kind really.
I drop to my knees, my eyes avoiding the mirror. If she’s there in the reflection, I might actually stroke out on the floor, and no one wants to be found naked.
Behind the white grate under the bathroom vanity, I see it. There’s no mistaking what I see. My left arm tingles, no doubt from the heart attack I am actually having. I ignore the warnings from my body and scoot forward enough to drop to my elbows and stare straight.
Behind the grate there is exactly what she said there would be. A four-leaf box—a box with a four-leaf clover. I know the box; I clearly hid it in some fugue state. But I don’t want to touch it.
It feels like it’s more than just a box. It feels like a memory filled with joy and sadness. I was unhappy for the clover being trapped forever, but she was pleased that it was always going to be perfect, trapped there.
Who is she? Who is the voice in my head that says the clover will be beautiful forever, protected?
The mystery woman is one baffling notion, but the other is why I hid the box in the first place. Why am I dreaming about it and yet not remembering any of this?
My fingers creep forward, tiptoeing along the tile like legs might walk it—miniature legs. I loop two of my very expensive gel-tipped nails into the grate and use them to pull it forward.
I can only pray Rory doesn’t come home and open the door to find me bent over naked.
I tilt my head to the side as I drop the grate to the tile and stare at the ominous little box. There must be some meaning to it beyond the strange image it pulls up in my mind, the one of the lady with the different-colored eyes smiling at me. She laughs, tucking one strand of my hair behind my ear, and she helps me stand up. Her arms encircle me, but it isn’t her that’s clinging, it’s me. I’m clinging to her in my mind. I open my eyes, hardly aware that I closed them, and reach for the box.
A noise in the house stops me from reaching. I turn back, staring at the door. Rory’s back.
I don’t relish the thought of him finding me. Not because I look insane, but because there’s something about the idea of him in my mind that’s changed.
I turn the lock and stuff a towel under the door so he can’t see in.
His footsteps vibrate, but I ignore it and look at the box. As I do, I drop back to my knees, and the handle turns, clicking and jerking against the lock. “Andrea?”
That’s not my name.
I don’t remember everything, but that is not my name—I know that.
My hands shake and my thighs tremble as I lean forward and clutch the small wooden box.
“Andrea!” The door rattles and the lock clicks, but I drag the box out, focused solely on it.
“What are ya doing in there? Are ya all right?” His body slams against the door, shaking the entire house. “Andrea! Bloody hell!”
I tilt back the lid and instantly I know it all. There’s a face with green-gray eyes and perfect lips inside. I lift the picture and know him. Dash!
I glance at the underside of the lid and whisper the words that seem foreign and familiar at the same time. She was the sugar and I was the spice. “Tell me about the swans, the way the swans circle the stars and shoot across the sky.”
The cupboards blow up and away from me. The walls of the house where I am become nothing more than debris and particles, making dust in the air. I step into the nothingness, the black and swirling vortex. I don’t float like the particles or the cracked mirror that reflects things to me. I drop and fall into the blackness, where I see and feel nothing.
“Jane!” he screams, but I blink and leave the screaming there inside him. Something beeps and something swirls, and my blinking eyes convey still images as if in a flip-book, trying to give me a moving picture.
I cough and gasp and stare at the white-tiled ceiling of the bright room. Everything is moving too rapidly, but I now know where I am—just barely.
I’m in Rory’s head because he abducted girls and kept them in cells. He used them in a brothel built for powerful men around the world. Leaders. I am on a mind run trying to find answers and to see if he has other secrets he isn’t sharing with us. The memory of the girls in their cells and the torture Rory inflicted upon them gives me chills. He is a rapist and a murderer, and, worst of all, the best CIA agent I have ever met. And likely the better mind runner.
I reach for Dash, the one who will bring it all back.
His hand closes around mine, but when I look, it’s Rory, not Dash. He’s smiling and holding me. “Get away from me!” I scream in a cracked and croaking voice.
He drops to my side, patting my hand and shaking his head. “I only want to love ya, Jane. Let me love ya. Only you can save me.”
I try to swat and fight, but my hands are restrained and my muscles are weak, atrophied from my lengthy stay on the bed. He stands and nods at someone I can’t see. “Take her to the ward.”
I scream and cry, everything coming out in dry pieces as my throat feels like it’s bleeding. I need to wake up. I need to find Dash.
I chant the things I need to remember.
“I am marrying Dash. I am happy. This isn’t real. None of this is real. I don’t live here. I live at 1707 Girard Street North in Washington, DC. I am Jane Spears. I am military. I handle
mind runs and special ops. I am not Andrea. I don’t live in Manhattan. I am not married to Rory. I am not in love with Rory. The love of my life is Binx.”
Angie walks to me, glaring with her cold gray-blue eyes. “Shut yer yap, ya wee harlot. Going after my man like that. I know it was ya who corrupted him. Yer Jane Spears all right. Yer the reason Rory is a bad man. It’s all yer fault.”
“No!’ I scream, but the bed is already rolling, the walls flying by. The ceiling. The ceiling indicates the distance I am going. I count the tiles, seventeen. A door opens and the light changes, turning gray and dank with a smell of something I can’t quite discern—musty but sweet. We are still in a hallway.
A woman in an old-fashioned nurse’s uniform walks to me. She has a clipboard and a pen. She clicks it and glares at me, pursing jammy pink lips that remind me of a B-movie villainess. “Dr. Dash will be here any second. He will want to assess you.”
At her words, I blink, and the world gets hard to focus on. When I tilt my head to the right, it tilts with me, twisting and roiling like I do.
She transforms from Nurse Ratched into a sweet older woman the moment I hear his voice from behind us. “I want her in a private room, fully restrained. I will examine her before I administer any meds.”
The nurse nods her head, batting her lashes at him. She turns to me, again becoming something frightening. She snaps her fingers and my bed moves, as if by magic. The ceiling lights are gapped between several tiles, telling me we are going a much longer way this time. I count fourteen lights and seven tiles before we stop and turn to the right. The bed scrapes and knocks into a room with only one light, hanging from a cord by a crack in the concrete ceiling. Water drips in the background, and I don’t know what to make of it all.
The room is more cell than room.
I lift my head, in time to see the door close. I’m left staring at a slot-like gap in the middle of the door. Something you could peek through to check on patients or hand meds and food through. It looks like a mail slot.
I am alone long enough to realize what it is.
I’m still inside.
The clover box was a trap. Rory is running the show.
But at least I know that now.
I am stuck inside his mind, with no way out on my own. He somehow hijacked the mind run Angie and I had planned, turning it into one he ran himself.
He is better at this than I am. If a mind run can be compared to playing a video game, then he’s winning.
Feeling a cool breeze tickle across my skin, I shudder under the swinging light. In the stillness of my room I can’t stop hearing its wires creak ever so slightly as it sways in the breeze.
That sound could make me crazy, but the next sound I hear makes me scared.
I would know his footsteps anywhere. He drags his left leg subtly from an injury during his time in G2, Irish intelligence. His ACL went in a hard landing from an airdrop.
When his key turns in the lock, I expect it. The squeal of the door doesn’t shock me. I don’t even flinch when he closes us in here together.
“I will need ya to tell me how it felt to be fucked by me when ya were in the cells with all the girls. I need ya to tell me how much ya liked it.”
That surprises me. I grimace at the disturbing man he really is. A man I never saw inside the colleague I had liked, maybe because I always saw the damage and respected it—as kindred spirits might.
But as his hand lands on my foot and he rubs it, chuckling to himself, I see it. I see what he is.
He laughs like he’s reliving it, squeezing my foot in a rhythmic fashion. “I loved that cave of cells. I even loved those girls. I cared for them. It was my idea to put the medicine in the water bottles and vitamins in the food. I loved those bloody girls.” His voice cracks and I realize his laughing is shredding into tears and the gripping of my skin is out of desperation.
I look at him, hardly recognizing him.
His dark-blue eyes find their way out from under his heavy brow, seeking out my stare. “But you didn’t see it that way, did you?” His grip tightens to the point that I wince and then his nails dig in and I cry out.
I’m softer here. I’m weaker. He’s controlling the script and running the show and I can’t be me, Jane. I can’t be strong and trained and ready to fight him. Somehow he’s changing who I am in the story too. His sick and twisted version of Andrea, my poor dead sister, is weak and pathetic. She needs him. She’s malleable.
But I am me. I will find a way to be Jane.
I struggle against the restraints and bed, but he doesn’t relent.
He doesn’t care that I’m struggling or crying. I don’t even know if he’s consciously in this room or if his mind is somewhere else, imagining we are somewhere else. Someplace where I am enjoying his affections and not writhing and crying.
His hands work their way up my legs. He rubs and massages, getting so deep into the tissue I’m sure I’m bruising. He moves his hand between my thighs, lifting the hospital gown I didn’t even realize I was wearing.
I jerk when his fingers make direct contact with my bare lips. I’m not wearing underwear either. It’s his dream and his fantasy.
Maybe it’s the way he sees my relationship with Dash. He is wearing a DR. DASH name tag.
He glides a finger inside me, still staring off to the back of the room, absently thrusting his finger in and out of me.
I look up at the ceiling and scream, “Tell me about the swans, the way the swans circle the stars and shoot across the sky!”
He looks down at his hand and my bared body. “Why can’t I see it? Why can’t I see what it really looks like? Show yerself to me! Let me have ya.”
I don’t know what he means, but I imagine it perfectly: the room with the old French decor and the lady, my grandmother, sitting at the couch.
She holds up a cup of tea, but the distraction of a second finger being inserted inside me blurs the room. He thrusts harder, keeping my attention span.
The swans aren’t working. Dash isn’t working. The clover box isn’t working. But I know there’s one thing that will. One thing Rory can’t change in any world. “Binx, come to Mommy! Come and find me, Binxy bear!” I squeeze my eyes shut and relax into the jerking sensation, leaving it behind. I need it to fade away, but Rory’s doing it to keep me present. He is trying to make me his victim and his prisoner, but I refuse to be either.
The first meow echoes like a miracle. I laugh, both relieved and combative. “You can’t stop him or my love for him.”
My beloved Binx jumps onto my belly, his little cat feet kneading. He comes to my neck, nuzzling himself there. He curls around me. When I open my eyes, I meet his as he purrs and stares at me. His green eyes glow. Tears stream down my cheeks suddenly, unexpectedly. Binx turns and hisses against Rory’s snarl. He spits his disgust, but Rory doesn’t stop thrusting his fingers in and out of me.
“That cat isn’t here, Jane. But I am. I know you feel me.” He sounds angry, maybe because he can’t seem to get the cat out of his scenario.
Binx is my part of this horrid world.
Binx turns back to me, overtaking my gaze with his. It’s mesmerizing.
His eyes swirl, making my lips turn up. Everything fades, except the shoving motion, but I don’t care. I know it isn’t real. Rory isn’t touching me. He’s abusing me in his head; it’s his pleasure and pain and twisted perversion. I am not here.
Binx’s purring gets louder, bringing me back with him, like the rabbit leading Alice. I fall back into the swirling vortex, still jerking from the fingers inside me, making me raw even if it’s not real.
I blink and the room is the one I went to sleep in. The lab where Rory is next to me. I don’t need to look at him to know he’s there with me. There is one face, and only one face I need to see. And he is here. Dash gives me a worried look. “Jane?”
I st
ill jerk like there are fingers moving in and out of me, but I don’t look away from the green-gray eyes bearing down on me.
“Jane?” Dash repeats as he reaches for me.
I clear my throat, recoiling from his touch. I swear I can still hear my cat purring and feel the weight of him on my throat. I close my eyes and focus on that, still moving like the fingers are jabbing me.
I turn my head away from the heat coming off Dash, opening my eyes to Rory lying next to me. His fingers move like he’s inside me.
I wince and realize the doctors and lab techs know what is happening. The movement stops, yet Rory continues jerking as if he is inside me. As if I am still in there with him.
“It never was me,” I whisper and close my eyes again. “He was never touching me.”
In that moment, hands touch me. I flail and curse at them. The people talking, trying to calm me, say they want to help. They say they need to take off the monitors. I don’t believe it. None of this is real.
I am still inside.
I scratch and claw, punching someone in the face and kicking another in the stomach.
In only seconds of fighting, I have my hands around Rory’s neck, choking the life from him. Someone grabs my arms, but I head-butt him or her, and continue squeezing as hard as I can. I hit them and him in the face, each as hard as I can from atop Rory’s chest. When I manage to fight them all off, my hands find their way back to his throat, and within heartbeats, his eyes are bulging from their sockets.
A stabbing pain hits my arm and all my strength fades. The floor doesn’t fall away, even though I prepare for that, because I am still inside. I can’t get out.
“I can’t get out! I can’t get out!” I panic, losing my grip on his neck even though I want to squeeze.
Dash is there suddenly, in my face. He lifts his hands, and the worry in his eyes makes me wonder if he is just trying to take off the monitors. If I’m out of the imaginary world and free of it all, even though I’m still moving like I’m inside.
