by Amy Cross
I freeze.
It can't have been, but...
“Karen,” I whisper.
“I'm sorry?” Doctor Williams asks.
I turn to her. “Did you hire Karen?”
She frowns.
“Is Karen working here?” I ask, getting to my feet as I feel a cold shiver passing through my chest. “Is Karen a nurse now?”
She reaches under her desk, no doubt to press a button and call some orderlies.
“No!” I say firmly, sitting back down. “I'm fine, you don't need to do that. I'm calm, I just...” I look over at the window again. I swear, the nurse who walked past was Karen, and she even smiled at me as if she knew that I recognized her. “I want to go back to my room,” I whisper after a moment, turning back to the doctor as I feel a wave of exhaustion. “I think I'm seeing things again. Can I go to my room and sleep?”
***
“But that's the thing,” Beth continues, as she stirs her porridge in the dining room, “I couldn't have been the one who set fire to all those houses, because I wasn't even in that part of town when it happened! I was in the other place.”
“The other place?” I ask wearily, turning to her.
“Where you get taken.”
I stare at her for a moment.
“Haven't you ever been to the other place?” she continues, her eyes wide with shock. “Not everyone gets to go, you have to be special. You have to stand out and attract their attention.”
“Whose attention?” I ask.
“The people from the other place.” She looks down at her porridge for a moment. “It's not something that can be described. You can't imagine it, you have to see it. The other place is this vast series of worlds. I don't know why I was chosen to go there, but I flew through the sky on a magic carpet and I saw it all!”
“You did, huh?” I reply, forcing a smile. Poor Beth is clearly out of her mind.
“I saw plains filled with deserts,” she continues, “and huge oceans, and a vast library, and whole worlds spinning through the sky.” She stare at the table for a few seconds, clearly lost in her fantasy. “And then when I got home, there were lots of police there, and they said I'd been seen setting fire to the shopping mall and some houses nearby. I tried to tell them it wasn't me, but they said they had proof. I explained that I'd been to the other place, and that when you come back from the other place you always smell of gasoline and have gasoline stains on your clothes, but they didn't believe me!”
“Fancy that,” I mutter.
“But I know I'm right,” she adds firmly. “Anyone can say what they want about me, or to my face, but I know with absolute certainty that I went to the other place.” She pauses, before leaning closer and lowering her voice. “By the way, do you have a box of matches I can borrow?”
“Sorry, no.”
She mumbles something, before scooping another spoonful of porridge into her mouth.
And that's when I realize the truth. Beth absolutely believes every word of the nonsense she just told me. The human mind is an incredible thing, capable of recognizing vast truths but also, at times, capable of maintaining immense fictions. I truly can't trust my own perceptions anymore, and if all the police officers involved in my case and all the lawyers, and all the doctors and psychiatrists, agree that I murdered Matt and tortured Karen, I guess I can't really argue with them. With tears in my eyes, I lower my head and take deep breaths, but I feel as if this is a turning point.
“Excuse me,” I mutter, getting to my feet and hurrying out of the room. Beth calls after me, but I ignore her as I make my way along the corridor. As I get to the double doors, they swing open and a nurse walks past, bumping against my shoulder.
I pause for a moment, before turning and seeing that it's the same nurse I saw earlier, the nurse who I thought was Karen.
“Hey!” I call out, hurrying after her. “Hey, wait!”
She stops and turns, and I immediately see that I was wrong.
“Are you okay?” she asks. “Sorry, I'm new here, but is there something you need?”
“No,” I reply, staring at her as I feel the last of my hope slipping away. “No, I'm sorry, I didn't mean to disturb you.”
She smiles as she heads toward one of the nearby doors, and I turn to make my way back along the corridor. I'm losing my mind, seeing things that aren't really there, and there's no point denying the obvious truth any longer. Everyone else is right, I'm just a killer, and I never really recovered from what happened to me at the cabin. Maybe some things are just too horrible for anyone to ever recover. Maybe from the day I first set foot in that place, I was doomed to a lifetime of madness.
Sometimes, I think maybe it would have been easier for everyone if I'd just died in the cabin. At least Karen, Matt and Freddie Gray wouldn't have suffered.
***
My room is cold, as usual, but I don't bother ringing the buzzer and asking someone to turn the radiator up. It's getting late now, and I'm glad of the chance to come to bed and get some sleep. The whole day has gone past in something of a blur, and I feel as if I'm losing control of my thoughts again. I thought saw Karen, then there was the weirdness with the nurse, and now I'm exhausted. As I climb into bed and pulls the sheets up, I can't help feeling that being asleep is better than being awake. Lately, my everyday life makes about as much sense as my dreams.
Less sense, even.
I'm never going to get well.
This is me now, forever. There's no life after the cabin. Only madness.
As the night wears on, I find that I can't sleep. I toss and turn, thinking back to the moment when I discovered Karen and Matt in the basement of that building. I know that everyone says I was responsible, and I guess they're right, but I still have a burning sensation in my chest every time I try to imagine myself doing something so awful. Whenever I try to picture myself torturing Karen or cutting Matt's throat, I feel as if I'm actually watching someone else as they do those things. Could my experience in the cabin really have turned me into such an awful person? Was I really so badly broken? I guess maybe my real memories are lost forever.
Eventually I manage to drift off to sleep. My dreams are dark and deep as usual, filled with flashes of the cabin. Lately I never dream about anything that happened before I ended up in that awful place, and it's almost as if my entire personality was severed at that point. The old Anna, the Anna from before my trip to Norway, was discarded and left to die somewhere, and the new Anna is a messed-up ball of madness. I guess that explains how I ended up torturing Karen and killing Matt. The good parts of me were dead by that point, just memories, while the bad parts of me lived on, emboldened by my experience in the cabin.
After a while, I start to stir. I hear a faint bumping sound nearby, but I just assume that it's coming from one of the other rooms. I allow myself to slip back into dreams, but another bump brings me back.
Someone's in my room.
“What?” I ask, turning over to look, just as something slams into my face and presses me down against the bed. I try to struggle, then to call out, but some kind of gag is forced into my mouth and I feel ropes being passed around my wrist and ankles.
“It's okay,” the voice whispers, leaning over my bed. “Don't struggle. It'll all be over in a moment.”
I try to shout for help, but all I manage is a muffled groan. I pull on the ropes, but they're far too tight. A moment later, the light next to my bed flickers to life, and then a woman in a nurse's uniform leans over me.
“Hey Anna,” Karen says with a faint smile, keeping her voice low as if she's worried about being overheard. “It's finally time to finish what we started at the cabin.”
Eighteen
I try to cry out as footsteps pass the door, but Karen's hand is placed too firmly over my mouth. As quickly as they came, the footsteps are already receding again and finally everything falls silent.
“No-one's going to hear a thing,” Karen says after a moment, gently easing the pressure on my mouth. �
��That was the bitch who checks on things every two hours. Plenty of time before she comes by again. Don't worry, I'll be long gone by then.”
Still struggling against the ropes, I try desperately to twist free.
“The camera isn't on yet,” she continues. “Not everything has to be recorded. Some moments are too private. Some things have to be just between the two of us, don't they?”
Letting out a desperate grunt, I pull as hard as I can manage, but the ropes feel too tight and the gag means I can't call for help.
“You deserve an explanation,” she says, staring down at me for a moment. “Anna, I know you probably don't understand what's been happening to you, but before you die... I just want to tell you that I'm sorry. Looking back at it all, I wish we'd picked someone else, but when Marit first came up with the idea, we realized you were the perfect target. I mean, face it, you've always been a very trusting person, haven't you?” She pauses. “Yeah, I guess you didn't know that Marit and I were still in touch back then, did you? We lost contact after her family moved to Norway, but eventually we found each other again online and, well, it turned out that we had a lot of interests in common.”
I try to cry out for help, but the gag has been stuffed so far down my throat, I can barely even breathe. All I can manage is a few brief snorts.
“Marit was involved with these really dark groups out in Norway,” Karen explains. “When she admitted it to me, I was shocked at first but then I realized I kind of... I liked it. We talked more and more, and eventually she trusted me enough to tell me what they'd been doing. She told me they'd killed a girl named Karen Lund and filmed it, but that they were planning to go one better and make a proper, longer video. Karen Lund was just a practice run, but they wanted to make something better, something they could sell for a lot of money. They were trying to identify the right star, and to be honest I was joking at first when I suggested you. But as we kept on talking, somehow we both felt that you were the right choice.”
With tears streaming down my face, I pull on the ropes, but they're far too tight.
“So I traveled to Norway the day before you,” she continues. “I got to the cabin, and the others decided that I'd stay well out of sight. I mean, even you would have been suspicious if I'd shown up. Even poor, naive Anna might have actually started to wonder what was going on.” She smiles. “I was there, though. I was filming you the whole time, watching you at the camp-fire with Marit and the others, and when you were down at the lake... When they killed Marit, I admit I was shocked, but they quickly explained why it was necessary. The crazy thing is, I understood. Marit turned out to be the weak link. And then later, when it all went wrong and you managed to escape, and the others were dead too, I realized I had two choices. I could have given up and run away, and hoped that no-one ever tied me to that place, but instead I decided to grab the footage and get the hell out of there. There was still a lot of money to be made from that video.”
She leans closer. Again I try to cry out, but again the gag is too tight.
“I admit, I considered finishing you off after the cabin burned down,” she sneers, “but when I saw you beating Jennifer's corpse... Well, I decided to play it safe. I've always been kind of... ambitious.”
I try to lash out at her, but she just smiles. The bed's metal railing shudder slightly, but no matter how hard I try, I can't make enough noise to attract help.
“So I waited,” she adds, reaching down and brushing her fingers against the side of my face with a strange kind of tenderness. “By the time you finally got out of the hospital last year, I'd managed to get in touch with the people who were working with Cole, and they made me a hell of an offer. Of course, just grabbing you and killing you to finish the original video wouldn't have been enough, so I decided to make things really interesting.” She leans closer, her eyes wide with excitement. “When I went missing, I was really just hiding out in that basement. I knew I needed injuries and I knew they had to be real, because I knew that eventually I'd have to trick the police. So I sat there for a few nights, doing things to myself. I watched the video of you for inspiration. It was hard drilling into my bones and cutting my own flesh open at first, but the weird thing is, after a while I actually started to like it. Does that make me sick? I think I'm a little sick.”
Taking a deep breath, I stare into her wild eyes. She's insane, but at the same time, I'm starting to wonder if this is really happening.
“Everything that they did to you at the cabin,” she continues, “I had to do to myself. By the end, I was actually getting off on it. It was better than sex.”
She's insane.
I don't know how I didn't realize it before, but she's completely insane.
Either that, or this is another hallucination.
“And then there was Matt...” She pauses. “Poor, sweet, decent Matt. Now that was a shame. He really liked you, he told me that, but I needed someone to die and I picked him. Torturing him wasn't much fun, though. In fact, it was kind of boring. Eventually I decided to speed things up and lure you to the building. Did you like the way I messed with those surveillance tapes, by the way? I'm pretty proud of myself for managing that. I laid a trail of breadcrumbs and you walked right into my trap. Once you'd come into the room and been caught on camera, I was able to knock you out and kill Matt. Then I re-edited the footage a little, and it was time to move on to the next stage.”
She pauses, as another faint smile crosses her lips.
“It was kind of fun running out of the building, naked and bleeding, and screaming as I raced toward town. I've always thought I'd be a good actor. After that, it was very easy to convince everyone that you were the one who was responsible for it all. Poor, mad Anna had snapped and gone postal.”
I try to lunge at her, but of course the ropes hold me back.
She laughs.
“When you came back from Norway,” she continues, “you refused to sell your story. Why was that? Some kind of dignity? My God, I sold mine, and I made a lot of money. More than Max ever made with his dumb book. For a while I thought that'd be enough, I thought I could just leave you to rot in this prison hospital, but eventually I ran out of money and I realized I needed another hit. I contacted the people who buy that kind of video and offered them some footage from when I was cutting myself up, but they said it wasn't worth much. Can you believe that? They said the only thing they were interested in buying would be...”
She leans closer.
“The final, final scene for the greatest video of all time,” she says with a smile. “Every movie needs an ending, right? The finished edit will start with you arriving in Norway, and it'll end with you dying here in a hospital bed. And the best part is, I don't have to share the payout with anyone. I'll disappear with the money and spend the rest of my life doing whatever the hell I want.”
Reaching over to the other side of the bed, she grabs a video camera and switches it on. The red light comes to life as the dark lens is aimed at my face.
“I'll make it quick,” she tells me. “I figure I owe you that much. Besides, this is more of a risk than I'd usually like. I used a fake name to get this job, but still... Better to get on with it.”
She turns for a moment, and I hear the sound of blades bumping together, as if she's trying to choose which knife to use. Realizing that this might be my last chance, I lean forward as far as I can and slam my head into the side of the camera, knocking it from her hand and sending it clattering to the ground.
“What the hell?” she hisses, turning to me. She clambers over the bed and picks the camera up. “Why isn't it turning on?” she stammers, before turning and punching the side of my jaw. “Do you think that was clever?” she asks. “Maybe I shouldn't make this quick, maybe I should make you suffer.” She fiddles with the camera for a moment longer. “You've just dislodged the battery, that's all. You've only delayed the inevitable by a couple of minutes. Bitch!”
As she turns and starts trying to force the battery back into
place, I try once again to pull free of the ropes. I know I don't have much time, but these restraints are too strong and whereas in the cabin I was able to break the chair, here in the hospital the metal bed-frame is far too strong. No matter how hard I struggle, I can already tell that there's no way to force the bed apart, and I only succeed in hurting my arms as I try once again to get loose.
“Damn thing,” Karen mutters, still working on the camera. “Nearly got it...”
Still straining, I feel a sharp pain in my arm. Finally, I realize that there's only one possible way to get loose, so I twist around as much as I can and put all my weight on my left arm, straining harder and harder. I know the ropes won't break, and neither will the bed itself, but I can feel my wrist starting to hurt more than ever. The pain is intense, radiating all the way along my arm, but I don't have another option so I keep pushing even as I feel I might pass out. Karen hasn't noticed yet, but I only have a few more seconds and -
Suddenly there's a loud snap and I realize I've managed to break my wrist. The agony is shocking, pulsing through my body, but at least now I'm able to pull my hand out from the under the ropes. This, in turn, makes the other ropes a little looser.
“Hey,” Karen says, turning to aim the camera at me, with the red light working again. She has a huge grin. “Are you ready for -”
Slipping my right hand free, I reach out and grab her by the neck, pulling her closer and slamming her face against the bed's metal frame. She drops the camera and tries to push me away, but I simply crash her head into the wall. She starts to slump down, but I know I can't afford to let go of her while she can still fight back, so I hold her neck and haul her onto the bed. She's struggling frantically, but as she lets out a gasp I smash her face against the corner of the bedside table, hitting her several times until I feel her body going limp. I don't trust her, though, so I hit her again and again until, finally, I realize that I'm close to killing her. For a moment I want to finish her off, to punish her the same way that I punished Jennifer, but finally I push her away and let her unconscious body slip to the floor. Reaching up, I fumble with the gag for a moment before eventually getting it loose.
