Hallowed

by Tonya Hurley

  “Don’t worry about me, Agnes. These bastards aren’t going to break me. Or you!”

  Agnes wasn’t able to put on as brave a front as her soul sister. She swallowed hard and took a deep breath, sweeping her long, greasy copper fishtail braid off her shoulder.

  “I just don’t know how much longer I can stand it, CeCe. I feel like I’m on Death Row instead of in a hospital, waiting around for my head to be chopped off or something.”

  “Yeah, it is a kind of terrorism. The meds, electroshock. Threatening your sanity or your life. Scaring you into submission. Compliance,” Cecilia said looking up and flipping off the omnipresent camera lens mounted in each corner of the psych ward lounge.

  “Aren’t you afraid?” Agnes asked almost embarrassed, voicing the one thing Sebastian had expressly warned them against.

  “No,” Cecilia said, finally turning to Agnes. “Only thing I’m afraid of is the unknown and I’m pretty sure I know how this story is gonna end. For better or worse.”

  “How do we rewrite it?” Agnes anguished.

  “I don’t think we can, or should, Agnes.”

  “We’re kind of at his mercy here. Who knows what he’s really planning.”

  Cecilia lowered her finger and her head and turned to make eye contact. She laughed a scornful laugh. “Yeah, that’s exactly right. Look at what happened to Lucy.” She paused. “Mercy? What mercy? And as for his plan? This is the plan. The game.”

  Agnes was skeptical. To her, it just didn’t seem elaborate or sadistic enough for Frey. “What? Keeping us here worrying? Smoking?”

  “It’s a kind of death, don’t you see, but without actually dying. Removing us from the world. From its consciousness. People are sheep. Without leadership, they’ll stray. Forget, Agnes. That’s what he’s betting on.”

  Agnes considered carefully what CeCe said and came to a conclusion of her own. “It’s more than that.”

  “What?”

  “Rejection.”

  “Very high school, but maybe so,” CeCe said matter-of-factly, her eyes widening. “He’s not stupid enough to really think he can talk it out of us after all that’s happened. After Lucy. After . . . Sebastian.”

  “Life is high school after all, isn’t it? “ Agnes asked rhetorically.

  Cecilia continued to muse, not really responding but more thinking it through out loud. Thinking about why she dropped out to come to New York and try to make it in music in the first place. The sort of emotional vertigo that comes with being misunderstood. A misfit in your own hometown. In your own mind.

  “It’s at the core of every fear. In high school, on stage, in life,” CeCe mumbled, almost trying to convince herself.

  “In love,” Agnes agreed, citing the one thing that mattered most to her. “That’s what there is to be afraid of, CeCe. It’s all about rejection.”

  “The more accepted we are, the stronger. The more dangerous to Frey.”

  “Yes. We can’t forget it. We can’t falter, Cecilia.”

  Jude walked over to them in a sign of solidarity. Cecilia picked up her head and smiled at him wanly, then turned it to process her grim, colorless surroundings.

  “I don’t know anymore. What kind of game is it when you have to die to win?”

  Agnes sensed despair in her tone, a note she wasn’t used to hearing from the rough and tumble rocker.

  “You know, rejection isn’t just about others rejecting us. It’s about rejecting ourselves. I think that’s what this is really all about.”

  Cecilia snuffed out a butt on the tiled floor and lit another, exhaling as much of the smoke out of her lungs as she could. She waved her hand quickly in front of her face, fanning the fumes away from Jude.

  “You keep believing that, Agnes, but . . .” she cooed, taking Jude’s sweet face in her nicotine-stained hands. “I’m not so sure it’s even about us anymore.”

  “Then who? What?”

  “The future,” she said, pointing out the window toward the chanting crowd and then gently kissing Jude on the cheek.

  The mental and emotional exhaustion both on CeCe’s face and in her words was obvious to Agnes. He might not have been able to shock the fight out of her, but Frey was getting to her nonetheless. She was in a funk for sure, dispirited. And who could blame her, Agnes thought. Agnes could feel the nurses moving closer, silently warning the three of them to split up.

  “Okay, break it up. Party’s over,” one nurse ordered.

  Cecilia and Agnes complied, not from fear of the consequences they might suffer but to shield Jude from any more unnecessary pain or punishment. They’d almost gotten used to the inhumanity they faced each day, from forced druggings and solitary confinement to strip searches and straitjackets, but he was just a child and needed whatever little protection they could provide. Some days that meant not making things worse. CeCe ran her hands through his hair gently and Agnes nodded toward his room. The boy blinked, signaling he understood, and left.

  The girls exchanged a few final comments in whispers as the nurses looked on impatiently.

  “My mother said the papers are reporting some gossip that Daniel Less is trying to get you out of here.”

  “Yeah? Well, whatever,” CeCe said, wiping the ash from her pant leg and forcing her lean frame upright. “I’m not leaving here without you.”

  Agnes turned uncharacteristically stern and took Cecilia by the shoulders, startling her and Jude, getting right in Cecilia’s face. It was a steely side of the free-spirited girl that rarely showed itself. “If you get a chance to get out of here,” Agnes insisted, “you take it. Do you hear me?”

  Cecilia stared hard into Agnes’s eyes. “Do you know what you are?” Cecilia said sweetly.

  “I’m not sure I want to know,” Agnes said with a smile, bracing herself.

  “You are an unframed masterpiece.”

  Agnes was flattered but suddenly saddened, thinking of Lucy. If ever there was a masterpiece it was her.

  “I think that’s what the chapel is for,” Agnes said. “Framing. Do you know what I mean?”

  “I do,” CeCe said, a note of resignation in her voice.

  “I meant it, Cecilia. If you get a chance to go, you go.”

  “Not without you.” The determined look in Cecilia’s eyes told Agnes she meant it.

  “You can do more good on the outside.”

  “Outside will take care of itself, Agnes,” Cecilia said, placing one hand on Agnes’s heart. “It’s what’s inside that matters.”

  Sister Dorothea approached the front desk of the Perpetual Help psych ward as she always did, with extreme caution and suspicion. The well lit but tiny foyer was not really suited to visitors, not welcoming. It seemed to her this might be intentional. If not entirely discouraging loved ones from visiting, making it as uncomfortable as possible. The trend in psychiatric care was clearly away from that kind of sterile environment, especially when it came to treating children with mental health issues, but there was no arguing with Frey’s reputation and success rate, so little fuss was made about the general visual unpleasantness.

  “I’m here to see Jude,” the sister announced.

  The desk clerk pretended not to know exactly why the nun was there and went through the formal just a moment perfunctory platitudes and then buzzed the floor nurse in the back of the ward. It was taking longer than usual to reject her request, which the nun found disconcerting.

  “Is there a problem?” she asked.

  The response the nun expected came back to her. It was the same each day.

  “No, I’m sorry but Jude is in session right now and is not allowed visitors.”

  “Can I just leave this bag of treats for him with you?” the nun asked politely.

  “I can’t accept gifts for patients.”

  The no-nonsense look in the nurse’s eyes told the sister that sympathy was not this nurse’s specialty.

  “Groundhog Day,” the nun mumbled sarcastically, to a blankly indifferent stare from the desk
. . . . “I’ll come back tomorrow. You can count on that. Bless you.”

  The nun felt as if she’d entered some sort of real life Twilight Zone. The same questions asked, the same responses given as if it were the first time. Neither acknowledged the redundancy, preferring to play the game by the rules. The visit ostensibly had accomplished little, just as her previous visits had. Though she might not have gotten to see the boy, she was quietly putting Frey and his psych ward minions on notice that someone was watching.

  As she turned to leave, she spied the boy at the end of the hall being ushered into Frey’s office. He walked slowly, staring straight ahead, frowning. Whatever joy there had been in his childhood, and there was precious little she knew, was gone or had been taken by Frey. Jude looked up and down the hallway toward her as if he could sense her presence. Their eyes met and his lips curled into a smile, a sign she felt, to let her know that he was okay. It was all the nun could do to hold back her tears. Seeing him standing there, so helpless, so alone. But the smile spoke volumes. It spoke the words he could not. Or would not. She only hoped it might soften the doctor’s black heart as Jude disappeared inside the office. But that would be a miracle and they were in short supply, she reckoned, in this literally godforsaken place.

  Frey was buzzed over the intercom from reception, notifying him that the nun was departing. He headed over to his door and looked out toward her as she walked away, closed his door, returned to his chair behind his desk, and stood behind it.

  “Good morning, Jude.”

  The child was his usual silent and unresponsive self. Frey pulled the shades on his office windows, allowing the sun to shine through, nearly blinding the boy. It wasn’t exactly the hot lights interrogation depicted in noir detective film squad rooms, but it was close enough. Jude could barely make out the doctor’s silhouette in the glare.

  “Such a lovely day, isn’t it, Jude?” Frey observed snidely, as the squinting boy remained impassive and motionless. “The sun is up. Children are outside playing. Roaming free. Where you should be, son, don’t you think?”

  If he was tempted, Jude didn’t show any sign of it. He remained stoic.

  “I hope you weren’t too upset by the commotion Cecilia caused on the ward earlier. She’s a rebellious one.”

  Jude sensed that the doctor referenced the incident not to reassure him, but to remind him.

  “You, young man, seem to me to be far more rational than either of your friends. Wise beyond your years.”

  Jude was unmoved by the doctor’s flattery.

  “Do you know why you are here? Why all of you are here?”

  Jude slowly turned his head from side to side.

  “The short answer is because I want you here. In fact, though you might find this hard to believe, you are better off here. In my, ah, care. Safer.”

  Jude remained poker faced, unimpressed by Frey’s claims of magnanimity, but it was clear to Frey that he was at least listening.

  “Make sure the girls know. They trust you, Jude. All this is for their own good. And for yours,” the doctor suggested ominously.

  Jude smiled. Guilelessly, innocently, as he had at the nun a few moments earlier, but Frey’s reaction was not a benevolent one. His persistence bordered on obsession. Jude was no longer sure if the doctor saw him as a source of irritation or whether he was simply using Jude to taunt himself. Either way, his displeasure in Jude’s indifference was evident. His words began to flow more quickly. Manically. As if he was running out of time at a college lecture and trying to get every thought out.

  “What you are suffering from is a kind of child abuse. A deep psychological and emotional trauma foisted on you first by Sebastian, then the Church,” Frey opined, foamy white spittle collecting at the sides of his mouth. “This is the power of religion. It makes saints of the confused and the vulnerable and glorifies them through the stupid and superstitious. It amplifies the young person’s penchant for make-believe and naïveté, with disastrous results.”

  Jude dropped his chin to his chest, almost as if he’d gone to sleep on the doctor’s scathing dissertation. Frey barely noticed and continued with his speechifying.

  “. . . Bringing with it guilt and shame and eternal damnation. I bring you relief from such supposed morality. Freedom.”

  Jude’s head suddenly snapped upright. His pupils widened and eyes focused squarely on Frey’s. “But no soul, Doctor,” the boy said, in a voice that was not his own. “Nothing inside.”

  Frey was stunned. Not only that the mute boy had spoken, but at the familiarity of the tone. The doctor recognized it. He held up a prescription bottle of psychoactive medications, rattled them, and twisted off the child-protective cap, opening it.

  “Don’t bother looking too deeply inside yourself for a soul, Jude. It’s right in here.”

  The wind blew gently across the patient’s face, caressing it. The smell of roses hung thick in the breeze, invading his nostrils, rousing him.

  “Wake up, Jesse.”

  The familiar voice seemed to come to him as if from a subway speaker in the darkened room. Crackling with static in the black night that spilled through the windows, barely comprehensible.

  “I can’t,” he moaned.

  “You have to.”

  “I’m so tired, Lucy.”

  “You’ve been asleep a long time, Jesse.”

  “My whole life, is that what you mean?”

  “Weren’t we all?”

  Jesse stared up and the ceiling, wincing in pain, unable to move.

  “My hands hurt.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “It was my own fault.”

  “No. It was brave.”

  “It was stupid.”

  “You did it for me. For all of us.”

  “For what? I’m lying here like a cadaver.”

  “You’re still alive.”

  “Always so hopeful. And confident, Lucy. I wish I had more of that.”

  “Get up, Jesse.”

  “Help me.”

  “I can’t.”

  “You mean you won’t. I think you like this.”

  “No.”

  “Come closer. I want to see you.” Jesse watched a shadow on the ceiling above him grow larger but could not hear her approaching. He turned his head to the side and she was there.

  “There is work for you to do, Jesse.”

  “I’m shot, Lucy. There’s nothing left inside me.”

  “I don’t believe that. You’re a fighter. A survivor. Remember all we went through.”

  “You mean what I put you through. I shouldn’t have.”

  “You didn’t make me do anything. No regrets, Jesse.”

  “I was angry and jealous of those other kids at school. I wanted to show them what I had.”

  “You did. We did. Now you need to show everybody.”

  “I feel like I’m dreaming but not, you know.”

  “I know.”

  “Are you even here?”

  Lucy shook her head no.

  She reached for his injured hand and took it in hers. His pain subsided and his body strengthened at her touch.

  “I don’t understand. I see you,” Jesse said, tears welling in his eyes. “I feel you.”

  “I’m nowhere and everywhere.”

  “They killed you, didn’t they? Frey and those fucking animals.”

  “No, Jesse. I did what I had to do.”

  Jesse began to shake in anger and frustration.

  “This is all Sebastian’s fault,” he wailed. “I hate him!”

  “Don’t, Jesse. There is no blame.”

  “He took you away from me!”

  “He brought me to myself. He brought us together. Forever.”

  “But you’re gone, Lucy.”

  “I am more here than I ever was. I won’t be forgotten. That’s your job. Your mission now.”

  “Tell the story?”

  “Write what you know.”

  “I can’t do it without you.”


  “You can. You will.”

  “We’re a team.”

  “And always will be.” Lucy smiled a never-ending smile. Bright and magnificent and contagious. Stars appeared about her head in an almost blinding headpiece, creating an otherworldly glow in the room.

  “You’re a star now, Lucy.”

  She lowered her head and her blond mane hung down over his face. Tears of gold ran down her face and mixed with his. She brought her hands to his eyes and dried them, kissing his cheek three times.

  “Please don’t go. If you stay, then it’s not true that you’re dead.”

  “I died so that I could live, Jesse,” she said. “We’ll be together again. Believe it. Laughing. Fighting. And then I can tell you . . .” He squeezed her hand tightly.

  “Tell me what?” Jesse pressed.

  “How much I love you.”

  It was growing faintly light. Jesse opened his eyes. Lucy was gone. If she was ever really there to begin with. He started to rise. Determined. He struggled up to a seated position despite the tightening atrophied muscles in his arms and legs. The pain was intense but he refused to cry out. The electrodes monitoring his heart rate and breathing pulled away as he sat up, sending out an alarm to the nurse’s station.

  He heard calls for Doctor Frey made over the ward’s PA system and the rush of nurses and orderlies coming toward the room. They looked at him, astonished. He looked back, thinking only one thing.

  “Where’s my laptop?”

  13 Cecilia could hear the argument going on outside her door only in muffled strains. Sounded like official business to her.

  “Step aside.”

  “This is completely against all accepted medical practices,” the head nurse declared defiantly. “Against medical advice and not in this patient’s best interest.”

  “Step aside, I said,” a man with a deep voice ordered.

  Cecilia slipped out of her cotton hospital smock and put on a black tank top, leather leggings, and wrapped herself in a vintage see-through embroidered black kimono. The clothes she came in with. Down the backs of her arms and across her back was the word S-A-I-N-T handwritten in black lipstick on her skin—showing through her kimono.