Raine quickly set to work, liberating Evelyn from the torture device.
But even with the memory of Loretta Saye lying dead on the floor, the dream of Cygnet Hospital did not easily loosen its grip.
Within moments we discovered that the chair’s construction did not follow the logic of the waking world; it was not simply a matter of loosening the straps and uncoupling the buckles, freeing Evelyn as if from an overzealous dentist’s chair. The logic of the dream — or perhaps of Evelyn’s personal nightmare, her confinement and abuse at her mother’s hands — had fused many of the straps to the plastic body of the chair itself, or melted the buckles into unbreakable twists of metal, or formed them without any unlocking mechanism in the first place.
The restraints which bound Evelyn’s withered left leg and the unprotected stump of her right thigh were particularly egregious; they seemed to have been constructed around her limbs, glued and welded and stitched into place, with the assumption that she would never leave her torturous throne.
Raine got down to the messy business of freeing her anyway — undoing what buckles and clasps and velcro-strips she could, bending and breaking and snapping what she could not. She freed Evee’s head, throat, and hands first. More than once she had to stand up and kick a piece of the chair, stamping on it over and over, putting her body weight into the task of destroying Evelyn’s prison.
Raine’s bloody hands left behind smears of sticky crimson as she worked, dirtying the clean plastic of the chair, staining Evelyn’s white clothes.
I hurried to explain, as best I could.
“We’re in a dream,” I said. “Sort of like when Lozzie and I go Outside, in dreams, but different. It’s all so much more lucid, there’s no dream-haze, no confusion, no sense of unreality. Total lucidity! Or this might be some kind of extremely convincing illusion, woven by the Eye? I’m not sure, I don’t have enough data to go on, not yet. Or I might have broken reality somehow, back in Wonderland. I—I must have! I must have contributed to this somehow. We all must have! It doesn’t make any sense, otherwise. There’s no way the Eye could do all this, it’s impossible, it doesn’t even understand. It doesn’t know you, Evee! There’s no way it would summon this chair, this room, let alone your mother, it’s impossible, it’s—”
“Heather!” Evelyn croaked my name. “Slow down, for pity’s sake. Start at the beginning.” She flexed her torso against the straps. “Not like I’m going anywhere for the next five minutes.”
Raine popped her head over the side of the chair; she’d been down on Evee’s left, working on the restraints around her hips. “I’ll take that as a challenge, Lady Saye. Four minutes fifty-nine seconds. You’re on.”
Evelyn squint-frowned at Raine, but Raine just ducked her head and carried on.
I hiccuped — a failed attempt at a laugh. “The beginning,” I echoed. “Good question. Where even is the beginning of this? I don’t—”
“Heather,” Evelyn said through clenched teeth. “Just tell me where we are.”
Raine appeared again, with a smirk on her lips. “Cygnet Prison and Hospital,” she purred. “Maximum security for some. Run-of-the-grounds for others. And some Clockwork Orange shit for you, it seems, My Darling Lady.”
She finished with a wink, then set back to work, tugging on a strap over Evelyn’s stump. Raine took extra care not to touch the stump itself; even if she didn’t remember Evelyn, she treated her with exceedingly gentle care.
Evelyn’s expression curdled into a cocktail of shocked recognition, but she was too exhausted and confused to challenge Raine’s words.
Seeing Evelyn like this was not easy. She was awake, coherent, whole of mind — but not in body. She still barely looked anything like she did in reality, in real life, my cuddly soft Evee with her habitual layers of comfortable clothing and her half-sleepy scowl. She was thin and weak from malnourishment, her skin was pale and blotchy, and her left leg had almost no muscle at all. Her eyes were sunken and ringed with great dark circles of exhaustion — not mere tiredness, but the bone-deep bodily weariness that comes when one has not had a good night’s sleep or a good meal in months and months on end. Her hair was filthy, dragged out in long rat-tails of faded blonde. Beneath her thin white institutional clothing, there was so little of her left. Part of me yearned to sweep her up and carry her to safety, to put a big bowl of food in front of her, or tuck her into bed. This was Evelyn Saye as she had been ten years ago, crushed by her mother’s grip, as if nothing had changed across the intervening decade. Evelyn without Raine. Without me.
“E-Evee?” I prompted. “Let Raine work. She’ll have you free in a moment.”
Evelyn shook her head and blinked at me. “Wait, wait. Cygnet? I know that name, of course I do. Heather, isn’t that where you went to hospital, when you were little?”
I nodded. “Yes, yes, that’s correct. But this isn’t the real Cygnet, Evee. It’s some kind of nightmare version, made of all these different influences and spare parts. Like this room!” I gestured at the whiteboard covered in hateful nonsense, at the too-clean walls and bland ceiling, at the chair in which Evelyn sat, at the broken two-way mirror and the trio of corpses amid the glass shards on the floor. “This never would have existed in the real Cygnet, no matter how bad the real place could be! This is offensive, it’s vile, it’s sick! It’s—”
“Heather, for fuck’s sake!” Evelyn snapped, then descended into a dry and hacking cough. Her ribs were so thin and delicate, I was worried the coughing might break a bone. But the coughing subsided after a few moments. Evelyn waved one freed arm, waving off any help. “I can’t—” she wheezed, “can’t— process all this at once. Not right now. Not when I feel like— when I feel like this. I feel weak. Slow down.”
I burst into a beaming smile, tears filling my eyes. Couldn’t help myself. “Oh, Evee. You have no idea how good it is to have you back. I love you so much.”
Raine looked up from Evelyn’s straps again. “Do I love her?” she said.
“Um,” I hesitated, wiping my eyes; my hands were so covered in blood that I had to use my sleeves. “Yes, emphatically, but not like that.”
Raine shot me a wink. “Gotcha.”
Evelyn watched this exchange with mounting confusion, exhausted eyes flicking back and forth, squinting harder and harder. “Heather, just bottom line it for me.”
I took a deep breath, trying to steady myself. I put my hands together briefly, but that just smeared more blood around.
“None of this is real,” I said. “We’re all trapped here, in a dream, or an illusion, or something else. All of us are trapped in personal nightmares. Sort of. This was yours.”
“Okay, alright,” Evelyn said with a huff. “That makes considerably more sense. Thank you.”
“Sorry.” I gestured helplessly with my blood-soaked hands. “I’m a bit … uh, a bit shaken up … ”
All my muscles were still aching, especially my arms and down my back. My knuckles were throbbing, complaining every time I dared to open or close my fingers. My head was pounding, my heart was racing, my knees were weak and shaky, and my breath still came in ragged heaves. My left shin was throbbing extra hard from where I’d cut it on the glass, when I’d clambered into the room; there was nothing I could do about that right now, and the blood seemed to have stopped, while the pain was muted by adrenaline. I’d feel that in the morning, for certain.
Evelyn stared at me for a second, then looked down at the corpse of her mother again.
“Maybe don’t look at that?” I murmured.
“Mm,” Evelyn grunted, tearing her eyes away from the memory. She gestured weakly with a freshly-freed arm, pointing at the corpse without looking down. “She is definitely not real. She is in the ground. She is rotten and full of worms. I know that for a fact because I put her there myself. I don’t … ” Evelyn trailed off as she noticed the state of the scars on her maimed hand — the red-raw flesh, all cracked and dry, leaking pinkish blood plasma. “What?” she murmured, face creasing with a frown. “Why is my hand—”
I scrambled to explain: “Evee! Evee, we’re all in a pretty sorry state. Raine was locked up in a cell. I’m … well, I mean, just look at me.” I flapped my arms and tugged at my yellow blanket, but Evelyn couldn’t tear her eyes off the stumps of her long-ago severed fingers. Her breathing picked up, growing ragged with mounting panic, eyes going wide. She swallowed with some difficulty, then began to look down at the rest of her body.
“Evee? Evee!” I almost shouted. “Evee, look at me! Look at me.”
Evelyn jerked her head around, blinking rapidly. “What? What is it?!”
“I said, we’re all in a pretty sorry state. You included. But it’s not real. You have to keep that in mind, Evee. None of this is real. Please.” I reached out with both hands, bloodstained and trembling, gesturing with a plea for Evelyn to let me cradle her ancient wounds, resurrected by this cruel dream. “It’s not real. I promise.”
Evelyn swallowed again. She could barely choke down the dry remnants of her own saliva. She slowly lowered her maimed hand into mine. I cradled the back of her palm.
She whispered: “That’s my mother’s blood on your hands.”
“But it’s not real.”
Evelyn was panting softly. “Metaphorically it is. If this is a dream made by the Eye.”
“It’s not—”
“It is real,” she hissed, eyes glued to our joined hands. “In the only way which matters. Thank you. Both of you. I … I love you too. Both of you.”
Raine muttered: “Always up for a spot of ultra-violence in defence of a pretty little thing.”
Evelyn rolled her eyes; Raine’s irreverence had broken a spell and broken the embarrassment of Evelyn’s heartfelt words. Her breathing was slowing down, the panic fading as I cupped her hand in mine. She looked me up and down, frowning in her usual way, coldly interested, curious and puzzled. Her eyes were still thick and gummy with sleep and pain, ringed with dark circles, stained with tears. But she saw clearly enough.
“Where are your tentacles?” she croaked.
“I don’t know. This place has reduced me, Evee. I’m missing my tentacles, I can’t do brain-math, and I’m alone inside my own head. I don’t have my bio-reactor, I don’t have anything. I’m just one of me right now. The others must be around here somewhere, but … ” I trailed off and shrugged, trying not to think about the abyssal dysphoria tearing at my insides. “I’m just a human. Alone.”
Evelyn didn’t seem to know what to say. She shook her head, stunned and weak. “Fuck.”
“I know,” I said.
“That’s sick.”
“I know.”
“Are you— Heather, are you—”
“Alright?” I finished the awkward question for her, then forced myself to smile. “No, Evee, I’m not alright. I’m far from it. I’m alone inside my own flesh and my flesh is all wrong. And no brain-math means I’m weak and vulnerable.”
Evelyn snorted; it was forced, but I appreciated the effort all the same. “You just beat a nightmare of my mother to death.” She started to laugh, a wet little chuckle deep down in her throat, like her lungs were clogged with cold mucus. “With your bare hands.”
“Evee … ”
She was still laughing. “That’s pretty far from weak and vulnerable, Heather. That’s like an angel, descending to save me from hell. Like her.” She gestured at Raine with an elbow, which Raine deftly dodged. Evee’s laughing turned to ragged panting. “I’m going to look down at myself now. What am I going to see?”
“Evee, maybe don’t—”
Evelyn lowered her eyes and looked down at her own withered body, her atrophied muscles, her sunken belly beneath her plain white t-shirt. Her jaw tightened as she stared at the stick-like protuberance of her left leg beneath her white skirt, next to the terminal stump of her right. Her throat bobbed once, rasping as she swallowed.
She hissed through clenched teeth, voice dripping with rage: “Where the fuck is my leg?”
Raine looked up and caught my eye, fingers paused on the second-to-last strap around Evelyn’s hips, eyebrows raised in silent question.
“A prosthetic,” I said quickly. “Evee uses a prosthetic, in reality.”
“Yes!” Evelyn spat, head jerking up again. “And where the fuck is it?! Where’s my leg, where’s my walking stick?” She tried to gesture wildly at the wheelchair by the door, one weak arm flailing above Raine’s head. “I am not going in that fucking carriage. I am not! Where’s my stick!?”
Raine finally finished breaking Evee’s bonds; she ripped the last restraint off from around Evelyn’s left ankle, tossing the leather strap to the floor. But she didn’t stand up right away. Raine stayed down on one knee, right in front of Evelyn. She reached out with one hand and hovered it gently over Evelyn’s left knee, not quite touching her, even through her long white skirt.
She said: “Evelyn, Lady Saye, I will carry you if I have to. No burden is too great. No weight too heavy.”
Evelyn did a double take. “Oh, shut up! We’re not fifteen years old anymore, Raine!”
Raine raised her eyebrows, grinning with surprised pleasure.
“Evee,” I said gently. “Do you really not recall anything about being here, before we— I— ‘neutralised’ the dream of your mother?”
Evelyn huffed and frowned, opening her mouth to deliver some grumpy retort. But then she paused. “I’m not sure,” she admitted, looking around the room again. “I feel like I’ve been here for weeks. Months? There were … nurses, yes. And … ” She blinked several times, then squinted at me. “You tried to save me, Heather. This very morning. I was playing some watered down version of Battle of Kursk, by myself. And losing! Which would never happen, I would like to note, if anybody ever bothered to play against me. I remember now, but it’s like a dream. Or like it wasn’t quite right, somehow.”
“And before that?” I asked. “Do you recall anything before that?”
“Wonderland,” Evelyn growled. “We were in Wonderland. Carrying out our plan. And then this.”
“That’s about the long and short of it. It was the same with me. I woke up here, in a residential room for patients, this morning.”
“And now we’re in a nightmare asylum, filled with evil nurses and stupid bullshit.” Evelyn snorted a bitter little laugh. “Great. Now, here’s the important question. How do we get out?”
“Um. I don’t think we do.”
Raine finally straightened up. She shot a wink at Evee. “We’re working on breaking down the walls, pussy-cat. Both the physical walls and the walls in the heart, if you know what I mean.”
Evelyn squinted at Raine like she was mad. “‘Pussy-cat’? Raine, if you call me that again, I will find a way to hit you across the head, even if I have to carve myself a new walking stick from my mother’s fucking bones.” Evelyn gestured weakly with one of her thin and withered arms. “God, this is humiliating! You’re going to have to fetch me that wheelchair, and lift me! I can’t stand up like this!”
“It’s— it’s alright, Evee,” I said, “you don’t have to be embarrassed, or ashamed. It’s not your fault, you—”
“Well I am anyway, Heather!” she snapped back at me.
Raine leaned down and eased in close, so her face was inches from Evelyn’s eyes; she rippled with sudden predatory intent, voice dropping to a husky purr, eyes darken with amusement.
“Want me to pick you up, pussy-cat?” said Raine.
Evelyn scowled at her, put one hand on Raine’s face, and firmly pushed her away; Raine blinked in surprise, eyes peeking out from between Evelyn’s fingers.
Evelyn turned to address me, without letting go of Raine’s face. “Heather, please, what is wrong with her? Why is she acting like a dog in heat?”
“Um,” I said. “She’s never been like this with you, before? Maybe when she was younger?”
Evelyn narrowed her eyes at me. “Not like this, no. Not exactly.”
“Raine doesn’t remember anything from before the dream,” I said. “From before Cygnet. As far as she’s concerned, she and I only met each other today. She has no idea who you are. She remembers nothing. She believes me, she believes that this is all a dream, and about the Eye, and everything else, but she doesn’t actually remember anything herself.”
Evelyn squinted at Raine in disbelief. “And you went along with Heather, with no memories?”
Raine grinned from behind Evelyn’s hand. “Love at first sight. How could I say no to that kind of beauty?”
Evelyn snorted. “You are incredibly lucky that you fell in with me when we were teenagers. The wrong person could have made a monster out of you, at no higher price than a bit of affection. You’re hopeless, Raine. Head empty, no thoughts.”
Raine finally removed Evee’s hand from her face, brimming with curiosity. “So, you and I go way back, pussy-cat? I can see why. You’re all fire and acid, aren’t you? Real spicy. Mmmm-mmmm.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Evelyn snorted. “You’re right, Heather. She did used to be this way, back when we first met. But she was far less coherent in reality. This is like the worst of both periods of her life. Articulate and undomesticated, both at the same time.”
“I think you mean the best of both,” Raine purred back. “It doesn’t get much better than me, Lady Saye.”
“Tch,” Evelyn tutted. “Heather, are the others all the same? All like—” Evee’s face went white, her eyes flew wide, and she clutched at my bloodied hands all of a sudden. “The others! Praem! Where’s Praem?! And Twil! She can’t—”
“It’s okay!” I said quickly. “Everyone is okay! Well, not ‘okay’, but as okay as can be expected. I don’t think anybody has been hurt.”
“And Praem!? Where is Praem?”
“Praem’s here. We’ve seen her.”
I quickly informed Evelyn of everyone else’s current condition. She almost spat in disgust when I told her how Zheng was being treated, then squinted at a total loss, when I told her about Twil’s boarding-school fantasy with her pair of Lilies. She clenched her teeth over Night Praem’s location, and sighed when I finished getting her all caught up.
“And no sign of Sevens? No Maisie, either?” she asked.
I shook my head. “I suspect Sevens might be the ‘Director’ who the Knights mentioned, but I’m not certain.”
Evelyn frowned and screwed her eyes shut. “That isn’t right.”
“Evee?”
“I saw Praem,” she hissed. “I saw Praem, earlier. In the morning? Or another morning, another morning in this place. I don’t remember. Dammit! I won’t leave her to fend for herself!”
“You saw Night Praem? Maybe you were down in the prison, too?”
“No,” Evelyn snapped. She opened her eyes, frowning with exhausted determination. “I saw Praem, not dressed in lace or made of shadow, neither of those. I saw Praem. I remember. Just … it’s fuzzy. Dammit!” She slapped at one arm of the chair. “I can’t think. I feel like I could drink an Olympic pool and eat a whole herd of horses. Get me out of this thing, please, Heather. Please.”
Raine said: “I got permission to lift you, pussy-cat?”
“Stop calling me that.”
Raine cracked a smile. “How would you like me to address you, then? What do I call you in reality? My lady? Madame? Mistress? You seem like the type.”
Evelyn scowled at her. “Where is this coming from?! You’ve regressed, fine, whatever. When we first met you called me ‘you’ and ‘girl’, not whatever this nonsense is.”
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“It comes from the heart, my darkling lady.” Raine’s amusement vanished, like she’d thrown a switch. “Seriously, I can’t explain it with words. It’s not like with Heather. I don’t want to pin you against the wall and finger-bang you stupid like I did with her. Somehow I get the message that’s not your jam. But I want you out of that chair and into a safe place, and I will carry you over my shoulder if it’s the only way. I will carry you across burning coals with bare feet. I don’t care how undignified it is. Nude and shivering, wounded, half-dead — none of those could take away your dignity. In you is embodied something that cannot be removed. It’s incredible, I can see it just looking at you.” Raine smiled a little, rueful and ironic. “I’d say it’s like you’re a princess, but I’m not exactly a fan of monarchs. Maybe it’s something divine, instead, or maybe—”
“Alright, alright!” Evelyn snapped. She was blushing; her malnourished body could muster little more than a pale rose in both cheeks. “Fine. Stop. You can lift me into the chair. And just call me Evee. It’s what you always do. Bloody hell. Last thing we need right now is Raine with no limits.”
Raine winked and bowed her head to her beloved Evelyn.
I fetched the wheelchair from the far side of the room, crunching across the carpet of broken glass, trying to ignore the twin corpses of Push and Shove, the two nurses Raine had defeated. Raine’s kills had been far from clean, committed with a cast-iron frying pan. Both bodies were sprawled in slowly spreading pools of blood; my reflection shimmered in the crimson as I scurried past.
The wheelchair was solid and heavy, a metal frame with black leather upholstery. I had nowhere to wipe my bloody hands except on my own clothes, so I did the best I could before I grabbed the handles, but I still ended up smearing them with gore. I wheeled the chair across the room, stopped in front of Evee, then picked up the big grey dressing gown off the seat.
Evelyn eyed the contraption with contempt. “Fucking hate these things. You two have to promise me — promise me! — that you won’t leave me behind.” She swallowed as if choking down cold sick. “I don’t think I have the strength to propel myself.”
“Evee, I’d never leave you behind,” I said. “I promise.”
“Carry you if it comes to it,” Raine added.
Lifting Evee was easy enough; doing so without causing her serious pain was almost impossible, even with Raine’s strength and skill and loving care. Evelyn hissed through clenched teeth as Raine hauled her out of the torture chair, clutching at Raine’s shoulders with fingers curled like claws, whining deep down in her throat at the agony of her twisted spine, her fragile bones, and her ruined legs. We worked together to get her wrapped up warm and snug inside her dressing gown, and then Raine set her down in the wheelchair, very gently.
Evee said nothing for several moments, panting softly, blinking tears of pain out of her eyes, hands shaking as she found the armrests. I hovered at her side, wishing I had a way to reduce her discomfort. I would have done anything to soothe her pain.
She was covered in bloody hand prints now, crimson stains smeared all over her white t-shirt and matching white skirt.
Her eyes lingered on the torture chair.
“Evee?” I murmured. “Evee, don’t look at it. None of this is real.”
“When we get home,” she rasped, “I’m going to have a new one built. A replica. So I can burn it. And have the ashes crushed in a press.”
“E-Evee … Evee, please look away from it. Please.”
“Mm,” Evelyn grunted. She glanced at me instead. “Not the first time you’ve freed me, Heather.”
“I suppose not,” I said. “I love you, Evee.”
“Mm,” she grunted again. “Yes. Yes, you do. Hmm. Me … as well. Mm.”
Raine hopped away from us for a moment, past the corpses and the broken glass. She peered through the shattered portal of the two-way window, then walked over to the door which led out into the opposite corridor. She cracked the door open, stuck her head through, then closed it again and hurried back over.
“Coast is clear,” Raine said to me. “No nurses. Empty corridor. We probably can’t get that wheelchair over the broken window, so we’re gonna have to go out the opposite way.”
“Okay, good,” I said. “We can do that. Evee, you— oh!”
Evelyn was staring at her mother’s corpse, face down on the floor in a lake of blood. Crimson had soaked into the clothes and hair, blessing the dead memory with a halo of gore.
“Oh, um!” I made to grab the handles of the wheelchair and turn her away, but then I hesitated; I realised I needed to ask for permission. “Evee, may I touch your chair? Is it alright to move you? I don’t want to—”
“Shhhhhh,” Raine murmured. “Give her a sec, sweet thing. It’s her mum, right?”
I nodded. “Mm.”
Evelyn stared for what felt like minutes, though it was probably less than twenty seconds. Her pain seemed to ebb away, locked up behind the walls of her heart. She stared at her mother’s pitiful corpse with hardening eyes, then almost cracked a smile — but not quite. She caught it at the last moment, then snorted instead.
She turned her attention to her fellow audience.
The Saye Fox was also examining the corpse.
The Fox hadn’t moved an inch since Loretta Saye had fallen. She was sitting on her haunches, regarding the banished memory with those fire-light orange eyes, ears lowered, mouth open slightly to show her vulpine teeth.
“She’s not real,” Evelyn said, voice almost shaking. “She’s just a nightmare I used to have.”
The Fox looked up. She made eye contact with Evee.
“And I’m still alive,” Evelyn carried on. She swallowed, hard and raw. “And so are you. We have to move on. Come on. I can’t … can’t do it alone, you stupid thing.”
The Fox stood up and padded over to us. She circled Evelyn’s chair once, then sniffed the end of her withered leg. “Yip!”
“Better,” Evelyn murmured. Then she frowned. “How the hell did she get in here, anyway? The Fox, I mean. She wasn’t with us in Wonderland. Heather?”
“My question exactly,” I said. “I can’t figure it out. I don’t think she was with us, no. She appeared earlier, out in the asylum grounds, and then helped lead the way to you. She knew where you were. She unlocked a door for us, too.”
Evelyn frowned harder and harder at the Fox.
“Our Evee’s on to something,” Raine purred.
“Perhaps there’s a way in and out of this dream,” Evelyn murmured. “Perhaps she found it. Hard to keep foxes out of anywhere, you know that? You have to put fences deep into the ground to stop them from digging a way in. Maybe she knows a way.”
Raine said: “If she does, she needs to tell us, ‘cos we gotta move.”
“Ah?” I blinked at Raine. “We do? I mean, of course we do, but do you mean to somewhere specific?”
“That’s up to you,” Raine said. “What do we do now, sweet thing?”
Evelyn snorted in disbelief. “Sweet thing?” she muttered. “Bloody hell. Worse than when we were teenagers.”
I boggled at Raine. “Y-you’re asking me?”
“Mmhmm,” Raine purred. She gestured at the wreckage of the ‘Correction’ room. “We need to get out of here, for a start. We got three corpses on the ground and nowhere to put ‘em. The rules up here are different, not like down in the prison, we can’t get away with leaving bodies behind. We’re covered in blood, at the scene of the crime.”
Evelyn snorted in agreement. “Standing around like a trio of farts in the aftermath of a triple murder.”
“Mmhmm,” Raine grunted. “Two out of three of us are now fugitives, me and Evee here. I’d say we need to hide, hole up somewhere safe, steal some grub. But it’s up to you, sweet thing. You’re the only one of us fully awake.”
“I think I’m quite coherent, thank you very much,” said Evelyn.
I bit my bottom lip and cast about the room. Raine had a point. We were right in the middle of a multiple murder scene, all three of us covered in blood like we’d stepped off the set of a comedy slasher movie. “I don’t know,” I said. “We need to keep freeing the others, especially Zheng and Twil. If we can get either of them, the nurses wouldn’t stand a chance, even if they had guns or other weapons. But Lozzie’s riot might have—”
“Lozzie’s what?” Evelyn blurted out. “Excuse me?”
“Lozzers done caused a riot,” Raine said, with an approving smirk. “To give us cover, so we could get in here and save you, Lady Saye.”
Evelyn shook her head in disbelief. “That girl is a miracle sometimes, I swear.”
Raine purred deep in her throat. “Damn right. I think she had the right idea, too. A prison riot, a real one. Break the walls, take some hostages, throw a party on the roof. But I think she lit the fuse too early, or with too small a payload. If we could cause a big enough riot, with enough girls, and just a pinch of proper organisation, we could tear this place apart, body and soul.”
My heart sang in chorus with Raine’s words; on a gut-deep level I knew she was correct. A riot. A revolution. If only we could all work together.
“Alright,” I said, mouth going dry. “But first we need to regroup with Lozzie. Twil and her friends might be more receptive now, after that riot, if we can find them. And Zheng! We have to get some food to Zheng, we—”
Knock knock knock!
Knuckles rapped against the door which led out into the hallway, the hallway Raine had checked only moments earlier.
We all froze. Evelyn gripped the armrests of her wheelchair. The Fox went stiff, tail bristling, eyes fixed on the door. Raine pressed a finger to her lips, for silence.
A voice called through the door, bright and cheery and all too familiar; I cringed with recognition.
“Hello in there!” the voice said. “I’m sorry to interrupt a session, but we’ve got a bit of an incident unfolding in the main area of the hospital. We’re just checking on everybody. Two staff members in there haven’t answered their pagers.” The voice paused, then: “Hello?”
Raine clenched her teeth and drew her little plastic knife. I clutched my yellow blanket tighter around my shoulders.
The voice called through the door again: “I know corrections are not meant to be interrupted, but these are exceptional circumstances! I’m going to need an answer, or we’re going to come inside! Hello, is anybody present?”
I shrugged, completely lost. Evelyn looked like she wanted to vomit with anxiety. The Fox bared her teeth.
Raine cleared her throat, opened her mouth, and spoke in the most absurdly fruity French accent I’d ever heard: “We are currently occupied, yes!”
Worth a shot, I supposed.
The door slammed open with a bang, smashing into the white-washed wall.
A squad of nurses poured in through the door, crunching across the gravel of broken glass, stepping right over the corpses; four, then six, then a dozen, all of them heavyset and well-muscled beneath their white uniforms. All the nurses were armed with equipment from the riot-control in the entrance hall — man-catcher poles, lengths of rope, and plastic wrist-cuffs. They wore padded helmets and masks like imitation armour, protecting their necks and faces and heads. Two of them carried thin, arm-length metal truncheons with blunts points at the end: cattle prods. The nursing staff were more willing to use unsavoury methods of control, when sheltered deep with the walls of Cygnet Asylum.
The nurses stopped in a semi-circle, blocking the door, barring our exit. Their name tags all said the same thing: AN.END.
Raine glanced at me, then nodded at the broken two-way mirror back into the tiny observation room. I turned, ready to scramble over the shattered edges of razor-sharp glass, willing to do anything to escape.
But it was too late; a second squad of nurses tumbled into the observation room, packing themselves in shoulder-to-shoulder to deny our retreat. It would have been hopeless anyway. How could we have hauled Evelyn over that broken glass without wounding her?
Raine twisted back to the wall of nurses, clutching her little plastic knife; her frying pan was out of reach now, behind our opponents. I bared my teeth and raised my fists, feeling ridiculous. What could I do against a dozen heavily armed people? They would pin me to the wall with those poles and put cuffs around my wrists before I could so much as punch one of them in the face.
All the rage I’d felt toward the memory of Evelyn’s mother was gone now. That righteous anger had been personal, emotional, and raw.
Against the bland violence of institutional control, it meant less than nothing.
Evelyn whispered under her breath. A rapid string of Latin poured forth from her lips.
Magic!
That’s what Raine and I could do, now Evelyn was free. We could buy time.
Horror stepped into the room — A.HORROR, the nurse, the first nurse I’d seen in this unkind dream. Still young and blonde and comfortably plump, still dressed in that clean white uniform. She wasn’t armed like the other nurses. Instead she carried a shiny black walkie-talkie in one hand, and wore a sad frown on her face.
She spotted the three of us and sighed, then squinted at the fox in curious incomprehension. She closed the door behind her, shutting us all in with the heavily armed nurses; I wasn’t sure why, but that small fact made me suddenly and acutely more afraid about what they were about to do to us.
Horror spoke quickly into her walkie-talkie. “Correction room thirteen, east wing, three patients. Also a wild animal inside the building. Call grounds-keeping, get them to bring and snare and a plastic bag. Over.”
The walkie-talkie crackled: “Backup? Over.”
Horror said, “No, we have it under control. I know these three. Over and out.”
“Out,” said the walkie-talkie.
Horror lowered the handset, sighed a heavy and unimpressed sigh, then stepped forward, just beyond the protection of her nursing muscle.
Down at my side, Evelyn’s flow of Latin cut off. “Fuck!” she hissed, then started again. Had she fumbled? Had Horror done something to her?
Horror made eye contact with me, then with Raine, then with Evee. She ignored the Fox completely, glancing around the room, letting her gaze linger on each of the three corpses, then on the broken window.
“Well,” she said eventually. “I don’t know what you three girls have to say for yourselves. I really don’t. I don’t even want to hear it. I—”
“Heyyyy there, you mommy-coded slampig,” Raine purred in a voice that would have collapsed my knees if she’d used it on me. “How’s about you let us walk out of here? Forget about the whole thing. Let us go, and maybe I’ll come visit you after-hours with a ball gag and a strap the size of my arm. Promise I’ll make you squeal harder than you ever have before.”
I blinked several times and frowned at Raine, successfully distracted from the peril of our situation for a second. Evelyn’s string of Latin halted briefly with a splutter. Even the Fox let out a little ‘yerp?’
Horror was not impressed. Nor did she blush, or trip over her words. She regarded Raine with cold inevitability.
“I’ll skip the after-hours visit, thank you,” she said, “but you’re right about one thing. This little scene you’ve made here is going to have to be swept under the rug. Do you have any idea how much work that will be? How much backbreaking, painstaking, difficult, stressful, work that will entail?” She sighed again, put her hands on her hips, and shook her head. “All this is going to have to be cleaned up.”
I said: “I’m sorry? What do you mean, we’re right about one thing?”
Horror made eye contact with me again. “And you should really know better, Heather. You’re a clever girl. A good girl, usually. Well read, smart, bright. You have a future ahead of you, once you’re better. I don’t know what’s gotten into you today, or where it started, but it stops, right here. You should know that Cygnet can’t deal with a scandal like this. Think of all the patients who would be left without anywhere to go, if we had to disclose what had happened here today. The disturbance in the entrance hall, that’s one thing, that’s regrettable. But this?” Horror shook her head. “It will be as if this never happened.”
“Fuckin’ typical,” Raine hissed through clenched teeth. “Can’t even get noticed if you do a spot of murder, these days. What is the world coming to?”
Evelyn’s Latin muttering cut off again. She swallowed hard.
“Evee?” I hissed.
Her eyes were wild with panic. She shook her head sharply. “No magic. No magic! Heather, it’s not working!”
All hope fled my heart.
Horror said: “The three of you are going in isolation while we clean up. No ifs, no buts, no appeals. We’ll figure out what to do with you eventually, after you’ve spent a few days cooling your heads. But nobody is going to know this happened, least of all the other patients. Your little mess will result in nothing. Let that be a lesson to you. Don’t do it again.” She smirked. “Not that we’re going to give you the chance.”
Raine said, “You ain’t built no cell that can hold me.” She raised her white plastic knife and spun it over the back of her hand. “I can put half a dozen of you out with nothing but this bit of plastic. You wanna risk that? You wanna try me?”
Horror sighed, then held out a hand — to me. “Heather. Heather, come here, please.”
“What?” I said. “Sorry?”
“You don’t belong with these two. Raine is a known danger, and Evelyn is highly delusional. You have your problems, you’re a very unwell young woman, but you’ve got a sensible heart. You don’t have to get hurt if you come in peacefully. Come on, come away from those two.” She gestured with her fingers.
“N-no,” I said. “No, I won’t abandon my friends. No, never.”
Horror sighed. “Your sister is waiting for you.”
The bottom dropped out of my stomach.
For just a second, I almost stepped forward. The promise of Maisie outweighed everything else, every loyalty and every love. A week or two in isolation, and then my sister would be returned to me? Why not take the deal? I could always break Raine and Evee out a second time, couldn’t I?
But I knew it was a lie.
“Actually,” I said, “I think I’m fine with Raine, and with Evee, thank you very much. You can … ” I swallowed, braced myself, and broke out in hot sweat before I even said the words, but I did say them. “You can fuck off and die.”
Raine grinned wide. Evelyn huffed out an unimpressed sigh, shaking with adrenaline. The Fox padded in front of me, bristling and growling.
Horror took a step back, behind the wall of nurses. “I really didn’t want to have to do this the hard way, but we’re running out of time. Alright,” she raised her voice. “Try not to injure them. Especially Heather, she’s basically innocent, and—”
Raine glanced at me. “We need a miracle, sweet thing”, she said quickly. “What you got up your sleeves?”
“I … I don’t have anything!”
“—make sure not to let Raine up before she’s bound and gagged. Use the metal restraints on her, not the plastic. Tip—”
“Heather!” Evelyn shouted. “Hyperdimensional mathematics!”
“It doesn’t work right now!” I wailed.
“—Evelyn out of her wheelchair and get her on a stretcher, it’ll make her easier to control—”
The semi-circle of armed nurses stepped toward us. My heart leapt into my throat. I need a nuclear option, something I would never dream of doing under any other circumstances, something too risky, too dangerous, too daring. I would do anything to get my friends out of that room. To break for freedom.
But what did I have left?
“Hastur!” I shouted.
Evelyn yelped, “Heather, you can’t be serious!”
“Raine!” I said quickly. “Grab Evee’s wheelchair and be ready to move. I have no idea what this is going to do!” Then, again: “Hastur! That’s two!”
The line of nurses levelled their man-catcher poles, ready to box us in against the back wall and pin us to the plaster. Raine did exactly as I asked without question or hesitation; she grabbed the handles of Evelyn’s wheelchair and braced as if to break into a sprint.
Behind the wall of nurses, Horror frowned at me with pitiful curiosity, as if I was just another mad girl lost in magical thinking.
“Hastur!” I repeated. And that made three.
Nothing happened. No electrical charge passed through the air. No yellow goo bubbled up from the floor. No rescue arrived from beyond the dream.
The nurses stepped closer. The pair with cattle prods eased forward, weapons extended. I stumbled in retreat. Raine pulled Evee’s wheelchair backward by a few inches.
Raine said: “Heather, what’s meant to happen?”
Evee snapped, “It hasn’t bloody worked! He’s not coming, Heather! You said it yourself, we’re in a dream!”
Horror raised her voice: “Be gentle with them. Remember, everybody, we are dealing with mentally ill young women here. It’s not their fault. Be gentle, if you can—”
Knock-knock-knock-knock-knock — knock-knock!
A second round of knocking sounded against the chamber door.
The nurses stopped, surprised to be so interrupted. Horror frowned in utter incomprehension, turning to the door. She raised her walkie-talkie to her mouth and said: “No backup. We have the situation under control. Don’t—”
The door eased open on creaking hinges.
Dim light silhouetted a figure, outlined by the door frame, his front bathed in shadow. A man, tall and gangly.
Time was suspended for but a moment. He — with his face deep in shadow and darkness — appeared to tower over the room, as if we were all looking upward toward a higher stage of reality.
Then he stepped over the threshold, and into the play.
Thin blonde hair was raked sideways across a knobbly skull, a comb-over so obvious that it seemed to dare the observer into commenting upon the vast pale bald pate in the middle of the man’s head. Beneath this sink-hole of hair was an attempt at a face, narrow and gaunt, with a sunken chin, bulging eyes, and skin the colour of tainted wallpaper paste. The whites of his protuberant eyes were dyed the colour of fresh urine, as if he was falling into the final stages of liver failure.
He wore a suit the colour of rotten mustard, complete with a matching tie and a pair of trousers slightly too short for his long, thin legs. Socks dyed like polluted sand poked out from shiny shoes made of peeling black leather, revealing an under-layer the colour of aged banana peels.
Bent at the waist like his hips were a hinge, with his hands tucked behind the small of his back, he stalked into the room, turning bulging, bug-like eyes upon all available angles.
He did not look impressed. His mouth was the shape of an upside down U.
He walked right past Horror while staring straight at her, then through the wall of nurses. He ignored us and the Fox completely as he made a full circuit of the correction room. He stared at the walls, the skirting boards, the corners of the ceiling. He examined the torture chair, bending even more at the waist until his body was a full ninety-degree angle. He peered at the three corpses, and paused to look at many of the shards of glass on the floor. He even stared at the nurses, examining them as if they were fixtures or furniture.
Nobody else moved. Raine and I shared a glance. Raine raised her eyebrows. I shrugged, unsure exactly what I had summoned.
If this truly was the King in Yellow, my father-in-law to be, then I had no idea what power he held here, if any. Or what game he was playing.
‘Be ready,’ I mouthed to Raine.
She nodded, hands tight on the handles of Evee’s wheelchair. Evelyn just stared, frozen with shock.
Eventually, Horror recovered her composure. “Excuse me, sir!” she said. “But you can’t come in here. This isn’t a public area of the hospital. I’m afraid we’re going to have to escort you out. If you’ll come with me, please?”
The Yellow-Suited Apparition straightened up and looked Horror right in the eyes.
“Quite!” he said, in a voice so high-strung I was surprised his vocal chords did not explode. His whole head vibrated when he spoke.
Horror hesitated. “Then if you’ll—”
“Not a public area,” he echoed. He made ‘area’ sounds like ‘aarr-reah!’ He went on: “But I think you will find that I am not a member of the public. Not at all. Not in the slightest. Not even from a very distant position. I am an inspector, you see. A government inspector, with the Ministry of the Mind.”
Horror blinked. Several of the burly nurses hesitated as well, putting up their weapons or glancing at each other.
“Excuse me?” said Horror. “The Ministry of what?”
“The Ministry of the Mind!” repeated the Bureaucrat in Boiling Butter.
“I’m … I’m afraid I’ve never heard of your ministry before,” Horror said slowly. “I’m going to have to see some credentials, please?”
The Functionary in Failing Flax stuck a hand into the breast of his suit jacket, arm pistoning like a flailing mantis. He extracted a thick wallet — in pale yellow leather, of course. He handed it to Horror, then kept talking.
“I am afraid this facility is not up to snuff!” he said. “I am inspecting your hallways and your rooms, your corners and your cubbyholes. And what should I find? What should I find here, but broken glass all over the floor? A tripping hazard. This is a class seven infraction of habitual and usual and customary standards, under subjection bee-seven-eight submarine citation one-two-three, line twenty five kangaroo epsilon.”
I realised with a kind of terror I’d never felt before that The King in Yellow was improvising as fast as he could — and he was not getting very far. This was not his domain, his area of expertise, or his kind of narrative. He was scrambling to do whatever he could.
Horror juggled the walkie-talkie and the wallet in both hands, trying to open the latter without dropping the former.
“Well,” she said, huffing and puffing, “we’re having a bit of a patient incident at the moment. If you would see to a meeting with my superiors, I’m sure they would be happy to—”
“Oh!” he exclaimed. “Oh, no no no. No, no. Negative. I prefer the direct approach. The Ministry encourages it! Nay, demands that inspections are carried out at ground level. Now!” He indicated the room with a sweep of one arm, indicating us, me and Raine and Evee and the Fox. “Would you explain to me why these three young ladies and one older lady are walking around without their legally mandated hats and jodhpurs and without even a semblance of a joinking stick between them?”
Horror got the wallet open, but then she looked up at the King in utter confusion before she had a chance to examine his ‘credentials’. “Excuse me, what?” she said, squinting. “Their— their what, sorry?”
Raine nudged me in the side, and hissed: “We gotta go! He’s not giving us an opening!”
I mouthed back: “Give him a sec! We can’t break past the nurses.”
“Oh, no no no!” the Corn-Coloured Civil Servant repeated. “This won’t do, this just—” Horror’s eyes flicked back to the wallet again, as if trying to read the credentials at last. The King raised his voice: “It won’t do, madam, it simply will not!”
Horror tutted and huffed. “Sir, if you could just give me a moment, we are dealing with a patient situation and—”
“Tell me,” he said. His voice rang like a dozen broken violins. The air filled with the chemical tang of ozone and chlorine.
“Tell you what?” Horror said.
The Officer in Ochre bent at the waist again, bending toward Horror. Suddenly he seemed to make another ninety-degree angle with his body, but also tower over her at the same time, like he was looking down at a terrified human being, pinned beneath his gaze. Yellow-lit eyes, wide as oceans, bathed her face in stinking sulphuric light.
The hands he kept behind his back flickered once, gesturing toward the door with his long, moist fingers. A signal, for us. For me.
He said to Horror, his voice a jerking screech: “Have you seen the yellow sign?”
The squad of nurses exploded.
Yellow slime burst from beneath clothing and erupted from between the cracks of their padded armour, splattering against the walls and ceiling, gushing across the floor and mixing with the blood. The slop moved as if alive, slapping against the walls like tentacles of pearlescent flesh, shaking inside the bodies of the nurses, turning their weapons upon each other with jerking, stop-motion limbs.
Horror screamed, clutching her head, eyes clamped shut.
The Minister in Molten Gold seemed to tower over it all, a rocky outcrop in a churning sea of rotten urine and jaundiced pus.
“Now!” I shouted.
Raine and I plunged forward, crunching across shards of glass, feet splashing through the puddles of blood. Evelyn gripped the arms of her wheelchair as Raine pushed her ahead. The Fox leapt past my heels, racing for the door on quick little paws.
The yellow madness parted before us, as if it was never there.
We slammed out into the corridor; Raine turned Evelyn’s wheelchair to catch her momentum, so Evee didn’t go flying. Behind us, the room was a screaming, churning vortex of blood and bile, yellow foam like sulphur whirling in a torrent against the walls. The door banged shut, then yawned open, over and over again, like a shutter caught in a storm, showing us the interior of the correction room like the flickering stills of a silent movie.
Horror staggered and lurched amid the bloody froth. The King in Yellow towered over her, deep in his temporary mask.
And then Horror straightened up, reached out, and put a fist straight through the King’s chest.
He reeled backward, suit coming apart like yellow tissue paper, skin flying from bones like a cloud of butterflies scattering into the air.
“Where now?” Raine shouted. “Heather, we gotta go!”
“ … just run!” I said, turning away from my strange and alien father-in-law to-be. “Anywhere, just go! Anywhere we can hide!”