“I thought I was, too.”
“Never say never,” she chuckled. “There’s no way he’s done with any of us.”
“There’s so much to tell you, I don’t even know where to begin,” Ricky said. The fog in his brain was quite obviously from the blow to his head, much more manageable than the disconnecting numbness of his treatment. At least he could chalk one up in the positive column.
“Does it look like there’s a rush? I don’t have to be anywhere.”
“Even if I am a dead man, I’m glad I get to see you again. It was so lonely. For a while . . . For a while I couldn’t even remember you. It was like being in someone else’s body. Someone with no past, no memory, no future.” The idea of moving from that spot was almost unthinkable. Her leg was so comfortable, even if the floor was hard and he was so, so thirsty.
“I like you in this body just fine.”
“Enjoy it while you can,” he muttered. “I have a strong suspicion it’ll be that sicko’s science project soon.”
Kay brushed her hand through his hair again, tsking quietly. “What was the alternative? You said you were supposed to kill somebody, right? You did the right thing.”
“Maybe. But then why does it feel so bad?” Ricky asked.
The pain gradually lifted and he became more aware of his surroundings. Their cell was no bigger than the one he had been in when the warden made him watch Patty’s lobotomy. At the slightest movement, bugs scattered to the corners of the room. Persistent drips fell from unseen sources, falling unevenly like the last remnants of a rainstorm.
“This is bad, you know,” Kay said seriously.
“I know.”
“Tossing you in here with me . . . It can’t be for long.”
“I know that, too.” Stirring, he tilted his head to see her more clearly. She looked gaunt, but still pretty, her full apple cheeks the surviving evidence of a healthier diet. “What do we do besides wait? Nurse Ash is probably in a ditch somewhere. We have no friends, no help, nobody on the outside to get us out of here.”
A wry smile brightened her face. “That’s not entirely true.”
“What do you mean?”
“Wait for nightfall,” she said with a wink. “And you’ll see.”
Ricky didn’t have long to wait. He had been blacked out for most of the day, but now his head wound was just an occasional throb at the base of his skull. When he touched the area it was tender, but most of him hurt, so he hardly noticed it. The orderlies had bruised him all down his back and shoulders, and just flinching from one pain made another sting.
But the pain was forgotten when night fell and slowly, one by one, the doors of the lower ward opened. He heard the others scraping open first, the huge, metal hinges sounding like the inner workings of a steamboat. When their own door opened, he simply stared at it, certain he was either imagining things or this was some kind of trick.
“What the hell,” he muttered, sitting up quickly and scooting back to where Kay sat against the wall. “What’s going on?”
“It happens every night now. He just lets us out.” Kay shrugged. She hadn’t moved. “The ward is still locked up tight. No way out.”
“But the others?”
“Oh, they roam around down here. Talk. Scream at one another. Whatever they want. I’m starting to think he’s hoping we’ll all kill one another and save him the trouble of a cover-up.” She sighed and stood, helping Ricky to his feet. Out in the hall, he could hear voices and a shape passed right by their open door. “Let’s go see what all the commotion is about.”
“Aren’t they dangerous?” he asked, trailing behind.
“Says the guy who stabbed the warden.”
“That’s different,” Ricky defended softly. “You would’ve done the same thing.”
“No way, I would’ve gone for the throat.”
Fair point. Still, he didn’t know what they would find out there. Kay seemed less nervous, padding out into the corridor. A few lamps behind cages hung from the ceiling, striped patterns of light making the stone floor glow yellow. Ricky stopped short the moment he left the cell. He hadn’t expected to recognize so many of the people in the hall.
Tanner was there, leaning against the wall, his eyes hardened with frost as he glared at Nurse Ash. And she looked completely different now, shrunken, cuts and bruises on every visible skin surface, her red hair a fiery bramble around her head. She stood next to the little girl, Lucy, who had been transferred from the upper floors to the basement. Her eyes lit up when she saw Ricky and she beckoned him over.
He could hardly believe it. In his dreams she had seemed like an unholy terror, and now he was walking right toward her, his fear giving way to curiosity.
Glancing up at Nurse Ash, the girl tugged on Jocelyn’s sleeve and pointed. The nurse—former nurse—leaned down and listened while the girl cupped her hand around her ear and whispered something.
“She’s proud of you,” Nurse Ash said, still bent over. “And she wants me to thank you for making the right decision.”
“That makes one of you,” Tanner muttered. His eyes never strayed far from Nurse Ash.
She ignored him, giving Ricky a shrug and a “what can you do?” smile. “For a while there I didn’t know if I’d be seeing you again. He tried to make you hurt Lucy?”
“That was graduation,” Ricky said, finding his voice. “But I found your note in the book and the card, too. I managed to dodge the medicine this morning. Everything started coming back. I remembered all of you, and my house, and my dad . . . The warden killed him. He was a specimen to experiment on just like me.”
“Everything?” Tanner asked, finally tearing his eyes away from the nurse.
“Yes, well, I think so anyway. It’s hard to know what’s real anymore.”
“If his memory came back, then so should yours.” He turned back to Nurse Ash. Even after being kept in the basement he still had a bigger, more intimidating build than the others. And he wasn’t shy about using it now, taking a menacing step toward the nurse. “You helped him with all of this even after Madge died. How can we ever trust you?”
“She tried to make up for it, okay? She’s been helping me.” Ricky hadn’t meant to intervene, but he did, darting forward and holding out a hand toward Tanner. “This whole time she’s been risking her own safety to help me and now she’s no better off than the rest of us. You have to let it go.”
Tanner’s icy gaze only hardened. “I don’t have to do anything.”
“We all do messed-up things to survive,” Kay said, joining Ricky and putting a hand on his shoulder. “You heard what he said, she’s been helping him out upstairs. She must have pissed off the warden pretty bad to end up down here, and that makes her fine in my book.”
“He’s toyed with all of our heads,” Ricky added, using her momentum. “The warden did a lot of things, and he has a lot of influence. I almost cut my own throat because he asked me to. I know that doesn’t forgive everything, but whatever Nurse Ash did or didn’t do, she’s working against him now. He probably brainwashed the entire staff. Jocelyn is the only one who actually managed to fight through it. That’s remarkable, not something you should yell at her about.”
Tanner turned his scowl to Ricky.
“Tanner was an orderly here,” Jocelyn explained gently. “He . . . didn’t cope well with Madge’s death. It was hard on all of us, but he was close to her. I understand why he blames me. I blame all of us. We both should have tried harder to protect Madge from that monster.”
At that, Tanner glanced at the nurse, then to Ricky, and finally backed down. He leaned against the wall, working his jaw. “It doesn’t matter anyway. We’re stuck down here until he decides what to do with us.”
Ricky took in each one of them in turn. A tall silhouette lumbered up behind Lucy, and he almost cried out to warn her. But the man stepped into the light and simply stood, watching, his dark, balding hair mussed and powdered with dandruff as big as snowflakes. He looked vacant,
almost like a mannequin come to life. One that had been left out in the rain to decay.
Dennis.
He recognized Patty and Angela lurking in the shadows around him. Seeing them all under the lamps, he had to laugh. It was like getting spooked by a shadow in the dark, only to turn on the light to see a hat stand and a pair of mittens. Maybe they were dangerous, but right now they only looked bedraggled. They were the broken heart of the asylum.
“There is a way out,” Nurse Ash spoke up, tentatively, her eyes darting from face to face. “Only . . . It’s not easy. One of us would have to die.”
There was a loud, clanking sound from down the hall and past the locked ward door. Everyone scattered. Ricky did, too, yanked by Kay back to their cell.
“What are we hiding from?” he whispered. She had pressed him into the corner.
“You never know down here. Does it matter?”
“No,” Ricky admitted. “I guess it doesn’t.” There were no more sounds from outside the ward, but he didn’t move. It wasn’t exactly unpleasant to be crammed into a corner with a pretty girl. He hadn’t had safe human contact in so long; just standing in close proximity to someone he didn’t despise felt like a revelation. “We don’t have to do this, you know.”
“Do what?” she asked, craning her neck back to see him.
“Whatever Jocelyn is suggesting. We could just ignore it, stick to ourselves.”
“And wait here to die?” Kay shook her head and then rested it back against the wall. Her hands settled on Ricky’s shoulders and squeezed. “There’s a target on your back now, Ricky. The warden isn’t just gonna let this go.”
“There’s one on you, too . . . Thanks to me.”
“Please. I’m the only black girl in this place. Maybe in this entire state. You don’t think I had a target on me the second they threw me in here? Down here we’re not in trouble, Rick, we’re discarded.” She gestured to the door behind him. “Trash, get it? Forgotten. Nobody knows we’re here and nobody cares. Unless that nurse is some kind of James Bond superspy we’re not getting out of here. Maybe if your parents come, but then—”
He winced. “I saw them.”
“What?”
“I was so brain-dead . . . Just not myself. The warden had me tell them a bunch of lies and they ate it up. Look, I’ve been thinking about what you said. About the Scouring of the Shire, and going home. Even if we do get out of here, I don’t want to go back. They liked what they saw. They would rather get a different person back or no person at all. They don’t want me,” he said, taking in a shaky breath, “and I don’t want them. My real dad died here. There’s nothing for me with my family.”
“Ricky . . . Jesus.”
“Yeah.” He didn’t know what else to say. “The warden wanted me here because of my father. He thinks there’s some kind of biological link in whatever he’s trying to accomplish. I guess he got really close to brainwashing my dad, but when it didn’t work out, he found a way to get me here and try again. I heard him talking about it with his rich friends the night of the gala.”
“Then we’re really stuck here,” Kay murmured. There was another large bang and they jumped apart, scattering, hiding together behind the cot that didn’t do much to conceal them. He heard the cell doors shutting, slamming, and they were plunged into overwhelming silence.
They shared that single rickety cot. The next morning, food arrived through a slot in the door. No utensils. Barely enough for one person, let alone two. Like they were animals. Dogs. Kay was right. They were forgotten down here, given only what someone would spare if they bothered to remember the patients at all.
He still wouldn’t trade it for his relatively nicer accommodations up on the third floor. And he hadn’t dreamed of anything at all. It wasn’t freedom, certainly, but he felt more like himself, at least a little unburdened. Faking a stomachache, he let Kay have most of their porridge.
“What do we do all day down here?” he asked.
“Sometimes we can talk to one another through the walls, but you have to shout and that makes the orderlies mad. They’ll come sedate you if you get too rowdy. I say we just sing to ourselves or think about stories. Books. Keeps me from losing it.” She pushed the empty porridge bowl back toward the door slot. “It’ll be easier now. We can at least talk to each other.”
“It’s so nice not to be alone,” he said softly. “Isolation was hell.”
The breakfast plates were collected without a word and Ricky watched the hand shoot in and out before the slot slammed shut. “Does the warden come down here much?”
“It’s only been a few days for me so I couldn’t say. My guess is he was too busy messing with you, but now? Unless he’s found a new favorite we might be in trouble.”
“Gah.” He shook his head, hunching his shoulders and turning away from her. “This is all my fault. I should’ve just . . . I don’t know . . .”
“Killed that little girl?” she asked.
“I could have tricked him for a little longer,” Ricky said, but he knew that line of reasoning would lead him nowhere.
“And then what? If we get out of here, it’s despite his best efforts not because of them,” Kay said, standing and pacing. “That nurse helped you out. She helped me out. If anybody knows a way out of here, it’s her.”
“Don’t you worry about the ‘and then whats’?” Ricky asked. “We even get up to the first floor, and then what? We make it outside, and then what? We make it out of Camford, and then what?”
“Would you rather not try?” she asked, sounding defensive.
“No . . . Obviously we have to, I just . . . I don’t know. Don’t listen to me.”
She stopped pacing and joined him, sitting facing him and leaning forward with a sigh. They all looked so rough, so abused. He wondered what it would be like to see everyone in the basement cleaned up and happy. Treated well for a change. “The college,” she said. “Maybe we could go to the administration. It’s right there, you know.”
“Or they would think we were crazy runaways. And anyway I think the warden has influence with them, he’s trying to make his buddy the dean.”
“Scratch that, then,” she murmured. “Does it make you feel better if I say: we’ll think of something?”
“Sure,” Ricky replied dryly. He remembered what his father had said to him, or his vision of his father, though he was now starting to believe it really was him. Fight. That seemed so impossible now, but they had survived this far and stayed together. His mother said she had been writing and calling, so maybe she did still care, and even if he was angry with his parents, they might at least provide a way out and that was better than nothing. He could decide if he still wanted her love and support later, when they were safely away from the warden.
“We will,” he told her confidently. “I know we’ll think of something.”
They gathered in the cell Nurse Ash shared with Lucy. There weren’t enough rooms for everyone to be housed individually, but even if there were, Ricky had a feeling they’d be packed in together. This freedom wasn’t a gift, he knew, it was a statement of their powerlessness.
Scheme together, plot together, kill one another . . . It doesn’t matter.
He tried not to entertain thoughts of helplessness but they kept creeping back.
“We don’t have to actually die,” Nurse Ash was explaining, addressing them from the corner of the room. The rest of them were fanned out in a semicircle, their backs to the door. Dennis stood at the very back, towering over the rest of them. “I don’t know if one of us could fake it well enough, but if someone even seems incredibly ill and close to dying, they’ll have to be treated.”
“What makes you think that?” Tanner asked. His attitude toward the nurse wasn’t improving by much, but at least he was standing with them. “What makes you think he cares at all what happens down here?”
She centered herself with a long inhale, folding her hands together tightly at her waist. “When Madge died—my friend, o
ur friend—Tanner and I were there. We saw it. He could have killed us, too, to cover it up but he didn’t. We’re a liability. We know things. If more and more bodies start piling up here someone will notice, and attention is the last thing he wants.”
“The warden was furious about what happened at the gala and that wasn’t even such a big deal,” Kay said reasonably. “Things look pretty good if you don’t see what goes on down here.”
Nodding, Nurse Ash went on, speaking more excitedly now. “Exactly. He tried to use his techniques on Tanner and me to solve the problem. If he could control us, then he could control the situation and Madge’s death was one instead of three. I know some of us don’t have much family, maybe nobody is looking for us, but there has to be a way to get some outside attention.” She paused, pursing her lips, apparently steeling herself for what she wanted to say next. “I have people in Chicago who care about me. They’ll start to wonder if I don’t check in soon. If I disappear for good, my family will start asking questions.”
“This is all about you,” Tanner said with a snort. “You want to get carried out of here and taken to a hospital. And what, we should just take your word that once you’re out you’ll get us help? What if nobody believes you?”
“It’s not just that,” she shot back just as irritably. “I know the schedule. Intakes and visits don’t happen every single day. There’s a pattern to things. The warden scheduled a second fund-raiser after the first one ended so miserably. He’s going to try again. That’s our opportunity. Even if we can’t get out, we can at least make enough commotion to startle whoever is waiting in the lobby. It doesn’t exactly look like we’re being fed, cleaned, and clothed properly.”
“That’s thin,” Tanner said. Even if the guy was being extremely combative, Ricky had to agree with him. The plan revolved around too many Ifs and Maybes. They could give it a shot, of course, but he doubted it would cause so much as a ripple. “They’ll sedate you right away; if the warden is so worried about his reputation he won’t risk that kind of trouble.”