Chapter 37 Mr Mulcherson #2
We walk back to her office together while she tells me about a paper she wrote a decade ago arguing for long-term therapeutic containment rather than punitive isolation.
She uses the phrases ‘care pathway’ and ‘community integration’ like they could be spells.
I nod, attentive, the way you nod at a child’s drawing of a dragon that’s absolutely fucking shit but you can’t tell them that.
By the time we sit, the soporific is in full conversation with the first two guards’ bloodstreams. I can imagine them blinking hard at the monitors, deciding they’ll just rest their eyes for one second, heads lowering into sleeves.
The coffee will be slower; people drink their vigilance like a sacrament.
I gave him enough to make God blink. Callaway takes her first sip and grimaces at the taste.
“Strong,” she says.
“Long day,” I reply.
Doctor Callaway’s pen lifts, falls, lifts.
“Let’s try something different this evening,” she says, setting the notebook aside like a parent closing a bedtime story to talk seriously about monsters.
“You’ve been very calm. Perhaps we could revisit the end point of your…
incidents. What are your earliest physical cues? ”
A generous offer, to map my edges. I sit forward, hands folded. “Heat along the forearms. A tightening in the jaw. The urge to correct noise.”
“Noise,” she repeats. “Define.”
“Chaos without purpose,” I say. “Screaming that doesn’t mean anything.”
“And when you redirect—”
“I plan. I make the noise mean something.”
She nods, pleased, then sips her tea again. The steam fogs her glasses for a second. When it clears, her pupils have thinned. Her hand shakes, just once, a tiny tremor that has nothing to do with fear this time.
Good girl.
In the halls the camera feed performs the eighteenth minute of twenty-two.
Two guards blink in pairs. One sweeps the corridor with his beam, slow and lazy, the cone of light heavy with sleep.
No radio chatter. No ping. The temp writes his initials in a box to prove he existed there at that time and then writes them again because his hand slipped the first time.
“Kayla,” Doctor Callaway says, a little thick, “I want you to know that I’m proud—”
Her sentence veers sideways. The word slurs. She blinks slow, like she’s moving through honey.
“I know,” I say, and I stand.
She tries to follow. Her knees don’t fully cooperate; the sedative has loosened the joints of her certainty. She catches herself on the desk, breath puffing out through her nose. “I’m…a little light-headed,” she admits, and the confession annoys her even as it leaves her mouth.
“You should lie down,” I say, all bedside kindness. “You do so much.”
She hesitates, then lets me guide her into the spare chair in the corner, the one she offers me on days she’s trying to be the softer kind of warden.
Her movements are sloppy now, the edges of her professionalism blurring.
I put a cushion behind her head, loosen her collar, move the cup just out of reach.
Her tongue feels thick in her mouth as she tries to form another reassuring phrase.
“Kayla…we can…reassess…intervention protocols…if—”
“Shh,” I say, stroking her hair back from her forehead. “You’ve done enough for today.”
Her eyes fight to stay open. She loses. Sleep drags her down in ugly, graceless swallows. I watch her chest rise and fall for a full count of thirty, just to be sure. Then I take the keycard from her pocket and the pen from her fingers and step out into the corridor alone.
It is a kind thing, the way sedation turns a person into an unlocked door. I don’t have to push; I only have to lean.
Harry is in the break room with his bowl empty and his head down on his arms, one hand still in the crisp packet, fingers shiny with salt and grease.
A string of drool glistens from his mouth to his sleeve.
The TV murmurs some game show where people clap on command.
I take his bowl and set it in the sink because I like things tidy.
His pulse flutters, steady and slow, at the side of his neck.
“Harry,” I murmur.
He barely stirs. I slide the cord from the back of the TV free, loop it once, twice, smooth as braiding hair.
It fits nicely around his throat, the plastic warm from the wall.
His eyes shoot open when I tighten it, hands clawing at the air a beat too slow.
His chair skids; his heels drum against the linoleum.
His face blooms from pink to a spoiled plum, veins rising under the skin like a map of all the places he wishes he’d paid attention.
His nails scrape my wrists. I hold, gentle as a hug, until the last twitch drains out of him and his bowels loose in a wet, ugly apology.
“One,” I say softly, unhooking the cord and letting his head sag forward onto his arms as if he’s only napping harder. “Noise corrected. I told you. Twenty-two minutes. Enough time for a girl to get creative.”
The two competent guards are exactly where they should be, their competence softened into docility.
One is slumped in his chair in the monitoring room, head tipped back, mouth open.
The other has made it as far as propping his forehead on his fist, eyes rolling under half-closed lids as he loses his fight with gravity.
The screens flicker, showing the same corridor three times in a loop.
I open the drawer where they keep the emergency supplies. Not the flashy things – batons and tasers, the obvious toys. The quieter tools. A roll of gaffer tape. A pair of trauma shears. The heavy steel torch with the loose bulb. The box-cutter.
The first guard never wakes properly. I tape his wrists to the arms of the chair, ankles to the base, mouth shut around the soft grunts that are all he has time for.
“Hey,” I murmur, leaning in, letting him smell the hospital on my skin.
“You know they were going to cut it out of me, right? The thing you’ve been guarding.
Scheduled intervention. For its safety.” His eyes flare, bloodshot.
A sound tries to claw past the tape. “Funny, isn’t it?
Who gets to decide what happens inside my body. ”
The box-cutter opens with a satisfying little click.
Just a blade, really. It doesn’t take much.
The first slice goes along his forearm, elbow to wrist, shallow enough to sting, deep enough to open a clean red grin.
Blood wells up and spills over, runs along his knuckles, drops to the floor with soft, wet ticks.
The second cut crosses it, a careful X. He thrashes; the tape groans.
I work methodically. Measured lines. No hacking, no frenzy. I have the time and I want to have fun. I deserve this. I’ve been so patient, planned so well.
Peeling back skin in neat strips, I show him the pale tissue underneath, the gleam of tendon. His eyes roll, but I keep bringing him back with small touches – a thumb pressing into a wound, a light slap to the cheek, the dig of a fingernail under an eyelid.
“Stay with me,” I chide. “We’re doing accuracy today.”
By the time I finish, his hands look like someone has been practising filleting on him.
The floor under his chair is a spreading lake.
His breathing is a wet rattle. I step behind him, hook my fingers into his hair, and snap his head to one side.
The vertebrae pop like knuckles. The silence afterwards is clean.
Two.
The jumpy one who loves his zip ties is in the side corridor, slumped against the wall, his extra restraints spilled in his lap like a bouquet. I pick one up, balance it across my palm. Ratcheting plastic. So many small imprisonments in one simple design.
He stirs when I nudge his boot with mine. His eyes roll open, unfocused. “What—”
I crouch in front of him, press the tie to his lips like a shushing finger. “You like these, don’t you? Always ready to bind someone. Make them small. Make them quiet.”
His pupils widen as he realises I’m not a dream. He tries to push himself upright. The sedative drags him sideways into the wall.
“It’s important to understand what you’re doing with your tools,” I say. “Where they go. Where they dig. How to make them hurt.”
I take his wrist, loop the tie around, pull until it bites. Then the other wrist. Then ankles, drawn in tight. He breathes fast, shallow, like a preyed-on animal. I flip him onto his front with a shove of my boot and sit on his back, feeling the shallow hitch of his ribs under my weight.
“People like you,” I murmur, leaning down so my mouth is near his ear, “always think you’re the one holding the leash.”
I slide another tie around his throat and pull. Slow. Deliberate. Not enough to cut off all his air. Just enough to make every breath a fight. His feet drum the floor. He starts to cry, confusing himself with the sounds he’s heard other people make when he’s tightened restraints a little too far.
When his struggling begins to weaken, I move the tie higher, digging it under the jawline, feeling cartilage give little complaints. His tongue bulges between his teeth. There’s a pop, and a gush of warm wet down into the collar of his uniform as a tiny vessel gives way in his eye.
“Three,” I say when he stops. “Nearly done.”
I touch the world with quiet hands and it yields.
There is very little screaming. The syrup sees to that.
I move between rooms the way a moon moves across a lake.
The camera pauses its loop whenever I ask it to; it looks away with good manners.
I am not greedy. I don’t need to linger over every cut, every choke, every bone pushed past where it was meant to go.