Chapter Twenty #2
My doctor. The tired kind man who'd sat across from me a hundred times in soft lamp rooms, who spoke low and never rushed me, who'd been the one unremarkable gentleness in four gray years.
Dr. Reed. And the fog in me reached for him like he was a lifeline, because a known face is a known face, and some broken animal part of me went he's here, the doctor's here, doctors keep you safe.
"You're somewhere you can finally rest," he said, in that gentle clinician's voice, the one I'd trusted.
"Somewhere quiet. Somewhere those men can't reach you and crowd you and fill your head with noise.
I've watched them undo so much of my work, these last weeks.
All that careful progress. It's all right.
We have time to put it right again. We have all the time in the world now, you and I. "
Something in me, far down, under the drug, under the fog, snagged. My work.
"You've always been so frightened," he went on, soft, soothing, reaching out to smooth the blanket near my hand the way a good doctor would.
"Ever since the woods. So frightened, and never able to say of what.
Do you remember what I used to tell you?
In our sessions? When the fear would come and you couldn't find its name? "
And then he leaned in close, and his voice changed.
It dropped. It shed the gentleness like a coat slipping off a shoulder, all the warmth draining out of it until what was left was low and smooth and patient and cold, a voice with nothing underneath it but interest, and he said, quiet, right against my ear, the thing he used to say:
"What’s in the dark, Beatrice? Tell me."
My whole body convulsed.
It came up out of me before my mind could even reach it, a full-body knowing, violent, total, every nerve I owned standing up screaming at once, my heart slamming so hard the drug couldn't hold it down, because I knew that voice.
I knew it the way you know your own name screamed across a parking lot.
I had heard that voice low and smooth and patient in the worst dark of my life, in the trees, hanging back where I couldn't see, telling the hands what to do with me. Don’t be gentle.
Use her. Break her. The voice that had no face.
The voice from every nightmare. The shadow I'd told Eli about just this morning, the one they never got, the one that had been out there the whole time.
It was Dr. Reed.
The room tilted and roared. I lay there paralyzed in my own unplugged body and watched the two of them slide together and become one man, the gentle tired doctor who'd sat at my bedside, and the smooth cold voice that had directed my own destruction in the dark, and there was no space left between them at all.
There never had been. He'd been the same man the entire time.
He'd put his voice in my ear in the woods and then he'd put on a kind face and sat across from me, and watched me try and fail to remember where I'd heard him before.
"There it is," he breathed, and oh, he was delighted, I could see it, the warmth coming back into his face except now I understood what the warmth was, it was appetite.
"There it is. You found me. I wondered if you ever would.
I'll be honest, Beatrice, I'd nearly given up hoping.
Four years I sat with you and said the gentle things in the gentle voice, and you never once felt it.
Do you know how hard that was? To be that close to you, that patient, and never let you see me?
" He sat back, pleased, settling in like a man getting comfortable for a long-awaited conversation.
"But your body always knew. I could see it know, every session, the alarm going off in you and never able to find the door.
That was the sweetest part. Watching you sit there frightened of me and not know it was me. "
I made a sound. It was supposed to be a word. It came out as nothing.
"Don't try to talk yet. It'll come back.
Everything comes back, in time, in here.
" He gestured, easy, at the clean quiet room, the drawn blind, the rail on the bed, and I understood with a fresh wave of horror that this was no accident of a place, this was built, this was made, a room dressed up like care, like healing, like a hospital, by a man who knew exactly how a place like that looks and feels and smells, because looking like healing was the whole disguise.
"You're wondering where you are. You're wondering how.
I'm going to tell you all of it, I've wanted to tell you all of it from the very beginning, and I find I can't bear to wait another minute.
You're going to understand, Beatrice. By the time we're done you're going to understand everything.
That's the part I've looked forward to most."
Behind him, near the door, Holly stood with her arms wrapped around herself, and her face had begun, slowly, to change.
She'd brought me here believing something. I could see it cracking. She was looking at the man she'd called a real doctor, the kind who understands, and she was listening to the smooth cold thing his voice had become, and the first true fear was coming up in her eyes like water rising in a well.
But Reed wasn't looking at her. Reed was looking at me, only me, the way he must have looked at me in the dark of those trees, with all the patience in the world.
"Now," he said softly, folding his hands again, settling in. "Let me tell you everything I am. You've earned it." He smiled, gentle and terrible. "Let's begin where you began. Let's begin in the woods."