Chapter 7
Chapter
Seven
HALLOW
The world is a smear of charcoal and fluorescent hum.
Aris doesn’t call Miller. He doesn’t call for a gurney.
He unbolts the iron cuffs himself, the clink-clink-clink of the metal hitting the mahogany sounding like coins on a grave.
He slides his arms under me—one beneath my knees, one supporting my neck—and hauls me up.
My head lolls against his shoulder, my hair matted with electrode gel and sweat. I am a weightless, empty thing.
He carries me out of the office. The hallway is an industrial throat of white tile and peeling paint. The air out here smells different than his office—less like scotch and old books, more like floor wax, bleach, and the sour, sharp tang of unwashed bodies.
The lights overhead flicker with a rhythmic pop-buzz. Every pulse of light feels like a physical slap against my eyes. I see the shadows of other inmates pressed against the reinforced glass of their doors—pale, featureless faces watching the Doctor carry his broken doll back to the dark.
He reaches my cell. It isn’t the standard cage. It’s the “Soft Room” at the end of the hall.
The door is reinforced steel, heavy enough to stop a truck.
He kicks the release, and the door groans open.
Inside, the walls are padded with thick, cream-coloured vinyl, stitched in diamond patterns that look like teeth.
There is no window. Just a single recessed light in the ceiling protected by a wire cage.
He lays me down on the low, integrated platform in the centre of the room. It isn’t a bed. It’s a slab of high-density foam covered in the same cold vinyl.
I don’t move. I can’t. My muscles have forgotten how to hold tension. I just lie there, staring at the wire cage on the ceiling, the tears finally drying into itchy salt-tracks on my skin.
He works fast. He’s practiced at this.
He pulls the heavy leather restraints from the sides of the slab.
These aren’t the thin nylon straps from the infirmary.
These are thick, oil-tanned leather, stained dark from years of use.
He cinches them over my thighs, my waist, and my chest. Ratchets-click.
Ratchet-click. The sound is industrial, final.
He leans over me, his face inches from mine. He’s still flushed, the adrenaline from the office making his eyes look glassier than mine. He reaches out and brushes a stray hair from my cracked lip.
“You’re safe now, Hallow,” he whispers. The room is so quiet I can hear the click of his spit when he talks. “No more Thorne. No more Miller. Just the silence. I’ve adjusted your chart. Total sensory deprivation until the neural pathways reset.”
He runs a thumb over my jaw, his touch light, almost reverent.
“The others… they think I’m punishing you. They don’t understand that this is the only way to keep you pure. Outside this room, you’re just a target. In here, you’re a secret.”
He stands up, looking down at me. I’m pinned to the foam, my arms splayed and strapped, my chest rising and falling in shallow, hitching breaths. I want to scream, to tell him that the silence is worse than the electricity, but the words are buried under a mile of static.
“I’ll be back in the morning to check the vitals,” he says, his hand on the heavy steel door. “Don’t try to fight the straps, Hallow. The leather only bites if you pull. Just be the ghost. Just wait for me.”
The door swings shut. The heavy iron bolt slides into place with a definitive thunk.
Then, the light goes out.
Total, suffocating black. The air is thick and still, smelling of old vinyl and my own fear. I lie there in the dark, the leather digging into my skin, listening to the sound of my own heart—a wet, muffled drum in a padded tomb.
I’m not Hallow Maddix anymore. I’m just a heartbeat in a box.
The blackness is so thick I can taste it. It’s a physical weight on my tongue, tasting of copper and the vinyl padding.
I’m supposed to be a ghost, but my body won’t stop remembering. My muscles, even strapped down and thrumming with the leftover current of the ECT, begin to twitch with a rhythm that has nothing to do with Aris.
It starts in my feet.
In the dark, the cold leather against my ankles isn’t a restraint; it’s the silk ribbon of a pointe shoe. I can feel the ghost-pain of a bruised toenail, the scent of rosin and sawdust, the heat of the stage lights that didn’t burn—they glowed.
I’m back in the studio. The floor is sprung maple, not foam and bone.
I can hear the sharp, rhythmic clack of the wooden barre as a dozen girls move in unison.
Plié. Relevé. The music isn’t a funeral march; it’s a heartbeat I actually want to follow.
I’m eighteen, and the only thing that hurts is the stretch in my hamstrings and the fire in my lungs after a grand jeté.
I remember the way the air felt when I spun. I wasn’t a specimen then. I was gravity’s middle finger. I was a streak of movement that men looked at with wonder, not with a scalpel in their pockets.
The memory bleeds.
The white walls of the asylum dissolve into the dusty velvet curtains of the wings.
I can see the silhouette of my partner—not Aris, not a monster, just a man with steady hands who knew how to catch me without breaking my ribs.
I remember the sweat on my neck, the way the applause felt like a physical wave, pushing me back into the light.
Clink.
The sound of the leather strap buckling against the metal frame snaps me back.
I’m not on stage. I’m splayed on a slab in a room meant for the dying.
I try to hold onto the image of the stage, but the electricity has frayed the edges of the film.
The applause turns into the sound of the ECT machine’s hum.
The scent of the rosin turns back into the smell of my own singed hair.
The man catching me in the dark isn’t a dancer; it’s Aris, his face twisted with that sick, reverent joy as he watches my soul leave my body.
I try to move my arm, to find the curve of a third position, but the leather bites deep into my bicep. I’m a broken bird pinned to a board.
The tears start again, but I don’t feel them. I just feel the hollow space where the music used to be. I am Hallow Maddix, and I used to be beautiful. Now, I’m just a collection of triggered reflexes and scar tissue.
The silence in the room begins to throb. It’s a heavy, low-frequency vibration that I feel in my teeth before I hear it in my ears. It’s not a memory. It’s the building.
The facility is groaning. Far below the Soft Room, something is waking up. It isn’t a ghost, and it isn’t a doctor.
It’s the first real tremor of the end.