Chapter 13
Chapter
Thirteen
HALLOW
The silence has a flavour. It tastes like the dust of bones and the sour, chemical tang of the padding that lines my world.
I’ve been in the dark for so long that I’ve started to invent new colours. There’s a shade of bruised violet that happens when I squeeze my eyes shut too hard, and a jagged, electric yellow that streaks across my vision whenever the phantom hum of the machine echoes in my skull.
Two hundred and fifteen days.
I am a specimen. I am a long-form poem written in scar tissue. I don’t think in sentences anymore; I think in vibrations. The tilt of the floor. The rhythm of the ventilation. The heavy, measured thud of Aris’s expensive Italian loafers as he approaches my door.
But today… the vibration is wrong.
It’s not the rhythmic clack-clack of a man coming to check a pulse. It’s a low-frequency roar that starts in the foundation of the building and travels up through the foam slab I’m strapped to. It feels like the earth is grinding its teeth.
I lie still, my wrists raw beneath the leather, staring at where the ceiling should be. My eyes are open, but they don’t see the room. They see the memory of a red pigtail. They see a chipped tooth in a mirror I haven’t touched in a lifetime.
Boom.
It’s distant, a muffled thud that sends a shower of fine white dust down from the wire-caged light above.
The silence breaks. It doesn’t shatter all at once; it peels away. From the hallway, I hear it—the sound of running. Not the orderly march of the orderlies. This is the frantic, uneven stumbling of men in a panic.
Then comes the sound that makes my heart—that stuttering, half-dead bird—jump in its cage.
A scream.
It’s not a patient’s scream. It’s not the long, melodic howl of someone lost in their own head. It’s sharp. It’s jagged. It’s the sound of a man seeing something that shouldn’t exist. It ends abruptly, cut off by a wet, heavy sound that I feel in my own throat.
The air in my cell changes. The vents usually cough out the smell of bleach and recycled breath, but now… something else is drifting in. A sweet, sickly scent. Like peppermint mixed with a chemical fire.
I inhale, and for the first time in months, my lungs don’t feel like lead. The scent is sharp, stinging my nostrils, making my vision swim in a haze of toxic green.
I start to laugh.
It’s a horrible sound. It’s the sound of a rusted gate swinging open after a century. My throat is dry, my vocal cords frayed, but the laugh bubbles up anyway—a quiet, wheezing giggle that shakes my chest against the leather restraints.
The door to my cell doesn’t open, but I hear the bolt slide. Not the main bolt. The emergency lockdown.
“Hallow?”
The voice is muffled by the heavy steel, but I know it. Aris. He sounds different. The clinical ice is gone. There’s a tremor in his voice, a ragged edge of fear that I want to reach out and wrap my fingers around.
“Hallow, stay away from the door,” he commands, though he’s the one outside. “There’s been an… incident. A breach. Miller is handling it.”
He’s lying. I can hear it in the way his breath hitches. Miller isn’t handling anything. “Do you hear me?” Aris screams, his fist slamming against the steel door. “Do not move! You are stabilised! You are mine!”
I don’t answer. I just watch the green mist begin to swirl under the door frame, a thin, emerald ribbon of chaos entering my sanctuary.
I close my eyes and let the peppermint fire fill my head. The ‘Soft Room’ is starting to melt. The diamond-stitched walls are turning into theatre curtains. The foam slab is becoming a stage.
The little girl in the tutu just stopped crying. She’s standing up. And she’s looking for her teeth.