Chapter Twenty #3
“Sorry, darling,” an orderly told her, and she didn’t like the way he looked at her.
She glared at him with her sharp, clear eyes and chanted soror mea soror mea until he remembered that he, too, had a sister who had troubles of her own, and so he looked for Ava Abbot in the patient directory.
She was in a building called Harte House.
He might have asked for a kiss as payment on any other occasion—he had no manners—but if he did something so boorish, he might never be able to face his own sister again.
Once Lauren was gone, he wondered if he might have imagined the girl who had spoken to him, for he didn’t even hear her go out the door.
She’d merely disappeared; perhaps she had been nothing more than a fantasy.
It was a large campus, with dozens of buildings and extensive lawns.
Lauren did her best to make her own way, intending not to draw attention to herself by asking anyone official for directions.
When the hospital first opened, the clientele was extremely wealthy and doctors and patients would play badminton together.
Women wore white, gauzy dresses and had their hair washed by their own maids, and picnics were held on the lawn.
But this day, the grounds were deserted; there were a few nurses taking their break, chattering about work, and two young men tossed a ball back and forth without much interest. A young blond woman sat on a bench.
She threw Lauren an amused look when Lauren sat next to her and offered her a cigarette, which she gratefully accepted.
“This is against the rules,” the young woman said, also accepting a light and inhaling. “Thanks.”
“I’m looking for Harte House,” Lauren said.
“You don’t want to go there. It’s a lockup. They do horrible things to you until you become ordinary. By the time they’re through, you’ve become nothing but air. I learned the game, and now I have privileges, if you call sitting on a bench a privilege.”
“Why are you here?” Lauren asked, for her new companion seemed perfectly fine.
The young woman gave a tiny shrug. “I’m a victim of my own introspection. What about you?” She narrowed her brown eyes. “Depression? Obsession? Mania? Sexual perversion?”
“I’m here to rescue someone.”
“I’m here because I’m afraid of getting older.
I am afraid of getting married and being normal and living my life to please others but never myself.
Spare me from cooking three meals a day, spare me from the relentless cage of routine and rote.
I want to be free. I want, I think, to be omniscient. Know all, tell all, write all.”
Lauren realized that she had stumbled upon a poet. She wondered if the other young woman’s fingers were ink stained, if she thought in rhyme, if she felt the same sort of loneliness that Lauren did, the kind that could be cured only by words. “What do you write?” Lauren asked.
“Anything. Everything.” She gave Lauren a knowing look. “Just like you.”
“I’m not a writer,” Lauren said. “Not really.”
The blond woman choked back a laugh. “I say the same thing. I tell them I’m nothing, but inside I am everything. I’m on fire. They just can’t know it, or they’ll drown me alive.”
The young woman poet seemed broken in some ways and strong in others.
“They told me my father died,” the poet said, “but they’re always lying to me, so I lie right back. They think I made it all up inside my head.”
“Well, then to hell with them.” Lauren paused. She could rescue two as well as one. “Do you want to leave here? I can take you anywhere you want to go.”
“By broomstick?”
They both laughed.
“Actually, by taxi. I’ve got one waiting for me out on the road.”
“I thought you were a witch,” the poet said, clearly disappointed. “I was sure of it. I can usually sense them.”
“I am, but we don’t use brooms. We pretend to be perfectly normal.”
The poet laughed. “I’m one, too. I eat men like air.
I can see what others never can.” She admitted she had attempted suicide and had had a series of dreadful electroshock treatments at another hospital that had driven her further into herself.
“Go rescue your friend,” the poet told her.
“Then write about it. I’ll just have to rescue myself.
That’s always the way unless you have a good friend like you. ”
“I’m not a good friend. I’m not good at all,” Lauren said.
“Oh, bullshit,” the poet said. “You’re looking in a mirror when you should be looking into your soul.”
Lauren realized she had taken the poet’s hand, which wasn’t like her at all. She felt her heart melting inside her chest. She felt like crying, as a matter of fact.
“If you’re a witch, can you tell my fortune before you go?” the poet asked. She didn’t sound as fierce now. She sounded frightened. She sounded as if she knew the end of her story.
Lauren then saw that the poet wouldn’t be rescued. Instead, she would marry and make three meals a day, but despite that veil of normalcy, and the husband and children she would have, she would never be like anyone else. Each word she wrote would be beautiful and fierce.
“Everything you write will be remembered,” Lauren promised.
“That’s not the important part,” the poet said, sure of herself. “The important part is doing it. Even when they tell you not to.” She narrowed her eyes. “Make me believe in you. If you’re really a witch, show me who you are.”
Lauren unbuttoned her shirt and slipped it off, and there were the black letters that defined her, every word that meant something to her, words she dreamed about and used in her poems.
“Did it hurt?” the poet asked of her tattoos.
“Not at all,” Lauren said, thinking of Carrick. “I think I fell in love because of it.”
“I try to stay away from that,” the poet responded, and they both almost laughed, and they might have if they had been other people, but they were themselves.
“People say it’s fun,” the poet said. “Falling in love.”
“Well, that’s bullshit, too.”
They exchanged a look, and then faint smiles.
Lauren was aware that some mistakes could ruin you forever if you weren’t careful.
She would have stayed and continued their conversation, but the poet pointed out that beyond the hedges there was an entrance to one of the tunnels used by the staff during inclement weather.
The tunnels were also the secret way to go from building to building, to do what they told you not to.
The system had been put into place in the late nineteenth century so even if eight feet of snow fell it was still possible to move around the campus.
“Go and don’t feel guilty,” the poet said, stubbing out her cigarette. “If you stay here any longer, they’ll find you.”
They would have embraced if they had been other people, but instead they smiled at one another before Lauren went across the lawn.
She found the entrance, and when she opened the door, she came upon a stairway leading underground.
Roots had broken through the concrete in several places, and spiders hung by silken threads.
She held on to the wooden banister and soon arrived at the lower level, where there was a linoleum floor and a few dim lights set into the ceiling.
The plumbing system ran along the tunnels, and it was said bodies were transported through it if need be.
Several doors said RESTRICTED, for they led into rooms for animal testing or electroshock therapy.
There was a darkness here that was almost suffocating, and it was difficult to get one’s bearings.
Lauren sat on the floor cross-legged and took some sage and a box of matches.
When she set the herb alight, it flickered to the right; she stomped out the little flame and went on, turning right, until she reached a closet where some white jackets were stored.
She slipped on one with a name tag so that she was now an attendant named Martha Cooke.
She opened the door to the next set of stairs and took them two at a time.
She spoke a spell out loud so that the nurse at the desk would recognize her as Martha Cooke.
She was plain and unsmiling and not at all suspect.
“Just checking in on our Little Miss Witch,” Lauren said in her guise as Martha the attendant.
“Getting her ready for her treatment tomorrow,” the woman at the desk said.
“Electroshock. That should quiet her down.” She leaned forward and spoke confidentially.
“It’s the strangest thing. Every time we cut her hair, it keeps growing back, so we have to keep cutting it.
She’s peculiar, all right.” Lauren was handed a razor and a pair of scissors. “Give it a go.”
“I’ll do my best,” Lauren said.
She went down a hallway, so filled with sorrow and confusion that she felt dizzy.
This place could do that to you, and she had the urge to flee—not that she would, for she had spied Ava in a chair by the window.
Her beautiful long hair had been shorn and was choppy.
She wore gray pajamas and heavy woolen socks and was gazing out at the view in a sort of daze.
Ava thought she’d seen Jack’s shadow, but she decided her eyes were playing tricks on her, for that was surely impossible.
When she heard her name spoken, her expression was blank.
She was going crazy here. That was the only explanation for thinking that the attendant in a white coat who was approaching was someone she knew.
The attendant had pale hair and sharp little teeth.
“Something’s wrong with me,” Ava said when the attendant came closer.
“I think my father might be dead, but I saw him sitting on the edge of my bed. And there’s a wolf outside waiting for me. ”
“Nothing is wrong with you,” Lauren said. “Your father’s spirit is watching over you, and the wolf is your dog, Jack. People here make it all seem very complicated, but it’s not. It’s simple. We’re going to jump out the window and get the hell out of here.”