My whole life before feels distanced.
Side effects of the drugs and electroshock. Memory loss one of the most prominent. Alex claims he’s curing me of my illness, but if he doesn’t kill me, all he’ll achieve is frying my brain.
I’ll become a hollow vessel. Vacant and lifeless. I suppose he can then claim I’m cured, as I’ll have nothing left that makes me me. I’ll be one of those drooling, empty-eyed, comatose patients in a constant stupor.
I hope he kills me.
Night is the only time Alex allows me out for fresh air, like some caged animal. And only at the top of the basement stairs, not daring to risk another attempted escape. I spend my fifteen minutes staring at the stars. They’re brilliant here, unlike the city, where they have to compete against the big, bright lights.
After that night in the staircase, Alex hasn’t looked at me longer than the seconds necessary to mark an observation. He hasn’t touched me other than to get an updated brain scan. By keeping his distance, he’s assuring he won’t make a mistake—that he won’t give me the chance to get close to him again.
With what mental capacity I have left, I open the notebook to the marked page. Alex did give me a journal. And a pen. I know he reads it while I’m under, so today I write a passage I hope will reach him. One last attempt to unchain myself from this fate.
For some reason, as I touch the pen to the page, an image of Ericson in his wrinkled business suit pops into my head. I can smell the coffee, feel the metal spoon in my hand. I close my eyes and see the words on the page, the notes I’d taken of my target.
That’s who I was. I despise the fact that a memory of Ericson—the piece of shit that he is—is what awakens me, but I hold on to it regardless, because it’s what binds me to Blakely and her life.
Then I write:
The forest sky is blood, the trees black veins. Decay is the wind that whispers through the limbs, corrosive, destructive. Like the rotted soil devouring the roots, he poisons my body, stealing that vital essence which makes me alive.
Shadows can’t exist without the sun, yet the stars burn like an inferno against the inky black, casting me in the deepest shadow of darkness. An inescapable void where he chains the lock.
Alex believes I’m sick, but his infection is even more dark and monstrous.
Her murder is his ailment—a festering disease seeping from his pores. Letting go of his taste for retribution is the only cure, or he’ll self-destruct.
The forest rot has leeched into him and only the cleansing water will free us.
At the sound of his approach, I stop writing. Hopefully my thoughts are abstract enough to be concerning, and even a little bit tempting. I’ve asked him before to take me to the water, but every request is met with silence. Before my mind is completely broken, I need one last chance at the outside world.
“The results don’t lie,” he says, as he enters the room. He’s wild and unkempt today. He hasn’t shaved, his face scruffy, hair disheveled. “I’ve tried to reproduce them, over and over…but the data is staring me in the face.”
He paces the room as if I’m not here, rambling and hands waving. I sit up and scoot back on the cot, trying to be unseen. It makes me feel weak, pathetic. It makes me loathe Alex in a way I’ve never experienced before—because no one has ever made me feel this powerless.
He yanks on his lab coat and pulls the computer cart around. He’s lost in thought as he clicks through pages of data. I look past him to the keys hanging on the wall. They’re so close, but just out of reach.
“That’s the variable. That’s the only difference,” he mutters to himself. “I have to recreate the first session.”
A sense akin to dread crawls over me, a million hairy spider legs walking over my skin. My flesh is tight and hot at the thought of experiencing that torture again. “Alex.” I try to get his attention, but he’s absorbed in his work. “Alex—”
With a jolt, he looks up from the screen. “We’re wasting time,” he says. “The anesthesia affects the molecular structure of the compound. The only way to achieve breakthrough is to recreate the first treatment. But this time, at a higher level.”
I’m weak and exhausted and damn near broken—but I can’t just give in, give up. I get to my feet and lift my chin, ready for when Alex comes for me with what fight I have left.
He stops far enough away that I can’t touch him. He removes his glasses, placing them on the cart, then takes me in curiously. I’m wearing the same clothes I had on the day before. I plan to wear them again tomorrow. I’ve stopped caring to wash my hair, and it’s a snarled mess with grown out dark roots. But he’s looking at me like he sees none of it. Not the dark circles under my eyes. Not the pallor of my skin.
No, to Alex—right here in this moment of maddening discovery—I’m the most beautiful thing he’s ever seen.
I’m his answer.
And when he moves toward me, I lash out with all the fight that my body can muster.
In the end, it’s not enough. I’m subdued and dragged to that gurney where he injects me with his cocktail brain drug, and my heart careens against my chest as I see those paddles coming closer.
“Everything in nature has a defense mechanism,” he says, a crazed gleam in his eyes. “You’re strong, Blakely. Stubborn. The most resilient subject. Your mind refuses to crack. But even the strongest defense mechanism can be broken. Just have to find your weakness.”
I try to push myself below consciousness, to some distant place far away from him and this hell. But when the current comes, I feel every electrifying pulse. My body is a lightning rod for pain.
I hear music. Cords plucked in a frenzy, bows scraped across strings at an earsplitting decimal. An agonizing symphony of torture, and Alex the conductor.
A scream claws past the guard in my mouth, and it doesn’t stop until my throat flames raw. Alex dials the voltage up until my body can no longer withstand the torment, and mercifully, this psychotic level of hell goes black.
Tiny pinholes of light bathe an endless expanse above.
I’m weightless. Bodiless. There’s no pain, no memory. Only the knowledge of existence, and the cool sensation of touch. Dark puffs move across what I now realize is the night sky, and the serenity is smashed.
For a brief moment, I thought I was dead.
I curl my fingers toward my palms and hear a distinct splash.
I’m suspended in water. Then the feel of his arms beneath me comes into my awareness. I stare at the stars to shut out the reality that I’m still here, locked in Alex’s realm of torture and madness. I want the river to swallow me.
Nyctophobia is the fear of night. I learned that from Alex, who is full of trivia when it comes to the brain and phobias. My mind is spinning with useless thoughts.
“Who could fear the night?” I suppose I say this out loud, because suddenly Alex’s face materializes from above.
“More than ten percent of adults have a fear of the dark,” he says. His face is shadowed. He’s a dark silhouette against the cobalt sky.
I look into his eyes—that are brilliant despite the absence of light—and then turn my head away. Water covers my ear, and I appreciate that it muffles half my hearing.