“Brattleboro? Wait”—my chest seized—“Brattleboro Retreat? The asylum?” I’d heard the name whispered among Locke’s guests; it was where rich people put their mad maiden aunts and inconvenient daughters. “But I’m not crazy! They won’t take me.”
Locke’s expression turned almost pitying. “Oh, my dear, haven’t I taught you the value of money yet? And besides: as far as anyone knows you’re a little half-breed orphan who heard about her father’s death and started gabbling about magic doors. Took a little extra convincing for them to overlook your coloring, I admit, but I assure you: they’ll take you.”
It played in my head like a movie reel: the title cards flashing out Mr. Locke’s lines to the audience, “Your father is dead, January!” and then jerky scenes of a young girl crying, raving. “She’s gone mad, poor dear!” And then a black streetcar slides beneath a stone archway reading ASYLUM, lightning flashes in the background, and it cuts to a scene of our heroine strapped to a hospital bed, staring listlessly at the wall. No.
Mr. Locke was speaking again. “It’ll only be for a few months, a year maybe. I need time to talk to the Society, let cooler heads prevail. Demonstrate your tractable nature.” He smiled at me, and even through my reeling horror I saw the kindness in it, the apology. “I wish it could be otherwise, but it’s the only way I know to keep you safe.”
I was panting, muscles quivering. “You can’t. You wouldn’t.”
“Did you think you could just dabble at the edges of things? Dip a toe into these waters? These are very serious matters, January, I tried to tell you. We are enforcing the natural order of things, determining the fates of worlds. Perhaps one day you might still help us.” He reached toward my face again and I recoiled. He drew a finger down my cheek the way he might have stroked a piece of imported china: delicate, covetous. “It seems cruel, I know—but believe me when I tell you this is for the best.”
And, as his eyes met mine, I felt a weird, childish longing to trust him, to curl up inside myself and let the world flow around me, as I always had, but—
Bad.
I tried to run. I really did. But my legs were still weak and wobbly and Locke caught me around the middle before I’d made it out of the parlor.
He hauled me to the coat closet, clawing and spitting, and slung me inside it the way the cook slung beef sides into the icebox. The closet door slammed and I was trapped in the darkness with nothing but the musty, rich smell of unworn fur coats and the sound of my own breathing.
“Mr. Locke?” It came out quavery and high-pitched. “Mr. Locke, please, I’m sorry—” I babbled. I begged. I cried. The door didn’t open.
A good heroine is supposed to sit stiff-lipped in her dungeon cell, formulating brave escape plans and hating her enemies with righteous heartiness; instead I begged, swollen-eyed and shivering.
It’s easy to hate people in books. I’m a reader, too, and I know how characters can turn into Villains at the drop of an authorial hat (those capital Vs like dagger points or sharpened teeth). It just isn’t like that in real life. Mr. Locke was still Mr. Locke—the man who had taken me under his suit-coated wing when my own father couldn’t be bothered to raise me. I didn’t even want to hate him; I just wanted to undo it all, to unmake the last few hours.
I don’t know how long I waited in the closet. This is the part of the story where time becomes fickle and flickering.
Eventually there was an officious rap at the front door, and Mr. Locke’s voice said, “Come in, come in, gentlemen. Thank God you’re here.” Shuffling, footsteps, door hinges. “She’s a bit wild at the moment. You’re sure you can cope with her?”
Another voice said it would be no difficulty at all; he and his staff were very experienced in such matters. Perhaps Mr. Locke would like to retire to another room, so as to avoid distress?
“No, no. I’d like to see it through.”
More booted footsteps. Then the slide-thunk of the closet door unlocking and the silhouettes of three men framed in the afternoon light. Rough, gloved hands fastened around my upper arms and hauled me into the entryway, numb-legged.
“Mr. Locke, please, I don’t know anything, I didn’t mean to, don’t let them take me—”
A cloth clamped itself over my nose and mouth, damp and honey-sweet. I screamed into it but it only grew larger and larger until my eyes and limbs were covered in muffling, sugared blackness.
My last sense was of distant relief; at least in the darkness I no longer had to see Mr. Locke’s pitying eyes on mine.
The first thing you notice is the smell. Before you’re even awake the smell twists into the darkness with you: starch and ammonia and lye, and something else that might have been panic, distilled and fermented in the hospital walls for decades. You smell yourself, too, a greasy, sweating scent like meat left out on the counter.
So when I opened my eyes—a process much like pulling apart two caramels that have melted in your pocket—I wasn’t surprised to find myself in an unfamiliar room with gray-green walls. All the normal elements of a bedroom seemed to be missing, leaving only a smooth expanse of polished floor and two narrow, stingy-looking windows. Even the sunlight filtering through them was somehow muted.
My muscles felt unmoored, as if they’d come unhooked from my bones, and my head pounded. I was desperately thirsty. But I didn’t really begin to be afraid until I tried to reach for my waistband to feel for the silver coin and couldn’t: soft woolen cuffs circled my wrists.
Being afraid did nothing at all, of course, except make me sweatier.
I lay there with my fear and my thumping head and my gummed-up mouth for hours, thinking of Bad and Jane and my father and how much I missed the dusty, aged smell of Locke House. And how badly, deeply wrong everything had gone. By the time the nurses finally arrived I had wrung myself out with waiting.
The nurses were iron-spined women with lye-roughened hands and coaxing voices. “Let’s sit up now and eat, be a good girl,” they ordered, and I was. I ate something mushy and bland that might have once been oatmeal, drank three glasses of water, pissed on command in an open steel container, and even lay back down on the bed when they asked and let them refasten the cuffs around my wrists.
My only act of rebellion (and, God, how pathetically small) was to slip the coin from my waistband and clasp it hot and round in my palm. I survived the first night by holding it and dreaming of silver-faced queens sailing foreign seas, unbound.
The second morning I was convinced a legion of grim doctors would arrive at any moment to administer drugs or beatings, the way they did in the most sensational news stories about asylums. It took me many more hours of lying on my back, staring at the dingy sunlight inching across the floor, before I remembered the lesson I’d learned as a child: it isn’t pain or suffering that unmakes a person; it’s only time.
Time, sitting on your breastbone like a black-scaled dragon, minutes clicking like claws across the floor, hours gliding past on sulfurous wings.
The nurses returned twice and repeated their rituals. I was very biddable, and they cooed at me. When I stuttered that I’d like to speak to the doctor please, because there had been a terrible mistake and I wasn’t crazy, really, one of them even giggled.