The Woman Who Made Me Feel Strange

by Anna Ferrara

  It was me who flinched when eye contact was made this time. The Paul that barged in looked so determined to do whatever it was she came in to do, I had no idea what to expect.

  “We have to go. Now!” the new Paul said when her mouth was right in front of my face. Her voice sounded exactly like the voice I had been willing out of my head, only this time, it seemed to be coming out of a mouth—her mouth—that was moving in sync with the words right in front of my eyes.

  My jaw dropped. I froze. I wondered if everything happening before my eyes was really nothing but an illusion.

  The new Paul’s hand—solid and heavy as if it were real—fell onto the plaster cast on my right arm and dragged my entire body towards the door.

  I didn’t resist because I was too stunned. I couldn’t decide what to think, much less what to do. It was all so weird and made absolutely no sense!

  “Just move!” the new Paul said out loud as she opened the door effortlessly and led us into a small room with black painted walls. “We have only three minutes left, all because you hesitated!”

  What the—? Why wasn’t the door Dr Clark always used locked this time? I blinked many times but the sight of a fellow patient dragging me through a small room with black painted walls, towards the two doors at the end, never went away.

  She opened the door on the right instead of the one on the left. Beyond that was a long, dark corridor full of black doors on both sides. Doors that looked just like the door we had come out from. Doors with metal squares and a decorative line of green light above their handles.

  Was this really the rest of Wonderdrug? Or was this all just a dream?

  Before I could answer myself, the green lights on the doors began blinking, as if grooving to the beat of music in a dance club. Red lights appeared above us and flickered. I looked up and realised they were coming from the many globed security cameras on the ceiling.

  Maybe it was a better idea to just get back to bed, I thought. I turned and tried to go back through the door we had just come from—

  —but its handle wouldn’t budge. The line of green on its metal square was now red. The door was... locked?

  I turned back to Paul just in time to witness the green light on the next door turning red. After it did, the door next to it turned red too. It seemed the redness was spreading towards all the doors, down the corridor in a chronological fashion, down towards...

  ... the door with a green exit sign sticking out from above it.

  “We need to get to the exit! Run, Lane! Run!!!”

  The new Paul broke into a sprint. Her hand was tightly around my plaster cast so I had no choice but to run with her or be dragged to the ground. My legs struggled because of their injuries, stiff dressings and lack of use, yet she never slowed.

  “The handle needs body heat to open! We need to get to it before it turns red and locks up! Move it!!!”

  Why would an exit door lock itself up? Unless... this was all just a dream and... my dream’s way of telling me how I could get out of this situation and wake up?

  Why not find out? I picked up the pace and ran as fast as I could towards the exit, almost as fast as Paul was running, almost as fast as the lights were turning red. I shook off Paul’s grasp eventually because I knew I could run even faster. I knew I could out run the lights. At least that was what I thought until I realised—

  —the light on the exit door’s metal square was next, and I was still two doors away.

  “Fuck!” the new Paul screamed from behind.

  Fuck, I agreed. There was no other option but to try the insane. I rammed my foot hard against the floor and propelled my entire bandaged body towards the exit door the way a long jump Olympian might. My body stretched and extended as it flew across the remaining ten feet or so until—

  —the tip of my middle finger made it onto the exit door’s cold metal handle and pushed down a mere second before the light on the exit door’s metal square changed into red.

  I crashed onto the cement floor right as the new Paul caught up and shoved the door open. She grabbed my arms, dragged me through and let the door close behind my feet.

  I heard the familiar sound of a lock within the door click into place right after.

  I did not wake up. Instead, I saw us both panting frantically on the floor of what looked like a commercial building’s stairwell. There were no windows in sight.

  “That was too close,” the new Paul said between large gulps of air. “A few seconds more and the alarm would have gone off.”

  She grinned, to my surprise, and looked, unexpectedly, a little pretty. Her features had not changed—they were as unremarkable as they had been before—but there seemed to be a new sparkle in her eyes that made all the difference.

  She stared right into my eyes and her grin widened. She dragged me to my feet and told me to follow her in a manner that suggested she knew exactly where we were going.

  I followed her only because I didn’t know what else to do. What I really wanted to do was go back to my ward and go to sleep, but I had no idea how to get there.

  We went down six flights of stairs, through windowless spaces, until at last, we got to a landing that actually had a window.

  A window which could not be opened, I realised, when I got closer.

  I peered through its plate of glass and saw a dark and isolated back alley far down below. It was night out there and there were good-quality skyscrapers all around the building we were in; skyscrapers that looked like they belonged to the Financial District.

  “Stand back,” the new Paul said. She pulled a showerhead—exactly like the one my ward’s bathroom had—out from under her pyjamas. In one dramatic move, she swung the showerhead against the glass.

  Glass shattered, onto us and through the window, and almost immediately, I felt fresh air hit me in the face like a splash of cold water on a humid summer’s day. It was unexpectedly delightful.

  “This is your jump,” the new Paul said.

  My delight vanished at once. Jump? No way! There was a long drop out that window and the red painted numeral on the stairwell wall read ‘10’. Ten storeys! Twice the amount I had fallen from before!

  “You sit on the ledge, I sit on you, and we tilt backwards. That’s how we’re going to get out of here.” Her brown eyes sparkled with excitement as she broke into a grin again.

  “No.” My eyes processed our distance from the alley below and my gut plunged. Fucking hell no! “It took me three whole years to wake up before. I’m not doing it ever again.”

  The new Paul laughed. “You were only out five days, darling. Like I said, don’t believe their bullshit. The year’s still 2030.”

  What? “That is not possible. My body was fully healed by the time I woke.”

  “Precisely why you’re here. Look, turn around.”

  Before I could even decide if I wanted to, the new Paul swivelled me so that my back faced her and pushed my shirt up. Her fingers ran along my spine then pierced through my flesh like sharp, pointed claws.

  “Oww!” I screamed and tried to run away from her but she jumped right in front of me and blocked my path.

  “Don’t worry, it’s done,” she said and showed me the little blood-covered stone in between her fingers. She had a strange device in her other hand. It had the shape of a fat syringe but with the foot of a sewing machine at its tip instead of a needle.

  “Now you do mine.” The new Paul shoved the strange device into my hand then turned and lifted her gown so that her pale back and bony spine was exposed right in front of my eyes.

  “Look for a lump somewhere near the base of my spine. When you find it, put the Remover over it, press down, then let go.”

  It sounded so ridiculous, I couldn’t resist the urge to see what would happen if I did exactly that. It turned out there was a lump, just like she said, and the lump came out with the ‘remover’ very easily.

  The ‘lump’ I held in my palm afterwar
ds turned out to be a tiny microchip with some blood on it. It looked exactly like the blood-covered stone the new Paul had been holding in between her fingers moments earlier.

  The new Paul replaced her gown and grabbed the microchip from my hand. She held it up to the florescent light and looked very pleased when she saw it. “You’re a fast learner.”

  Not what my teachers thought, unfortunately. “What are those things?”

  “Trackers. Helps them find us if we ever run away.” She tossed them over the balustrade and they fell out of sight. I didn’t even hear them hit the ground.

  “Now you need to jump,” she said to me.

  I took in the seriousness of her face and felt my heart begin to pound like it had gone crazy. I tried to will myself to wake up but no amount of wanting changed what was in front of me. “Can’t we just use the stairs?” I said eventually.

  “This window is the only way out. Believe me, I checked and checked and checked.”

  “But I don’t even want to get out. I like it here. I’m… happy here.”

  The new Paul raised her eyebrows and moved closer. Now that her back was fully upright, I realised she was just about the same height I was, with eyes on the exact same level. She put both hands on my shoulders and gave me a look that made me think she might be very wise. “You’re happy only because you’re new and don’t have a clue what’s really going on.”

  The hell I didn’t. I had been soundly asleep and then boom! This happened.

  “So, sleepy head, just do as I say,” the new Paul’s voice said in my head.

  She laughed when I gaped at her lips which hadn’t moved.

  “Yes,” her voice said, although her lips still did not move. “Fact is, I can read and talk to your mind. You’re not crazy and neither am I.”

  After she said that, I laughed. Here we were in the stairwell of a psychiatric centre, both in sad blue pyjamas, with bad hair and no make up, me wrapped up like the Michelin Man, she doing all sorts of bizarre things and insisting we weren’t crazy? This was one helluva big leap from what I knew to be sanity that was for sure.

  My laughter didn’t faze her one bit. She grabbed my cast arm and, without warning, smashed it hard against the ledge of the window.

  I screamed so she threw a hand against my mouth. She came so close to my face, I could even smell the soap on her body—the same soap I myself had been using for weeks. “Shh,” she whispered as if we were in a romantic situation. “Look at your arm.”

  I shook my head and squeezed my eyes shut. I hadn’t forgotten how my lower forearm looked the morning I woke up and found it broken—dangling at a right angle with bones and flesh exposed. I had no interest in seeing how it would cope without the plaster cast holding everything together.

  I panicked when the new Paul grabbed my other hand and forced it over my broken forearm. I tried to push past her but she was stronger. Try as I might, I could not stop my hand from moving towards the site of injury.

  “Stop, Paul. Please just stop!” My words came out muffled under the weight of her hand on my mouth.

  “Just trust me.”

  Against my will, my hand fell onto my right forearm and rubbed against it thoroughly from top to bottom and then all over again.

  My eyes shot open once that happened and I stopped resisting entirely.

  My arm felt normal. In fact, it looked normal. It was a perfectly normal arm. No open wound, no visible bones or flesh. Not even a scar of any sort. But... how?

  “Told you,” the new Paul said with eyes that seemed to twinkle. She let go of my hand and mouth at last.

  “But… Dr Clark said…”

  “Dr Clark lied, get it?”

  No. I did not get anything, but somewhere below, along the stairwell, a door opened. The sound made both of us turn.

  Paul peeped over the balustrade then stepped away almost at once. “Uh oh,” she whispered, very softly this time. “We really have to go.”

  She pushed me towards the window and shoved herself, backwards, against my chest. Her arms grabbed mine and pulled them across her body as if she wanted me to hold her.

  “Here’s what we’re going to do,” she whispered. “On the count of three, jump backwards. Don’t let go of me, don’t let me hit the ground. I don’t have what you have and if I break anything or die, there’ll be nobody to drag you away to safety. Do you understand?”

  No. Not at all. How in the hell had I gone from being perfectly safe in the best psychiatric centre in the world to being in a situation as dangerous as this? Had I done something I shouldn’t have? Or... what?

  “One, two, three!”

  Paul pushed all of her weight on me and I felt myself levitating in mid-air, into the pitch-blackness of night, with good-quality skyscrapers moving all around me.

  All I could think of to do was pray. I prayed I would find myself back in my ward after the fall and see Dr Clark all ready to explain what was really going on, with breakfast hot on the table, ready to be eaten with pills.

  Chapter 10

  Date Unknown

  Absolute black, that was next. A menacing sort of black; the sort you saw in horror films. The sort that made you want to check over your shoulder at least once every minute.

  There was no beeping this time, only a foul smell; the sort you encountered in mouldy abandoned toilets; a mix of rot, excrement and other putrid liquids stirred together.

  Seconds or perhaps hours later, something began growling right next to my head. It sounded like a wild beast that was determined to fight me and not ever back down.

  I struggled to make contact with my eyes. Open, so we can see the foul-smelling beast and run from it. Open! My eyes did not open. All they could do was twitch and I soon realised there was also—

  An intense, shooting pain behind my eyes. As if very sharp and very thin objects were piercing through my eyeballs. I tried to open my mouth to scream and realised my mouth already was open. In fact, there was nothing I could do to close it. I tried to use my hands but no longer seemed to have any, nor did I have legs, or a body.

  It was utterly terrifying when, right after I realised all of those things, my eyes shot open, all by themselves.

  I was horizontal. Some place dark. On a mattress, I think. My vision was blurry so there was no way of knowing for sure. The growling I had been hearing sounded further away now, as if the beast had gone a long distance away, but the foul smell was still most definitely in the air, close by.

  Not my clean and quiet Wonderdrug ward, that was clear.

  My next thought was of Paul. The jump. Ten storeys. The new Paul! Where was she?

  I tried to call out to her but my vocal chords did not seem to work. I tried to sit up and turn my head and discovered I couldn’t do that either. My brain seemed to be no longer in contact with my body—everything I wanted to do I no longer could—but that wasn’t the worst of it.

  The worst was the shooting pain that spread from my eyes down towards body parts I hadn’t realised I had. Once it spread, it began to feel like a zillion spikes were pulling at and stapling my body together at a million clamps per minute. The pain never once ceased. I found there was no avoiding the discomfort of it, no relief at any moment. I screamed—not by choice—and could not stop.

  My voice bounced all over me and blanketed me with its persistent presence. It was so loud, so shrill, my ears began to hurt. Yet nobody came. Nobody else seemed to hear me.

  I stopped screaming only because I wore myself out. My head collapsed down onto my chest against my will and I then saw, right in front of my eyes...

  Spears. All over my body. They had the texture and colour of teeth and a brown core in the middle. They stuck out from bloody holes; holes in my skin! Those spears were my own bones! All broken! And my limbs all looked very peculiar. They weren’t angled in a logical fashion, like a normal person’s would be, but instead were twisted into all sorts of unnatural poses, the sort only wooden ar
tist mannequins could get into.

  It was happening again. I had self-mutilated again! And there was nothing I could do then but scream.

  I screamed again. I screamed for Dr Clark, for nurses, for anybody who could get me medical help. I screamed till my voice turned hoarse but not once did anyone appear. Not even Paul.

  Where the hell was Paul?

  Where the hell was I?

  Where the hell was everybody? Anybody?

  “Dr Clark?” I said when I finally found a way to use my vocal chords again. “Can you help me?”

  Dr Clark never replied. Nobody replied. All I could hear was the growling of the beast overhead and nothing else.

  I think I eventually cried myself to sleep.

  “Wake up! Are you dead?”

  Somebody shook me.

  What? Was I? Dr Clark? My eyes opened.

  Dr Clark was nowhere in sight but I did see Paul leaning over me. She looked different though. Her hair was no longer red or as long and messy as I remembered it to be. It was now brown, half the length it used to be and quite neat despite still being curly. An illusion of light? I realised there was light; a dim one, from an unknown source behind me. Paul smiled, put two fingers over my cheeks and turned my face from side to side as if she were checking a piece of meat at a supermarket.

  “You okay?” she asked.

  Was I okay? Hell no. I was in a fuck load of pain because my body was all messed up. Again! I opened my mouth to say so but closed it when I noticed I wasn’t in any pain at all.

  I felt... okay. I sat up and rubbed my eyes. The shooting pain that had been behind them was no longer present. Nothing hurt. Not my fingers, not my hands. My hands looked... fine. They felt fine and moved fine too. No different from normal hands.

  My arms and legs were now normal too. They no longer looked peculiar. They were… healthy. And clean. Way cleaner than the thin, shabby-looking mattress they lay on. The mattress under me was greyish with faded patterns covered by huge dull maroon patches.