by Frazer Lee
And he had laughed when she told him. Actually laughed. Even when he did that, she thought for a moment that he might be laughing with joy. Far from it. The unencumbered cruelty in his eyes had pierced her heart. He had looked at her as if to say, ‘And what do you want me to do about it?’ She had lost it, then. She had hurled every insult in the English language at him, probably in the hope of getting some other reaction from him, some semblance of the man she thought she knew. The man she had fallen in love with. The man with whom she had created a child. And the man who didn’t give a damn about either of those things. She had threatened him, then. Had even swung at him. The calm way that he told her – even with a split lip – how everyone knew she’d been sleeping around had shocked her to the core. Oh, he had done a number on her and covered his deceitful ass long ago. If she ruined him, he lectured her, he’d take her down with him. As he mopped his bleeding lip, he reminded her that no right-minded institution would take her on with a reputation such as hers.
Lecture over, he had invited her to show herself out.
And as she’d sobbed all night into glass after glass of liquor – he didn’t care about their child, so why should she? – she had realized that her wonderful life had become nothing more than a trashy romance novel with the best pages torn out. She had considered a termination. Had booked an appointment and had met with her doctor, who gave her a fake smile, some leaflets, along with an estimated bill for the procedure.
And then, as the world turned beneath her, aloof from any of her problems, she had decided to keep her child. Crucially, she had also decided to continue her behavioral research after the child was born. The birth was not without its complications. The baby had become entangled in its umbilical cord. Quite the visual metaphor. But it had lived, and it was female. Quick nursed the child with formula, and named her Emily. She had tried one last time, confronting William in the parking lot with Emily crying the whole time in her papoose. He wasn’t interested. But by the time he had called security she had made enough of a scene. Enough, it turned out, to secure her position as principal at Greyfriars through one of his contacts at The Consortium Inc., where he was earning a fast and significant buck as a consultant. Career academics were often company men at heart, and William had proven no exception. Greyfriars, he had explained to her, had been shut down some years ago due to newer facilities being built closer to the city. It would provide the perfect laboratory for her to continue her research with a steady income, away from prying eyes, while providing a home for her and Emily. She didn’t really have any choice but to accept. William held all the cards. She needed his reference, and he had hand-picked a role for her. Even though they were separated, he still had a hold over her life.
And so, she had started a new life at Greyfriars. She took to her new role with gusto, and began researching the personality types she could harvest from detention centers for her experiments. But it was a lonely existence. And as each day passed, she knew that the isolation of Greyfriars Reformatory wasn’t meant to help her at all. William had merely wanted her and their daughter to be far away. Out of sight, and out of mind. So he could focus on his new protégé.
(Thanks a bunch, baby daddy.)
The kid had her father’s eyes, which helped. Helped Quick to focus on the endgame. To use the gift he had put inside her belly against him.
She had weaponized Emily, over time. And time was something she had in abundance.
It had been a natural progression really, for her to begin to see Emily as one of the inmates, rather than as her own daughter. Every time she looked at her, she saw William Drake in those eyes. She used that to accentuate the distance. Keeping his surname attached to Emily’s helped to consolidate it. Emily Drake became as alien to her as any of the girls in her care. And it was all too easy to work a backstory into Emily under conditions of hypnosis. With regular sessions, she had Emily believing that she had done something terrible in order to be locked up in the reformatory. After several treatments, she was someone else entirely.
She was ‘Girl A’.
The next stage in Emily’s usefulness was for her to develop a bona fide set of symptoms via careful conditioning under hypnosis, and in meticulously orchestrated social situations with other inmates. William Drake’s daughter had been reworked from out of Quick’s mortar and pestle of rage and revenge, and was reborn as ‘Girl A’ into the pages of her research.
Principal Quick flicked through the sheaf of pages forming her manuscript.
She was getting close now. So much closer. She was almost certain she had succeeded in demonstrating that it was possible to create a disorder in the raw materials of her subject. Emily had been a healthy and happy youngster. Now she was a fuckup like the rest of the inmates. Like her dear old dad. And she was exhibiting symptoms of an actual disorder, when she had no history of ever having had one before. The imaginary friend, the lapses in concentration, and the disassociation from everyday reality.
It was beginning to feel exciting again.
Quick glanced at the blank page in her manuscript. It no longer looked so insurmountable to her. Now it posed only possibilities. She looked from the page to the slit of William’s smile depicted in the photo hanging on her wall. Now, more than ever, she needed to focus, and to get on with her research. All the darkness and doubt had seemed to leave her. A cloud giving way to the clear light of day. She decided to refine her focus the very next day. She would step up Emily’s ‘treatments’, and get her next chapter written up. And that was the endgame. Publish, and someday, after she and ‘Girl A’ had taken the world by storm, she would reveal who William Drake really was.
A smile curled her lips. She glanced at the closet door. The drink would have to wait until after she had achieved her next milestone. But she had another way to celebrate. She slid open her desk drawer and pulled out a pack of cigarettes, followed by her lighter. The words on the pack caught her eye. ‘WARNING. Smoking can cause serious heart complaints.’
That was a good one. Her oh-so-serious heart complaints had started the day she had met William.
She closed the desk drawer and crossed to the window. The moon was high in the night sky, casting a steely glow across the center of the recreation yard. The bare branches of the tree made crazy paving of the ground with their geometrical shadows. Quick placed her cigarettes and the lighter on the windowsill, then unclasped and opened the window to its fullest extent. The cool, crisp night air flooded in, awakening her senses. She put a cigarette to her lips and thumbed the lighter. The flame felt warm on her face as she lit the cigarette. She placed the lighter back on the windowsill. She drew hungrily on the cigarette before exhaling a plume of gray smoke out of the window and into the night.
When the smoke plume cleared, Quick saw the shape.
It stopped her heart for just a second, the sight of the girl’s body. Even in the cold silver of the moonlight, the girl’s hair was unmistakably auburn.
No, no, no. It couldn’t be.
She stubbed the cigarette out on the brickwork surrounding the window, and tossed it out of the window. Pausing only to snatch her keys from atop her desk, Quick dashed to her office door. By the time she was out in the corridor, she had broken into a run. The clatter of her heels echoed off the walls like machine-gun fire as she ran, full pelt now, down the corridor and into the one that led to the recreation yard door. She shoved a key into the lock and turned it. But the door would not open. Wrong key. Careless of her. She tried another. Wrong again. She heard a strange sound, akin to a horse’s whinny, and realized that it was coming from her own throat. Her hands began to tremble, and she rifled through the keys over and over, for what seemed like an age, until she found the right one. Her hand was now shaking so badly that she couldn’t get the key into the lock. She had to clamp her free hand around her wrist in order to slide the thing home. Still holding on to her wrist to steady her hand, she turned the key – and the l
ock clicked open.
She flung the door open and felt night’s chill wash over her.
So cold that she felt as though she had fallen into an icy lake.
As she stepped into the recreation yard, her eyes found the dark, prone shape on the ground, half-hidden by the shadow of the dead tree. The shadow around the body had the aspect of a dark cloud. Quick glanced up at the sky and saw only the bright moon, the twinkling stars, and the sightless eyes of the clock tower’s arches, high above. As she reached the body, she realized with fright that the shadow was blood. It had pooled around the poor girl’s broken head. She must have climbed all the way up there, and then she must have—
So much blood.
—fallen from the tower.
Quick took a step back and knocked against something with her foot. She looked down to see the crumpled shape of the music box lying discarded just a few feet away from Emily.
Just a few feet away from her dead daughter.
And there was so much blood.
It had all been for nothing. She’d be ruined. A laughing stock. William and his ‘assistants’ (she was picturing dozens of them now, a harem of fucking bitches eager for distinction) would see her name in the headlines – but as a murderess, a failure, a fuckup like all the others under her care.
One harem led to another and soon she began to blame the girls. It must have been Emily’s fellow inmates who drove Emily – literally and figuratively – over the edge. Emily had said as much, and she hadn’t listened.
Her fatal flaw again. She had been so focused on her research that she had failed to see the telltale signs. Why hadn’t Emily come to her? She must have been scared, that was why. Scared of what the others would do to her. Quick knew that beatings were all part of the process of desensitizing Emily, but this? This was too much.
They were the fuckups – the lot of them. Concluding thus, she retreated to her office. Began to read through their case files. She had been blind to them, too. Her eyes so fixed upon the prize that she had missed the cracks in the firmament. Each girl would have ended her meaningless life if it hadn’t been for her care. If it hadn’t been for her carefully constructed reality of punishment and virtue.
She could read between the lines of each and every one of them. Quick took up her pen – no point now in completing her other research – and began adding their epitaphs, concocting fitting ends for each life less lived.
Jessica? A sad, navel-gazing specimen who misspent her every waking moment clutching at an umbilical cord that had long since been cut. A little leech, sucking the life out of anyone who came near. Her only purpose in life was surely to slit her throat and to stop being such a pathetic burden on the world.
Next page. Victoria. The universe was still trying to course-correct itself around Victoria because she really had no place in it. She should have died in the gas explosion that wiped out her family and all its tawdry secrets.
Next page. Annie? By rights, she should have been sent to death row for the despicable things she had done. Any court in the land would agree with her, Quick was sure of that, but instead she was supposed to take her under her wing and look after her. Because of her age. There was no justice in this world.
Oh, but there would be.
Next page. Saffy. Self-styled ‘Queen Bitch’, inflicting her own crippling insecurities upon others. A perpetual, entitled teen, stuck inside a tawdry love affair with a man old enough to be her father. Drowning in self-delusion.
Next page. Lena. To what depths had she sank to feed her addiction? She would almost certainly have died from a drug overdose if she hadn’t been picked up by the authorities.
An overdose.
And that was Quick’s eureka moment.
All good doctors have them, after all.
She began the next morning by dismissing the kitchen staff. They hadn’t questioned her when she told them that Greyfriars’ funding had been pulled. She had thanked them for their service (and she had almost meant it) and packed them off to the minibus that awaited them outside on the gravel forecourt.
Singing a jolly tune to herself as she went, Quick had made her way to the med store. Once inside, it didn’t take her long to find what she needed. The correct combination. A corrective cocktail, as she liked to think of it. After taking her dark bounty to the kitchens, she set about grinding the pills into powder in a large pestle and mortar. The crunching, grinding sound as she pummeled the pills using the heavy utensil was not unpleasant to her as she worked. She wondered if Emily’s skull and bones had made the same sound when they had hit the concrete.
Quick added the powder to a huge pan of bubbling porridge, which she mixed and stirred at a slow simmer over a low flame. Once it was a pleasingly slushy consistency, she set it aside to reheat later. Oh, but she could have been quite the domestic goddess, given half a chance. Shame. But now she was more – so much more.
She made the girls line up after their morning shower, beside their beds. Emily’s was, of course, notably empty. She informed them that there would be no breakfast ration that morning until they had performed a special task. She added that the task would be physical, and so would help them work up an appetite.
Quick sensed their apprehension as she led them in silence through the corridors until they reached the door to the recreation yard. She led them over to the spot where Emily’s body lay, facedown on the concrete. The pool of blood had begun to dry, forming an indelible stain.
Victoria, ever the weakling, was the first to scream. Quick felt like beating the snot from the miserable girl’s face, but managed to control herself. Decorum was so important when setting an example for disaffected youth. She had set out an assortment of shovels, trowels, and rakes in a neat line for each of the girls to use – the tools of the groundskeepers’ trade. Those workers had been dismissed, too. Good for their gardening implements to be put to use in their absence. She instructed her charges to dig in the small area of bare earth surrounding the dying tree. Small, and yet ample to be dug into a grave for Emily.
One of the girls began to vomit into the soil as she dug alongside her fellow miscreants. Principal Quick ignored it. The girl’s bodily fluids, a symbol of her guilt and of her complicity, would be buried in the cold soil along with Emily’s remains.
And once the hole was deep enough, Quick allowed the girls a breather before setting their next task.
“Lift her up,” she said.
Victoria started sobbing again, and bolted for the door. Quick intercepted her, and this time she slapped her hard across the face, a violent backhander that sent the tears and snot flying.
“Lift her up. Lift her together. Just as you put her there together.”
Not one of them dared argue with her. Through their pathetic sniveling and wailing, they each grabbed a wrist or an ankle and heaved Emily’s deadweight over to the waiting grave. At Quick’s signal, they lowered her in.
“Now replace the soil,” Quick commanded.
They each grabbed a digging implement and set to work.
Quick noted how eager they seemed to cover the body over. With each scoop of soil, they were concealing the guilty consequences of their actions. It took them a while, but Quick had all day, and when they had filled the grave with soil Quick instructed them to use the rakes to return the topsoil to some semblance of normality.
When they retreated to the outskirts of the recreation yard, Quick was able to take a step back to look at their handiwork. It was as though nothing had happened. Only the dark red stain remained, and that would fade with time, and rain.
“Good work, girls,” Quick said. “Get cleaned up. You have earned yourselves a meal.”
After washing, they trudged after her in silence as she led them, single file, to the refectory.
“Line up, and I will dish up,” Quick said.
“Where are the kitchen staff?” L
ena asked, first in line. Brazen of her, really.
“Union dispute,” Quick replied, smiling inwardly at her jibe. She ladled a generous portion of lumpy porridge into Lena’s bowl.
A look passed over Lena’s face for a moment, and Quick thought she might be planning some act of retaliation.
“Next,” Quick said, fixing her gaze upon Jessica, who was sniveling and clutching her bowl to her chest like some ridiculous Dickensian parody.
“Please, Principal Quick,” Jessica said, “I don’t think I can eat anything, I feel too sick.”
Quick looked at the wretched girl. So thin. An extra ladleful of the slop went into Jessica’s bowl. Well, why not? Quick ignored her ridiculous sobs as the girl dragged her feet all the way to one of the tables.
She watched them eat, counting each mouthful and wondering if she had seasoned the mixture with enough ‘corrective cocktail’.
Only time would tell.
And it did.
Lena began gagging first. She made a sort of grunting sound initially, which grew into a cough and then a series of frightened yelps before she fell, choking, facedown onto the table. Her convulsions set the other girls off, each of them shrieking in terror before the lethal cocktail of drugs took hold. Quick watched as each successive girl clawed at her throat, thinking perhaps even in their last moments that they could save themselves. How stupid of them. They had each signed their own death warrants as soon as they had sat down to partake of their first spoonful.