What Lies Beneath

by Archer, David

  Wake up? Am I sleeping? Cassie tried to remember what had happened, but her mind was so foggy that her memories were jumbled. She remembered working at the café, and there were bits and pieces from college. A face drifted across her mind and she recognized Mike, but for some reason she suddenly found herself fearful. That was crazy; why would she be afraid of Mike?

  Darkness and silence enveloped her again, and when the beeping began once more, she could hear her father’s voice. He was speaking to her mother, and there was a sadness in his tone that made Cassie want to comfort him. She tried to reach for him, and then she heard a gasp.

  “She moved her hand,” her mother said. “Look, she moved her hand.” There was a sound, and Cassie felt something shaking beneath her, and then her mother’s voice came again. “Cassie? Cassie, can you hear me? Are you awake, sweetheart?”

  “Nngh…” Cassie heard, and it took a moment to realize that it came from her. She tried to make her mouth work, but it wasn’t cooperating for some reason, so she concentrated on trying to open her eyes.

  There was pain, mostly around her left eye, but her right slowly opened. It wobbled around for a moment as everything came into focus, and then she saw her mother’s face leaning over her.

  “Oh, Cassie,” Annie said, and then tears began flowing down her mother’s cheeks. “Oh, sweetheart…”

  Cassie tried to talk again, but there was something in her mouth. Slowly, she got her right hand to come up toward her face, and that was when she saw the IV line stuck into the back of it. She managed to put it to her mouth, and realized there was a plastic tube that seemed to be going down her throat. “Mmks,” she said, and then tried again. “Wha…”

  “Sweetheart, it’s okay,” Annie said. “You’re in the hospital, honey. Do you remember what happened?”

  Cassie’s eye narrowed as she looked at her mother, trying to remember what might have put her into a hospital, and she started to shake her head. When she did, however, there was an incredibly painful sensation on her neck, so she stopped and held still.

  “Just relax, honey,” Annie said. “You—you’ve been burned pretty badly, and you’ve been in the hospital for couple of weeks, now. The doctors said you were in a coma, but they said it was good for you, so they wanted to let you just wake up on your own. Are you in pain?”

  Cassie tried to bring her left hand up to point at her neck, but it seemed to be held down. When she attempted to move it, it also erupted in pain so she let it lie. Instead, she used her right hand to reach up to her neck, and that was when she felt the bandages. She touched them on her neck and realized that they went down her shoulder and up the side of her face, and she very gently patted them. She looked at her mother and raised her eyebrow questioningly.

  “Cassie,” Annie said, and then her dad, Jack, loomed into view. “Cassie, something happened, and you got burned very badly. You don’t remember it?”

  Cassie’s eye jumped from one parent to the other, as she tried desperately to understand what had happened. She thought back to the last things she remembered, and at first it seemed that she had just been in the house with Mike, but then a cascade of memories flooded into her mind. She remembered the video, and how she had gone to a hotel to try to think, she remembered Abby coming to talk to her and then Mike coming into the room. As she watched the mental movie screen play out, she remembered Mike holding a gun and forcing them into his car, taking them to some old shack in the middle of nowhere, and then she remembered the other man who had come in.

  Suddenly, she remembered seeing Mike lying dead on the floor, and the smell of gasoline seemed to be everywhere. She remembered Stuart pouring gasoline on her and Abby, and then dropping the match, and the tears began flowing from her right eye.

  “Aggie?” She managed around the tube. “Aggie?”

  Annie started crying harder, and it was Jack who leaned in. “Cassie,” he said softly, “I’m sorry. I’m afraid she didn’t make it.”

  Darkness flooded in, and Cassie welcomed it as it engulfed her.

  The next time she woke, the tube was gone from her throat and she opened her eyes to see her mother sitting in a chair right beside the bed. She tried to speak but only a grunt came out, so she worked her mouth a couple of times to moisten it and then tried again.

  “Mom,” she said, and her voice sounded like it came from a bullfrog.

  Annie leaned forward quickly, smiling at her. “I’m here, sweetheart,” she said. “I’m right here.”

  The memories were still there, and Cassie’s tears started flowing again. “Abby?” she croaked. “Abby’s dead?”

  Annie nodded sadly. “Yes, honey,” she said. “She was burned even worse than you, and she died when they were trying to do something for her at the hospital. Oh, Cassie, I’m so sorry.”

  “Mike? Mike’s dead, too?”

  “Yes,” Annie said, and Cassie saw the hardness in her mother’s eyes. “The police said he was already dead before the fire began. The other man killed him, apparently, before he set you on fire.”

  Cassie stared at her for a moment, then slowly nodded her head. The pain was still there, but not quite as bad. “Good,” she said. “He was a monster.”

  Annie pressed her lips together in a thin line. “We’ve been hearing about it,” she said. “There is a police detective who’s been coming to see you, and he’s told us about what happened, and about what they’ve found out since then. It turns out Mike and another policeman were actually involved in the murders that have been happening in St. Louis. He said they never would have caught them if it wasn’t for you.”

  Cassie nodded again. “Abby shouldn’t even have been there,” she said slowly, her voice still rough and raspy. “She came to try to help me, and I got her killed.”

  “No, no, honey,” Annie said. “It wasn’t your fault, sweetheart. Mike and his friend were killers, and there’s no way you could have known that. It’s terrible that Abby is dead, but you can’t blame yourself.”

  Cassie looked at her for a moment, then raised her right hand and felt the bandages on her face again. “How bad?”

  Annie closed her eyes for a moment, but then opened them again and looked at her daughter. “The doctor says you suffered third-degree burns all the way up the left side of your body,” she said. “There was too much damage for normal skin grafts, so they’ve been using artificial skin, and just keeping everything clean and free from infection.” She hesitated for a moment, licking her lips. “The fire burned your left leg and arm, and went up your left side completely. The bandages are just there to protect the synthetic skin while you heal, but— Cassie, the fire burned the left side of your head and face. I’m afraid you lost your left eye, and there isn’t much left of your ear on that side. But the doctors say you’re going to recover, you’re going to be fine, sweetheart.”

  Cassie looked at her, and Annie was struck by the calmness she saw in her daughter’s eye. “Gonna be pretty ugly,” she said.

  Annie smiled, but the tears flowed. “You will always be beautiful to me,” she said, and then she wiped at her eyes. “Hold on, the doctors wanted me to let them know when you woke up again.” She reached across Cassie and picked up the call button on its cord, then pressed it once.

  “Can I help you?” The voice came from a speaker in the ceiling.

  “The doctors wanted me to let you all know when Cassie woke up,” Annie said to the disembodied voice. “She’s awake now.”

  “Okay, great, we’ll be right there.” The speaker in the ceiling went silent and a moment later, two nurses came in and gently moved Annie aside.

  “Hey, there,” said one of them. “I’m Darla and this is Janine, we’ve been taking care of you. How are you feeling?”

  “Not too bad,” Cassie replied. “Mom says I got burned, but it doesn’t seem to hurt too bad.”

  “Well, that’s both good and bad,” Darla said. “It’s good because the pain could be pretty intense. It’s bad because it means that the nerve
endings have been completely destroyed. You may never recover a lot of feeling in the scar tissue, I’m afraid.”

  Cassie nodded. “A little sore when I try to move,” she said.

  “Okay, that’s a whole different problem. What that means is that the muscles and tissues underneath the skin suffered some damage, but they survived. The reason it’s sore is because you’re healing, and when you move it kind of aggravates the damage.”

  “Okay. How long do I have to stay here?”

  Darla looked at Annie for a second, then turned back to Cassie. “You’ve probably got a couple more weeks as our guest, letting the skin grafts heal. Once we see that they’re closing up the way they’re supposed to, then the doctor will probably let you go home. He’ll be here in just a minute, so he might be able to tell you more about that.”

  The doctor, in fact, arrived at that moment and the nurses quickly got out of his way.

  “I’m Doctor Rich,” he said. “It’s good to finally meet you. How are you feeling today?”

  Cassie looked at him with her one eye. “I don’t feel all that bad,” she said, “but it’s a little hard to talk and I’m a little frightened of mirrors.”

  The doctor’s eyebrows went up half an inch. “Then, I take it you’re aware of what’s happened?”

  Cassie nodded slowly. “Mom told me. Is it really bad?”

  Doctor Rich turned and looked at Annie, who nodded. The look on her face said that her daughter deserved the truth. He turned back to Cassie.

  “We’ve done all we can with synthetic flesh,” he said, “but I’m afraid you’re going to be permanently scarred. There are some nasty scars on the left side of your head and face, and you’ve lost the outermost parts of your left ear, and I’m afraid we had to remove the left eye. Your hair was burned away, but most of the follicles on the top and back and on the right side were unhurt. On the left, I’m afraid there’s not going to be much hair growing back. Your left arm and leg are badly scarred, and the ring and pinky finger on your left hand were literally fused. We had to cut off the ring you had been wearing, and remove part of it surgically. We can operate to separate the fingers if you wish, but that will mean a whole new round of skin grafts that may not even succeed. The tissues on the insides of those fingers were basically cooked together, and when we took away the burned parts there wasn’t a lot left. We could either take the fingers off completely, or we could let them grow together, and that seemed to be the better option.”

  Cassie looked at him, an aura of calm about her. “When can I go home?”

  He looked at her chart, which he had picked up upon entering the room. “Everything seems to be healing pretty nicely, or at least as nicely as can be expected. Right now, we are keeping silver compounds on your burns and over the grafts, to keep out infection. I’d say you’ll be here at least another two weeks, but then you should be ready to go home and start getting back to your life.”

  “My life?” Cassie asked. “I think my life has ended. My best friend is dead, the man I loved turned out to be a monster, and now I look like Freddy Krueger’s half-sister. I don’t think I’ll be trying to go back to my old life.”

  Surprisingly, the doctor only smiled and nodded. “That’s smart thinking,” he said. “After this type of traumatic event, the best thing you can do is lock yourself away from the world and just give up.”

  Cassie looked at him for a moment, and then she began to laugh. “I was a psych major, you ass,” she said. “I’m not talking about giving up, I’m talking about moving on. There’s no way to go back to my old life, it’s over. That was the life of a pretty young girl who had dreams and ambitions. Now I need to look into what kind of life I can have as the ugliest girl in town.”

  The doctor nodded again, but this time it was approvingly. “Now you’re talking,” he said. “You majored in psychology?”

  “Yep. Made it through my first year, anyway.”

  “You know, there’s an entire field devoted to counseling burn victims. If you complete your degree, you would be excellent in that capacity, especially with the ability to maintain a good attitude. I’ve never seen anyone go through this and manage to have a sense of humor about it so quickly.”

  “My attitude sucks,” Cassie said. “Inside, I’m crying and screaming and cursing God and trying everything else I can think of to convince myself this isn’t real, but I know it is. What I’ve got to do now is refuse to give in to that part of myself. I’ve got to figure out what I can do with all of this. For right now, I just want to go home and think, but I’ll probably go back to school as soon as I can. Whatever I do, I’m pretty sure I’m going to need that psychology degree.”

  Doctor Rich stood there and looked at her for a moment, then reached out and patted her right shoulder. “Whatever you decide to do,” he said, “I suspect you’re going to do it better than anyone else ever could.”

  Chapter 13

  Cassie knocked on the door, keeping her face turned to the left. It was answered a moment later by a chubby brunette who opened it with a smile already on her face.

  “Hi, you must be Cassie,” she said, and Cassie felt an incredible sense of déjà vu. “I’m Brenda, Brenda Wickham.”

  “I’m Cassie,” Cassie said unnecessarily, still looking to her left. “Listen, there’s something I need to tell you about myself before we go any further.”

  Brenda leaned out the door and glanced to her right, looking to see whatever Cassie was watching, then stepped back again and looked at her. “Okay,” she said hesitantly. “What’s that?”

  Cassie sighed. “I—I’ve been burned really badly,” she said. “Part of my face and all down my left side. I just thought I’d give you a heads up before…” She turned her face to look directly at Brenda, who jumped back a step involuntarily. “See?”

  Brenda swallowed, staring at the burned side of Cassie’s face, and at the eyepatch that covered the empty eye socket. “O-kay, then,” she said, swallowing, her eyes wide. “Please forgive me for staring, but it’s gonna take a few minutes to get used to this.”

  Cassie couldn’t contain the giggle. “Trust me, I understand,” he said. “When they took the bandages off, I stared at the mirror for three hours and I never did get used to it.”

  Brenda nodded, her eyes still wide. “I could imagine,” she said. “But, hey, there really isn’t a lot you can do about it now, is there?”

  “No,” Cassie said, “but I would like to come in and put these bags down.” She looked inquisitively at Brenda. “Unless you want to ask for a different roommate?”

  Brenda made a face that dismissed that possibility. “No! Come on in, I didn’t mean to block the door. It’s just one room with two beds, yours is the one on the right.”

  Cassie carried her bags of clothes inside and dropped them onto the bed. “That’s good,” she said. “That means you won’t have to look at my ugly side when we first get up in the morning.”

  “That doesn’t scare me,” Brenda said. “I wanted the other one because it’s closer to the bathroom. I’ve, um, I’ve got sort of a weak bladder.”

  Cassie smiled at her. “No problem,” she said. “So, what are you here for?”

  “Oh, I’m studying accounting, going for my master’s in business administration. You?”

  “Psychology,” Cassie said. “This is actually my second year, I finished my first the year before last, but then this happened,” she waved her fingers at the burn scars, “and I took a year off to learn how to deal with it all. I’m glad to be getting back to school, I just hope I don’t traumatize too many people.”

  Brenda looked at the left side of her face and head appraisingly. “I don’t think you’re actually going to scare anyone,” she said, “but I’d almost bet you could win best Halloween costume this year, if you wanted to.”

  Cassie smiled again. “And I wouldn’t even need makeup, right? Maybe I’ll try, just to see if I can get some laughs.”

  Brenda giggled. “I don’t think to
o many people would even try to compete against you,” she said. “So, is it rude for me to ask how it happened?”

  Cassie told her, the whole story. By the time she was finished, Brenda was sitting on her bed with her mouth hanging open.

  “Oh, my God,” she said at last. “I actually remember hearing about that on the news, but I never thought I’d actually meet you. It must’ve been terrible.”

  “It was,” Cassie said, “but the most terrible part is realizing that I had allowed myself to become an abused woman, when I had always, always felt that any woman who let that happen was simply asking for it. I can remember times when I told people I’d never put up with a guy treating me like that, but then I did. I thought, since he only hit me once, it wasn’t that big a deal, but now that I look back...”

  “You see what it really was,” Brenda said. “Emotional abuse can be just as bad as physical. Oh, Cassie, that’s horrible.”

  Cassie shrugged. “It is what it is,” she said. “I’m just hoping to turn it into something positive. When I get my degree, I plan on counseling abused women, see if I can maybe help some of them get out of it. Maybe if they see what happened to me, they’ll understand just how dangerous it really is.”

  Brenda lit up with a smile. “That’s awesome,” she said. “Turn your lemon into lemonade, right?”

  Cassie laughed again. “I guess that’s one way of putting it,” she said.

  The two of them got along well, and soon became good friends. When Cassie would occasionally go out to drink, Brenda was usually by her side. They had found a couple of little bars where the other patrons didn’t seem shocked or offended by her appearance, and where they didn’t have to worry much about anyone bothering them.

  There were a couple of men there who would actually flirt with Cassie, though she often wondered what would happen if she responded with willingness. “I’m pretty sure,” she told Brenda one night, “they all feel safe enough because no one’s ever seen me flirt back. If I did, I’m afraid they’d all run out the door.”