The Girl in the Box Series, Books 1-3: Alone, Untouched and Soulless

by Robert J. Crane

  Eighteen

  I heard a click at the far end of the medical unit and started, my eyes darting to the door of Dr. Perugini’s office where she stood silhouetted in the dimness. She stretched her hands above her head and yawned. “I saw you wake up.” She took a long, meandering walk toward me. “Trouble sleeping?”

  My hands clutched the sheets, my palms sweaty and sticky. In spite of the warm, comfortable air in the room, I felt a trickle of sweat run down my spine underneath my cloth gown. The bitter taste in my mouth became synonymous with the fear I felt every time I came across Wolfe, and the thudding of my heart was so loud in my ears I was amazed I could hear the doctor. “Yes. Just a…nightmare.”

  She nodded and stifled another yawn as she snapped on a pair of latex gloves. “Let’s check your injury.”

  “Don’t you mean injuries?” I said it with a bitterness that welled up deep inside; a cutting edge of irony that reflected my inner turmoil at the fact that since I left my house I’d been severely beaten twice. Far worse than any punishment Mother had ever levied.

  “No,” Dr. Perugini said with an odd tone, and reached to the end table behind me, clicking on a lamp and coming back with a mirror. She put it in front of me and I looked at the face within.

  There were no visible cuts, marks or bruises. My dark hair and pale skin, my big eyes and pointed nose all looked back at me, a contrast to how I had looked only a few hours before. The only sign that something was different were the bags under my eyes. I looked tired.

  “So you see,” she said, returning the mirror to the nightstand, “there’s only one wound left.” She lifted my gown to reveal gauze and bandages on my lower abdomen, around my belly button. “He ripped through the skin and pushed through your peritineum, perforating your intestines.” Her brown eyes looked at me, almost as though she were lecturing. “If you were human, it would have taken a surgeon who could work miracles to keep you from dying. All I had to do was give you time to heal yourself.”

  She peeled back the medical tape securing the bandage to reveal red, scabby tissue beneath, roughly the size of a quarter. She plucked at the pink, sensitive skin around the edges, eliciting a hiss of pain from me. “Be grateful you’re alive,” she admonished, throwing the bandages in the garbage can and taping a fresh piece of gauze onto the smaller wound, then pushing on my stomach to either side of it. “Any pain here?”

  “No.” I looked at her hands as she pushed again and this time I cringed, not entirely from the pain. I watched her gloved hands pressing on my skin and had a remembrance, like a flashback in a TV show.

  Mom had been sitting on the sofa, not even changed out of her work clothes yet, her dark hair tucked back in a ponytail. She was pretty, I thought, and all I had to compare her to were the actresses on TV. I got my dark hair from her, but her features had always seemed more chiseled than mine, making her look statuesque. Her complexion was darker than mine; not surprising since she did go outside more than I did. Her eyes were green rather than the cool blue of mine.

  Her head was resting on the back of the sofa, her eyes lolling a bit, but she focused on me when I approached her. I had in my hand the calculus book that I had been studying from on the kitchen table, my assigned space for working. If I didn’t work there, I got in trouble. Needless to say, I only worked in my room when Mom wasn’t home.

  “Finished your test?” Mom said, looking up at me with indifference. She reached out and took the paper I handed her. She leaned over the end of the couch and pulled the teacher’s edition of the book from her bag. She always took them with her so I couldn’t cheat by looking up the answers. Nor did we have an internet connection for me to cheat with.

  She browsed through it. Her dark eyebrow rose at one point as she chewed on the end of her pen. I stood back, in my sweatpants and t-shirt, the heat of nervous anticipation on my cheeks as I waited to hear the result. She reached the bottom of the paper and looked up at me, still impassive.

  “Flawless,” she pronounced with a curt nod. “I think you could do a better job of showing your work, however, so keep that in mind next time.” She gave me a half smile, the highest mark of affection offered in our house. “You can watch one hour of television, then we do our evening training session.”

  I let out a squeak of happiness at her pronouncement of TV privileges (I was fourteen, what do you want from me?) followed by the slightest sigh of disappointment at the news of an impending workout. That was the end of her half-smile.

  “You think I’m too harsh, but you don’t know.” Her eyes narrowed and her lips were a thin line. All traces of prettiness vanished in a hard look that drove terror straight through me. “You don’t know what’s out there.”

  Her hand pointed toward the front door and I stifled any word of argument I might have given – something along the lines of, “You’re right, but only because you won’t let me outside…”

  She went on. “You can’t ever get soft. You can’t ever get weak. It’s a dangerous world out there, filled with people who want to give nothing but harm to a little girl like you.” She stood up and tossed the TV remote on the couch, never looking away as she brushed past me, taking particular care not to touch, and went into her bedroom.

  I longed for a hug, affirmation, something. I lowered myself to the couch. All the little words of approval were washed away in the heat of her anger, light as it was. I didn’t pay much attention to the TV that night for the hour I watched it, instead thinking about my life and how much I wanted someone to just hold me.

  “I expect you’ll be up to full strength again within a day,” Dr. Perugini spoke, jarring me back to the here and now.

  “Good to know,” I mouthed more by instinct than from processing the words she’d spoken. She fussed about for a few more minutes, then admonished me to “get some rest” and retreated back to her office, shut the door and turned off the light. I don’t know why I wasted my time letting my head get clouded with that stupid memory of Mom when I had Wolfe to think about. His threat.

  I had let the doctor distract me for a few minutes while I should have been pondering whether to tell Ariadne and Old Man Winter about my dream. I couldn’t blame myself too much, because honestly, I didn’t want to think about it. Didn’t want to consider the idea that Wolfe might be out there right now, killing people because of me.

  I repeated to myself that it was just a dream. Then again. Then five more times. I really wanted this “dream walking” to not be a power but a delusion. I kept repeating it to myself until I fell back to sleep, blissfully uninterrupted by any more horrific visions of Wolfe.

  The next morning when I awoke the medical unit was still quiet. I lifted my gown and checked my wound; it was gone. I bent at the waist to sit up and felt no discomfort. I stood, letting my feet touch the cold floor. It didn’t bother me.

  A hiss came from my left and the door to the unit opened, revealing Ariadne, a key card in one hand, newspaper in the other. “Glad to see you’re awake,” she said with a perfunctory smile. “We’ve prepared accommodations in the basement, but first we have to go speak with…” She hesitated.

  “Old Man Winter?” I said with a nasty smile in return.

  She blanched. “I wouldn’t call him that to his face.”

  “Think he’d get mad at me?” My smile got worse, I could feel it.

  “I wouldn’t care to find out,” she said without further comment. “You should know something.”

  I froze. “What?”

  She threw the newspaper onto the tray by the bed, and underneath the banner was the headline “Family of Five Slaughtered in South Minneapolis”. A photo of a home not unlike mine sat underneath the blaring headline. Police tape blocked the entire scene and there were at least a dozen officers in the photograph.

  My hands went to my mouth, covering it, pushing the words back in before they could come out. I halted, tried to regain control before speaking. My eyes flew up to Ariadne. Hers were fixed on mine, watchin
g to see my reaction. When I said nothing, she spoke.

  “We think it’s Wolfe.”