Leoni was filling out the questionnaire on autopilot while her mind was busy with a more pressing problem. Who was she going to call?
All her friends’ numbers were stored on speed dial on her own cellphone and she didn’t remember any of them. Not one. Her coke snorter’s Swiss-cheese brain didn’t hold on to little details like that.
As this realisation sank home Grinspoon hailed a passing colleague and stepped into the corridor again. Through the open door all Leoni could see was his back, the dirty grey hair straggling over his collar, the dandruff on his shoulders, the way he nodded his head and moved his hands as he talked. It was the perfect opportunity for her to call … Information!
With shaking fingers she dialled 411 and asked in a stage whisper for the number of the UCLA Med Centre.
The operator wasn’t helpful: ‘I don’t hear you clearly, ma’am. Say again, please.’
‘UCLA Med Centre,’ Leoni breathed.
‘Ma’am – in which city would that be?’
Under normal circumstances Leoni would have been spitting buckshot by now, but these were far from normal circumstances. ‘Los Angeles, of course,’ she hissed.
‘And which bed centre did you say in Los Angeles?’
‘Not bed centre. Med Centre. I … want … the … number … for … the … UCLA … Medical … Centre. Surely that can’t be so difficult?
‘Do you wish me to connect you, ma’am?’
Leoni was picking up hints from Grinspoon’s body language that his conversation in the corridor was ending, and she was forced to lower her voice still further ‘No. Please just give me the number,’ she hissed. ‘Just give me the number, OK?’
‘310-861-8251.’
Leoni scrawled the figures on the palm of her hand, hung up and shoved the cellphone under her bedclothes just as Grinspoon turned away from his colleague and walked back into the room.
‘Have you finished the questionnaire, Miss Watts?’
‘Umm. Not yet.’
‘Well, get on with it, then’ – he looked at his watch – ‘I haven’t got all night.’ There was a chair by the bathroom door which he now sat down in. He crossed his legs and began to examine the fingernails of his right hand.
Another ten minutes passed. Leoni was sweating under the covers, and giving ever more random responses to the annoying, persistent, repetitive questions on the form. She could feel Grinspoon’s cellphone nestling against her thigh and it was driving her crazy. She was terrified that he would make another call, or receive one – either way her entire escape plan would go down the tubes. But she didn’t dare reach down and switch the instrument off; if it was password-protected she wouldn’t be able to activate it again later.
Five more minutes. ‘False,’ ‘False,’ ‘False,’ ‘True.’ She glanced over at Grinspoon. He had finished with his fingernails. Now – hopeful sign – he tilted his head back against the wall and yawned. Tick, tock, tick, tock. Never had Leoni felt more aware of the passage of time, or more fervently willed another human being to fall asleep. ‘True,’ ‘False,’ ‘True,’ ‘False.’ Grinspoon’s eyelids were drooping closed, his neck muscles relaxed and his head flopped forward, pulling his upper body with it. He began to topple off the chair, then jerked awake at the last moment, sat upright, and gazed around, blinking in apparent confusion.
‘I’m nearly finished with the questionnaire,’ Leoni offered. ‘Just give me another few minutes, OK?’
Grinspoon yawned and made an exasperated sound. ‘I’ve got a call to make,’ he said. ‘I’ll be right outside in the corridor.’ And he stood up, patting his pockets.
It was now or never. Her heart thudding, Leoni started punching in the number before Grinspoon was even through the door. She figured she had thirty seconds – tops – before he realised what had happened to his phone.
An operator answered: ‘UCLA Med Centre, who would you like to speak with?’
‘Er … um …’ – Leoni was momentarily tongue-tied – ‘Bannerman. Dr John Bannerman.’
‘He’s unavailable right now …’
‘But I have to talk to him! It’s urgent!’
The operator was unimpressed. ‘He’s in surgery and he can’t be disturbed. Would you like someone else, or shall I connect you to Dr Bannerman’s voicemail?’
Leoni was shaking with stress and fear. She felt as though she was about to burst: ‘Voicemail? OK. Yes. Put me through.’
For a moment the line went dead but then, without any announcement, there was the kind of tone that normally invites you to leave a message. Was this really Bannerman’s voicemail? Perhaps the operator had put her through to another extension entirely? Since there was no way of knowing, she just had to go for it. ‘John?’ she yelled into the phone – she was no longer making any effort to keep her voice down – ‘This is Leoni Watts. I’ve been kidnapped by my parents. They’ve locked me up in a fucking mental hospital called … um … er – shit, I can’t remember. Mountain something or other’ – she racked her brains – ‘Mountain Ridge Psychiatric Hospital, that’s it. The Director is a guy called Sansom …’ She sobbed, peered at the door, took a deep breath: ‘You’ve got to get me out of here, John. I don’t have a friend in the world who can do this for me except you.’
As Grinspoon came pounding back in with a thunderous look on his face Leoni hung up his phone and held it out to him. ‘Look what I’ve found,’ she said.
Chapter Eighteen
Despite her worries, it wasn’t too long before Ria was having a good time. On Brindle’s further encouragement she had feasted on the mushrooms – she had forgotten how hungry she was – and now she was just hanging out, tuning in to the strange rhythms that the Uglies were producing. Her thoughts flew and soared on the bone-song’s sad notes, swirled and dived amongst rivers of flowing colours, waterfalls of brightly hued dots, dazzling starbursts, rotating spirals.
Meanwhile Brindle was out of it. Not communicating. Silent. It wasn’t like he was asleep. It was like he was somewhere else. Maybe he really had gone through the veil into the spirit world. If so, he obviously didn’t need his big gangly body to make the journey because his body was still here, stretched out on the floor, breathing slow and deep.
And had eating the mushrooms made any difference to her? Ria did a quick inventory. She hadn’t been turned into a tiger-toothed demon. She hadn’t been driven insane. Clan lore on these matters was obviously full of shit. Still, if she was honest, she had to admit that she was beginning to feel a little … peculiar.
It wasn’t just the patterns she’d never seen before, or the starbursts, or the way she could now taste sounds and hear colours. Everything else had gone queer as well.
For example, her arms and hands. Why were they glowing? Why were they steaming like the flanks of a hot reindeer on a cold day? She moved her left hand from side to side, laughing out loud at the ghostly smear of scintillating light that trailed behind it through the air. She held up the hand for closer inspection. Six fingers. Odder and odder. She flexed her fingers. Each one was outlined by a soft, radiant, pulsating aura.
‘Wow,’ said Ria, to no one in particular. ‘So beautiful.’ She let her hand drop and began to lever herself upright, at length getting to her feet. She was clumsy but her leg, though still painful, was not broken.
She grabbed another handful of the little mushrooms, crammed them into her mouth, flung a couple of ibex skins around her shoulders, picked up a stone lamp and limped out into the throng of Uglies.
Most of them were flat on their backs in the same silent, withdrawn state as Brindle. Maybe it was just an effect of the guttering lamplight, or maybe it was because they were very dirty, but she also noticed that some had green skin. Green. Totally gross. There seemed to be some changes under way in the shapes of their faces, too, that she preferred not to look at. Bit scary, really. But interesting at the same time.
She decided to check out a patch of the cave wall fifty paces away. It had caught her eye for some reason and she
felt drawn to it. But the floor was an obstacle course of prone and seated Uglies and now she saw a big male staring at her. He was sitting cross-legged, holding a stone lamp that lit his face luridly from below, transforming his nostrils into the black gaping holes of a death’s head. His beetling brows were knitted into a thunderous frown. His glinting eyes, reflecting the flame, were guarded and hostile.
Shit, Ria thought as she walked past him. What’s that about? She’d started to believe all the Uglies were gentle and good-willed but this guy gave her a different feeling. When she looked back he was still staring at her. She considered returning to the comfortable and reassuring pile of skins beside Brindle but rejected the idea. No way! She wasn’t going to be bullied.
The patch of wall that had attracted Ria proved, when she reached it, to be no taller than herself, no wider than the span of her outstretched arms. It was bone white and its surface, which was damp, mirrored her lamp’s yellow flame. There was something … compelling about these rippling reflections, something inviting about their glitter and shimmer.
Ria glanced back over her shoulder but the hostile-looking brave was lost in the shadows amongst the crowd on the floor. She didn’t think he was still staring at her and dismissed him from her mind. Brindle would not allow any harm to come to her here and she needed to give the wall her full attention. Holding out the lamp, she stepped closer, her eyes darting from side to side as she followed the dance of the reflections.
Except – and this was suddenly very obvious – these weren’t just reflections. With a flash of clarity and absolute conviction, Ria understood that the rock had become transparent through some strange sorcery, like a limpid pool on a hot summer’s day, allowing her to see through it … into another world.
It seemed to be a world that was very much like her own, full of sierras, of forests, of rivers, stretching away into a vast and incalculable distance. But it was also different, overlaid with an eerie and sinister glamour.
She stepped closer again. Could she see movement through the rock, in that enticing realm beyond? Were there figures there? She was beginning to get the creepy feeling that she was being watched. She frowned, narrowed her eyes. There. What was that?
For a moment the scene clouded over. When it cleared two specks were visible in the sky of the otherworld, moving towards her, and Ria found that she was standing with her nose pressed against the cave wall, gazing into it with fascinated intensity. The two dots grew in size and began to take recognisable form – wings, feathers, talons, beaks. These were birds of prey, big ones, flying fast. Could they burst through the rock? Could they cross over from their world into this world?
Ria braced herself. Her heart was racing. But she didn’t turn and run.
She could see now that the birds were white owls. Ghostly white owls. Spectres of the night. They came closer, right up to the other side of the rock wall, and hovered in front of her. The slow, powerful beating of their wings was lulling … hypnotic … She felt their eyes – huge, dark, filled with intelligence – boring into her.
Did they want to talk to her?
Maybe the same way Brindle talked to her?
‘OK,’ Ria said. ‘I know how to do that.’
She set down the lamp, laid the ibex skins she had brought with her on the floor, and sat carefully, stretching out her injured leg. All the while she continued to gaze into the rock surface where the two owls stared back at her through the wet, glistening sheen.
‘Do you wish to pass through?’ a thought-voice chimed inside her head. And at that, as though commanded by a magic spell, the owls vanished and a jagged vertical crack opened with a groan in the surface of the bone-white cave wall.
The crack expanded into a wide fissure.
Then a dwarf appeared in the gap and beckoned Ria.
Chapter Nineteen
Grinspoon snatched back his cellphone, retreated to a safe distance, looking furious, and pecked at the keys with an extended forefinger to check which numbers Leoni had dialled. Since there was no point in hiding what he would discover anyway, Leoni confessed: ‘I made a couple of calls. One to Information. One to UCLA Med Centre.’
Grinspoon pressed more keys and held the phone to his ear: ‘Hello, yes. This is Dr Silas Grinspoon, Mountain Ridge Psychiatric Hospital. A patient of mine just called this number and I’d like to know who she was put through to …’ Pause: ‘What do you mean?’ Longer pause, then: ‘I see … Yes … Yes … But that’s ridiculous … Our Director will be calling your Chancellor about this. Goodbye!’ And he hung up.
Grinspoon glared at Leoni: ‘I need to know exactly who you called at UCLA Med Centre,’ he demanded.
‘That’s private information,’ Leoni spat back. ‘I’ve got rights. Ask my lawyer.’
‘You’re a patient here. You have been committed. Don’t you get that? There is no private information. You have no rights. You have no lawyer. You don’t call anyone without our say-so …’
‘You should have thought about that before you loaned me your phone, asshole.’
‘I did not loan you my phone,’ Grinspoon spluttered. ‘You stole it from me!’
‘Sure … Whatever.’
Leoni’s mind was working overtime. Now they knew she’d made calls, and perhaps summoned help, they couldn’t risk keeping her here in Mountain Ridge. They’d move her. Perhaps out of the state – perhaps even get rid of her altogether, if her parents wanted that. How about another ‘overdose’? This time fatal? She was already on suicide watch, after all. And then no more risk of embarrassing revelations from the adopted daughter of a very rich man.
Grinspoon was red in the face and yapping at her: ‘I’m not going to ask you this again, Miss Watts. Tell me who you spoke to or you’ll spend the next twenty-four hours in a straitjacket.’
Leoni had a quick temper, and she lost it now – at the sheer ludicrous unfairness of her situation, at Grinspoon’s soiled and unwholesome presence, and at the catalogue of multiple indignities that her life had become. Without giving the matter any further thought she bounded off the bed, pounded across the room in her bare feet, shoved Grinspoon hard in the chest with both hands and bolted out through the open door.
A long empty corridor lit with neon and painted clinical white.
No windows, no natural light, just a vanishing perspective of door after door to either side of her extending into the distance.
Did any of them offer an escape route? Or just access to other rooms?
Leoni hesitated for a fraction of a second then darted to her right and sprinted towards what she hoped was a fire-exit sign glowing red at the far end of the corridor, maybe two hundred feet away. She could hear Grinspoon just behind, yelling something. A klaxon began to sound.
In front, to her left, a door burst open and a man and woman in green overalls rushed out. The man was small and had Oriental features. Leoni barged into him when he tried to block her and sent him sprawling. The woman executed a clumsy flying tackle at her legs, missed and collided with the man. When Leoni glanced back she saw that both were on the floor and Grinspoon had tripped over them. If it hadn’t been so serious it would have been comical. She could hear what Grinspoon was yelling now: ‘ESCAPED PATIENT! STOP HER! STOP HER!’
Leoni covered half the distance to the exit in a few seconds but by then there were people everywhere, pouring out into the corridor from the side rooms, grabbing at her as she hurtled by, and she felt panic bubbling up inside her chest, shutting down her reasoning.
(Not gonna make it. Don’t stand a chance.)
Now another threat loomed – young guy in a white coat, wire-frame spectacles, earnest expression. He got her in a bear-hug but she bit his ear, which crunched like raw cabbage …
(Yecch!)
… until he screamed and let her go.
Spitting the salt taste of his blood from her mouth, Leoni ran again, dodged a foot stuck out to trip her, and slalomed left and right. Her breath was coming in shuddering, wheezing gasps, her hear
t was thudding in her chest but she had just twenty feet to go …
(Maybe I can do this.)
… when she realised, with a sinking heart, that she really wasn’t going to make it, really didn’t stand a chance.
She’d been right about the fire exit. But now it was guarded by Deirdre, Melissa and three other brawny nurses. Panting, Leoni skidded to a halt and faced them.
‘You don’t want to fight us, girlie,’ said Deirdre. There was menace in her voice.
Leoni knew she was right but was so far beyond reason that when they tried to grab her and pin her down she fought back anyway, biting, scratching and kicking, drawing blood, pulling out fistsful of hair. Someone punched her in the head so hard she saw stars. A beefy elbow pummelled her kidney. Finally they managed to turn her face down on the floor and one of them knelt on her back, pulling her arms out behind her in a sweaty wrestling lock. Her ankles were pinned under what felt like a ton of lard, and out of the corner of her eye she could just see Melissa prepping a large syringe.
‘What’s that?’ Leoni protested, close to tears.
Melissa leaned down, stabbed the needle into her thigh and pushed in the plunger: ‘Four hundred milligrams of ketamine intramuscular, baby! It’s all I had to hand at such short notice. Let me tell you, this is really going to calm you down.’
Soon after Melissa had administered the drug, and before it had fully taken effect, there was a commotion in the corridor. Leoni heard Grinspoon’s voice, wheedling, and Sansom’s confident bullying tones. ‘I’m not worried,’ Sansom was saying.
‘But she might have talked to someone.’
‘Even if she did, so what? What can they do? The girl’s here legally. Her own parents had her committed. Nobody can touch us.’
Leoni was barely conscious and had lost control of her limbs when the nurses lifted her onto a gurney and wheeled her back to her room. They strapped her into her bed. When they left they turned out all the lights and triple-locked the door.
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