And with that, the arms around me suddenly loosen. Before I even have time to throw out my arms to catch myself, I’m tumbling into darkness.
My world becomes a swirl of light and dark. I land on my shoulder several steps down and don’t stop tumbling until I collapse in a heap on a concrete slab at the bottom.
My head still spins and every extremity in my body feels bruised or, in the case of my smallest toe on my left foot, possibly broken. But the pain in my body is nothing compared to the one that wells up in me as I lift my spinning vision to look once more at the three shadows looking down at me from that open doorway above.
For one second, I think they mean to follow me. Price lunges forward, his eyes trained on mine like he’s the hunter and I’m the prey. But then I hear a voice, another howl. It’s Kingsley…I think…but somehow different.
Even in my bruised and battered state, I can hear the difference.
I don’t hear what he says, but I see the way Ives catches Price on the shoulder and drags him back. The two exchange a hurried glance, and then Price puts one hand to the door with a growl of frustration.
“Sweet dreams, greenie,” Price says. Even though he means it to sound intimidating, I swear I hear an edge in his voice that tells me something different.
With a last glance down at me, he slams the door shut and plunges me into darkness.
13
Thalia
I sit, rubbing the grit from the bottom of my palms while I wait for my eyes to adjust to the dark. There’s a dark, musty smell down here. Somewhere in a far-off corner a pipe leaks a steady drum against the concrete. Several seconds pass, then minutes . . . and still, I see nothing. Not even the stairs in front of me take shape.
After a short while, I have to come to terms with the fact that sight isn’t going to happen.
The longer I sit here in the darkness, the more the pain in my foot increases. The rest of me might be bruised, but bruises fade on their own. I have to force the part of me down that doesn’t want to move at all in the dark and I shift myself into more of a sitting position.
I stretch out one arm in front of me and find nothing, and then the same to the back. All my fingers find is empty air. If it weren’t for the ground beneath me, I’d think I was simply suspended in nothing.
Images of bodies, creatures, deadly instruments all surface in my mind. I don’t dare crawl away from the stairs since there’s no telling what could be in this room, so I just grunt my way over until my back is against the bottom step. Even though I can’t see, I feel down my foot until I flinch back from the pain in my toe. Nausea rises in my core, the pain making patterns appear at the backs of my eyes.
I’ve never broken anything before, but I’m pretty sure this is how it feels. Even though Kemper has tortured me before, dislocated shoulders, bruises, and the occasional laceration were as far as he ever went. This pain is deep and throbbing, growing ever worse as the silence stretches on.
This isn’t the first time I’ve found myself locked in a dark room, just waiting for my captors to come release me. I shouldn’t have tested Price and the others. I’ve been warned, multiple times, that they aren’t to be messed with.
That dripping sound in the darkness continues, the only sign that time continues to pass.
I’ve been in this position before, thanks to my brother Kemper, and I know I have two options. I can stay here, sitting in the dark waiting for Price and the others to reign down whatever awful torment they have planned for me, or I can try to escape. I roll my shoulders and check my body for more damage, but aside from my toe, I’m mostly unharmed.
Even though it’s too dark to see, I still find myself turning back to stare up at the vacant space between me and the top of the stairs. That dripping continues, marking a steady beat to my current tragedy.
If I stay and wait I’ll be tortured for sure, but then it’ll be over. At least for a while. I’ve done it before. With Kemper, I learned that there is a certain give and take to this kind of thing. From the way the others kept warning me about Price and the others, I’m guessing this isn’t the first time someone new has found themselves trapped at the bottom of a hidden staircase in the asylum.
I turn my head back to face the blackness in front of me.
I should stay. I should just . . . let it happen. That’s what I always did before. I learned to keep my head down, shut up, and stay out of my brother’s path. Every time I changed my mind and tried to stand up for myself, bad things happened. Worse even than the torture I endured.
Like this. Here. The asylum. I take one stand against him and here I am, committed to the very asylum I’ve always feared would be my ending ever since I was a child. This is what happens to those who dare to go against the grain.
That’s when I hear it, in the silence.
And look where that got you.
Fear freezes every part of my body. Even the pain in my toe seems to stop, suspended in disbelief and shock. The dripping sound ebbs back into focus. For a second it seemed like that had stopped too.
“Hello?”
My voice comes out small in the darkness, and yet, at the same time, the sound feels like it grows to fill the whole, empty space.
There’s no reply. After a long second, I slump back against the stairs. I hadn’t even realized how I’d tensed up into an alert sitting position, my head trained towards the source of the noise.
But then . . . this voice . . . I shake my head. Where was the source? It wasn’t like other voices. It sounded like . . . it came from somewhere else.
I cover my face with my hands and sigh. “This place is going to make me crazy.”
I don’t expect a reply, so when I get one, I’m wracked to my core.
Only if you let it.
This time I lunge to my feet, ignoring the pain in my toe.
“Who are you? Where are you?”
My hands reach out and search the darkness blindly behind me until my fingers find the slope of the handrails and grip them for my very life.
There’s no response.
I don’t know what scares me more, being alone here in the dark . . . or finding out that I’m not alone.
Actually, I do.
I spin on my heel and bound up the stairs, ignoring the fact that my footsteps make the old wood creak and groan suspiciously underfoot. The sound drowns out any other voices that might try to speak to me from the darkness.
My outstretched fists collide with the door before the rest of my body. A quick, desperate search across the surface of the door reveals nothing. On this side it isn’t so much of a door as it is a blank slab. No handle, no hinges.
My fingers root through the grime and filth, they bat through thick spider’s webs without so much as a shiver at the thought of the creatures who made them—now likely crawling up my arms and hair looking for a suitable replacement for the home I just destroyed. None of this matters so long as I get away from whatever lies down below.
You know it isn’t going to be so simple.
The voice is so close. It’s in front of me, directly behind me, inside of me. I freeze again.
Just as my breaths have begun, once more, to race and the beating of my heart pounds so loud in my ears that I can’t hear anything else, I feel it. The voice, wherever it comes from, is right.
I take a tentative step back, making sure not to lose my footing and tumble back down the stairs. People have died from much less. I’m lucky, really.
Just that thought makes me snort, and somehow, the darkness feels just a little less . . . dark . . . just for a moment.
The voice doesn’t speak to me again, but it doesn’t need to. My mind, once more freed from the grip of fear, begins to turn over any possible way for me to get out. Even though I might not have my sight, I still have all my other senses.
I stop feverishly flailing my arms all over and instead start carefully and methodically touching the walls and floor around the hidden door. When I don’t find any hidden grooves o
r catches, anything that might symbolize an opening mechanism, I start crawling back down the stairs on hands and knees while I feel the stairs for anything else.
This time I am more careful of the obviously worn and rotting wood. I’m really surprised I didn’t shatter any of these stairs on my earlier descent—or the thundering ascension that followed. The top steps are the strongest, but the closer I get to the bottom the more rotten and soft they become. My fingers feel beneath the wood, reaching into the soft and musty crannies that should have disintegrated long ago. Something wriggles and I jerk my hands back.
Even though the ground is dry, this room must have flooded at some point for the wood to be so soft and insect-ridden.
That incessant dripping continues at the other end of the room. It isn’t much, but it’s a start. I don’t want to get lost in this room. There’s really no telling how large it is. Actually, there may be.
“Hello?” I say again, this time a little louder than before. I’m relieved when no one responds, inside my own head other otherwise. I repeat myself again, even louder.
There’s no echo, which I take as a good sign. It means there probably isn’t a gaping hole somewhere in the floor waiting to swallow me, and despite the seemingly endless space around me, it can’t actually be that big. At least, not big enough to get lost in here until the others return and it’s too late.
I take my time, my arms outstretched and sweeping to either side as I start crossing the room. I look for something, anything, to ground me. Only a couple steps in, I nearly run into a floor-to-ceiling metal pole. Like everything else down here, the rust tells me it’s been long forgotten. A good shove would probably make the weaker parts of the metal crumble in my hands.
But at least it’s something. I keep one hand on the pole and walk a slow circle around it, my other arm outstretched and feeling for something else to grab onto. While I don’t find anything, I do hear a slight change in the dripping noise. I stop moving, keenly aware of the fact that I have no idea which direction leads back to the stairs now.
I cock my head to the side. If I listen closely, I think I can actually tell which direction the sound is coming from. It’s all I have, so I let go of the pole and walk hesitantly towards it. After just a few steps, I’m sure I’m headed in the right direction and I pick up my pace. I must take fifteen steps before I feel my fingers brush against something.
It’s another wall.
Just the feel of something solid makes that fear that had started building up in my heart ebb. It’s a reminder that no matter how dark the darkness, I’m still solid too. I’ve not drifted away and become a lost spirit.
The wall is damp and grows wet and slick as I grow closer to the dripping water. The scent of rust and mold is heavy in the air; heavy enough to make my sinuses begin to swell and breathing becomes more laborious. I take another step forward, my face pressed close to the wall, and I feel a droplet of water land on my face. Then another. The dripping sound is broken as it lands on me instead of the puddle collecting on the floor.
I reach up, feeling for the source of the water until my knuckles brush against a low overhanging pipe. Like the rusted one in the middle of the room, this one has long since given way to the ravages of time. The drip of water is slow but steady, so I imagine it isn’t part of the plumbing system anymore. It might be connected to an old well that never dried up when the new plumbing was put in.
I shift my hand, feeling down the length of the pipe for a moment when it brushes up against something else just out of reach; the familiar touch of small, metal beads. My heart leaps.
I’m too short to reach it standing, but I jump up a few times, each time my hands nearly catching the invisible chain between my slippery fingers. Finally, after enough attempts to make my breath grow ragged, I catch the chain in my fingers and tug it down.
It breaks in my fingers . . . but not before a dull hum fills the air and the dimmest, oldest, lightbulb I’ve ever seen crackles to life.
In any other room, any other situation, it would be useless. But here, in the utter darkness, this tiny dull bulb is a beacon of hope.
My eyes, accustomed to the darkness, take a moment to adjust to this sudden newfound sense. The first thing I ascertain is that I am, indeed, alone. No one waits for me crouched and ready to spring from just out of reach.
The puddle underfoot stretches its black water halfway across the room and disappears down a small, half-clogged drain in the floor. At the other end of the room, a small collection of sinister looking implements sit rusting in the dark, but I’m not interested in getting a closer look.
Whatever Price and the boys had planned for me…still have planned for me…won’t matter if I find a way out of here.
The light doesn’t reach out into the very far outer corners of the room, but it reaches far enough for me to see what even the most delusional part of myself didn’t think was possible.
There’s a second door.
Like the one at the top of the stairs, this door has no handle and no visible method of opening it—but it does have the only thing I need. I waste no time hobbling over. There’s no telling how long that bulb is going to last.
I take my one good foot and stomp on one of the hinges, hard. A jarring pain shoots up my shins, but I do it again, and again until the rusty metal crumbles. The second, higher, one is a bit more of a challenge, but I don’t stop until it too breaks. By the time the door sags in its forgotten, broken frame, I am drenched in sweat and I’m pretty sure I broke the toe on my other foot too.
It takes all of my strength to wedge the door out of the frame, but after much heaving and puffing and a moment where I think it’s all been for nothing—it falls away. I have to jump out of the way as the heavy metal door slams down to the ground in a whoosh of suddenly freezing air.
A massive dust cloud erupts up around me, temporarily blinding me once more. The ancient mold and dust fills my nostrils and runs rampant in my lungs, making me double over in a fit of coughing.
The room has easily dropped a good ten, fifteen degrees in the seconds since the door fell. As soon as the dust begins to clear, I see why.
Before me is a scene I know too well.
On the other side of the door is a small, stone room dug even further into the earth. Sawdust and straw is packed tight along the ground and outer walls, insulating the massive block of forgotten ice.
For a moment, I think I must be imagining things. It’s some kind of cruel joke, some hateful reminder of another time I was trapped, helpless, in the grip of a boy more cunning than me.
This time I don’t cower in the dark. I don’t need another voice, no matter how haunting, to tell me to rush across the ice, up the steps on the other side, and break through the door. Even when the light does finally give way, casting me in a freezing, familiar darkness, I don’t stop pounding against the door until it too collapses into the night.
Cool night air rushes into my lungs, clearing out the dust and the mold and the fear.
I stumble several steps away from the old ice house built into the side of the asylum and collapse myself in the damp earth. It’s a cloudy night, but no darkness can compare to the complete darkness I just escaped.
I roll over onto my back, looking up into the night sky. I’ve never gotten a good look at the small, wizened forest encased in the back of the asylum’s grounds. The trees here are already bare, even though winter is many months away. Their roots cradle me like friendly hands, reaching out to me in the dark.
After a moment, I sit back up. My eyes scan the tops of the high brick walls.
I could climb them. I could run.
A cold reminder presses against my ankle and the thrill of escaping falters slightly.
Thanks to this, they’d only catch me and bring me back, armed this time with more ammo to keep me here. I might have escaped one set of captors, but the truth still remains that I’m not truly free. Breaking down doors will only get me so far.
I flop bac
k against the damp earth and grass and look up into the clouds framed by twisted branches.
Whatever it was, that voice was right. I’ve played along with bullies too long, and it’s only led me here. My gaze wanders down to the asylum walls themselves and wonder how many new guests have entered the asylum to be stripped and humiliated by the staff only to find even worse treatment at the hands of the other inmates.
I don’t care what the others say.
I heard a whisper in Price’s voice earlier. It was faint, faint enough than no one else would have been able to hear. So faint…even I shouldn’t have been able to.
Because it came from inside.
And it was fear.
Fear. That’s what binds us together here. And it’s what’ll one day get me out…if I learn how to use it to my advantage.
14
Price
I stand at the top of the stairs; the door flung wide, looking down at the mess left down below. The fact that Ives stands to my side, his shoulders braced, waiting for me to tell him what to do next only makes the humiliation of it all the worse.
“The bitch escaped.”
Not that I should be surprised. We left her down there for hours. For nearly the whole night.
This is not what we had in mind. Not what I promised Ives.
But none of us could have counted on Kingsley losing his grip like that. All this time I’ve been worried about Ives…when it was Kingsley I should have been keeping an eye on.
Ives brushes past me to look down into the old storage room. He sucks in a short breath, which once again, just makes it all even worse.
“I didn’t even know there was another door down there.”
“No one did,” I snap. My mind reels. This isn’t going to look good to the others. Our grip over the asylum has been slipping as it is. The new director keeps trying to give the other inmates a false sense of hope, and it’s making them get plucky. Just this week, I caught one of the older ones poking around the hallway on the top floor. Our floor. He didn’t even run when he saw me. Not at first. It was as if he could sense that after the billiards room, that was next.
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