And I know exactly where to start.
19
Thalia
I don’t know what I expected my treatment to be, maybe to be dragged in chains to some subterranean dungeon and have holes drilled into my skull to appease the humors. Maybe that’s still on the table. But first, it seems, Dr. Silver has a much more mundane plan in place for me.
But still, somehow, reporting to ‘grief therapy’ with Dr. Mallory on Monday morning feels nearly as torturous.
Maybe this last week in the asylum hasn’t made me stronger. Maybe it’s just made me soft.
I know seeing Mackenzie and Garret at the open house won’t guarantee I’ll get out of this hell scape any sooner, but it could. Even they, timid as they are, will have to see through this sham for exactly what it is.
And even if they can’t get me out, that little glimpse back at the outside world should give me enough hope to get through the coming weeks. With that to cling to at least, I might be able to keep sane just a little bit longer.
It takes me a minute to figure out where I am in the asylum, and then several more to find the room Dr. Silver assigned me to. Most of the classrooms are located on the second floor off the great hall.
As soon as I open the door, I wonder if I should have insisted on skull-drilling instead.
I’m late . . . as I am to most things in life . . . and I’ve just interrupted a girl in the middle of bursting into tears. She’s the only person in the small circle who doesn’t look up to see who would be so rude as to interrupt a grief counseling session.
“Sorry,” I whisper, grabbing a metal chair from a stack in the corner and banging it all the way across the floor until it scrapes to a wheezing halt in the only open space I can squeeze into.
It then proceeds to stick, and it takes several slamming kicks to make it unfold. At this point, I just throw myself down noisily into the chair and cross my arms in front of me as tight as I can, as if I can create a barrier between my own obnoxious self and everyone else around me.
Now even the crying girl is glaring up at me, her eyes red and bloodshot, tears and snot glistening on her downturned face.
“Welcome, Thalia.” A female doctor in a white coat hands me a packet of papers, her voice sounding anything but welcoming. She’s much older than Dr. Silver, and the lines on her face don’t indicate she’s spent much of that time smiling. “We’re glad you finally decided to show up.”
“That makes one of us,” a voice whispers in my ear. I freeze in my seat as the girl, Emmie, starts back up again about how her pet cat died when she was seven and she’s never been the same before.
Just wait until she hears about what happened to my cat. All eight of them.
See how fast you crack? One minute into therapy and you’re already remembering things you shouldn’t.
I have no time for the voice, however. In my hurry to find a seat as noisily as humanly possible, I failed to notice who it was I ended up sitting next to.
Ives is so large that the seat underneath him shouldn’t be able to hold his weight. One of his broad shoulders brush the wrinkled old man to his other side, who seems frozen in as much fear as me . . . or it could be fear of whatever he seems to be staring at in an otherwise empty corner of the room. Ives’ clothes must have to be tailor made, but still the sleeves are short enough that he has to roll them up past the elbows.
He leans in even closer. I know that the doctor sees him, but like every other person in this asylum, she pretends not to notice.
“You enjoy your night downstairs?”
I want to ignore him but try as I might, somehow, paying attention to Emmie is even worse. I last just until the point where she starts reaching into a bag at her side and I spot what I really hope is not her taxidermied cat, before I have to look away. My eyes search for something, anything else, but continue to return to the behemoth of a man beside me.
He opens his mouth to say something more, but I snap back at him with a whisper.
“Yes, actually,” I say. “I really needed the exercise.”
A muscle in the side of his neck bulges.
“Price wasn’t happy about that.”
I shrug. “I’m not here to make Price happy.”
“So you—”
“Thalia!” The doctor interrupts our whispered conversation. “Since you seem so eager to talk, why don’t you share next?”
“Um, no thank you,” I say, quickly slouching back into my seat.
But this lady is having none of it. I don’t know if it’s because she too is terrified of the stuffed cat in Emmie’s lap or just out of spite, but she scoots her chair forward with a loud screech of its own and stares me down.
“You aren’t going to make any progress by refusing to participate,” she says, false concern heavy in her voice. She shuffles through the papers on her lap until she pulls one out. A poorly-lit photograph of me has been paper clipped to the front. It must have been cropped from one of those awful photos my brother took of me at the funeral, because to be honest . . . can I really blame her for thinking I need help with that photograph in existence?
She can see my hesitation, so she reaches out a hand and pats my knee. I have to fight the urge to slap her away. Instead, I lean forward in my own seat and let my eyes bore into hers.
“If you promise never to touch me again, I’ll say a few things about my dead parents.”
Her hand snaps back like a coiling snake. I see Ives shift in his seat beside me so his knee now brushes mine, and I know it’s no mistake.
Shit. I’ve just given him more ammo on how to torture me.
Even though I’d like nothing more than to kick him in the shins, I keep my leg steadily in place. Stubbornly in place.
All eyes are on me. Aside from Ives and Emmie, there are six other inmates in here with me. Two of them are so old their eyes have started to get that filmy look to them, so I quickly look away. Not, unfortunately, before I visibly shudder. I hate to think how long they’ve been locked up in here.
Too Long.
I freeze, choking on the very words forming in the back of my throat. Now is not the time for the voice to be acting up. Somehow, here, the voice just seems more wrong. A voice that’s not my own, but rather whispered in my inner ear.
But since no one else seemed to hear it again . . . I guess there’s no harm done. It’s just the asylum trying to sink its dirty claws into me yet again.
I shake my head to clear my mind and try to start again.
Dr. Mallory sees my struggle and jumps in with an enthusiasm that has no place in grief counseling.
“Why don’t you tell us about your first experience with death, then? We’ll work up to your parents.”
“But they were . . .” I trail off, another memory surfacing in my mind. It’s fuzzy at first, like trying to look out a window fogged with breath.
Here you go again, the voice says. Just out of spite, I let the rest of the memory rise to the surface.
“It was here,” I say, squeezing my eyes shut to remember the details. “At the asylum.”
When I open my eyes again, I don’t see the rest of the group. I know Dr. Mallory is still there, leaning invasively close while the other inmates stare me down, their interest peaked.
But I don’t see them. I see past them, past the drywall and past the hall beyond, the lawn, all the way to the other side of the high brick walls surrounding this place.
If they want a story about death, I’ll give it to them.
“I couldn’t have been older than six. Seven at the most.”
My parents first moved us into the country house to get us away from the city after an . . . incident . . . with Kemper at school. At first, I thought that the new house had tempered him. He was calm, almost eerily so for an eleven-year-old boy who’s just been dragged away from his friends.
“Up until that summer I’d been invisible to him, and then suddenly, I wasn’t.”
I was his sudden, if somewhat reluctant, pla
ymate. In our games he was always the villain, he never let me win . . . but it didn’t bother me. He saw me finally, and that was all that mattered.
“Most of our staff stayed behind in the city so for the first time in our lives, we were left almost entirely up to our own devices. The only rule? Don’t leave the grounds.”
So, naturally, that’s exactly what we did.
Each day we ventured further and further out into the woods, testing how far we could go without getting in trouble. My parents knew, I think, but they were just glad that Kemper finally seemed to be acting normal. Despite all the things he’d done before, no one ever believed he would hurt me. I was his sister. He wouldn’t hurt me—he would protect me.
“Kemper found the asylum first. He led me there in the middle of the night promising some fantasy creature or another. But there was no fantasy. Only a nightmare.”
He had dug a hole in the ground and filled it with worms. The sight of it revolted me, but at the same time…it mesmerized me. It was that sort of thing that was too horrible to look at, but also too horrible to look away.
I stood too close to the hole, too close to the edge, just as Kemper had known I would.
“I don’t remember him pushing me in. I just remember falling, drowning, crawling with insects…spitting them from my mouth, pulling them from my hair, plucking them from my ears.”
Kemper just kept laughing. He laughed and laughed until his throat grew hoarse. He dumped buckets upon buckets of worms and maggots into the hole with me, and each time I tried to get out he just shoved me back down with the heel of his boot.
When he grew tired of me, he didn’t help me out. When he grew bored, he left me there for dead. He left me there so long that by the time a groundskeeper found me, I thought I had died too.
“That was the first time I knew what death was. I knew what it was like to be a corpse.”
There’s silence. Even the voice inside my head doesn’t know what to say.
Or maybe that was the voice inside my head. Maybe I wasn’t even the one telling the story.
Then it whispers to me.
Well that explains the spiders.
And in a way, I know the voice is right. I get the smallest sense of satisfaction that this time, thanks to Kemper—the very reason I’m here inside the asylum now—I know how to fight back.
“Well . . . that isn’t exactly what I meant, but . . .” Dr. Mallory clears her throat a minute and looks through the papers on her lap as an excuse to look away.
I flop back in my chair and cross my arms. I try to look indifferent, but I have to clutch at my own body to hide the fact that I’m shaking. All these years and I’ve never thought of that night again once. I couldn’t. If I did…if I dwelled on that sort of thing…I would have broken a long time ago.
Now, I remember why. Now that I’ve dragged it back up, now that Mallory, this place has brought it back up, I can’t stop feeling them, tasting them, seeing them.
And it looks like I’m not the only one.
Of the other four inmates, only Emmie looks unfazed. She still stares down at her dead, poorly-stuffed cat like it’s the baby she always wanted. The others sit in awkward silence, ankles scratching at the back of their legs and fingers brushing imagined creatures from their shoulders.
Dr. Mallory takes a deep breath and lets it out like a heavy weight. Her fingers take a break from scribbling a very long note on my chart before she suggests we convene for the day.
“I think it’s best for all of us if we leave it at that,” she says. “And please, if any of you were disturbed . . . I’ll be in my office until noon.”
I don’t need to be told twice. I bolt from the room, needing to escape the suddenly oppressive air that’s settled here. I’m supposed to be doing some kind of relaxation therapy next and never before have I needed it more. Though, with the way things are going so far, it’ll probably turn out to be some kind of leech bath or something.
I thought I’d escaped him with the others, but yet again, Ives surprises me with his speed. He stops me before I’ve made it more than a few steps down the hall with one massive arm stretched out across my path.
“That was quite the story.”
I shrink back, trying to leave as much space as possible between us. I see Dr. Mallory standing by the doorway talking to someone about their apparently traumatic experience listening to me, and though I doubt she could actually do anything if Ives wanted to hurt me, I at least think he’ll be less likely to try with her so close by.
Emboldened, I try to step around him, but he just moves to block my path a second time.
I heave a massive sigh, tighten my hold on the packet of papers on dealing with grief, and glare up into his annoyingly handsome face. God dammit.
“What do you want?” I ask.
He shakes his head. “That story . . . it was fucked up.”
“Welcome to my life.” I glance over my shoulder. Dr. Mallory has started moving away, one hand on Emmie’s shaking shoulder as she cries about something to do with worms in her cat. I don’t envy her that delusion.
Ives leans in a little closer, and I get a whiff of him. I try not to breathe it in, but I can’t help it. There’s a certain sweetness to his sweat, his lack of cologne, something almost animalistic and raw. It makes the hair on the ends of my arms stand up, and some feral instinct in myself is drawn to him . . . even if my brain knows he’s more monster than man.
“Your brother . . . he should be the one in here instead of you. Or . . .” he looks me over, “Maybe both of you.”
I guffaw. “That is the only good thing about this place,” I say. “He isn’t in it.”
And just as the truth of the matter strikes me, it’s stricken down.
“Who isn’t?”
I whirl around, no longer afraid of Ives. I step back, my shoulders bumping into his chest so that he’s almost cradling me in his shadow. He stiffens but doesn’t back off.
I would know that voice anywhere.
It’s the source of my nightmares. My reason for being locked up in this hell-hole.
It’s the voice of the devil himself, my brother.
Kemper Novak.
20
Thalia
He stands before me like an unwanted vision; a demon of my past that I cannot seem to exorcise.
“Kemper . . . what are you doing here?”
My brother shifts his stance, lazily cocking his head at me as he looks me over. His eyes scan the loose white clothes, my unwashed hair, the pallor of my face without so much as a smudge of eyeliner.
“This is a good look for you.”
Of course he would say that.
His casual posture doesn’t fool me. I stay perched on the tips of my toes, rocking back against Ives’ chest and then forward again, my muscles poised to spring. I’m ready for something. I don’t know what . . . but something.
“Are you finally here to commit yourself?” I ask.
It takes everything in me to keep my voice steady, to keep from dissolving into some new sort of madness. The memories brought up in that room are too fresh. Too close. Every time I blink my eyes, I see him covered in worms. Covered in blood.
I know it isn’t real, but that doesn’t stop my heart from throwing itself against the walls of my ribcage.
The corners of Kemper’s mouth turn up as he looks me over, sensing my fear and fury, but it isn’t a smile so much as a sneer.
“Not today, little sis,” he says. He makes a point to check his watch so I can get a good look at it. It’s my father’s. The one-of-a-kind timepiece was his most prized possession, maybe even more so than either me or Kemper. No matter one of us ended up an asshole and the other in an asylum. He sees me eyeing it and fakes a disappointed nod.
“It’s a shame really, I think he would have wanted you to have it.”
Even though I know the words were meant to sting, they still cut deep.
“I think we both know he wanted to be buried with it
.”
“Yeah well,” he says, his arm dropping to his side while he shoves the other in his pocket, “I also think he didn’t mean to die so soon, but here we are.”
“Here we are,” I echo.
I’m not entirely sure what a Mexican standoff is . . . but I think this is it. Neither of us says anything for a long time. We just stand and stare, the space between us growing into a chasm that neither of us is prepared to cross. A tension grows there too, taught like a wire ready to snap. It’s palpable, my hatred for him.
Ives presses closer into me, his arm drawing tighter as if to shield me from Kemper. He stands above me like a watchful, silent shadow as I finally find words for my traitor brother.
“I thought you’d be long gone by now,” I say. “You never did like the country house.”
“I still have some business to attend to. After all, what kind of brother would I be if I didn’t make sure you were . . . taken care of.”
I snort. “A better one, I’m sure.”
The door behind Kemper opens and the asylum director steps out. I haven’t seen him this close since I accidentally cut him with my grandmother’s ring . . . right before stabbing Craven with a very expensive stiletto. That could be why he only looks tired to see Kemper, but wary to see me.
“Ah, Mr. Novak . . . I was hoping to catch you before you leave.” He glances my way once before opening the door into his office just a smidge more. “I was just finishing up some work regarding the open house.”
“Which is exactly what I wanted to talk to you about.”
I feel my blood run cold.
Of course this is why he’s here.
“That’s what I was told,” Director Hedgewood says. Rather than look at Kemper, the director’s eyes cut over to me again and I know whatever it is, it doesn’t bode well for me. “Perhaps we should discuss this in private.”
Kemper doesn’t move to step back inside. “Come on now, Director . . . I’ve got nothing to hide.”
The director clears his throat. “I really don’t think that’s such a good idea. It can be hard on the patients to hear these kinds of discussions—”
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