Nightingale

by Amy Lukavics

  “Your face says all I need to know,” the doctor said, satisfied. “And where did you live before you came here?”

  The feeling of having no idea was tremendously terrifying. Again came the awful pain whenever June stretched to remember the truth.

  Before I was here...I was...at a school?

  In a house?

  In outer space?

  There was a place she could picture somewhat before the pain, a place that was metal and cold and smelled like formaldehyde. Outside, there were stars. Inside, there were creatures.

  No, she thought. That place wasn’t real; that’s from your story...

  Whose story?

  “Patient appears to be confused and disoriented,” Nurse Joya spoke into a large tape recorder that was running on the desk. “Increased dosage was successful.”

  Yes, June remembered now, without pain. She’d taken an extra red capsule this morning. Eleanor had been worried. She had been right to be worried. June would never get to see her again and tell her so. She was about to let Eleanor, Jessica, and Cassy down, and have Simpson’s, Lauren’s, and Adie’s deaths remain in vain. She would die before finding whatever was supposedly hidden in this place.

  It was in that moment June got her first idea of where to look for the thing Eleanor had dreamed about. If she somehow lived through whatever was happening, she’d try as hard as she could to get herself back into that tunnel.

  “The air vent,” June heard herself slur as Joya went behind the desk and put her hands on the wall. What on earth was she doing?

  But the wall appeared to rattle at the nurse’s touch, and then all of a sudden it was sliding sideways into itself, a large secret door that led to what looked like a laboratory of some sort. They wheeled June in and parked her at the near end of the room. There was a thick plastic sheet separating another side of the room, and it looked like there was another stretcher with someone lying motionless on it on the other side.

  “What we’re going to be doing today is essentially force a seizure on your brain to try and shake loose whatever nastiness has clogged its way through,” Nurse Joya said. She was now wearing a crisp white mask that covered her nose and mouth, and bright blue gloves that made grotesque snapping sounds as she adjusted them. “I won’t lie to you either, sugar. It’s going to hurt.”

  “No,” June tried to say, but already the doctor was binding her to the table with heavy straps. The nurse squirted something thick and oily from a tube onto her rubber-protected fingers and rubbed it on June’s temples.

  With every second that passed, June started feeling less fuzzy and more awake. She was able to remember her story now and felt like she was the girl on the spaceship getting cut into and experimented on. She suddenly felt sorry—very sorry—that she’d put her heroine through so much.

  But she needed it, June thought. She needed it to fulfill her destiny.

  June had always suspected that something great would become of her. Maybe finding the missing thing before Nurse Joya did was her destiny. Maybe she’d just failed it, and they had already found whatever it was.

  “I can tell by your face that you think you’re about to die,” Nurse Joya said, placing a hard, thin bar in between June’s teeth and strapping two metal plates against either side of her head. “But I promise you, you won’t. We need you, silly girl.”

  There it was. The admission that they weren’t trying to treat anybody at all, they just needed them to find whatever it was they were looking for. June remembered Robert and her parents with such a startling intensity that she jumped, as if she had already been jolted. Before she was in the hospital, she had lived at home with her parents. Robert had proposed. The engagement party had happened, and everything had been ruined beyond recognition.

  And now she was here.

  “You know what to do once it’s through, Joya,” the doctor said, his wrinkles very prominent in the lighting. “I think this may be it.”

  “I do, too,” the nurse murmured as she fidgeted with whatever device was behind June’s head, the one attached to the wires and metal plates. “There’s something especially unusual about this one.”

  If they wanted to keep her alive, why were they speaking openly about her like this? They know that you know.

  “All right,” Nurse Joya whispered deliciously, out of sight, the smile evident in the sound of her voice alone. “Let’s see what we’ve got here.”

  And then came a strange wheeee sound that got louder and louder, and just when June thought, This isn’t so bad, there came a great crackling jolt that caused every muscle in her body to harden and seize. It hurt to an unfair degree. She could feel the straps holding her down too tightly as she convulsed, pressing into her bones, threatening to snap them.

  She thought she heard someone gurgling, before she realized she was hearing herself.

  Everything went white, then blue, high heat, dry heat, a head screaming in pain. The sound of the machine whirred sharply in June’s ears, made them feel like they were bleeding.

  Finally, finally, it ended. June could have sworn her eyes were open, but everything was black. She could smell something unpleasant, like burning hair. She didn’t dare move a muscle, in case they weren’t finished with her yet. She didn’t know how she was even able to survive such a thing.

  “Monitor readings are impressive,” June heard the doctor murmur.

  “Can you see what she’s thinking?” Nurse Joya demanded. “Any signs that she’s ready to talk?”

  Someone was crying, far away. “Drat,” the doctor said. “The other one’s awake. I don’t think we’re going to find anything with her, to be honest. The language she hears can’t be decoded in any way that we’ve found. It’s another lost cause. Might as well do away with her.”

  June could hear Nurse Joya and the doctor step away, then came the sound of the heavy plastic sheet wrinkling as it was moved.

  “Please don’t,” a voice pleaded, and June recognized it immediately as belonging to Adie.

  This was when June’s vision came back, or she was simply able to open her eyes for real, she wasn’t sure which. Her mouth was still gagged with the bar, and she could see outlines through the thick plastic sheet, Joya and the doctor standing at each end of the other stretcher. June recognized Adie’s head of short, dark hair though the heavily blurred plastic. She was alive!

  Then she remembered what the doctor had said before they stepped over there. Might as well do away with her.

  “Adie,” June called out clumsily through the bar, but wasn’t heard over her friend’s shrieks. She sounded terrified, but June couldn’t hear any sort of machine running, and at first it appeared as though Joya and the doctor were standing still.

  Through the plastic, June was able to make out that something was happening to them. The mass making up the doctor’s head was expanding to an impossible form, as though it was a giant, fleshy, wrinkled flower that was opening up like a four-parted mouth. The gaping end of it lowered down over Adie’s feet, and then June could hear a nasty crunching noise.

  Her heart raced as Adie continued to scream. Nurse Joya’s form was changing, too—it had grown slightly and was hunched over. Long appendages extended out from her face, shredding into Adie like a parcel on Christmas morning. Soon Adie’s screams came to a bubbling stop and were replaced by loud, long slurping sounds. The two monsters shuddered, and their forms resolved to resemble humans once again. June was suddenly grateful that the plastic had made it so hard to see clearly.

  Monsters. They’re monsters!

  When they returned to her side of the room, June closed her eyes and held still. “Her eyes are closed now,” the doctor noted right away. “Do you think she came to during any of that?”

  “Impossible,” Joya said brusquely, and June felt her straps being roughly undone. “Nobody ever remembers anything with the voltage level we use
. I am very eager for her to wake up, though, so we can see if it worked. Should only be a few more minutes.”

  If what worked? June thought, her pulse racing. Whatever it is, it apparently didn’t work with Adie.

  The bar was yanked from her mouth, and right away June’s head felt like it was filled with wasps. She moaned as they wheeled her back out, then felt them lift her back into the wheelchair. They wheeled June out of the laboratory and back into the office.

  “Her hair got scorched pretty good,” Joya said, parking June beside the doctor’s desk and retrieving something from a cabinet in it. “The skin opened, too, but that’s to be expected.”

  June felt her head being wrapped with some sort of gauze. She must have looked an absolute fright. What would Eleanor think when she saw her? There was no way she would continue to love June, especially when she eventually realized that June wasn’t capable of finding anything that would help them escape this place. They’d been so silly, getting close like that.

  The Simpson in Eleanor’s vision had been wrong about June. She had to have been.

  “Wake up, Nightingale,” Nurse Joya said, very closely, her voice deeper and more stern than it’d ever been. Monster. “Wake up, and tell us exactly what you did at that goddamn engagement party.”

  June opened her eyes. The nurse looked like a human. There were no holes in her face, but June feared that they’d appear any second, and then the terrible limbs would reach through them to rip June into pieces. She tried to make what had happened at the engagement party come back to her, but it didn’t work because it wasn’t a real thing to begin with; it had been a terrible coincidence was all.

  The smile on the nurse’s face faded fast. Minutes of silence passed as she stared at June, unblinking, expectant.

  “It didn’t work,” Nurse Joya finally said under her breath to the doctor, and she got up. June vaguely registered the sharp sting of the injection needle in her arm. “She’s still hiding what she knows.”

  What do I know?

  When it was done, Nurse Joya grabbed the wheelchair handles and started pushing June incautiously. June half expected to be discarded by the monsters like Adie had been, but then she realized she was being wheeled to the office’s exit, not back to the awful laboratory behind the secret door in the wall. “We’ll just have to keep trying with some more...invasive procedures,” the nurse said, clearly let down by whatever hadn’t happened.

  More invasive than this? June couldn’t comprehend anything worse than what she had just been through, or what Adie had just been through. Poor, poor Adie.

  “We won’t let them win,” Nurse Joya went on, and the doctor let out a gruff sound of agreement. “Those disgusting things think they can come to our home, wipe us out like bacteria. They don’t even want to live here. They just want us dead. We don’t have much longer to find where they’ve hidden the key.”

  Who are they? June wished she could ask, but already whatever she’d been injected with was drawing her into a deep sleep. She fought it only for a moment before giving in to the darkness.

  days past

  The evening of June’s engagement party, her mother came into her room with a new dress. June had spent the week doing every little thing she could think of that would appease her parents enough to leave her alone and, combined with the engagement, you’d think that her family had forgotten all about the significance of the incident on graduation night. Nobody wanted to remember the phone call, or the bus ticket, or June’s wails in the night. Nobody asked her if she was all right or if she needed anything. Nobody acknowledged that she’d spent nine straight days in solitude.

  As always, they were only able to tell June what they expected of her.

  “I picked up your new dress,” Mom said, as though she and June had chosen the dress together, which was not the case at all. “I need you to wear it with your stockings and yellow pumps. Rolled hair. Pink lipstick, not red—red would clash too badly with all the yellow.”

  The dress looked similar to June’s graduation dress but was butter yellow instead of mint green. There was a thin white leather belt and a pair of tiny white gloves that didn’t fit June’s hands, which was good considering that June would have rather eaten a pair of lacy gloves than wear them.

  “Thank you.” June made a point of speaking to them only when absolutely necessary, although when it came to her brother she made a point of not speaking at all.

  She may have been rolling her parents along, but June couldn’t bring herself to acknowledge Fred’s existence. Fred, the withering, spineless-fish boy who didn’t even have it in him to take a leaf from Dad’s book, instead trying desperately to re-create them on his own. But the final product was even worse, a poor imitation of a poor original. He spoke in a voice that was purposely loud and overbearing, and he took pride in telling Mom or June to get him another drink rather than asking them, while he sat there watching television. A real Little Man.

  June hated him for what he had done to her. She would never forget that stupid little look of excitement in his eyes after he came back from answering the phone call from the bus station.

  “And remember,” Mom said, running her hands over the fabric of the dress’s skirt to smooth it. “Good posture, be gracious, smile. This will be one of the most magical nights of your life.”

  “Can’t wait.”

  Mom patted June’s knee and got up, leaving the room without another word. June could tell that she was counting down the days until June was out of the house and out of her hair. Clearly, she’d come to the conclusion that there wasn’t any way to fix her daughter or make her a better young woman. They could only cover up what they believed were her shortcomings, move her along, pretend she didn’t disappoint them so immensely.

  When the time came to make their way to the party, June took a moment to stare at herself in the mirror, clean and polished and dressed in all yellow. Her plans for her own future had gone from being necessary to being nonexistent. Her book was only a writing session or two away from being complete, but she no longer felt hopeful that anything would come of it. She had purposely put off finishing it, since she’d always believed that something magnificent would happen to her shortly after she did.

  Nothing magnificent was going to happen to June in this life. To face the fact that she’d been wrong about her story was more than she could bear, and she hid the feelings even from herself, stuffed roughly into the darkest corners of her mind.

  She sat beside Fred in the car on the way to the party, and he kept trying to talk to her about this and that. He asked if she had invited her longtime best friend Sarah to the wedding, so he could try and date her for the third or fourth time. If June had been speaking to Fred, she would have told him that Sarah had stopped coming over two years ago because he gave her the heebie-jeebies with all his staring and his persistence. She had been disgusted with him, just as June was. June wondered how Fred would feel about that.

  While June ignored Fred, Mom and Dad chatted about who had RSVP’d to the party and who hadn’t, who would drink too much, who would leave their dropped napkins on the floor. First would be the cocktail hour. Dinner was to be served at seven thirty sharp, with dessert and dancing and more cocktails to follow. June wondered if they’d let her drink even though she was underage; it was her goddamn party after all. She decided that if they denied her alcohol, she’d sneak it.

  The venue was a place on the edge of town, with a big wooden dance floor and walls made of glass that gave view to the lush lawn that was lined with colorful flowers and decorated with white stringed lights. When June’s family arrived, the parking lot was decently packed, and people already lingered on the lawn with cocktails in hand.

  “Make sure to say hello to everyone,” Mom said under her breath while she gave a dainty wave of her frilly gloved fingers to a group of women June didn’t recognize. “They’re all here for you
, darling, so show them how grateful you are.”

  June didn’t see Robert anywhere, and she was glad. As long as he wasn’t present she could pretend that this party was for her alone, a going-away party. In a way, she supposed, it was.

  “Wonderful to see you,” June said through a wide smile to a perfect stranger. “Robert and I are so pleased you could come.”

  A man wearing all black approached the group, a tray of drinks balanced on his upturned hand. “Gin and tonics, anyone?” he asked. Everyone in the group reached for one of the sparkling highballs topped with a slice of lime.

  June took one, too, without hesitation, and made eye contact with Mom as she took a long, grateful sip. Mom looked away quickly but said nothing, instead busying herself by chatting with party guests. Another tray came by, this one loaded with pieces of deep-fried coconut shrimp. June hadn’t been eating well, not since graduation, but she took at least three samples from each tray, keeping her mouth filled with food so it wouldn’t have to speak words.

  As well as the coconut shrimp, there were crab cakes, deviled eggs, and little paper cones filled with french fries. June dripped ketchup on the front of her dress, and her mother glared as though she wanted to commit murder.

  Maybe tonight wouldn’t be so bad. Just as long as June could block out the voices in her head that were crying and screaming for her to finish her story. She had known that stopping would be difficult. It had almost felt at times like she was working on it whether she wanted to or not, with all the late nights and early mornings and endless typing and endless thinking.

  Still, when she’d realized the end of the story was near, she’d forced herself to stop. She thought the break would be good for her, would allow her to get some sleep and eat something proper and work on her life a bit before coming back to do the ending justice. But what had happened instead was frightening.

  June had started sleeping even less, obsessing over how exactly she’d word certain sentences when the time came, how she’d bring the heroine face-to-face with her unexpected destiny. She’d dwell on scenes she’d already written, picture what the creatures looked like. She started seeing the creatures standing all around the perimeter of her room at night, hiding in the shadows, their metal tools glistening and clinking in the moonlight.