Nightingale

by Amy Lukavics

  Where was Eleanor?

  June knew, without a doubt, that something awful had happened to her. But she was supposed to live forever! She’d said so! June felt that her face was wet with tears. She paced the room, making a plan—something had to be done, and it had to be done now. If there was even a chance she could find Eleanor, she had to be brave enough to try.

  June remembered Simpson’s ghost and what Eleanor had relayed from her. She seemed to believe that you were going to be the first one to find the lost thing, whatever it is. June had been frustrated at Eleanor for pushing her to start looking right away, and now she regretted it more than anything. She had, as she always had in her life before the hospital, let fear get in the way. She said to tell you not to let them get it, no matter what happens, or else the consequences will be more dire than any of us can comprehend.

  Now a new fear arose, a worse fear. The fear that it was too late.

  But how will I know? June wondered. Simpson said that once I find it, I’ll know without any doubt.

  It wasn’t until now that June thought that maybe the reason Eleanor was able to receive a message from Simpson beyond the grave was because she was dead herself. Goosebumps flourished over June’s back and belly and arms, remembering what else had been said of the vision: whatever’s happened to us isn’t as simple as a medical diagnosis.

  It was as if this were all planned somehow, set into place by some mysterious force. Destiny? June’s heart skipped a beat at the thought. If it was fate, if the gut feelings she used to get were more than wishes and were in fact intuition, then that would mean everything would be okay in the end. That was how June always knew it’d have to turn out. That was the only part she’d ever felt sure of.

  She remembered Eleanor’s soft laugh from that night, the night they had become intimate. To hear that you might be the one who’s supposed to save this place, Eleanor had said, her breath warm on June’s face, well...it doesn’t surprise me, I guess.

  “I’m coming, Elle,” June whispered, standing now to face the closed door leading out to the hallway. If the door was unlocked, it was meant to be. “Please wait for me.”

  The door was unlocked, and she stuck her head out. The hallway was dark, the only sounds the cries and grunts and howls coming from the rooms of the other patients, that harmony of despair that had haunted June so much on her first night here, but now sounded as natural as crickets or wind in the trees. The nurse in charge of bed checks wasn’t anywhere in her sight line, which meant June had managed to wake up within the delicate time frame that fell between the constant patrols.

  Destiny was working in her favor already. Suddenly, June felt stronger and more capable than she ever had. Something was protecting her. She didn’t know what, but she knew it was there. She had to find whatever the monsters were looking for, and she had to find it now, along with Eleanor.

  It was her fate.

  June stepped softly but quickly across the hallway and enormous recreation room, the nurses’ station emitting a dull glow in the darkness. June went along the edge of the far wall like a shadow, never taking her eyes from the glass of the station, behind which four nurses sat chatting and blowing bubbles with their gum and smoking cigarettes, their uniforms so pristine, styled hair, red lips, fake, fake, fake. June wondered if they were monsters, too, and guessed that they probably were.

  Either way, they didn’t see her cross the room.

  June searched through the forbidden hallway that Nurse Joya had taken her through on the day that Robert and her parent-things had come to visit, recalling on the way her surprise at all the rooms she’d never seen before. She peeked through the windows of each and every door as she made her way through. Most of the rooms were shrouded in solid blackness, and June had to convince herself that anything worth seeing would be illuminated to her by fate.

  Just as she was starting to doubt herself, she found a different type of door and peered through the dark rectangular window in the center. It was a library, the bookshelves lit with tiny lamps mounted on the ends. Simpson had taken Eleanor to a library in the vision. To see it with her own eyes made June miss Eleanor even more. I’m coming.

  The door to the library was locked, so she moved on. At the end of the hallway there was a sharp turn to the right, and when she turned the corner, June saw two rooms with the lights on. The first was near the end of the hallway, the door open, the light flooding into the hallway like a blinding white warning. The next room also had a light on, but the door was closed, the space at the bottom aglow.

  What if the monsters were in that first room, ready to kill her on sight? June had to trust herself. She had to remember that something was protecting her, that she was special, that she was the one who would stop the dire consequences threatened by this place and the monsters inside it.

  She walked slowly up to the room, listening as hard as she could for any signs that she should stop and back away. But there was nothing, only the low croon of a jazz tune playing from a radio or a record player. The melody was deeply calming. June was drawn to it, which led her to believe that she was very much supposed to look in this room for whatever the special thing was.

  Her breath caught in her chest, June turned the corner into the room, the light harsh enough to make her squint for the first few moments. There was a hospital bed against the back wall, the sheets and pillow splattered with yellow and red. It stank deeply, creating an extremely incongruent combination with the music that had just been calling to June. Her instincts were now urging her to run.

  In the center of the room, Eleanor sat in a wheelchair, her mouth open, her hands splayed open on her lap. Her hair was gone, crudely shaved, or at least what June could see of it. Around her head was gauze similar to June’s, but June knew right away something was different than with what had been done to her.

  Blood seeped through the bandages, dripping down the sides of Eleanor’s face, onto her shoulders and chest. Eleanor breathed heavily, and her eyes were open, but she didn’t see June, didn’t see anything. June let out a strangled whimper and went to her, lifted the sides of her bandages to peek underneath at an incredible black gap in Eleanor’s skull, cut in a perfect circle that wept fluids.

  Lobotomy.

  “No,” June whispered, moving to look into Eleanor’s eyes again, but to no avail. “No, it’s not supposed to happen this way, Elle! Look at me, know me! Sit up! Move!”

  Nothing. It wasn’t a temporary state brought on by drugs, this much was obvious. Eleanor looked like Lauren had but even worse. They had cut into her brain, the fucking sons of bitches! They’d disconnected her from the now. June thought of the last time she’d seen Eleanor, how she’d hurt Eleanor’s feelings by saying to her that the dream of Simpson had been “just a dream” after all. How panicked Eleanor had sounded when she yelled June’s name, as June was being wheeled away by Nurse Joya.

  “That can’t be the last time we saw each other,” June pleaded, forgetting to stay quiet, forgetting what the hell she was doing in this room in the first place, forgetting all of the strength and drive that had flooded her here earlier like some sort of adrenaline rush. She wept over her lover’s body, alive but not alive, alive but dead. Eleanor, the dead girl who’d scared the wits out of June during her first night at the hospital.

  June had failed her.

  “I’m so sorry,” she cried into Eleanor’s ear, only vaguely aware that there had been the sound of footsteps behind her and that the footfalls had come to a stop.

  “What a shame,” Nurse Joya’s voice said, and June looked at her, still holding Eleanor’s hand. “She didn’t have what we were looking for. Didn’t even have anything that could help us find it.”

  “I’ve already found it,” June lied, clumsy in her voice, pitched high with panic and fear. She was desperately clinging to the idea of her destiny. “I know where it is, and I’m not going to let you get it, no m
atter what happens.”

  The nurse paused, narrowing her eyes at June. She was clearly affected by June’s comment and, for a moment, June swore she could see the holes opening up on the nurse’s face. But Joya didn’t transform. Was it possible that the nurse believed her? Maybe June could string her along until she was able to find whatever the thing was, if she lived beyond tonight, anyway. It was still vital that the monsters didn’t get their hands on what they were looking for.

  “I’m afraid you’re going to have to come back for another procedure,” Nurse Joya said, and suddenly there were five other nurses behind her, one of them holding a syringe. “Cracking open your girlfriend here didn’t reveal anything new to me, but it did give me the idea that maybe I’d get better results doing the same thing to you. Time is running out for us, I’m afraid, and we’re getting a little desperate.”

  “No!” June bellowed, rising but still gripping Eleanor’s hand. The nurses all rushed forward at once, holding her down while she screamed and kicked, and injected her with something stinging and hot.

  “You’ll never get it,” she slurred as the drugs kicked in. Another wheelchair appeared, and June was lifted onto it. She was promptly pushed away from Eleanor and back into the dark hallway. June cried Eleanor’s name, but Joya slammed the door shut midway through.

  “Don’t be insulted,” she insisted at the look on June’s face. “She most definitely wasn’t able to hear you. She won’t be able to hear anything ever again.”

  When they got to the dark rec room, June saw that all the women from the nurses’ station were watching her, their faces unmoving and unkind, angry. Angry at her for getting by them undetected. June wished she had the strength to flip them all the bird.

  The door to the doctor’s office was open wide, greedily waiting to consume June. She was wheeled through it and the entrance of the laboratory, past the room where she had endured the electroshock, past the hanging plastic partition and into the room that had once held Adie but was now sterile and quiet, and finally beyond another plastic sheet that led to a much larger room, a room with carts, the trays of which held metal instruments, like saws and scalpels and needles, and basins to catch waste.

  The doctor stood at the side of an empty bed. June cried out in objection but was lifted onto it anyway, strapped in with heavy buckled leather belts that wound through and around the sides of the mattress.

  “The night before you came here,” Nurse Joya said, and the doctor’s mouth moved silently along, “you were at your engagement party. You killed the man who was to have been your father-in-law. I should know, June. I was there. I saw it myself.”

  June closed her eyes, concentrated as hard as she could on making it all stop somehow. “Drop dead,” she managed in a hateful but softened slur of words to the nurse, who looked nervous for a brief moment before overcompensating with laughter.

  “You don’t even know how you did it,” she went on, tightening the last strap before using a pair of rusty scissors to cut June’s hair off a half inch from the scalp. “I fully believe that now. You don’t even understand what’s happening. You don’t know what we’re looking for any more than you know the name of the character in that story you wrote.”

  She didn’t have a name, June wanted to say, but was too drugged. As paralyzed as she was, though, she could still feel the pain of the dull scissors ripping at her hair, the discomfort of the straps around her extremities, waist and neck. She was finding it hard to breathe.

  “Area almost prepped,” Nurse Joya said, and the doctor leaned over June so closely that she could smell his sour, awful breath, startlingly reminiscent of decomposition.

  “You had better be right about her,” he said, and June realized that he was addressing Joya. “We cannot afford a single mistake. They’re getting closer. They’re laughing at our efforts.”

  “I have to be right about this,” the nurse said, now shaving the shortened hair. The blade snagged and tore at June’s scalp, and a tear ran down beside her temple. “The key didn’t work like it was supposed to. She doesn’t know the name of the character in her own novel. There has to be another way to force the truth to reveal itself. It’s dangerous, but she’s too weak and fearful to properly understand. It ends tonight.”

  June felt another nurse inserting an IV into her arm. A strange sensation flooded her, just as there came a shrill whirring that would have made her jump if she’d been able to. She looked as far to the side as she could without moving her head, which was now also bound to the table with a strap tight across her forehead. The doctor was holding a hand-held electrical saw. That isn’t what they use for lobotomies was June’s last thought.

  Without pause or a moment of warning, the doctor lowered the saw directly onto June’s forehead, right above the strap. She felt blood spray down her entire face, cover her mouth and nose, making breathing even harder, making it impossible to do anything but scream inside. On the outside, her body strained. The saw continued, deeper, deeper, until June’s mind was filled with the sounds of ruined bone being done away with, first down, then across her entire forehead, down the side, across the bottom.

  It felt like it took hours. June didn’t understand how she wasn’t dead from the shock or the pain or both. She didn’t understand how she was still conscious even. It was like the sound of teeth grinding but amplified, multiplied, turned into a gravelly symphony that was only accompanied by the warm rush of heavily flowing blood. She could feel the liquid dripping from her chin and jaw, down her front, and somehow remembered Eleanor and how she’d looked in that wheelchair, gone. At least Eleanor hadn’t gone through this.

  Finally—finally!—the sound stopped. The silence that followed was more foreign than the sound of the saw had come to be, and to be released into it was jarring and unpleasant, but at least there was no more of that saw-on-bone grinding.

  “Let’s take a look-see,” Joya piped up from behind, and June felt the top of her skull get lifted away, felt the air of the place kiss her exposed brain. She heard a sickening sound that could only have been Nurse Joya hastily discarding the scalp-covered skull cap onto the floor.

  This is it, June thought in the absolutely unreal haze of doom. Peace in death at last. I’m sorry, Eleanor. I’m sorry, Simpson.

  I’m sorry, June.

  “Ooh,” the doctor breathed excitedly, and June knew that they had won. “Something’s been tinkered with inside of this one!”

  At his words, it occurred to June in a violent jerk of the mind that she had written about this exact feeling before, about being helpless and strapped down and cut into. It had been in her story, the thing that got her through all those mundane and expectant days of living with Mom and Dad before the hospital. She thought about the creatures that had started appearing in her room as the engagement party got closer, how the night Stewart Dennings had died, June had come home and finished her story in a single sitting against her own will.

  That’s right, she remembered, comforted at the thought. I finished it after all. How did it end?

  She had sent the heroine back to Earth to fulfill her destiny. The girl was changed by what she’d been through, never to be the same. She’d descended upon her town, barefoot and shaking, and then what?

  “What is that?” Nurse Joya asked, her voice full of wonder. “I’m not so sure we should touch it.”

  The girl in her story had only been ten years old, June also remembered something she’d forgotten until now. And she had figured out, only after coming back to Earth, that the creatures who’d taken her and cut her open endlessly weren’t scary at all, weren’t malevolent, but had been intelligent, had been cunning. Had been...deliberate.

  June’s eyes opened easily, the haze from whatever the IV had delivered completely gone, as though she’d willed it away. She felt blood run over her eyes, stinging, but her head didn’t hurt at all anymore. In fact, nothing hurt, and everything
was wonderful. Overhead, the lights began to flicker.

  “She looks awake,” the doctor remarked, worry evident in his voice. “Quickly, quickly! See if it can be destroyed...”

  “No,” the nurse said, firm. “I don’t think we should touch it. I think that would be very bad...”

  Something’s been tinkered with inside of this one! And then, much like a baby sliding from its mother’s body all at once, the memories returned to June, complete, whole, alive.

  Awake.

  She smiled, a wide and ecstatic and triumphant smile. The key that the nurse had spoken of... June knew what it was, knew exactly why it hadn’t worked before now, despite the hospital’s clumsy attempts. Simpson’s ghost had been right all along: June was indeed able to tell for certain that she had found it—it, the thing, the key—without a shadow of a doubt.

  June had named the heroine in her book after all. She just hadn’t remembered doing it, hadn’t remembered making the rash decision to reveal the name on the very last page, in the very last word, compelled and influenced by the unbeatable force that had pleaded with her to finish her story so she could fulfill her own destiny.

  June recited in the clearest of voices, and Nurse Joya’s eyes widened as she did:

  The girl had a new name, one given to her by the creatures in outer space, one meant to awaken her and allow her access to the full potential of what they had given her. And her name was—

  “Stop!” the nurse screeched, but it was too late.

  “Nightingale,” June said, and that was when she heard something in her brain literally click, like a trigger on a gun being pulled back, ready to fire. And since it had been her who could use the key properly, and not the monster in the nurse costume, it would be her with the control of the gun.

  So June let the gun go off, much to the dismay of the panicked Nurse Joya, who was yelling at everyone to Get away, get away, get away from her!