by Amy Cross
“Huh,” the governor replied, clearly unimpressed, “I suppose you would say that, wouldn't you? After all, it'd look very bad on your C.V. to have another girl killing herself so soon after the last. What was the first girl's name again, the one at the prison you worked at before? Sabrina something?”
“Sabrina Huntley,” Andrew said firmly, “and I really don't see what that's got to do with anything.”
“Apart from the fact that young women in your care have a tendency to end up dead?” He sighed. “One is unlucky, Mr. Dunne. Twice is suspicious. If it happens again, I think there will have to be very serious questions about your level of competence.”
“Emma Tate did not kill herself,” he replied. “I'll stake my professional reputation on that fact.”
“Jesus Christ,” the governor muttered, heading over to the window. “This is a disaster. There'll be press coverage, questions from the minister, anger among the inmates...”
“Your knighthood might be in danger,” Andrew pointed out.
The governor turned and glowered at him, and silence fell in the room for a moment.
“Some of the inmates are saying -” Grace began, before thinking better of it.
The governor looked over at her.
“Well?” he asked. “Out with it, girl. What have the fine ladies of Hardstone been saying now?”
“It's just,” she continued, “I know it's probably silly, but they are saying it. Apparently yesterday in the yard, Emma Tate, the dead girl, claimed she'd seen...” She paused, turning to Andrew and then back to the governor. “You know, the little girl, Leonora Blake.”
The governor stared at her.
“That's what she said,” Grace continued, already regretting having brought the matter up. “I talked to one of the guards, too, and he confirmed that she suddenly seemed terrified of something. It was all a bit of a mess out there, you know how these things can be, but she definitely seems to have believed that she saw it. I mean, that might be relevant, mightn't it?”
“Maybe she suffered from some kind of seizure,” Andrew suggested. “A hallucination like that could be a warning sign for something else, in which case the autopsy should tell us a lot more.”
“There are no ghosts in this prison,” the governor said firmly. “I won't have such stupid ideas being spread around.”
“Of course not,” Grace said quickly.
“I want you to find every inmate who's talking about such foolish things, and make them understand that they are to stop. Is that understood?”
“How -”
“Is that understood?” he shouted. “There will be immediate and direct punishments for any inmate who is heard uttering the name Leonora Blake! Ram that into their thick heads!”
“Yes, Sir,” Grace replied, getting to her feet. “Right away, Sir.”
“And that goes for you as well,” he continued, clearly struggling to control his anger. “If I hear one more word about this from your lips, Ms. Hooper, you will very swiftly find yourself in need of alternative employment. I refuse to allow stupid urban myths to spread through my prison, and I understand that many of the inmates are of low intelligence and find these things to be an easy source of amusement, but I would have expected better from my own assistant!”
“Absolutely,” Grace stammered, “I just... I didn't say I believed it, I just thought you should know what people were talking about on the wings.”
“Make them stop talking about it,” he said firmly. “The idea is simply preposterous, ghosts can't possibly be real. When a person is standing right in front of you, that means they're alive, they're really there, they...” He paused for a moment, as if he was in danger of losing his temper. “Leave. Both of you, get out. I want to be alone for a little while before Doctor Bell comes.”
“Sir,” Grace began to say, “we -”
“Get out! Just get out of my office immediately before I call a guard to come and take you out by force!”
***
“It's just horrible,” Grace said quietly as she stood by the elevator. “To think of that poor girl, all alone in her cell and -”
“Try not to think about it,” Andrew replied. “Please, Grace, I know what you're like. You need to learn to shut yourself off to these things or they're going to eat away at you.”
“How can I shut myself off to the pain and suffering of -”
“You need to find a way,” he continued. “There are hundreds of women in this prison and all of them have a story to tell. None of them just arrived at Hardstone after living an easy life. Trust me, some of the things I've heard, some of the things these women have been through, are more horrific than you can possibly imagine. If you try to engage fully with each of their stories, to contemplate them to their fullest extremes, you'll end up losing all faith in humanity.”
“So how do you do it?” she asked. “Without becoming some kind of cold-hearted, unfeeling monster, I mean.”
“I...” He paused, seemingly finding the question a little uncomfortable. “Practice, I guess. Believe me, I'm fully aware that I've had to toughen up over the years. It would be so easy to wallow in the misery, but then I wouldn't be able to do my job properly, would I? I owe it to the women in this prison to stay on top of my emotions and give them what they need, rather than just sympathizing with them.”
“I just can't stop thinking about it,” she replied with tears in her eyes, “and... The stories about the little girl, Leonora Blake -”
“They're just stories.”
“I heard her.”
He sighed.
“I did, Andrew!” she continued. “I heard a little girl, and that man who was here the other day, the father who was looking for an inmate, he said he saw a girl right here in this corridor! He walked into reception and he told me there was a girl right out here, but when I came to take a look there was no sign of her.”
“He was just messing with you,” he replied. “He'd probably read about Hardstone online and figured, while he was here, he'd try to freak a few people out. People love ghost stories, Grace, and they love pretending they've seen something, but for once the governor was actually right about something. Ghosts aren't real. They can't be.”
“Why not?”
“Because the world doesn't work that way. Little Leonora Blake lived a tragic life, but when she died, that was the end of it. She's not still here, haunting the prison and scaring people to death.”
“Then what did I hear?” she asked. “It sounded like a child running in the corridor.”
“I have no idea what it was, but you can't assume that because you don't have an answer, it has to be a ghost. There are hundreds of things that could have sounded like a running child without being a running child.” As the elevator door slid open, he leaned closer and kissed the side of Grace's face. “Do you want to meet up after work? You seem like maybe you could use some company.”
“You think I'm an idiot,” she replied.
“No, I think you're very perceptive and extremely perceptive,” he continued, stepping into the elevator before turning back to her. “In fact, you're too sensitive and too perceptive, even though those are two of the qualities I like the most about you. You need to learn to let go a little, especially in a place like this. If you don't, and if you listen to all these dumb stories, you're going to end up losing your mind. A woman died this morning, Grace. That's sad enough without adding a whole load of supernatural rubbish to the story.”
“There's something in this hospital,” she told him.
“Grace -”
“There's something here!”
“There are lots of things in this hospital.” he continued. “They're called living people, and I have to go and talk to some of them.”
As the elevator door slid shut, Grace took a step back and glanced both ways along the corridor, just to make sure that there was no sign of anyone nearby. Despite everything Andrew had said to her, she had no doubt: the little girl was real, and whatever she
wanted from the people of Hardstone, her appearance were becoming increasingly frequent.
Six months ago
“I'll just go and check,” Grace said. “Hold on.”
Setting the receiver down, she glanced at the alarm clock just as the display flicked over to 8am. She was used to her mother's friends calling early in the morning, and since the phone was for some reason in Grace's room, she always ended up going to wake the old woman.
“Mum?” she called out, knocking gently on the bedroom door a moment later. “Geraldine's on the phone for you.”
She waited.
“Mum?” she said, knocking again.
Silence.
“Mum,” she continued, easing the door open and looking into the gloom, “it's Geraldine, she -”
Stopping suddenly, she saw her mother's motionless form on the floor next to her bed.
“Mum?”
She stepped forward, but after a moment she realized that there was an overpowering smell of urine. Turning, she hurried out of the room and went back to the phone.
“She can't come to the phone right now,” she told Geraldine, trying not to panic. “Can I get her to call you back?”
Without even waiting for an answer, she hung up before heading back to her mother's bedroom. Stepping inside again, she made her way over to the body and looked down. Her mother's dead eyes were staring up at the ceiling.
“Oh,” Grace said, taking a step back. “Thank God.”
Today
“I hope this doesn't hurt,” Amanda said quietly as she slid the pipette's tip into Chris's bloody eye-socket. After drawing some of the blood up, she moved the pipette over to a bowl and discharged its contents.
As she moved to do the same thing again, Chris let out a faint moan.
“Chris?”
She waited, but no reply came.
“If you can hear me,” Amanda continued, “I'm just doing this because Doctor Bell wants to try something new. She's worried about the pressure build-up if the blood is left to accumulate, and she also wants to get a better look at the damage. Believe it or not, she's really trying to find a way to help you, and I think she might have a chance. She's not like other people, she actually cares.”
Again, Chris moaned.
“I'm so sorry that this happened to you. It feels like only yesterday that we were in that van together. I know I didn't talk much, but I was just overwhelmed. Now I'm starting to settle in a little more, I feel like...” She paused as she took another pipette's worth of blood from Chris's eye-socket and squirted it into the bowl. “I feel like my old life is over,” she added finally. “It came to an end and now it's done. I know that sounds weird, but it's the only way I can keep going.”
Looking down at Chris's mangled face for a moment, she felt a wave of sadness pass through her body.
“It should be me,” she said finally. “What I did... I deserve something like this to happen to me. You don't. You had your whole life ahead of you. Mine's done.”
***
“That man is insane,” Doctor Bell muttered as she stormed into the laboratory and set her files down on the bench. “I swear he's more worried about protecting his knighthood than he is about completing our work here!”
Looking over at her, Amanda could tell that she was genuinely angry, which was new: usually the doctor seemed so calm and implacable, as if she had everything under control.
“He's an idiot,” she continued after a moment. “There's no way around it. The man is just fundamentally moronic.”
“I took the blood out of Chris's eyes,” Amanda told her, “like you wanted, but... I think it was already starting to leak through again from the back. If anything, it seemed to be leaking faster.”
“He's going to jeopardize everything,” the doctor replied, as if she was so deep in her fuming mood that she hadn't even heard what Amanda said. “He keeps ranting on about how there's no such thing as ghosts, and about how he refuses to let the prison descend into anarchy, but it's as if he can't even understand that he's got everything wrong. I mean, of course there aren't ghosts, but you can't force people to stop talking. These women are locked up all the time, they have nothing to do but fabricate stupid stories.”
“But -”
“It would help if the average level of intellect wasn't so low,” she continued, still getting into the stride of her rant. “When you put that many unintelligent, uneducated people together, you're bound to end up with this kind of idiocy. Sometimes I think it'd be kinder to them and to society to just euthanize the lot of them. Lead them into the showers and turn on the gas.”
“I'm sure you don't mean that,” Amanda replied, shocked by her outburst.
“Don't I?” She paused. “Present company excepted, of course. A few of the prisoners here are worth keeping around, obviously, but the majority... Human waste, pure and simple. We'd be better off without them.”
“You don't know that they're -” Amanda started to say, before catching herself just in time.
“That they're what?” Doctor Bell asked, turning to her. “Please, don't tell me you believe in such stupid things!”
“Of course not,” Amanda said quickly.
“Thank God. I had you pegged as a rational woman, Amanda, but you made me wonder for a moment there.” She paused, as if she was lost in thought. “He's a fool,” she added finally. “He's a complete fool.”
“Who is?”
“The governor. I can't put my trust in him at all. My God, I'm surrounded by idiots. I mean, I'm literally surrounded by them! Whichever way I walk when I leave this laboratory, I'll bump into a moron sooner or later!”
“As long as you can work without being interrupted -”
“That's the problem,” she continued, “I can't, not when that knighthood-seeking cretin keeps causing problems. Do you know how often I have to stop what I'm doing and go fire-fighting to fix whatever mess he's caused? It happens almost every day. I should have found someone better to work with, someone who could actually pull his weight.” She glanced over at Amanda. “We have an arrangement,” she added after a moment. “The governor and I are conducting a little work on the side, or rather...”
Amanda waited for her to finish.
“Can I trust you?” the doctor asked finally.
“Of course.”
“No, I mean can I really trust you?” Stepping closer, Doctor Bell seemed to be studying Amanda intently. “I let you know about Christine Bradford's condition because I needed your help, and you've been very good with that so far. There are other things, though, that I haven't told you about yet, things I've been keeping hidden. With Alistair Windsor seemingly on the verge of losing his marbles, I could use someone else to...” Another pause. “Perhaps I'm getting ahead of myself. You're doing a good job, Amanda, and we have a major task ahead of us later. We should probably focus on that for now.”
“Are we going to do some more work on Chris?”
“I'm afraid she'll have to take a back seat for now,” she replied. “Amanda, I realize this is plunging you in at the deep end, but this afternoon I'm going to need your assistance as I perform a full autopsy on the dead inmate.”
Amanda stared at her, hoping against hope that she'd misheard.
“Well,” the doctor added with a faint smile, “we have to find out how Emma Tate died, don't we?”
***
“1.51 kilograms,” Amanda said as she looked at the read-out, before turning to Doctor Bell. “Is that normal?”
“It's absolutely normal,” she replied as she continued working on Emma's body. “In fact, it's right in the middle, completely perfect. Now put it in the metal dish and come help me over here.”
Turning back to look at Emma's brain, Amanda couldn't help but feel a little shell-shocked. Twenty-four hours earlier, she'd been in the same room as Emma, talking to her and even helping her fix her damaged knee. Now she was weighing and measuring her body parts, which were being cut out of her chest cavity one by one.
“Amanda,” Doctor Bell said after a moment, “are you okay?”
“Sure,” she replied, reaching over to the scales and gently picking up the brain before carrying it over to the metal dish on the counter, where she set it down again. It was lighter than she's expected, but also firmer.
“You're looking a little green around the gills,” Doctor Bell continued. “You're not squeamish, are you? If you need to vomit, for God's sake go to the bathroom.”
She shook her head.
“Then come and help me with the lungs.”
Heading over to the body, Amanda looked down and saw that Doctor Bell was elbow-deep in the chest cavity as she worked to remove the left lung. After a moment, however, she couldn't help but look at Emma's face, which was still staring wide-eyed up at the ceiling, as if she was still frozen in the moment of a scream. Having never seen an adult dead body before, Amanda couldn't shake the feeling that the whole situation seemed unnecessarily surreal.
“Are you sure we shouldn't close her eyes?” she asked.
“Try it.”
“Me?”
“Try it!”
Feeling a little uneasy, Amanda reached across and closed Emma's eyes, only to see them immediately blink open again.
“Is she -”
“It's quite normal,” the doctor replied, clearly amused by the shocked look on Amanda's face. “Well, not normal, but explicable. In this case, the eyes were open when she died and since she wasn't found until the following morning, rigor mortis set in while the eyes were in that state and now there's not much we can do. It's the same for her jaw. I could break it and force her mouth closed, but somehow that doesn't seem very respectful.” She smiled. “Haven't you noticed yet?”
“Noticed what?”
“Her feet.”
Glancing toward the other end of the table, Amanda frowned as she saw an extra little toe on Emma's right foot.