Page 9 of Lethal
My eyes never leave her, not even when the orderlies enter the room, and begin the process of chaining us. I don’t resist their rough holds, or give them any reason to be violent with me, not that they need one. My eyes meet hers before she tears her gaze away from me. I don’t need to move to follow her. I’m already in her head, already under her pretty, pale skin, embedded deep, just like she’s under mine.
She goes to turn her back on us as Wren is forced from the room, kicking and screaming about being hungry, and wanting to eat the Doctor’s eyeballs. Just before I’m pushed out the door, I say it, the words that have been rolling in my head for days. The ones that I need to see her reaction to. “Bring a photo next time.”
She freezes, her body whipping back in my direction as she takes a step forward, closer to the doorway.There it is, the secret.The rot in her belly she thought no one could smell. “I want to see what she looked like,” I murmur, my gaze sliding down her features, memorizing them in this moment, so later I can replay it in my room, “before he fed her to this place.”
She doesn’t utter a word, but she looks at me, really looks, as if she’s seeing me for the first time, and I know she’s starting to wonder just how much I know. The intercom buzzes loudly behind us once more, and she turns away as I’m forced out of the door and into the hallway.
She’s gone, but I can still feel her. Her scent, her heat, the rapid beating of her heart. The way her skin crawled, as if a skeletal finger dragged down her spine. In the corner of mymind, something dark and sinister crawls out of the cracks, and whispers:
She’ll come to you.
She’s already yours.
Just wait, soon, you will own her mind, body, and soul.
The door clicked shut behind me, but the chill didn’t leave with them, and it didn’t help to settle the racing of my heart. My hands fist so tightly at my sides, that my nails embed into the skin of my palms, and with the sheen of sweat that is covering me, they begin to sting.This can’t be happening; it’s not fucking possible.
Bash’s voice is still there, coiled and twisted inside my skull, dragging its sharp claws across the soft places I’ve tried to wall off, to protect myself from the world around me.“Bring a photonext time.”A shudder runs down my spine at the way he uttered those words.“Before he fed her to this place.”
“Cat, I’m so scared, please, I just want to go home. Please come and get me.”Her small voice echoes through my mind, and it scares me for a moment, and I have to use my palm to silence the cry that exits my lips.
Fuck, he knows.God help her, somehow, he knows. How does he know things abouther,and her time here, while locked up in a maximum security asylum? They’re strangers from different worlds, and she’d only been here for a short time. He’s been here for two years, and is incarcerated most of the day in that room with his brother, so it’s not like he can wander the asylum. What the fuck is going on? What sick game is he playing with me?
I lean my exhausted body against my office door, and press my throbbing forehead to the painted steel, the coolness helping to bring my rapid breathing under control, while I will the silence to crush the echoes of their voices, and my self-doubt in my brain. They cling to me, Wren’s voice filled with madness, and the threat of violence, and Bash’s deep tones filled with calmness and certainty. He was too tranquil, like he’d seen through me, right down to my bone and marrow.That can’t be, he can’t know, there’s no way.He’s just playing games with me, manipulating me, and looking for a reaction.
What if he’s not? What if he truly does know something? What if he actually interacted with her? Could he tell me what her final days were like?
A scream lodges in my throat, constricting my airway, as I stumble across the room after flicking the lock shut behind me, in an anxiety-filled trance. I no longer see the contents of my office, or the chairs they were just confined in. They’re now nothing but empty skeletons, devoid of their menacing inhabitants. My heels hit sharply across the tiled floor, theirsound echoing in my brain, and reminding me of nails being hammered into a coffin.Perhaps ours, if we’re not careful.
My body feels heavy and sluggish, as if the short distance to my desk has to be waded through quicksand. My chest feels too tight, like a band is slowly squeezing me, threatening to take away all of my oxygen, and leave me as an empty, discarded husk on the floor. I reach into my pocket for my hidden anxiety medication, my fingers trembling as I bring the pill to my lips, and swallow it dry. I rip open a few buttons of my blouse, hoping that it will somehow help, but I know the truth deep down, nothing will help this insanity. This visceral need to, both, see them for what they are, and what I imagine they could be.
You can’t save them. They don’t want to be rescued. They enjoy being monsters.
The thought crosses my mind like a serrated blade, messy and harsh, and nausea instantly assails me.What the fuck is wrong with me?I shouldn’t be having thoughts like this. I don’t want to save or rescue them from the consequences of their heinous actions. I don’t want them roaming free, and having the possibility of hurting someone else. The desk lamp casts a sickly halo over the scarred wood surface. Their file is still open on my desk, left abandoned and untouched, when I was suddenly called out of my office to deal with one of my other patients.Wren and Bash Norwood.Twins. Serial killers. Cannibals. The kind of monsters no one survives. The kind of monsters no one should want to understand.
Yet, here I sit, with thoughts racing through my mind, weighing my options, and the possible repercussions. My eyes slide across the room, looking for the potential placement of a hidden camera. Halstead was somehow watching my sessions, despite it being a complete breach of patient-doctor ethics.Do you really think he cares about ethics? He’s as much a monster as the ones locked up in this place.
My hands tremble with thoughts of the file hidden in this desk, the one I need to remove from here, and place somewhere safe, far from Wellard Asylum, and Doctor Halstead’s reach. The one I’d never shown them or anyone else. The information I’d come here to find, along with its dark secrets. The file, which was never submitted to the hospital, her family, or the board. The one that would damn them all for what happened to her. The one I desperately want to flip through, and stare at the case photo. Those pages call to me with a sweet, painful agony, demanding that I avenge her.
A beautiful, compassionate girl, who had been full of life.The only one that ever mattered. She was gone before anyone cared to explain why. My lovely, fragile cousinCecelia, taken from me without warning, or explanation. Ripped from her family, friends, and loved ones. Halstead has buried her death in bureaucratic dust, and a prescription fog. The question of why remains unanswered.
“Suicide.”“Treatment failure.”“Emotional fragility.”That’s what we had been told resulted in her death, but the truth is something much more sinister. Cecelia had called me numerous times, terrified, whispering about things she’d seen, and heard. Things the doctors in Wellard did in the dark, and bowels, of the institution. She begged me to come get her, in her frightened state. At the time, I hadn’t believed her, thinking that her mania, paranoia, and severe depression, were overwhelming her. I stupidly reassured my aunt and uncle that a medical facility with trained professionals was the safest place for her to be. I was wrong, dead wrong, and the ramification was that I lost someone who had meant so much to me. I should have listened when she begged for help. I should have come straight here, and checked on her claims. I could have fought to oversee her care myself, but I did none of those things.I am as much to blame as they are. I abandoned her.
Now, Bash Norwood, a patient, a murderer, a madman, has spoken her name without even saying it, hinting that he knows what happened to her.How?How much does he know, and worse, what does he want with it?You know what he wants. You can feel it deep in the constricting of your core, in the lies you tell yourself at night, as you touch yourself to the image of them in your head. The attraction between you is unhinged, and destructive, and yet you crave it anyway.
My throat dries, and a rush of heat prickles my skin, as I remember his vibrant blue-gray eyes, and how they had stared at me, before they forced him away.Calm. Intelligent. Possessive.He’s not interested in helping. Just... me. Just the web he wants to weave around me, and the games he wishes to play, for his and Wren’s amusement.
He wants to tangle me in his madness. To lure me in, and see how far I’ll go for the truth. The terrifying thing is, I have already gone farther than I’d ever thought I would, and yet I know it isn’t nearly enough. Not until I rip the blinds off the darkness, and show the world the evil that lies festering here inside these walls.They know, and they don’t care, Cat. They send them here to die, forgotten, away from society, so they don’t have to bear witness to what inhabits our world with us.
“You’re getting too close.” Halstead’s voice echoes in my head now too. Cold. Clinical. Watching. Dangerous. “You’re not objective anymore, Miss. Vaughan.”
I want desperately to scream, to run far away from this crumbling building, and all who reside inside. Not because Halstead is wrong, but because Bash knew it first. He can see the atrocities that tarnish my soul. Arethey a weakness, or can they be used as a strategy?I don’t know anymore. My whole world is being turned upside down, and I am drowning in the weight of my decisions, or lack thereof. Revenge poisons every breath I take now, and there’s no way to change that. The realityis, I’m just as bloodthirsty as the Norwood twins, and I have to acknowledge the truth of that, even if it’s just to myself.
One thing is for sure: today felt like a well-laid trap. I reach for my notes, the clinical lies I’ve been building like armor, but they feel like paper shields now.Useless. Thin. Worthless.I’d come here to expose Halstead, to take down the machine that ate Cecelia alive. To avenge my family, with evidence and intellect, and burn this place to the ground, with the inhabitants inside of it. Now, the monsters I came to dissect and banish are breathing down my neck, and one of them has seen me too clearly. I can feel Bash on my skin. Like a thick film I can’t wash off, no matter how much I scrub. Infected, that’s what I am now. Infected by them, Bash and Wren Norwood,the Carnevil Twins.
“Do you want to save us?”Bash’s voice echoes in my head, his tone filled with hunger. Not yearning for freedom from this place, and his sentence, no, forme. A part of me I try desperately to deny, didn’t want to look away, didn’t want to disavow that I wanted them, both of them, even with their madness. I slam the file shut, gasping loudly like it could smother the truth, which is trying wretchedly to crawl out of my lungs. I need to regain control of the situation. I need another plan.Fuck, I need to get my own head examined.
If Bash knows the truth about Cecelia and Halstead, then he is a threat to everything I’m doing here. To all the sacrifices I’m making, and threats have to be neutralized. The question is, how far am I willing to go? Can I manipulate him? Sedate him? Feed him enough truth to keep him docile, without losing myself in the process? Will I need to break the rules I came here to uphold? How much of myself am I willing to lose? How much am I willing to give him, to pay the price he will inevitably ask of me?
