Page 1 of No Quarter

PROLOGUE

They hate me.

She had tried to sit in their company earlier in the evening, but she felt their eyes. She felt their thoughts.

Gillian couldn’t bear the way the other patients stared at her in the communal area of Elmwood Psychiatric Retreat.

But the voices in Gillian’s head didn’t hateher. They told her nice things, most of the time. They remembered Gillian’s favorite moments and spoke of them often.

Like when her first love ran his fingers through her hair as they sat by the side of a lake on a sunny day.

Like when her father brought her a teddy bear with a pink ribbon the first time she got sick.

Like the time she came first in a spelling bee, and she saw the proud faces of her loved ones staring up at her from the audience.

The voices remembered all of it, and they would talk to her about those memories. They were a constant companion, and a soothing one. Soothing enough to almost make her forget that her family no longer visited her anymore.

Soothing enough.

Almost…

The communal area was a safe space for residents at Elmwood. That’s what they called them, but Gillian knew they were patients in all but name.

The room, with a piano, a television, some games, and arts and crafts, was large; it was the place where the patients would try to persuade themselves that everything was normal.

But things were not normal. Gillian’s paranoid delusions made certain of that.

Gillian got up from a soft armchair beneath a picture of a snow-covered field and began walking to the rear of the room as the other patients talked, watched TV, and played games.

Outside, raindrops cascaded down the windows. Gillian thought the view through them would have been nice if it weren’t for the bars covering them.

They were a constant reminder that she wasn’tquitefree. That she wasn’t normal. And all because of the voices, as kind as they sometimes were.

But not always kind.

Walking slowly across the cold hospital floor, she felt the stares again. The delusion was coming. But in Gillian’s skewed mind, she didn’t see it as such. She saw the paranoid thoughts as revelations. They were the truth about the real world.

Out of the corner of her eye, she felt the piercing gaze of another patient, demonic and malevolent.

But when she turned to face him, the patient was looking down at a game of checkers in front of him.

That was always the way. That was how they’d persuaded Gillian that she was mentally ill.

They always look away when I face them, she thought.Always.

Gillian looked down at her pale feet in hospital slippers. She remembered looking at those same feet when she was a teenager. When her dad had had her committed for the first time.

That was nearly fifteen years ago.

She had experienced four breakdowns since then, the last one being the worst. She had been found wandering three miles from where she lived wearing only a night dress.

That was why she was there at the hospital and had been for some time. It had been the straw that broke the camel’s back for her family.

They seemed to worry more about the embarrassment such behavior would cause them rather than showing unwavering care for their daughter.

Gillian heard the shuffle of movement around her, the television blaring, and the orderlies trying to harangue patients to take their meds.

Quiet, she thought.I just need some quiet.

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