"Farr off from these a slow and silent stream,

Lethe the River of Oblivion roules

Her watrie Labyrinth, whereof who drinks,

Forthwith his former state and being forgets,

Forgets both joy and grief, pleasure and pain."

- Paradise Lost

Chapter One:

Oblivion

"Let's go over this again, Kirsty."

Dr. Peter Daniels tapped a ballpoint pen against the plastic armrest of his office chair, dark brows drawn together and lips pursed. Kirsty stared him down.

"Which part?"

Daniels sighed and shifted, then glanced at his expensively gleaming watch.

"I want to know more about the part where you left the house. You say you don't know what caused the fire."

Kirsty gave him a bitter smirk. "That sounds about right. I think you've got everything you need."

Daniels dropped the pen to his desk, frustration finally winning over professionalism. She could hear the scratch as he ran hands over his graying, closely-trimmed beard - a fresh new look that had him staring and preening in his office mirror every time he walked past it. His hands were dry and cracked against his face, and the nails on his thick, stubby fingers looked chewed to the quick. It disgusted her.

"Kirsty, I'm only trying to help you get past these delusio-"

"I've had four fucking years to recognise just how full of shit that is."

She continued to fume as he steepled his fingers together and leaned his forehead against his hands, bumping the bridge of his glasses a touch.

"...It's important that we move past the delusions, Kirsty. I'm sorry you've struggled with them for so long, but I can only help you once you make the first move."

She hated this. She hated the false empathy, the empty, scripted statements of support. She could rip her hair out, she despised it so much. This man didn't give a shit about her and he never would.

"You wanna know what I've struggled with, Daniels? I've struggled with this fucking prison you keep me in -"

"You're here for your own good, Kirsty. You know that, we've discussed this."

"Do you think I'm a goddamn an idiot?" Kirsty shot up from her chair and started to pace. "You and the cops can't figure out how to fucking pin those murders on me, so you keep me here -!"

Orderlies rushed into the room, ready to subdue her if need be, but Daniels made a quick gesture to keep them at bay. They filtered back out the door quickly.

"That paranoia is keeping you from opening yourself up to me, Kirsty. You're afraid. When are you going to trust me? I only want to help you break free, but I can't do that if you keep creating more reasons to vilify me." He put on a sympathetic face for her, his brows drawing together in a masculine pout that would have been handsome without the unsettling falseness that shadowed beneath it. She imagine he conned plenty of women in his day.

She scoffed at him and leaned forward, her face full of sneering defiance and flashing teeth. "...Fuck you, Daniels. You're a fucking liar and you're not worth shit at your job. I wouldn't trust you in a thousand years. You think I can't see right through you? After years of listening to your bullshit, you think I can't see exactly who you are?"

Daniels was quiet for a moment, and she watched as his pout faded slowly from his face and his eyes grew sharp.

"Don't you think I should ask you the same question? You really think I can't see you, Kirsty? You think I don't know who you are? I still haven't asked about your mother."

She staggered back from him, shocked that his facade had actually dropped. "...What did you just fucking say to me?"

He smiled at her. "I still haven't asked you about your mother's death, Kirsty. We both know that's where all this really started, don't we?"

She gaped at him, stricken.

"You bastard!" She shrieked, and two male orderlies rushed in again and seized her. Kirsty knocked a chair over as she squirmed against their bruising grips on her body, felt a cold terror shoot like a bullet through her chest. They rarely did this to her, she must have really freaked them out this time. Kirsty let her body go slack because she knew better. It was pointless to pick this fight. The man on her left pulled out a syringe and shot her up with sedatives, then the two of them started dragging her from the room as she sobbed more obscenities at Daniels. She could see him watching her, his eyes inscrutable, that cynical smile still on his face.

"Don't you fret, Kirsty."

Hours later Kirsty turned to her side under her meager covers, bunching her old, flattened pillow into a more comfortable shape. The sound of rain pattered against the facility roof, soothing her down from the rage and shame and old hurts. It was in moments like these, curled up under too-thin blankets in the dark, that this rat cage actually felt like the place of healing it was supposed to be. Ironically it only feels that way when I'm not being interrogated by doctors. Kirsty snorted wryly to herself.

It wasn't like she didn't know she was sick. Of course she was sick. Who wouldn't be traumatised in her position? Who wouldn't be unstable? Kirsty knew she needed healing.

Healing was hard to come by when the person in charge of your care was focused on lining their pockets and convinced you were a murderer, though.

When this first started, when she was a little younger, she was still naive enough to believe that this situation really was for her own benefit. Despite her anger at their dismissals, deep down she really believed that the cops were on her side, there to do their jobs and protect the innocent, even if they believed her story was the delusion of a traumatized girl. She believed that the doctors genuinely thought she was in need of their help (which she certainly felt she was, precisely because her experiences were real), that they could all be convinced of the truth if she just fought hard enough.

What it all came down to was that Kirsty had believed in the genuine kindness and humanity of others.

When Channard came to her so long ago with papers to sign, telling her that it was for her own good that she keep herself checked into the facility until the cops could get to the bottom of things, she went ahead and did it. She followed the guidance of these people like a lost puppy, eager for someone else to take the reins for a while. Someone to give her much needed help and healing. Anything, just so she could finally just rest and recuperate from the horrors she had faced alone. She wanted to be rescued, and she believed that these people - the cops, the doctors, all of them - were professionally trained rescuers. She believed they were what they were supposed to be, what they told her they were. So like a fool, she put herself into their hands.

That was before she had discovered Dr. Channard's obsession with the occult, and situations had escalated beyond her control. With Channard missing, presumed dead, and the Institute in the hands of Daniels and his ilk, she was left imprisoned within the confines of Channard's remaining empire.

Now it seemed like she had no power at all, no way to call it all off and take it back, nothing to bargain with, no way to escape the clutches of dispassionate people convinced she was a dangerous criminal who needed to be dealt with accordingly.

Was she really that stupid, that she didn't immediately recognise the folly of just signing one's soul away like that?

A crash of thunder startled Kirsty from her ruminations. The inky night outside her window was shot through with the sparkling orange hues of street lights, the warm colors refracting through tiny water droplets speckled on the pane. She loved the rain; loved storms in fact. There was something soothing about being tucked away, warm and dry and safe while the chaos clamored around her. Sometimes, when the rain came, she could summon that bit of peace buried within herself to daydream and imagine she was somewhere else, someone other than the Kirsty living this particular half-life.

With storms came trouble in the institute, however. They were clearly low on funding, and the facility was old. Something, somewhere always seemed to be on the fritz, especially when the weather got bad enough. Particularly when it came to the electricity. Somebody always seemed to have to fix a blown fuse connecting to her room, or a bulb would blow. They must have changed the lightbulbs in this room thousands of times in the four years she occupied it. The little old TV she had the privilege of keeping (a bribe to encourage 'good behavior') liked to cut to static an awful lot, too. It was nicer just to watch outside the windows, anyway. The TV always had bad reception and only ran a few blurry channels, most of them featuring things like infomercials and old reruns of I Love Lucy and Gilligan's Island. By this point, Kirsty had seen every discarded, unwanted VHS tape that circulated in this shithole.

Life within the Institute felt like an existence stuck outside of time, a place where the memory of having a real, normal life was lost to a bottomless purgatory of waiting. It was as if her entire life had stopped, stagnated, and Kirsty felt trapped in a loop of the days right after her father's house went up in flames. When she watched from the windowsill above her bed, she could remind herself that time really was passing, and there was a living, thriving world out there that she might reach one day, if only she could just figure out the right steps to take.

The first year she was intent on escape for both herself and Tiffany. It was a hard-won battle on Kirsty's part, but eventually it was decided by the Powers That Be that Tiffany could be released to a local adoption agency. Kirsty had put up such a constant fuss on her behalf that they couldn't justify keeping Tiffany after she began speaking once more (and Kirsty had made sure Tiffany wouldn't repeat her mistakes and start spouting fantastical nonsense about demons…). As far as Kirsty knew, Tiffany had been adopted two years ago.

Of course it hadn't been so easy for Kirsty, who had been committed by Channard not long after admittance and was a suspect in multiple homicide. She had been given no access to legal avenues for legitimate escape, and ultimately she recognised that it was fruitless to attempt a jailbreak when the local authorities would be ready to follow after her. Without outside help, there was no way she could skip town easily enough to evade them. Kirsty had never been a defeatist, but at this point she recognised what battles she could fight. What kind of life was living on the run, anyway?

Kirsty knew something was wrong. She knew that at the very least she should have been afforded some kind of legal advocacy, but this place was full of clever, shady people, with ties to the authorities and god knows who else. They kept her as ignorant and powerless as the frightened, barely-twenty year old girl who knew hardly anything about the world that she came here as, and without family to fight on her behalf, she had run out of luck. Four years in and Kirsty was still swimming blind, still gasping to keep her head above the water

So she focused her efforts on smaller acts of subterfuge. Sneaking around in the facility, rather that outside of it. She knew this floor like the back of her hand. She knew each patient, each doctor's office, each janitor's closet, each dingy restroom and every loose vent screen in the place. She knew where the elevator to the maintenance level was, too. Not that she'd ever made it down there.

Deciding that she had wallowed enough, Kirsty checked the clock on the wall; it was late, and tonight was a Thursday. Usually Thursdays were when the orderly charged with the nighttime monitoring shift down her hall was Chuck. Chuck was a bit of an irreverent slacker who was more interested in watching whatever new horror VHS he'd bought himself on his little TV than keeping a good eye on patients. Lights would be low around the facility and staff activity was minimal. Most of the orderlies would have their guard down. She wandered over to the left wall. Low and close to the corner, hidden behind her television stand, there was a loosened brick. Sliding the brick out of its place, Kirsty dug around for a bent out of shape bobby pin. Sweeping her hand further, she grabbed a thin string with an old dingy quarter tied to the other side.

Moving back to the door, she took a good look out the small square window set into it. Satisfied, she inserted the pin into the emergency hole on the doorknob and pressed, unlocking the inner mechanism. Kirsty tentatively pushed forward and peeked for safety once more, this time through the opening to see the desk stationed down the left hall about twelve yards from her door. Chuck was there exactly as expected, his eyes and ears riveted to faintly screaming women while mindlessly stuffing his face with potato chips.

He's got the right idea, Kirsty thought. She ever so lightly stepped out of her doorway and tip-toed her way down the right hall.

Most of the patients were housed down the west wing, but the corridors of the east wing was where they kept the difficult individuals, nice and cozy behind locked doors. Like herself. Nobody liked to talk about the maintenance levels. Kirsty herself had heard the rumors from the mouths of timid patients, warning her not to act out too much lest she be punished with a little room change. The staff had yet to take her down there though, despite her tendency for trouble. Which suggested to her that the maintenance levels were kept very secret, and that they didn't actually punish anyone that way - at least not anyone coherent enough to tattle.

Room 302 housed Mrs. Merriweather, a nasty old bird who raged and squawked obscenities at any employee who dared approach her. She wasn't dangerous, but they liked to keep her down here regardless because she was for the most part universally hated by the staff for her outbursts.

Kirsty fished her hairpin around in the keyhole, unlocked the door, and popped her head in. Merriweather was sitting on her bed, looking miserable as usual and watching her little TV, but the creaking door pulled her attention to Kirsty. Merriweather's eyes lit up in a secret joy, and she waddled her little old hunched body over to meet her.

Kirsty smiled back. "What would you like this time, Jessica?"

"Oh I'd love some more of those chocolate chip cookies, dear!" she whispered excitedly.

"You got it!" Kirsty whispered back, saluting Merriweather and stepping back out.

Continuing her trek down the hall, she took a left and punched in a security code at a glass doorway, walked through another hall, and into the employee rec room. Against the back wall stood a series of vending machines, one for soda and two for snacks. Kirsty took her coin from her pocket and began to work, dropping it into machines and pulling back the string repeatedly until the fruit of her efforts were cradled like precious valuables in her arms: a cold soda, two bags of sour cream n' onion potato chips, and Mrs. Merriweather's cookies.

Kirsty made her way back down the hallways, stopping to drop the cookies off to Merriweather who giggled conspiratorially and patted her hand, and returned to her room with good-ol' Chuck none-the-wiser. She stashed away her tools behind the brick and switched her TV on, catching the tail end of some Lucy episode. She got herself comfortable back on her springy bed, pulled open a fresh bag of chips, and twisted the cap off her soda, which hissed and fizzed invitingly. She sighed in contentment, savoring the simple, hedonistic pleasure of tiny bubbles sharply popping against her tongue.

She loved Thursdays.

She generally wasn't afforded this kind of stuff, and sneaking out for them was always a risk. But it was worth it just to have the little things, sometimes. Helping Merriweather remember that she was allowed to just be a sweet little old lady sometimes was nice, too.

Kirsty let the low rumble of rain and thunder soothe her as she nibbled delicately at her chips, letting herself get lost in thought. Then everything plunged into darkness.

She sighed in exasperation. The storm had finally cut out the power.

There was a faint scream coming from far down the west wing hallway; somebody didn't take to the dark too well. Kirsty screwed her soda bottle closed and balled up an empty chip bag, then walked to her bathroom by the dim light of the distant street lamps shining through her window. In the cupboard under her sink she kept a little shoebox stuffed up behind the pipes. She used it to hide leftover trash from her little junk food excursions, and she emptied it out periodically on her trips sometimes.

Returning to her bed, she laid herself back against her pillows and toyed with her half-empty bottle, staring out her window.

That was when the television clicked back on.

Kirsty shot upright, spine ramrod straight and eyes riveted to the screen. In the pitch black, with the entire facility's power completely dead, her television was on and playing nothing but loud, static snow.

Her breath caught, her heart pounding. She couldn't move her body, couldn't blink.

For what felt like forever, she kept full, agonizing attention on her television screen, just waiting for something, anything to happen. What was this? How was it happening? What did it mean?

The television gave her no answers, only endless, monotonous white noise. The longer she listened the louder that static sounded, and the heavier the atmosphere of her room seemed to grow, until suddenly she was realizing that the static would break into lower hums. Was she imagining that? Was she imagining all of this?

No! There, she heard it again. It was like the static wasn't just static, but a voice. Was the channel reception clearing?

"Y...ha…he...m..."

She sucked in another breath, trembling. Yes. A man's voice…

"K...st..."

She started to her feet, backing away from the television.

"K...ty."

Oh god, she knew that voice! She…

"Kirsty."

Kirsty brought her hands up to her ears. Stop.

She grit her teeth, panting with terror. "Stop. Stop it right fucking now, do you hear me?! Stop stop stop STOP!"

And everything stopped.

The television shut off abruptly. The facility lights powered back on. As if she had said the magic word, the heavy atmosphere lightened back to normal, like nothing had happened at all. Like she had imagined it.

Like a delusion.

Kirsty staggered backwards, until her shoulder blades were flush to the icy-cold wall furthest from the television, then slid her trembling body to the floor and held her knees to her chest.

.