CHAPTER 1
"The smiles are bleeding on my wall.
The jacket holds.
No crawling, no crawling.
We must be a civilized young lady.
Do as your told.
Drink the soup, but do not slurp.
Don't look at the smiles.
He doesn't like that.
NONONONONO
No.
Whispering will get you nowhere my dearest darling.
Cats and dogs... Raining on a tin roof.
Just let me out on good behavior, and I won't hurt the baby.
Baby.
My baby.
Not my baby.
Her baby.
Not his, and not his.
I could tell the tale, but those smiles keep watching.
They know that the baby is gone.
He knows.
He knows.
He knows.
Plaster under the fingernails does not become a lady little missy.
You musn't scratch at the walls.
He'll hear. And then he'll know. The baby is gone. He took it.
Gone with the fire that would only burn and burn."
Jade stepped onto the dirty sidewalk, averting her eyes from the figures that filled the insides of the window paines.
A dark sign rose from the ground at the beginning of the short path that lead inside the decrepit building.
Arkham.
She sighed as if that one breath could wipe away the reason why she was there.
But it did not, so she continued to trudge toward the front door. A large clock on the wall just inside the doors told her that she only had twenty minutes left of the visiting hours, but those twenty minutes stretched out longer than an eternity before her.
The lobby of Arkham was white and pristine, making the television stick out with its dark images of crime in the city. Of course it would be turned on the news.
Everyone watches the news in this city.
"Excuse me miss, but how can I help you?"
She turned toward a large woman sitting behind the plexiglass cage of a reception desk.
If by help you mean you can provide some hard liquor, then yes. I could use quite a bit of help right now.
"Actually, I'm here to see my- someone. Her name is Maria. Maria Aiden."
The woman's face fell for a fraction of a second.
"I see."
Wonderful.
Jade tried to... grin for the nurse.
I want to see this woman just about as much as you do, so if we could just get this over with, then that would be great.
She followed the nurse down the hallways of the asylum, trying to close her ears to the crude and obscene remarks that the patients would scream through the windows of their cells.
Jade had been coming here for years now, but the long walk to the isolation room never got any easier.
She glanced down at the flower in her hands.
A daisy.
She always asked for a daisy, and Jade would always bring her one.
And then she'd watch as Maria would pluck each petal off the stem and eat it.
Watching Jade.
Waiting to see if Jade would stop her.
Jade and the nurse rounded the corner that led to Maria's cell.
She was waiting.
She sat in the center of the cell, completely still, staring at the wall in front of her through the bars.
Jade dropped the daisy through a space in the bars.
Maria didn't move.
All Jade could do was watch her in silence, and try to find a trace of the woman that she once was.
She didn't see anything though.
There was nothing of Jade's mother behind those vacant eyes.
