A/N: I love my readers. I hope this chapter scares the shit out of you.

Chapter 11: Alone With A Monster

She stood in the doorway, 6'8", 280 pounds, naturally muscular and bulging out all over her black tank top and grey sweats pants.

She didn't speak as she moved towards Ed, a drifting continent of a human being, moving silently across the floor to engulf him or to rip him down, he didn't know yet.

His shoulders bounced gently against a bookshelf. His breath came so fast it whistled in his throat. The muscles in his arms and stomach clenched convulsively. "Don't touch me," he breathed as she towered over him. He raised an arm in defence. "Don't touch me!"

Erin Ahn Vo grabbed his wrist and twisted him into the bookshelf. Before Ed could react she had a handful of his hair, yanked his head back and slammed him face first into the shelf. His chin caught the shelf, his glasses snapping against an unyielding spine, glass spearing him under one eye.

Ed's knees buckled. His head struck a filing cabinet as he fell but Vo grabbed him before he fell. Her massive formed writhed above him like a thunderhead of snakes. One arm wrapped around his waist and tossed him over her shoulder.

The light of the oil lamp smeared in Ed's vision like a long exposure photograph of the full moon. He reached for it, gauging it was somewhere between a million and five hundred billion miles away, and it slipped away beneath his fingertips, the last beacon of comfort in a world mired in darkness.

He thumped a fist against Erin's back, caught her thigh with his shoe. She didn't flinch. Alvaro – alive? Either way, he'd been gone for long enough that he was unlikely to be of any help. He'd either fled or been captured, by security or by Vo, it hardly mattered.

Which was a shame, really. Because Alvaro and security pretty much summed up the list of people who were likely to come looking for Ed in Arkham. Everyone else would assume he'd taken a day off, if they noticed he was missing at all.

They were moving away from the main hall. He tried to keep track of corridors and turns as Vo carried him effortlessly through the ranks of cobwebs and broken furniture. But his knowledge of the mansion's layout was almost entirely anecdotal, what he had pieced together from the CSIs as well as his short hike from the main door to the clock tower. Darkness swirled in his vision and his mind, rapid-fire bursts of memory framing a disjointed image. Vo had the torch and Ed saw only ghosts.

Finally she stepped into the rattling cage of an elevator. As Ed reached for a hold on the brass bars his mind clicked where he was. There was only one elevator in the mansion. It was over by the warden's office, linking the small second floor library with the clerk offices below. He was a long, long way from the main entrance. He was a long, long way from home.

His fingers were wrenched from the bars, stomach flip-flopping as Vo heaved him onto the elevator floor. The little cage juddered underneath them. Ed rolled onto his side and Vo's boot caught him in the chest and scuttled him against the cage bars.

He was still gagging for breath when she stepped out of the elevator.

"W- wait!" Each word burned his lungs. "Who are you? What – what do you want?"

Maybe if he played dumb, she wouldn't kill him.

Fat chance. Vo hit the button for the elevator. Ed flattened against the floor as it rose in jarring series of shrieking cords and malfunctioning brakes. He felt the cage slap the side of the shaft as Vo grabbed a hold of the counterweight cable. In the reflected torchlight the cage bars cut crazy shadows over the ceiling.

Ed tried to rise, and couldn't. His body was a mass of aches with no discrete points of reference. Pain made him sicker than he could ever remember being. He wrapped his hands around the cage bars and clung on with his breath too thin to plead.

Vo snapped the counterweight cable in a hand like a mechanised vice. The cage toppled, caught on the brakes, toppled again, ripped the brakes from the wall with a shriek of rust and plummeted two stories into the well below the ground floor.

As the dust rose in silence, she walked away.

Harvey pressed the buzzer for the fifth time. He slouched against the wall, calling into the comm. "Nygma!"

Pacing in the foyer of Ed's Downtown apartment block, Gordon shook his head. "Face it, Harvey. He's not in."

"Of course he's in!" Harvey snapped. "Where else would he be? He just doesn't want to talk to us!"

Gordon paused by the stairwell, hand over his mouth. "Why would he lie to us?"

"Why would he leave us a stupid riddle telling us he was lying to us?" Harvey pounded the buzzer. "Ed! Get your ass down here!"

A Latino woman with a baby on her hip appeared on the stairwell. She fluttered her fingers at Gordon. "You're looking for Mr Nygma? I didn't hear him come in tonight."

Harvey caught Gordon's eye. "That so?" he pushed away from the wall. "You usually hear him?"

The woman shrugged. "He's right next door. Sometimes he drives us crazy with the noise from his video games, and I ain't never known another young man to cry when he gets it wrong on Jeopardy. But I haven't heard anything 'sides the fridge from his apartment since this morning."

"There you go," said Gordon, "he's not here. Where else would he go?"

Harvey dismissed the neighbour with a grunt. "I dunno. The marina? That shitty Riverside Docks rathole? Maybe there was something there he didn't want us to see."

Gordon caught his partner's eye. "Something like ... a boat?"

Both men reeled in the wake of that thought.

They walked heavily from the foyer into the noise of the street. Harvey scratched his hat. "Maybe he's the killer?"

"Harvey."

"What? Sally Sue's been saying he pushed that Kringle chick under the bus. The kid's obsessed with riddles. Maybe this is all some game to him, trying to prove to us how smart he is."

The thought felt foul in Gordon's mind, but he had to admit it wasn't such a long shot. "Still, it's not smart to murder people for a riddle."

"And drugs are bad," Harvey chimed. "But people still do 'em. People are dumb, Jim. They do dumb things. Especially smart people."

They found the squad car with a nice new red spray tag on the wheel, no kids in sight. Gordon rested his head against the seatback. He tipped his head to face Harvey in the blue and yellow gloom. "He can't be the Stitcher. Ed's a little odd, but I'm sure he's not homicidal."

"Yeah, well, either way, I got one guess as to where he is."

"Don't say it."

Harvey said it. "Where he belongs. Arkham goddamn Asylum."

He lay for a long time in the darkness.

Trapped below ground in the broken elevator cage and the deepening night, not a solitary mote of light offered reprieve to his straining eyes. Strange colours and shapes fired through his optic nerves, but Ed knew enough about sensory deprivation to know it was just that. Visual hallucinations as his brain grappled with the lack of information. It tricked him. Are you blind? Did that glass cut your eyes? But Ed touched the blood running warm down his face, touched a fingertip to his eyeball, and knew he was not blind. For all the good it did him now.

He inhaled the darkness. He exhaled the darkness. In time his sense of his own form began to loosen, making him infinitely tall, a part of the darkness itself, a pair of invisible lungs pumping shadow into shadow, a twitching pulse nothing more than a mouse scuttling between the walls of endless night.

Time was impossible to gauge in such a state. Ed thought mere seconds had passed, only to find himself huddled in one crumpled corner with no idea how he'd gotten there. Pain shivered through him with every tick of his heart. Fractured scapula, maybe, broken ribs. He wasn't sure what had happened to the rest of him. His right leg was numb, the left curled to his chest where he could feel the swelling around his patella.

He was very thirsty. He thought he should try calling for help, but his throat was dry. He thought he might try it anyway. Once upon a time, when he was a boy instead of a mouse, he had lied to his father and his father had hit him. BANG! Into the kitchen counter. But I'm not lying! he cried, tasting blood in his mouth. And his father had hit him again.

His father had hit him quite often after that. Yes sir, no sir! It's better to be polite, sir!

The memory of his father's face twisted in anger was a small thought. Just a small thought lost in the vacuum of nothingness which was the only thing that existed in the bottom of the elevator shaft. Don't touch me! he had shouted at Erin Ahn Vo, and she had hit him, and now he was here. He wanted to call for help, but in the darkness there was no reasoning with his fear.

Unable to stand and unwilling to shout, he was left with nothing to do but wait. A while later he found himself lying at a weird angle on the floor, his head titled downwards and his feet pointing up, a dull throb in his left leg. Again, he wasn't sure how he'd gotten there, but on the bright side, his thirst had been replaced by a terrible hunger. He'd already vomited twice, no idea where. All he could smell was mildew and vomit and old books, and the blood in his mouth.

He rolled onto his right knee, climbing the small mountain where the elevator floor had crumpled over the counterweights. Luckily those hadn't been above him, or they would have smashed through the ceiling and killed him. He was shaking almost too much to stand, and the moment he put weight on his left leg, it collapsed beneath him and dumped him hard back on the floor.

Rising unsteadily to all-fours, Ed wasn't sure, actually, that he was so lucky to be alive. He knew what was coming. Vo might leave him all night, she might leave him for days, but eventually she would return for him, and then she would sew his mouth shut and hang him up for the crows.

He jolted at a the slamming of a door very far away. Gathering himself in one blind corner of the cage he strained to hear her footsteps, at first very far away, now rapidly approaching.

She was here. She was here and she was going to kill him. Ed's spine pulled straight, his whole body trembling as every muscle strained. Colours popped in front of his eyes, white light falling in streaks that he at first took to be another part of the hallucination until he realised it was the stripes of the cage bars falling through the open ceiling hatch, lit by an intensifying torchlight.

A black shadow fell over him. He peered up through the gap in the ceiling, which ended just below the level of the ground floor. The cage bars barricading the shaft were wrenched aside in a harsh clatter of steel. Silver light streamed around Ed, illuminating the debris on the crumpled floor, but he himself was lost in shadow.

He heard her breath on the still air. Inhaling raspily through the nostrils, exhaling through the mouth. The breath of the whole world in her mouth. Her huge, blurred form dropped into the shaft with a shuddering thud, the flashlight discarded on the carpet.

Ed hit the wall in an attempt to make room for the killer. His broken shoulder blade caught on a bar and he cried out, even though he knew he shouldn't. Vo used the sound to take him by the throat, her breath quickening, gusting over his face in a wave of meat and sauce. He coughed, fighting to breathe, and she squeezed his throat so tightly that he fell to his knees to appease her, nothing he could give her but his total submission. Yes, sir!

She spoke to him for the first time. Her voice sounded like the throb of his frantic pulse. "You have a secret. What is it?"

With her crushing his throat there was no way he could answer. He simply hung there until she let go of him in disgust or realisation, he had no idea, no desire to know. She kicked him as he lay in a heap, choking, clouds of red boiling in his optic nerves.

He thought of Kristen. Such a funny thing that only last night he'd entertained the prospect of marrying her. Seemed a long way away now. He would have married her, he would have treated her super nice, just the way she deserved to be treated. And when they had kids, boy, they'd be the best kids around. He'd be so proud. Just the way a dad should be.

Ah, all very far away now. He meant nothing to Vo's little scheme to keep the Asylum closed. She probably wouldn't even bother hanging him. She'd leave him here so if her scheme worked, even if the Asylum was bulldozed, no one would ever find Ed. He'd rot down here for a hundred years, until everyone he'd ever known had died, and then he would be truly lost.

He flinched as Vo took him by the jaw. "No secrets, huh?"

She banged his head against the elevator floor and stood, a black mass of shadows unfurling through the cavity in the ceiling. She yanked the cage door shut with a bang and a click of the latch slotting into place.

By time her footsteps faded from the hall, Ed was deeply unconscious.

A/N: Deary me. It appears events have turned pear-shaped for our bold wannabe detective. Let's hope he can find a way out alive and sane with just one chapter left.

Excited for chapter 12? Disturbed by the Stitcher's taste in sweatpants? Want to tell me how you're jaded and disaffected from it all? That review button has your name on it, friend.