Title: Charlotte's Web (Chapter 46)
Rating: M for graphic violence and language
Fandom: The Mentalist
Summary: Patrick Jane has lived his life obsessed with the capture of Red John ever since finding his beloved wife and daughter slain by the maniac's hand. Now, 10 years to the day after that horrific night, a young woman appears in Patrick's life, someone who threatens to destroy everything his life has become in the interim… if not his sanity, itself.
Author's Note: Hi guys- yes I am still alive, and yes this story will continue! I have some chronic health problems which leave me exhausted and this story can also be very difficult (emotionally and spiritually to write and do research for. But I promise I will not abandon "her" (stories can be a "her" right? If boats and yachts and countries can be, why not fan fiction stories?) One of the techniques I use to show Charlotte and Lisbon and Jane's increasing strength and dissociation from reality is mixing up the tenses in this story. Most of it is written in the past tense (Jane ate, Charlotte screamed, Lisbon watched TV…) but sometimes I will switch suddenly to present tense to create a sense of disorder and things being off-kilter…–Lexikal
"Here is a list of terrible things,
The jaws of sharks, a vulture's wings
The rabid bite of the dogs of war,
The voice of one who went before,
But most of all the mirror's gaze,
Which counts us out our numbered days."
— Clive Barker (Days of Magic, Nights of War (Abarat, #2))
"On the floating, ship less oceans
I did all my best to smile
Till your singing eyes and fingers
Drew me loving to your isle
And you sang, "Sail to me
Sail to me, let me enfold you"
Here I am, here I am
Waiting to hold you" – Song to the Siren by Cocteau Twins
Tuesday, November 14th, 2013 11:54 p.m. PST
Her father had showered and crashed on the inflatable mattress Lisbon had provided. He'd watched her with his almost-haggard face, searching her face for signs of distress. Not that he had any ability to relieve her distress, not her, he couldn't even relieve it much… yet he tried. Or seemed to try.
Ever the impromptu therapist, Jane was. Because, when you got right down do it, wasn't that what he was? What he did? Analyze others pain and difficulties, and guide them- in his own way- towards resolution?
Red John had done the same, but he had used his insights to torture people mentally, creating custom-made Hell-realms in the minds of his victims, right here on Earth, where naïve people still debated whether such a thing as Hell could even be real…
But Jane… he seemed to have her best interests at heart. Charlotte watched him carefully, constantly… looking for signs of deceit, looking for signs of danger, torn between the desire to trust him and accept him at face value and the desire to stay safe and not be trapped by the man wearing Red John's face.
Jane… Patrick… her father… Daddy… whoever he was… she watched him, and she considered him from the corner of her eye.
Most therapists generally weren't so manipulative, or smug when dealing with temperamental personalities.
Of course, most weren't half as good as Patrick Jane at figuring out what made people tick.
Her Daddy was still awake. He was drifting, but he was still awake. Probably waiting for her to go to sleep first. Something like that.
They were exhausted, but Charlotte knew what sleep represented. She wanted no part of that…
Sleep was like a dark, black ocean, endless in depth, and… and horrible nightmares lived in the ocean and wanted to grab her by the ankle and pull her down into the depths. Pull her down so deep she would never return to the surface.
They weren't interested in playing, these beasts, these nightmare-beasts- what they wanted was her to be flooded with terror, so distraught she was beyond the realm of sanity, so distraught her own body (the traitor!) began to chemically break itself down, dismember itself cell by cell with stress hormones.
When she'd lived with Red John she would sometimes awaken in the night (if you could call opening one's eyes and being barely aware of one's surroundings, waking), screaming, screaming hysterically because her body was beyond the realm of her mind and acting on its own accord, of its own terror, and Red John would come and watch, eyes shining, almost delighted by her screams, asking her in a calm and measured voice what she had just experienced, what she was continuing to experience… and that had been almost worse than the nightmares and flashbacks themselves. That sadistic hunger of his.
His eyes in the gloom of her room, watching, delighted and hungry.
The cold, detached, methodical way the man with her father's face had mentally dissected her psyche, prodding here and there for pain, pushing on the most painful parts to elicit still more screams and shudders.
Never satisfied with her level of pain, always hungry for more, for more pain, more fear, more revulsion, more despair… always so calm, and so hungry, at the same time. Red John, the psychic vampire. Never sated.
And then, on her own- when she'd gotten older and started to "bore" Red John and he'd gotten her a place of her own- she'd sometimes awaken in the night and scream and scream for what felt like hours, only half aware of herself and her age and her surroundings, one part of her mind analyzing and cataloging her own traumatized behaviours while the other part (or was it parts at that point?) remained locked into the madness and terror, unable to break free.
Thrashing in her bed, screaming, begging dark shapes that seemed to move through her bedroom for mercy.
Those shapes were never merciful, either.
Of course the dark shapes were not real by reductionist, materialist standards. So they never displayed the tiniest morsel of mercy. Mercy seemed to be limited to what was physically real. Not the real-unreal.
Demons were not real. Were they? No… couldn't be. Most modern, intelligent people had decided that they absolutely, positively could not be real.
But maybe. Maybe they were. Because modern, intelligent people throughout the ages had been wrong about fundamental aspects of reality over and over again.
Just maybe… then… just maybe…
Red John wasn't in her bedroom about to kill her (although, of course, that had always been a distinctly real physical possibility).
But the other stuff?
Spiders hanging over her in the dark, ready to drop thousands of eggs into her mouth and nostrils.
Corpses of the dead (including some dead she had helped "dispatch"), waiting in the shadows, faces puffy with decay and gas, eyes oozing a yellow fluid and covered with cataracts, clothes soaked and hard with old blood that looked black in the gloom of midnight.
They'd talk to her, but their voices sounded like rustling leaves, tin cans, razor wire… the trash that Charlotte found in alleys and dump heaps and ditches when she'd been younger and gone for walks to escape Red John and his classical music and his smile like a scalpel and his deeply-cutting words.
The trash that had been in the ditches Red John had left some of the bodies in, in Mexico, where criminal profilers and police were in short supply and proper "disposal" wasn't needed, where the locals still believed in demons and spirits and things that went bump in the night… in the ditches that were used as shallow graves, there was trash. And in the night, that trash sometimes came before her eyes, so mundane and inconsequential, cheetohs bags and gum wrappers, the shells of the objects they'd once contained, thrown away by the people who had eaten the insides.
Like Red John and his bodies. All the terror and screams and whimpers sucked out, because that was what fed him, screams and pleas for mercies, not chocolate, not cheddar-cheese flavoured snacks. Human misery.
Charlotte knew those bodies left in the ditches were left as a further insult, a further wound, left alone like the trash Red John thought they were… to rot, to roil with maggots under the hot sun, turn green, and be pecked at by carrion eaters, bright-eyed crows that saw human flesh as sustenance… and she'd been haunted, miserable, leaving the bodies in the ditches. Lying in her bed at night, lucky by reductionist, materialist standards, lucky to be "alive", but thrashing in her bed, haunted and miserable, ashamed and tortured…
After a little while, dumping them off like garbage had been almost more upsetting to her than watching Red John kill them.
And then, impossibly… after a while, dumping the bodies had no longer even upset her.
She was numb to the upset.
Body in a ditch, so what?
In the end, did it really matter? The apathy, the anhedonia, the numbing was severe… she couldn't even scrabble a proper tear up for the dead after a while, and how damaged was that?
How crazy was that? She had wanted to get to this point of numbness, wanted it desperately, and when it came it was its own Hell…
Those dead in her bedroom, watching with their death-puffy faces and blind eyes, they hadn't been real by material standards.
The faces that came back a few weeks or months later, the haunting dead, faces pushing behind the plaster and the dry wall of her room, watching her as she lay in his PJs in her bed and breathed her air and thought her thoughts.
Those couldn't have been real.
And yet they were, because she was experiencing them, and when you got right down to it, wasn't the experience of a thing how humans knew whether to call it real or unreal in the first place… wasn't calling somebody else's 3-d experience of life unreal a form of bigotry when you got right down to it?
The faces made out of blood in the drywall of her bedroom walls, winking and chuckling, moving and making exaggerated, Jim Carrey-esque facial expressions in the gloom… those hadn't been real either.
But they had been. And she'd been horrified to see them.
Oh, night…such a terrifying time.
Such a deeply personal, claustrophobic, suffocating and disturbing time.
Night flat out sucked.
She'd looked up psychiatric symptoms on the internet, become familiar with the term "sundowning".
Elderly senile patients got worse at night. Their psychoses got worse at night.
Not just the elderly, though. A lot of people got worse when the sun went down. Those with dementia, with schizophrenia, which schizoid affective disorder, with post traumatic stress disorder (she could tick off all the little symptom boxes for this one, herself) and panic disorder (another keeper for her personal collection).
Night time was bad for those chronically wrestling with demons. Sometimes, night was damned near torturous.
She'd been thinking these thoughts while Jane showered, and had still been thinking them when he returned dressed in sweats and a shirt for sleeping. The sweats on him toned down any superficial resemblance he had to Red John, made him seem sloppier, and therefore, safer. Red John had never been sloppy. Ergo sloppy was, if not exactly "good", different enough from the devil she knew not to scare her excessively, in the same way that three piece suits and particular personalities scared her.
Had Jane deliberately worn sweat pants and a sweatshirt on purpose?
Had he analyzed her, read her and adjusted his behavior accordingly?
She watched him and his damp, scruffy hair as he sat in one of Lisbon's stuffed chairs next to the couch and made himself comfortable. Or apparently comfortable, because if Charlotte Anne Jane knew anything, it was that appearances were not reality. They were often reality's photo negative, as ironic as that was…
Whatever reality was.
Jane in his sloppy sweats. She had to stay focused, because her lack of focus represented scary things to the man she wanted to believe was her father. He thought she didn't notice the slight concern in his features, his exaggerated calm when she got spooked.
To her amusement, she realized it was one of Lisbon's shirts- it read HARVARD across the front in bold letters, and Charlotte was pretty sure Lisbon had never been to HARVARD, except maybe to the gift store they had there for students and their families and all the fantasy-prone tourists with shitty scores on important tests, who liked to dream about what could have been their own lives, if they hadn't been born into poverty and forced to care for six younger siblings or watch their fathers drink themselves silly….
"What's on your mind?" Jane asked her after watching her for what felt like a full five minutes.
She blinked and looked at her father. Every interaction between them was emotional chess, analyzed to the nth degree. It was what the Janes did, programmed into their DNA, possibly…
She looked at her birth father and tried to seem like the teenager she was supposed to be.
He looked so much like his brother, like the beast of her nightmares, her tormenter… and yet there was a quality to him, unable to be described properly with mere words, which changed his face completely; a warmth and kindness to his eyes, and a marked compassion when he smiled.
She hoped that look to him wasn't a measured trick.
Jane had a marked humanity to him that Red John had never possessed. Not as long as she had known that beast, anyway.
Red John had worn his human face like a rubber mask, and his face and Patrick Jane's had come from the same mould. But Patrick had an honest-to-God human soul behind the eyes (pretty please, God, let that at least be true…) and Red John?
His was an eerie nothingness, flatter than paper. A giant middle finger to the entire treasured concept of humanity.
Except…
Not even a monster, really, but an eerie absence of life, nothingness impossibly distilled and trapped in a meat suit, pretending to be alive.
Somehow that was worse than all the demonic entities her subconscious conjured forth to keep her company during the bad nights.
That flatness, that blank emptiness, was terrifying in and of itself.
The impossibility of such a thing, staring you back with its intelligent nothing-eyes. Red John was the nothingness of the malignant, sadistic narcissist, walking around on two meat legs. A pretty nothing-beast with a nothing-soul but the eloquent words of a poet in his mouth.
She couldn't stop obsessing about Red John, even now, but Patrick was watching her, and every moment she didn't answer meant something…
"Huh?" Such an eloquent response.
Huh.
Patrick shared his brothers intense gaze though, the laser focus. That was probably genetic. She had it, too, she knew.
Had caught her own laser eyes in the mirror, when she cared enough to look. He was watching her carefully now.
"You look incredibly pensive, Charlie. Want to talk about it?" Intensity blunted by deliberate honesty. God help him, he was showing all his cards, trying his hardest to be "safe".
He wasn't playing games with her, beating around the bush.
He knew she'd close up tight upon herself if he dare tried that. He didn't want to win with her, or dominate her. He wanted her to heal, and feel safe, and be open with him, but it was not about his ego, she knew.
Impossibly, he loved her. Or appeared to love her, anyway.
He loved her as his daughter, and not with Red John's perverted, carnal lust and cruel appetite for mental pain, but as an honest, compassionate, caring human being. She wasn't even sure she believed in compassionate, caring human beings, or only people who acted like them. Maybe real, honest-to-God compassionate people were fairy tales, like unicorns, like mermaids, like fairies and leprechauns.
But she wanted to believe so much.
She looked at her father, at his face so much like Red John's, and felt a chill- the chill of remembrance and the chill that maybe Patrick Jane truly did love her, and was safe, and was good.
She was terrified to believe it, because if it turned out to be untrue, that pain would kill her. Sometimes hope, itself, was its own impossible sort of torture…
Jane smiled back at her, a sad, measured little smile that said: I am here.
He wanted her to be happy, and healthy, and whole, concepts that had ceased to mean anything to her many years earlier.
Trying to hold onto such ideas was like trying to hold onto statues made of ash and dust, or to shadows, or dreams.
Such a strange decency in a world full of walking shadows and maggots dancing in discarded corpses, such a strange wholeness to consider with a fractured, broken mind like her own.
She wanted, so badly, for his love and decency to be real.
That his decency might not be REAL was even worse than the reality of Red John's empty, nothing-there eyes which were somehow still animated and able to see…
Her heart was beating very slow and very hard as she thought these thoughts, and watched her father as he watched her, and pretended to be distracted by the flickering TV and her adolescent whims.
"Charlie… want to talk?" He said again, because she had gone off away in her own mind, and her mind was a dark jungle, and it was easy to get lost in there.
"No," she said, too fast, in response to his offer, and Jane's concerned face grew more concerned. He was good, though. He didn't look overtly concerned.
If Charlotte hadn't been taught to read faces so well, she would have thought he looked very calm… almost impassive.
But she had been trained to read faces, and to read microfacial expressions, too, and she knew he was concerned about her mental health.
And that was putting it mildly.
"I won't judge you, you know. You do know that, right?"
"You're my Dad," Charlotte mumbled, wanting to turn so her back was to him, unable to do it knowing that he might take such a move personally. Every word, every move, every look and expression and inhalation was a chess move. If you lost the game, you died.
If he was good, and she pushed him away out of fear, he might take it personally, and he might grow tired of her, and her damage, and that hollowed out expression in her eyes…
She didn't think he would, but there was always the chance he might, and feel wounded.
He was wounded enough.
But being watched by him was draining.
She felt exposed under his gaze. He was reading so much of her, things she didn't want him to read, surely.
Things she didn't want anybody to read in her, ever, because they were horrible stains on her soul, and because she could never take them back or bleach them out or make them right. Not ever.
"Yes, I am," he said simply, tempering the concerned gaze with a little smile.
She wondered, then, how he could smile at the thought that she was his daughter. To her own mind, there wasn't much about her own existence which warranted such a tender look. And yet, there it was.
"There are some things you can't talk to your Dad about," she said simply from where she was curled up on Lisbon's couch, clutching a throw cushion to her chest like a shield.
He knew instantly what she was talking about, even if she hadn't consciously been thinking the thoughts.
And she felt her cheeks flush bright pink at the ideas and fractured memories that suddenly swarmed behind her eyes, and blush even harder as the concerned look on her father's face grew more pronounced, as his desire to stay calm became markedly stronger, marred by his own grief and rage.
Fuck.
Damn it.
He knew.
He knew, and he knew that she knew he knew.
And it was fucking embarrassing, and humiliating, and horrifying, because he looked like Red John, and because part of her wanted to attack her own father, attack him viciously, for carrying Red John's physical appearance around in his body and looking so much like the man who had tortured her, repeatedly, over a span of years.
She had to consciously tell herself, always, to calm down. That he was Patrick, and that Patrick was safe. But the face… so similar.
He nodded at once.
"No, I suppose not." No judgment there, just concern, and somehow that was worse. She was tired of being an object of hungry lust or marked concern. Both realities meant being helpless, in their own shameful way.
Charlotte pressed a button on the remote, skipped through a few channels, features tense and strained, eyes shining. Jane watched her thoughtfully.
She knew he was watching her, but damn it, not much she could do about that watching, or his thinking, or his thoughts.
He deliberately slowed his breathing and worked to release the tension in his shoulders. Important to keep the dialog flowing, now.
That was what he told himself, but he didn't entirely want to be alone in his own mind, now, with these thoughts, late at night. Not right before sleep.
"Could you talk to Lisbon about it?"
"Lisbon's nice," Charlie muttered, eyes scanning the screen as she channel-surfed. "But she won't understand."
"She might," Jane allowed. Charlotte looked over at him, caught his eyes. Forced steel into her eyes, the edge of a razor in the green depths.
"She won't."
"Lisbon has seen a lot of stuff in her life, you know. A lot of bad stuff, I mean. It comes with her job."
"There is a difference between seeing bad stuff as part of your job, with... with people around you turning the whole thing into a procedure. Something clinical and safe, bad but…able to be gotten away from in your own head at the end of the day, or the end of the week. Big difference between that and… and…"
Damn it, how was he getting her to talk? He was like some sort of wizard. She just had to stop talking.
But he was watching her, and if anybody on earth could understand her, it was him… and she was so tired of being alone, too.
Silence hung in the air, something caught in a net, a deep sea monster. The silence wriggled and squirmed, uncomfortable and naked. That silence was ugly and needed to be thrown back to the depths. But it also wanted to die, that silence.
"And what, kiddo?" His voice like honey, or silk.
"And doing horrible things yourself." Her words were traitorous, squirming out of her mouth despite her desire to keep them locked inside her brain with all the other trash.
Part of her wanted to speak, so badly to speak, and to have her history paid witness to, to be absolved of her involvement with Red John, of her crimes under his tutelage. She felt so dirty, always, like the dirt was ingrained on every particle, every subatomic particle, of her soul.
Jane sucked on the inside of his cheek and lowered his eyes just a little. Finally nodded.
"I suspect that's true," he said softly. Charlotte felt a brief moment of victory.
She had managed to make her point, make her point and get the truth across to her father, to shut him up. But he looked forlorn now, almost lost in his own thoughts, and the victory was short-lived. Or rather, it was a Pyrrhic victory, a win at the loss of something special and good.
She hadn't won at all. There was no winning here.
How silly to think there would be. They were both on the same side. Weren't they?
And they were both deeply hurting.
She found a late night show- Conan- and upped the volume. Conan was funny. Lots of canned laughter, lots of stupid shit to suck some of the tension out of the room. Conan was safe. It was her peace offering, her olive branch…
No buried alive and rape memories in Conan, just botoxed guests and bug-eyed Zoo animals paraded around for the slack-jawed morons in the audience to gawk and laugh at.
Tomorrow the FBI would speak to her about Red John.
That's why they were here, after all. Sure, Jane wanted to talk to Elian, but that was more to figure out his daughter than minister to Elian's deteriorating mental health.
Jane now laughed at something Conan said. Charlotte considered leaving it alone. Couldn't.
"The FBI want to speak to me tomorrow."
"Is that what you're worried about? If you don't want to speak to them, you don't have to. I'm not going to make you."
A beat of silence.
"Can't they legally detain me or something if I refuse?" Charlotte queried. The idea of getting in trouble and maybe locked up by the FBI was terrifying. Red John still had eyes in the FBI, and they were ticking time bombs of insanity. They never blinked, they never slept, not as a whole.
"We'll figure out something else, if it really upsets you," Jane said, watching as his daughter let out a burdened sigh.
His words were carefully dismissive, as if talking to the FBI about her decade-long involvement with one of the nation's most infamous serial killers was optional, a trip to the zoo, a Saturday matinee at the movie theater, tooth whitening at the dentist…
Charlotte knew Jane would get her out of it. Impossibly, he would.
That wasn't the point.
It would haunt her, the idea that the federal government wanted to speak to her, and Red John with his eyes out there, watching… maybe just waiting to strike. Those eyes were unpredictable, and surely there were hundreds of them.
If they dealt with the FBI, then maybe a bit of the fear in her would go away.
Not likely… but one could hope.
"If I talk to them, can you be there?"
"You'd like me there?" Jane said. He seemed almost surprised, but nodded immediately. He had planned to watch through a one-way mirrored window anyway at minimum, no matter what.
Charlotte nodded. Because she knew he would be watching through the one-way mirror. Wheels within wheels.
"Red John has eyes in the FBI. I don't want to go anywhere alone with them."
"I will be with you," Jane promised, nodding.
"If I spoke to them you would have been there anyway. Probably watching through a one way glass, right?" She had to let her Dad know she had him figured out.
"I was planning to work out something like that, yeah," Jane said, nodding. Not surprised at her comment, smiling a little tenderly.
"If I don't want to answer something, can I just say I don't remember?" Charlotte said softly, eyes drifting back to Conan on the screen.
Conan was holding some sort of little monkey or something, holding it to his cheek and making a –ridiculous pouty face. The middle-aged Tiger Beat ™ pin up. There was laughter in response to the stupid expression on his face and the agitated, panicked expression on the face of the monkey. Charlotte let her mouth curve a little at the stupidity of it.
How wonderful it would have been, if she could have had an average, boring, stupid life… where being dumped by a boy or thinking herself fat or ugly were the worst of her traumas.
"If you don't want to answer, then probably just best to say you don't want to answer," Jane said and Charlotte furrowed her brow.
"If they asked you something, and you didn't want to answer, you'd probably say you didn't remember, right?"
Jane sucked on his smile, sucked the inside of his cheek.
"Maybe. But I don't want you to get into lying, Charlie. It… it changes a person. Besides, you're not manipulative enough to pull lying off effectively, so why bother?"
She thought about that response.
"Can they force me to answer?" Charlotte said a moment later.
The little monkey was gone and now there was some sort of brightly coloured, large bird strutting around on the stage, pecking its giant, prehistoric beak against the polished wood floor. More laughter.
Conan remarked loudly about the bird's impressive genius qualities, and the crowd tittered like the sycophants they were.
The audience would probably explode in laughter if the damned thing were to shit on the floor.
"Try to get some sleep, Charlie. It's going to be okay, you know. Please believe me."
Charlotte plastered on a smile for her father.
Sighed.
They both knew that "okay" was a concept she had abandoned years ago.
"Sleep is good," Jane said a moment later, yawning himself, and it didn't look staged or forced. Charlotte nodded and watched the television screen, and the fake, canned laughter. An illusion of safety.
In the night, reality changed. Because she was dreaming, and because reality changed with dreams… Dreams were as real, subjectively, as the waking world, and it was only the social contract, frail as it was, and the desire to have some control over the uncontrollable that led most people to claim otherwise…
In the dream she was neither girl nor boy, but a child, genderless in her youth and innocence. Her hair colour flickered between brunette and its current, waking blond. Her age undulated between about 5 (the year everything in her life went to shit, the year of her own personal apocalypse) and about 9.
She was in a large (large was probably an understatement), futuristic city.
The buildings had an ornate, gothic design to them, though, and bricks that seemed to jut from the side of towering walls, columns and spires and slanted pyramid walls, ornate ladders attached to the stone walls in case of FIRE… huge gargoyles attached indiscriminately to the sides of the walls, to scare away demons.
Giant stained glass windows depicting all sorts of scenes, both garish and sublime were set into some of the stone-walled buildings, and those stained-glass places were also cathedrals.
The God the dream-people worshipped inside the cathedrals were individual memories.
In some of the stained glass images in her dream-world, there were classical depictions of the mother and child, but the mother was her own deceased Mommy, (Angela) and the messiah child was her, at age 5, before she had been "killed" by Red John.
In some of the stained glass images, a golden haired Adonis who had been her father in another life carried her on his sun-tanned shoulders, grinning his perfect grin, in front of Malibu's blue waves.
And then the images changed to grinning, garish skeletons, and bloody smiley faces, knives and murder scenes, intestines and rot, demonic creatures and Hell-fire.
She ran through the futuristic city, and she was chased and hounded by a seemingly endless stream of people. Some pretended to be social workers, others were judges and police and fire fighters, psychologists and random "good Samaritans"… but she couldn't trust any of them, because far too many of them could morph before her eyes, and smile their brainwashed, hypnotized, sadistic smiles, and if they caught her, they would hand her over to the Devil Himself.
So she ran, and she ran, and she ran some more. She had been running for what felt like a million years. She was a child, but she was an old child, wizened and destroyed but stunted.
She would never stop running.
That didn't stop them from chasing her down the shadowy, twilit streets though, over the cobblestone, through the shadows, around the dumpsters, yelling: "We are here to help" and "you can trust me".
In her genderless dream form, she had to escape them.
She shimmied up fire escapes, but the wrought iron was too hot or cold, or sometimes covered in razor blades, and her hands were frozen or burned or cut to ribbons.
Still, she could not stop running.
She scrambled over ledges, swung from the garish tongues of middle-age gargoyles, dizzy over the dizzying dream-heights of this impossible city, unable to stop running, unable to stop hiding… she had to escape at any cost… she had to stay safe… she couldn't trust the people who claimed to be trust worthy.
Maybe some of them actually were safe, too, but the ones that were Red John's eyes looked and acted the same, exactly the same, and it was a crap shoot.
There was no way to know who was truly safe, and who was only pretending to be safe, so she had to keep running, and climbing, and scaling the ledges of skyscrapers, and risking her life jumping from roof to roof and from gargoyle mouth to gargoyle mouth, and crying and bleeding all over the place.
And if she clung to the tongue of a gargoyle for too long, it might start to move, it might taste her innocence and desperation and decide to close its mouth around her, and swallow her whole… so she could not ever rest.
She had to keep running.
Because there was no death, no death in the sense of peace and oblivion… just worse-than-death, more terrifying realms of consciousness... endless levels of Hell.
Her dream-hands were gushing blood, and so were her feet.
Her abdomen had holes in it from being punctured by spires and spikes and razor wire and other random architectural barriers.
Her genitals were cut to ribbons, almost a mush of flesh, oozing blood and clots of blood.
She knew if she kept climbing these buildings, and tip-toeing on the razor-edges of roofs, her feet would split to the very bone, and then through the bone to the soft marrow inside, and she would fall apart, dismembered by the heights, limb by limb, and tumble off the towering ledges, fall into the dark of the street… disappear down there forever, maybe… where the shadowy, faceless masses might eat her or bury her or thrown her in the trash cans to rot alone.
The dark streets, the unknown people… she was about to collapse in a pile of blood, and there it was: in the middle of the dream world was a hospital, and there were doctors there.
The hospital smelled of soap, and strawberries and medicine.
There was a paramedic in the large ambulance bay smoking a cigarette, and it was a woman paramedic, and it wore Teresa Lisbon's face.
"It's okay, sweetie. I won't hurt you… you're bleeding pretty badly, though. Why don't we get you inside and stitch you up?"
Inside the dream-hospital, they might save her life.
Or… they might torture her to death.
But if she kept running and leaping and jumping and scaling these terrible, gothic heights, she would lose her entire blood supply, she would be cut to ribbons…
"My feet hurt," dream-Charlie says to paramedic Lisbon. "My feet are cut." Her voice is that of a five year old child's, traumatized and shell-shocked.
"You need a blood transfusion, sweetie. You're in hypovolemic shock."
But that is not all dream Charlie needs.
Her genitals have been cut to fleshy ribbons, her uterus is festering with pus and blood and it hurts in a way that surpasses the mere physical dimensions of ordinary pain. She is hemorrhaging on the inside, from between her legs, and black and fresh blood is pouring from her privates, mixing with the blood from her feet, and her hands. Her legs are dribbling urine, too.
There is a hot, sticky heat on her face, on her baby-round cheeks.
She is crying blood, also.
"I don't want him to see," dream-Charlie tells the paramedic wearing Lisbon's face. Paramedic Lisbon's cigarette is on the ground now, forgotten but smoldering.
"He already knows. Jane is a doctor. He knows what your symptoms mean, so you can stop worrying about it."
"I don't want him to see," the genderless child named Charlie says. Its hair is now dark brown, almost black and the blood-tears are a stream down the face, a gush of blood.
"He can already see the damage, sweetie."
"Red John was a doctor, too, though," dream-Charlie says, voice trembling.
The paramedic with Lisbon's face is resolute.
"Red John was a butcher who just happened to go to medical school. A serial killer with a doctor's skills. He never took the Hippocratic oath."
"He told me he was Hippocrates in a past life," says dream-Charlie, voice shaking. Dream-Charlie wants to sob with the fear and the confusion, and because of all the blood. She is scared of blood.
"Red John does what liars do, because he is a liar."
"Is my Dad a liar? Is Patrick?"
"Patrick can lie, but he is not a liar," says the paramedic, and she stamps out the cigarette. No more smoldering. The dream-Charlie considers this. There is a pool of blood around her now, like a sticky dark shadow.
"I am dying, but I am still scared of Patrick."
"I can perform the surgery, then. Doctor Cho, maybe. But it needs to be performed soon."
"I don't want anybody to see," dream-Charlie says faintly, lip trembling hard, but the pain between the legs is increasing, and the bottom of his/her feet feel like hot slush. A quick glance in that direction shows gangrenous legs, black and stinking and a sticky slug-like trail of glistening blood, fingers that are broken and bruised, swollen and purple like sausages.
What a mess.
"I don't feel good," dream-Charlie says, and after running, the ageless, genderless little child (now wearing a fuzzy yellow footy pajamas over the bloody stump feet and gushing hands and hemorrhaging privates… that little dream child collapses on the black asphalt in front of the dream hospital and in front of dream-Lisbon.
Collapses in a heap of tears and blood.
Some of the tears, though, are from relief, because she is going to have hope and faith, and take a measured risk, and let the Lisbon-doctor help her.