He had seemed so kind at first…

Into the doctor's office, find the flashlight, turn it on.

…when he took over my mother's treatment…

Weak beam of light, turn of the key.

…keeping me informed of her condition…

Black metal filing cabinets filling the room.

…how well she was responding…

Straight to the Bs, straight to the end, flip straight to Burke, Elaine P.

…she was responding so well.

"I'm coming home soon," my mother told me the day before she killed herself. "Dr. Crane won't keep me here anymore. He agrees that it's time for me to leave Arkham. I'm so much better now, and I have so much to tell you when I get home."

Blackmail?

That afternoon he gave her the "sedative" scorbuticroton.

I don't know how long I lay there on the floor, holding my mother's crazy papers to my chest the way I used to hold my dolls. I could almost feel her presence in the room, berating me ever so gently for taking so long to figure it out.

This time when I closed my eyes and saw my dead mother's face in the water, I also envisioned Dr. Crane's hand on the back of her neck.

I ripped file after file from the cabinets at random, looking only at the final pages, throwing them to the floor when I was done.

They told me everything I needed to know.

Every single patient who had died after receiving a heavy dose of scarecrow had gone out by suicide or heart failure. They were—and I shudder even now to clear the way for such an obviously bad joke—literally scared to death.

I went back into Dr. Crane's office and smashed the lock on his bottom drawer, intent on giving the doctor a double handful of his own medicine.

It was then that the doorknob turned, and it dawned on me that I hadn't been listening to the vents.

I looked up to see Dr. Crane's tall, thin frame silhouetted in the doorway.

"What—" he started, seeing me.

"Wait! I have to stall you!" Al bellowed, and dove forward to grab his trousers and the waistband. She hit the floor, taking the pants down with her.

Her extra weight threw him off balance, and he fell, striking his head on the edge of his desk. I recoiled in horror. He didn't get up.

"Oh, my God. We killed him."

"No, he's fine." She turned on the desk light and closed the door. "Let's do stuff to him."

"Stuff?" I repeated hysterically. She was already on her knees beside him, stripping off his jacket and tie. "My God, Alice! What are you going to do?"

"Ssh." She took off his shirt, folded it, and tied it over his eyes as a blindfold. Then she took off his cheap cotton undershirt and pressed it against his gushing head wound. "Give me his socks and shoes. We need to tie him up." I did as she said, then started to use his pants to tie his feet together while Al tied his hands behind his back with his jacket.

My fury had died down. I still hated him, yes, I wanted to make him suffer, but at the same time, I felt a little sorry for him, lying there almost naked on the cold wood floor. He looked so vulnerable. In a suit, he looked scrawny; without it, he was positively gaunt. Had I not known what sort of man he really was, I would have been tempted to gather him up in my arms and feed him stew until he put some meat on his bones.

"Hey, wait," said Al. "Don't forget his underwear." I felt my face go scarlet.

"You can't be serious." I went cold all over, shuddering so hard I dropped the knot I was trying to tie. "Al, what are you planning to do to him? I mean, he saw me. Whatever happens, he'll trace it back." I was ready to burst into tears until Al started laughing.

"Don't worry. This place throws weird shadows. He didn't see your face. As long as we keep our voices disguised when he wakes up, he won't trace any of this to us." Not only could I not match her enthusiasm, but I wasn't quite sure I wanted to know what unspeakable acts he would be tracing. "I'm not going to man-rape him," Al insisted. "I just want to shake him up a little. You know, his studies revolved around fear. I prefer humiliation."

Dr. Crane groaned and shifted position slightly. Al gave me a significant look and pulled his jacket tighter around his wrists. I shut my eyes and removed his underwear, touching it with nothing but my thumbs and forefingers, placing it neatly on top of him as quickly as possible. Then I tied his feet together with his pants.

He groaned more loudly and then tried to sit up. Al pushed him firmly back down. He jerked away from her hand.

"Who's there?" he demanded. I was pleased to detect a note of fear in his voice. "Alice?"

"Your intern is gone for the night," Al said in a harsh whisper. "I assure you, doctor, you're quite alone with me." She put her hand on him in a way that could have been sexual or threatening. Kept it there when he tried to squirm away. Dug her nails in to see if he was ticklish.

"Who are you? What do you want?" Her hand moved up to hold his mouth open. Her other hand stuffed his socks inside. I gagged.

"First I want you to stop talking." Dr. Crane squealed in outrage as she tied his necktie over his mouth. She made it tight. I almost felt bad watching him choke on his own socks.

"You may find breathing extremely difficult for the next few hours, so I suggest you don't waste your energy on anything trivial," Al instructed.

I couldn't be completely sure, but he seemed to be trying to tell her something slightly outside the bounds of propriety.

Al pointed at the desk. I stood up silently and picked up a pair of scissors, privately wondering if I really had the stomach for this, or if the smell of blood would remind me of the smell of the drugs.

Al shook her head. I picked up a red marker instead. She smiled.

"Whatever you may be thinking right now, Dr. Crane, I assure you that I don't want your money." She picked up the little handful of change that had fallen out of his pocket and tossed it carelessly at his face. He flinched. "I don't want any 'special favors.' I don't even want you to be afraid." Her sudden laugh made me jump out of my skin. The doctor was clearly not feeling much better about it than I was.

"I want you to know that you will survive the night," she rasped in his ear. "You may be a little battered, but you won't be permanently damaged." She put a finger to his hollowed cheek and pushed, tilting his head to the side. "No, what I want is for you to squirm." The cap came off the marker and she began drawing a series of hearts and lip-prints down the side of his neck. "You will be utterly humiliated." She flipped him over on his stomach and began to write something across his ass. "Utterly." I fought hard not to giggle when I realized that what she was writing was "Batman Was Here."

"You know everyone will laugh at you. But that's nothing new to you, is it?" She flipped him over again, drawing on his chest: a little stick figure with his left nipple for a head. "They've always laughed at you, haven't they? Bullies are drawn to gangly little four-eyes like you. But four-eyes isn't what they called you, is it?" She wrote an S on his forehead.

"Mmmph!"

"Afraid, Jonathan? Haven't you ever been tied up before? I'm sure you have. Were you naked? I don't know if you can tell, but you're completely naked now. Did they ever tie you down and beat you, Jonathan? Did they want to hurt you, or just give you a good scare?" SCARE, echoed the writing on his forehead. "I want you to think about this while I have you. Remember. What happened to you last time? Did they leave you alone all night, alone and scared, tied to the goalpost at the far end of the football field? They thought they had left you close enough to your school for someone to hear you the next morning when you screamed for help. But no one heard you. How long did you hang there, scarecrow?" Dr. Crane flinched. Al smiled and finished writing the word SCARECROW across his forehead. She went back to drawing on his chest as she whispered to him.

"You may be glad to know that you'll be discovered much sooner this time. Those floodlights you installed to track escaping prisoners will shine directly on you tomorrow morning when your subordinates come to work. It will only be a few hours from now before someone finds you. And they'll laugh. And laugh. And laugh. Just like before, Jonathan. Laugh and point at the poor, pathetic joke of a man. At the scrawny little scarecrow. I see you don't like that word. Is that what they called you when you were a child? Poor, pathetic, sad little scarecrow."

--

When Al had every inch of his skin covered with drawings and obscene messages, we dragged him up to the roof. The place was easily accessible because, after all, it didn't make much of an escape route. The drop to the pavement was more than forty feet, the walls too slick to climb, the grounds patrolled by armed guards at night and surrounded by impenetrable walls.

The cold was like a slap in the face. When we let go of his feet, Dr. Crane curled into a ball, shivering. A light snow was falling.

"Cold, doctor?" Al whispered. "Don't worry. All the excess heat from this old building is released up here. I'm going to tie you right next to the vent. You may not be comfortable, but it should keep you warm enough."

It wasn't easy making it seem like just one pair of hands, but we managed to retie his bonds so he was hanging with his bare toes about a foot off the ground, the vent blowing warm air at his back. He was still shivering when we left him, but he would survive.

Al and I watched him from the window at the top of the stairs. He struggled to free himself. He was relatively calm, for now. Soon he would begin to panic and tire himself out.

"What you said before, about being tied to a goalpost…did that really happen?" I asked. Al nodded.

"One of the guards here went to high school with Dr. Crane. Yesterday, we had a nice little chat."

"That poor child." My feelings of pity passed quickly. "What do we do now? This was never part of the plan."

"We wait until morning. When everyone else starts coming in for work, we join the crowd rushing up to the roof. When we discover what a terrible thing some cad has done to our dear Dr. Crane, we call the police and invite them to search his office to see if anything was stolen. If they don't make the connection between the drugs in his desk and all those files you dumped on the floor, we can always tip them later."

"Then we should probably take a sample with us, just in case."

We watched Dr. Crane until he finally stopped struggling and slumped over, defeated. Then we went downstairs.