She went in and out, after that.
In her waking, she was taken down a hallway full of voices and bright lights and machines.
It was cold. So very cold...
In her dreams, she saw the thing with antlers standing in its field of flames again; only this time, she was floating miles above it, and she felt herself getting higher.
And again, the thing spoke to her:
"Rest, little lamb, but only now. You were made for the waking world — it was not made for you."
The stringing of words together didn't help her to process it, but before she had a chance to do so, it was over: for the very last time, the world around her disappeared.
She was in a hospital bed. That much she knew.
The beeping of a heart monitor, the smell of hand sanitizer, and the crinkling of the cot beneath her were enough to give it away, even before she opened her eyes and stirred awake from Hell.
Looking down at herself, she could see she was draped in a hospital gown and a blanket. That much made sense, but the strangest thing about it was that even here, she felt just as cold as she did when she woke up the first time.
'The first time.' She pondered that phrase. 'The first time ever?' Obviously not — she was a fully grown adult and, as such, she'd woken up many times before, that much was certain; and yet, she couldn't remember any one time that she did.
Still cold, she huddled her arms against her body and ran her hands along each one. It didn't help. Nothing helped, it seemed.
She had to fix this.
"Nurse," she called hoarsely. Her throat felt scratchy — atrophied, even. "Nurse!" she tried again. It was a little louder, but several seconds passed and no one came.
At least now she was sure her voice worked at all.
While one hand was still trying to gain friction on her arm, the other felt around on the side of the bed, and sure enough, there was a nurse call button for her to press. She pushed it a couple times before, like a kid using an elevator, she figured she'd have to be patient.
So she waited. To occupy herself, her eyes wandered around the room. It was small, plain, with white tiled floors and tan painted walls. A nightstand with a telephone and a shaded lamp on top stood between her head and the closest wall (second only to the one behind her). The lamp was off at the moment, dimmed lights coming instead from the windows and half-drawn curtains at the other side of the room.
Eventually, her eyes settled on a thermostat on the wall opposite to her. 'Seventy-point-zero degrees Fahrenheit,' it read.
She heard the clacking of heels grow louder, and soon enough, a fat stump of a nurse with a short, red mop of curly hair walked in.
"Sorry to keep you waiting," said the nurse. "What's—?"
The nurse took one look at her and jumped back. Gasped. Set a hand on her chest and closed her eyes, facing the ceiling.
"Good lord," she swore.
"What? What is it?"
"Nothing, nothing!" The nurse reached for the flat plank full of paper on the edge of her patient's bed and pulled it off to dig through it.
Clipboard. That's what it was called. She remembered, now.
"Oh my..." The nurse's brows furrowed more and more as she flipped through each medical reading.
"What?" she asked again.
But the nurse just shifted her eyes nervously between the papers and the patient.
"Do you have a name?" the nurse asked.
She thought back to when she woke up before. The clipboard.
"Jane Doe," she replied.
The nurse did a double-take and looked at her sideways. "Is that your real name?"
Jane nodded. She didn't really know. And yet, it made sense to her.
The nurse was still giving her that same odd look when she took out a pen and clicked it. "Alright." She something onto the papers. "And what do you remember?"
"When?"
"Before... well, you know."
She didn't. Jane tilted her head sideways.
Having no answer, the nurse sighed impatiently. "Before you woke up in a morgue," she added.
Jane looked down at her lap, attempting to collect her thoughts; there weren't any, however, and the sight of her blanket just reminded her of how cold she was. She began rubbing her hands against her arms again — faster, this time.
The nurse noticed, of course. "Do you want me to turn up the heat for you?"
"Yes, please."
The nurse smiled and nodded. She turned around to push the buttons on the thermostat, leaving Jane to stare at her ass.
The same ass that had been defiled by a married male doctor today, and for the fifth time in as many months. She knew he was married — she saw the ring, even though he never mentioned it, even though he hid it every time he walked into the same room as her — she wasn't married herself, though, so she was alright, is what she told herself; she wasn't to blame for taking part in it if he initiated it, right? Besides, nobody had to know.
But Jane knew. She didn't know how she knew, but in that moment, she knew.
"Seventy-five, how's that sound?" said the nurse. Jane blinked herself out from her train of thought.
"I'm st-till cold."
"It'll take a bit to warm up, sweetie. I'll put you at seventy-six, just to be safe."
"Th-thank you..."
'...whore.'
The nurse nodded slightly. Taking the clipboard, she jotted something else down and set it back on the edge of the bed where it was.
"I'll tell the doctor you're awake," she said, again without making eye contact, and shuffled uncomfortably out of the room.
Jane was alone with her new thoughts. She couldn't remember a time in her life when she had so many. She couldn't remember any time in her life at all — more to the point, she supposed.
She wanted to forget the pain she had felt: the fire, the giant with antlers, the feverish confusion of it all... but there was nothing in her memory to use. Nothing but her present pain to focus on. The room was not warming up. She could hardly even feel her hands on her arms at all, let alone feel the warmth of her palms which was most certainly there.
"Hel-lo there," the doctor sang warmly as he came into view.
Jane smiled. He was old and his hair was slicked back and grey, but he was tall and his features were soft and personable, like a movie star.
But her smile turned sour as she looked at his hand and saw the gold wedding band around his finger. He took it off when he walked into the room with that nurse. She'd caught him off-guard this time, so he'd stuck his hands in his pockets until she was out of sight.
And all of this, Jane somehow knew.
Just like she knew his wife worried herself sick when he came home later than usual. She worried when he lied to her, finding ways to uneasily explain away the extra hours, the mysterious phone calls, the things she found in his pockets she didn't remember him having... all of that worrying was years being taken away from the poor woman's life.
He was killing her.
The doctor didn't see the expression on Jane's face. He was too busy taking the clipboard off the bed, flipping through all the stats and graphs and the notes that that nurse had jotted down.
The nurse. His accomplice. She wouldn't take responsibility, but she was killing his wife just as much as the doctor himself with her ignorance, her complacency, her eagerness...
The doctor whistled in surprise at the papers.
"You've been through a lot, haven't you, Miss... Doe, is it?"
Jane nodded. "Yes."
"I see." He must have picked up the uncertainty in her voice.
"You don't prefer anything else?"
"No."
"That's alright. We'll go with 'Jane', for now." His brow bunched up as he scanned the notes with an air of skepticism.
"It says here you woke up inside of a... crematorium? Is that true?"
'Crematorium'. The word bounced around in her head. She couldn't say 'yes', only because she couldn't think of what it could mean for long enough without thinking of...
"I... don't know," she dismissed.
"I see. Can you remember anything before then?"
"Y-yes."
"Oh?" His eyebrows raised as he looked at her head-on. "Like what?"
"I..." She kept her mouth open, wanting to tell him about the fire, the giant, the words he spoke to her, but as soon as she tried, she thought: was that also in the crematorium? Was it even real? Or was it all just in her head?
"...don't know," she finished.
The doctor clicked his tongue. "Sorry about that," he said, as if he was sorry for anything. "But at least we got you out alright, relatively speaking."
" 'Relatively speaking'?" She didn't like the sound of that.
"I mean, you got out with no burns or outward tissue damage. That's... a miracle, frankly."
"I'm so cold."
He huffed out through his nose. "Ah, that. Well, there may have been some damage done to your nerves. We checked your reflexes as soon as we wheeled you in here — non-responsive."
"Non-responsive?"
"Completely. And, then there's, well, the obvious. We're not sure how it happened, definitely before you were turned over to the morgue, but—"
" 'Obvious'? What's obvious?"
"Well... you've probably wondered by now why you can't see."
"What are you talking about? I can see just fine!"
"I realize you might be in a state of shock. Like I said before, you've been through a lot, so, given the circumstances, shock is perfectly normal."
"Mirror," she commanded.
"I beg your pardon?"
"I need a mirror."
The doctor just stared at her. He chuckled, sounding nervous, and shook his head as he looked down at the floor. "Eh-heh, I'm, uh, afraid that won't do you much good in your current, um, condi—"
"I need a mirror!"
"Okay, okay," he said as reassuringly as he could, "calm down, I'll get you one."
He walked over to the side of Jane's bed and held out a hand. "Do you think you can stand up?"
Jane wasn't sure. She slid one leg out from beneath the blanket and touched the cold, hard floor. Then the other, so that now she was sitting at her bedside.
It was strange: she couldn't actually feel the floor, not the touch or the texture of it, and yet she was sharply aware of it, like the cotton of her blanket as it scraped against her skin.
She stood, first with bent knees as she held onto the nightstand to her for support, and slowly stretched out her legs. She wouldn't take the doctor's hand.
He wrapped an arm around her shoulders to help her forwards — "careful," he warned, "try not to strain yourself" — and he led her to the bathroom: a little sub-room walled off in the corner of the larger hospital bedroom, where a mirror hung just over a small sink. "Here we are," the doctor signalled. The bathroom was too dark to see anything until, entirely out of courtesy, he flipped the switch.
Jane jumped at what she saw: long, ink-black hair; skin which, having seen three other people now, she realized was paler than it should have been, being almost chalk-white; her most striking feature, however, was her eyes...
...which were missing entirely.
Her eyelids were there, but the space behind them was empty, up to the pink-and-red flesh bordering either socket.
All this, she could see vividly.
Jane leaned forward onto the rim of the bathroom sink to get a closer look. As uncanny as the sight of her face was, she found it hard to resist putting her hands up to her eyes. Her eyelids gave little resistance. They were like the outer surface of bubbles made of air and skin, and touching them felt like they should pop. They didn't, of course. She was about to stick her finger in one socket before the doctor intervened, grabbing her hand, startling her.
"Sorry," he said. "It's probably best that you don't touch that area too much. Even if your pain receptors are unresponsive, you could still agitate it, which would mean we'd have to take reactive measures."
"Oh?"
The doctor nodded, but only on reflex. He knew she couldn't see him. Even though she could. "Your eyes have been completely removed from their sockets," he said somberly. "There's nothing we can do. I'm sorry."
"But... I can see, really! Look, this shouldn't even be possible!"
"Whatever you're seeing is likely a hallucination brought on by extensive nerve damage. They might persist, but you'll just have to ignore them until we can explore your options, hopefully fix your condition, and, most importantly, get your memories back."
"My... memories..." It had escaped her just how little she thought about her past. It seemed so unimportant in the face of it all.
But now she was starting to question everything. Was what she was seeing now even real? She'd seen her eyes were gone before the even mentioned them... but had she really? Could she just feel that they were gone and now be guessing what that would look like? But how could she if her nerves were non-receptive? The question wasn't whether she saw it — she did, so then the question was how many blanks was her mind filling in by itself? And if her sight couldn't be trusted...
"What about thoughts?" she asked, facing the spot of the room where she thought she saw her doctor.
The doctor took pause. "What kind of thoughts?"
"The nurse that came in here... you..."
He leaned in closer to her, watching her expectantly.
There was something in his eyes: a slight panic. This was proof of nothing since it was based on vision, and yet, the panic itself felt real to Jane. As if it was radiating off of him.
Jane leaned away. "...you're having an affair with her, aren't you?"
The panic was deafening, now.
His mouth opened, but no words came out. He shook his head with his mouth shut tight and his eyes veering off to the side. He opened his mouth again, but still he was speechless; instead, he pushed a coughed out of his throat and into his fist — she knew he did, she heard him do it — and began leading Jane back towards her bed.
"We can discuss this later," he said. "Get some rest, for now."
But she didn't want to rest. She wanted him stay. Not because she liked him. Dear god, no.
She hated him. But that was precisely it.
It felt good for Jane — the fear she made him feel. So disarmed, so unprepared. And he deserved it, too. She knew he did. She wanted to make make him fear her again, to have that sort of control over him, to take control away and use it against him. To punish him.
After the shells of her eyes followed the doctor out, Jane layed herself down, unable to feel the pillow beneath her head and unwarmed by the blanket tucked around her.
She tried to rest, she really tried, but no matter how she long it took or how hard she tried, she couldn't go back to sleep; so instead, she lay fully awake, staring at the ceiling, or the nightstand, or the clipboard near the foot of her bed.
And all she could think was how the doctor was a murderer, and the nurse his bitch moll.
And how the lamp above her nightstand, if the bulb inside was somehow broken, would make for a great scalpel.