Chapter 8

Her

I don't remember this. I can't remember this. Everything before my turning was lost. And yet, everything here is so real, so solid. Nothing in the rooms I had explored was anything but tangible and crisply detailed. I must have wandered these halls, stared at these walls, sat in these lounges. The boredom, the emptiness, all etching the minute details into my mind.

Had I captured the position and shape of every freckle on Blanche McGrath's face? That nervous, wide eyed nurse? Every pore and hair?

She caught me staring at her and shifted awkwardly, tugging at her apron. One of her grey blue eyes had a fleck of brown in it. I did not look away. She wasn't real, after all.

The poor girl did not have the disposition to work in a place like this, she was far too sensitive, too open. Perhaps the years would harden her. Or, I should say, perhaps they had. because in the real world her vibrant ginger hair would long ago have turned grey. I guessed she would be in her early 90s, if she even made it this far.

I couldn't help but wonder at the immortal she could have been, had it been her, not I that Angelus had hunted. Another Victoria, perhaps? I couldn't imagine such a frail, doe like girl turned into a merciless predator. But I guess I had. We all have it in us.

Nurse McGrath had collected me from my room and, as instructed, sat dutifully watching over me until the psychiatrist would see me.

We sat silently in large square chairs of mahogany wood that felt impossibly hard against my flesh. Now and again, Blanche's eyes flicked to me, then down to my bandaged arms and back to the floor. Had we done this seven decades ago? Had she feared me then?

Or had I made her all up?

I could hear the soporific murmur of the alienist's voice through the wood as he talked to his patient. There was an arrogance to his tone, to his authority, that annoyed me. What did he know? Most of what he was certain to be fact was long ago debunked. They treated us with scorching hot baths and malaria, for Christ's sake.

Still, I knew that it would be best for me to play along with his illusions. Fiction as this all was, the sensations were painfully real. The disciplinary actions for any digression would still be torture to me. I had to get through this dream scape, survive until someone rescued me. I prayed Edward or Esme would sense me through the deep soil that hid my body.

Surely Buffy had noticed I had vanished?

Hadn't she?

I gasped as my nails punched through the skin of my palm, and it wasn't until that moment I realized how balled tight my fists were. Blanche looked at me curiously, I allowed a smile to flutter to my lips and hid my hand.

The heavy wooden door swung open to reveal the alienist, a portly man with shaved short hair and a long greying sagging moustache. He smiled curtly and nodded to the patient, a woman, who scurried out the far door at such a speed that I couldn't recognise her.

"Ms. Brandon. Do come in." He said.

…

His office reminded me of Carlilse's somewhat, although I clearly had not modelled it on it. The furniture was antique, the rich red polished wood not quite sitting right in the white painted, airy room. It was narrow, box like, but with a high ceiling and an impressive arch window just like the one in my room. A french door that opened out to the same landscape. It made me uncomfortable that it was wide open, that somehow that thin barrier of glass protected me from something out there. Something in the shifting shadows of the tree line. I nervously edged into the room, and he shut the door behind me.

"Such fine weather we are having, don't you think?" He said.

"A little warm for my liking." I said, resting my hands on the back of the chair, one still balled up and bleeding. "Could you perhaps turn on the fan?"

He eyed me curiously, his moustache twitching. He adjusted the fan to aim it at the chair and flicked on the switch. The cool breeze was a mercy on my burning flesh. He sat down and observed me in silence for a moment.

"Tell me Alice, what year is it?"

"1920." I lied.

"And your name?"

"Mary Alice Brandon. I prefer you call me Alice."

Again that curious look. Twitch. He gestured for me to sit, and I warily did so. I say warily, as that door was open and I could feel the darkness in the trees tugging at my nerves.

"Very well, Alice. Can you tell me where you are?"

Buried in the frozen ground of Forks.

"Jackson State Hospital. Juno Wing."

"Well, I never." He smiled. "Do you remember me?"

"Doctor Pendergast, the Alienist." I said.

"Can you tell me why you did that to your arms?"

"The hydro therapy doesn't agree with me. The heat makes me itch something fierce. It's infuriating. Barbaric. I much prefer the cold. Guess, ny nails must be need trimming, s'all."

"I see. So you were not trying to harm yourself?"

"Why would any sane person try to harm themselves?" I said.

"Do you think yourself sane?"

"I have seizures, Doctor. They are confusing and painful. But I am not insane."

"You claim to see visions of the future."

"Merely intense images- a symptom of my seizures. When I was a child I had no way to explain it. My only frame of reference was what people said. They called me a witch child, called my fits visions. By happenstance some of what I saw came to pass, purely by coincidence and chance, of course. I guess it frightened them."

"I see. How old are you?"

"I… guess around nineteen."

"You guess?"

"It's so numbingly dull in here, Doctor, time moves differently. It seems pointless to mark the days. I may have had a birthday, I may not."

He sat for a moment, staring at me with an expressionless face. Then he turned and made some notes with a black fountain pen. I watched the black ink sink into the paper with a sense of nausea.

"Have we met before?"

"Of course. Once a week." I said, confidently, since my last poisoning had me playing this same game.

"So, you remember our meeting last week?"

"I… uh… of course."

"Can you tell me what we spoke about? What you told me?"

I swallowed heavily. I didn't want to go back into the scalding baths, or endure fever treatment. I had to play the suddenly recovered. The sane girl, the saved.

"My memory isn't very good, I must confess. Refresh it for me?"

"You sat there. I here. And you spoke of your visions. Do you recall?"

I shook my head, deflated.

"And you told me about how your step mother had murdered your mother. How your father knew and put you in here to silence you."

I snorted a laugh, waving it away as trivial nonsense. But the revelation sat like Drusilla's talon to my throat, pressing in. Mother. Murder. Step mother. I felt the tip working it's way into my skull, puncturing into a place locked deeply inside me.

Chills speckled my back, and I sat sharply upright to fight them off. My wounds throbbed on my arms and palm. Murder. I glanced away from the man, out into to the gardens. I felt sickness boiling in my gut, and fought back the urge to scream away the images.

Lillian. Murder. Protect Cynthia.

"Tell me about your father."

"I…" I stammered at this, my eye locking on the tree line once again, to something just beyond the darkness, out of sight. "My father? I… what would you like to know?"

"How do you feel about him?"

I shrugged.

"And your stepmother?"

"My… uh…"

I tried to pull my eyes free from the trees, to glance at the doctor, but I found myself unable.

"Alice?"

"I… I mean… step mother. I… in what way? How do I feel about my…"

Amongst those dread shadows something was forming. Gathering. And I was overwhelmed by the feeling it was coming for me.

"Alice?" He said. "Alice?" Again.

It was a figure, forming at the very edge of my vision.

"Do you still believe your mother was murdered?"

I shuddered as the shadow stepped from the tree line. Sharp and real. It was a woman, long limbed and elegant, with bronze skin and black hair. She wore a long suit jacket, blouse and skirt in a lustrous black taffeta that shimmered in the sunlight. Upon her head was a black cloche hat, and about her neck a long string of white beads that she coiled around unnaturally long fingers.

The woman strode across the lawn, her long legs slicing through the hazy air like swords into flesh.

"Alice?"

I felt pressed into the chair, unable to move in my… terror? Yes, it was terror. I felt the razor trickle down my nerves, holding me in place like prey. And it grew, as the woman closed in. Somehow, she seemed to leap closer with each blink of my eye, so I held my gaze wide, shivering at what I saw coming for me.

A woman formed from the ungraspable stuff of nightmares.

"Alice, I must insist you… oh…" the alienist turned to see the woman too, which only made her all the more real to me. He seemed to shrink away, and vanished from my periphery. My attention was solely on the woman now.

She stood at the doorway, not crossing the threshold, eyes black with kohl, a sharp smile on her lips. She appeared in her late forties, thin, severe. The fine wrinkles around her eyes chewed at her makeup, pulling it into the grooves. One hand pressed against the glass casually, splaying like spider. The other, coiling through what I could now see is a necklace of carved ivory skulls.

"Alice." She said, her voice purring and smokey, her accent strange and ancient. "Finally. I have been so looking forward to meeting you."