Dear Charles,
I hope you're happy. You've pushed me out of my own home, locked me away in this wretched place, and right now I'd bet you're sitting next the the hearth, drowning yourself in liquor, trying to forget about your sister rotting away in an institution.
I want to see you suffer, Charles. I don't care if you never write back to any of my letters. Every day that goes by that you ignore me, I know you're in pain and I LOVE IT. You deserve EVERYTHING you get for this. I hope you die alone and miserable in the pile of FILTH you've made for yoursel-
The pen sprayed a cloud of ink onto the page as the tip snapped off. The letter slowly disappeared as the black fluid snaked in shadowy tendrils up the white paper, eating it up.
With a cry of frustration, Sasha crumpled the paper and tossed it into the trash, toppling the huge pile of balled-up papers already precariously stacked there. Hours of work and tears scattered onto the floor, one or two catching in the rusty air vent and rustling noisily. Ink continued to pump out of the broken pen like blood across her desk and onto the floor.
Stiffly, Sasha rose and grabbed a towel from the washbasin. Her knee protested with snaps and cracks as she keeled, scrubbing the foul-smelling stuff off the floor, her desk and her hands. The blackened towel went into the laundry chute; let the pillboxes do their jobs and deal with it, for once.
Her sleeping roommate rolled over, mumbling something about Oscar Wilde. Jill snored all night and talked all day, and her delicate psyche was like a soap bubble in it's tension and sensitivity: if one didn't stay at sharp attention and act happy and excited to hear her rambling, she dissolved into a weeping wreck. Sasha didn't think Jill was truly insane; the poor woman seemed desperate for something, maybe attention, and few people seemed to want to put up with her. Jill was Sasha's friend here.
Life behind the white walls wasn't terrible-boring, but not terrible. Days bled into each other, weeks into months. The Bright River Hospital was like the island of the Lotus Eaters, in a way. Time was idled away with little tasks, chores and activities; dull-eyed patients shuffled along in their routines like zombies, and that frightened Sasha more than anything. Soon, she'd be like that, too.
Charles wasn't going to take her back, even if the state released her. Sasha had nowhere to go: she wouldn't burden Elsie, and they had no other family that survived in the country. Right now, she stood to remain in the hospital, twiddling away her days weaving baskets and writing angry letters that would never be sent for the rest of her life.
She should be sleeping. Any minute now, pillboxes would be coming around for midnight inspection, and being up was an excuse for them to recommend extra medication.
Lying down, Sasha tried to forget. Maybe tomorrow will be better, she thought. Maybe something will change, and things will improve. It wasn't like she was in Rapture anymore.
Sleep didn't come. For hours, Sasha lied there, staring at the ceiling, pressing her pillow around her ears to block out Jill's sleep talking. At three, a violent confrontation exploded somewhere down the hall, as they did almost every night, shaking Sasha further. Any longer in this place, and she'd be the one snapping and popping a pillbox in the face.
###
Breakfast was tense and uncomfortable, as always.
Pillboxes glared over the shoulders of the patients, their chilly eyes carefully watching their hands and faces for any sign of aggression. They'd already tackled and pinned one woman to the ground that morning, and it wasn't doing anything for their moods. Sasha kept her head down and her lips tight.
"So I guess the problem is with my mother," Jill said. She had been talking nonstop since they had woken up, and since then she had gone over how her father had never been around, how stressed for money the mental health system was, and the pros and cons of herbal medicine. Sasha was on the end of her wits hearing about it.
"That's nice, Jill," she said, her voice cracking. The spoon in her hand was starting to bend.
"I never would have thought that'd be the reason why I'm here until Doctor Roy brought it up in therapy yesterday," Jill went on. "But I just can't help but feel like there's something else buried under the surface..."
"That's nice, Jill."
It wasn't until it hurt did Sasha realized she was clenching her teeth. She let it go when a pillbox gave her a dirty look; listening to Jill was better than going to isolation.
Group time. Rec time. Lunch. The day slipped through Sasha's fingers like so many grains of sand. It seemed like every time she blinked, an hour had gone by. Now it was four, and time to talk to Doctor Andrews.
Sasha hated Andrews. He was a snake in a fine designer suit, with peeling, sagging skin that he constantly scratched at, like he was shedding. His smooth voice and wheezing laugh were loathsome. He was one of those people that made you wonder why they went into a profession centered around helping people, like a teacher that hates children, or a doctor that can't stand the sight of blood.
Doctor Andrews probably tried to care. Maybe he had just been through too many hard cases. Maybe he had gone mad himself.
Two pillboxes escorted her to Andrews' office, guarding her on both sides, as if an old woman on crutches could pose a threat to two strong young men. Andrews looked at her evenly as she walked through the door to his office, putting down his newspaper.
GRISLY MURDERS CONTINUE: Five More Victims In Ritualistic Slayings
"Good afternoon, Ms. D'Angelique," Andrews said. "How are you?"
Sasha sat, crossing her arms and shooting Andrews a poisonous look. She wasn't going to tell him anything today. It's not like she owed it to him; she wasn't insane, and anything she told him would be the absolute truth. She hadn't said a word about Rapture to Andrews, and she got a little bit of satisfaction from his frustration.
"I'm fine, Doctor," Sasha sneered. "How are you?"
Her tone displeased him. "Let's not be sarcastic, Sasha. We're not getting anywhere when you have that attitude."
"I don't know what on Earth you're talking about, Doctor," Sasha said.
"Until you admit that you have a problem, we can't work on a solution for you," Andrews said, leaning forward. Sasha snorted.
For thirty minutes, Andrews tried unsuccessfully to pry information out of Sasha. He asked about her dreams, what she thought about at night, and each question was denied with an acid-tongued answer. Sasha started to smile as Andrews grew more flustered; their therapy sessions were fun, in some ways. The snake's ugly face would get red, and he'd start to spit while he spoke. He was the only entertainment Sasha had most days.
"Why don't you tell me about Rapture, Sasha?"
Her smile disappeared. Sasha glared at him, but he didn't seem fazed. This was the exact reaction he wanted.
"Rapture isn't real," she said.
"That's not what you told your brother," Andrews smirked. "Rapture might not be real, but the trauma you experienced is real."
The doctor stood and crossed the room. His red, stubbled face got closer to Sasha than she liked, not that she liked even being in the same room as him.
"You have incurred some sort of spectacular suffering," he said in a confident, scientific kind of way, as if he were giving a lecture to a class, "and you have invented this 'Rapture' to escape that suffering. You are unable to cope with the knowledge of what you have experienced."
"Oh do go on, Doctor," Sasha snarled at him.
"Rapture is your sanctuary," he said, examining her with his beady gray eyes.
"Rapture is not a sanctuary, except for the dead."
Sasha immediately swallowed her words. She had just fed him enough to keep her here for years! Stupid, stupid, stupid! Now he was going to say she just had a "breakthrough," and that she needed "special supervision" because she was "delicate." Eight stupid little words had just sentenced her to a lifetime of daily visits with this horrendous man.
"So what does Rapture represent?" He pressed, his face bright with excitement. Sasha clamped down, refusing to say anymore. Huge effort went into keeping her face cold and stoic. He asked several more times, but she would not cave in.
"Tell me about Rapture, Sasha. Why do you associate it with death?"
Stop talking. Stop talking you moron.
Under her chair, Sasha was tightening her fists. Memories of Rapture were starting to bubble to the surface, and Andrews' probing was prodding the membrane. Any minute, the tension would shatter, and the toxic sludge would rush forth in a flood.
"We're not leaving until we get some sort of sign, Sasha," Andrews said, furrowing his brows. Her silence was beginning to unnerve him, and she could see that his eyes were going between her and the panic button on his desk.
"Let me out of here," Sasha said darkly. "You have no idea what you're playing with, you fat, useless oaf."
The smallest smile crossed Andrews' face, and he played his fingers onto the red button. Sasha didn't have time to take another breath before a deafening alarm ripped through the placid air of the quiet mountain hospital.
Five huge, burly pillboxes exploded through the double doors like a living battering ram. A wall of white blocked out Sasha's vision as the men piled onto her, nearly breaking her arm and slamming her weak hip hard onto the floor. Within seconds she was bound tightly and totally immobile.
A needle went into her arm. A shuttering wave of numbness spread through her whole body, and unconsciousness came within seconds. A black curtain crashed down.
###
Solitary, officially, is illegal. And with good reason: any genuinely insane person could hurt themselves in any number of ways when left alone in a room.
Bright River was understaffed and overcrowded, and any patient that could be put away for a few hours was a few hours with one less crazy person to deal with.
Very slowly, Sasha began to bleed back into consciousness. The black veil started to lift, and thoughts trickled down like sliver drips of mercury. Her eyes flickered open, and she tried to take a breath, but it was stifled by the grip of a straitjacket.
She was surrounded by thick padded walls that, unlike the pristine white halls of the rest of the hospital, were sickly sulfur yellow. Unthinkable reddish-brown stains splashed over every surface, from the concrete-shelled toilet to the heavy steel door. To her revulsion, the tight straitjacket squeezing her arms to her sides was also stained, with all colors of a madman's world: yellow, red, brown and black. The sight made her want to vomit.
At that moment, Sasha realized there was nothing she could do. She was bound and alone, with no way to reach out or communicate. She could only sit there and wait for her captors to decide she had learned her lesson. After a few moments, she was sure that the waiting was making her more insane by the minute.
What had she done? Why did she deserve this? Everything seemed hopeless at that moment. Should she just give up, and resign to her fate, live out the rest of her life at the hospital, eating porridge, talking to Andrews, and listening to Jill just gabber gabber gabber until the day she died? She was too stubborn for that. They'd lock her up in the secure ward with all the really hard cases within a year if she had to live with that.
She wasn't insane. She couldn't be insane. All the things she remembered happened, didn't they? She had the scars to prove that Rapture was real, and the images she had were so clear and vivid they couldn't be illusions. Every moment, every breath was bright and distinct in her mind, like an individual portrait. Blood. Water. Splicers. Big Daddies. Sofia Lamb. Every second was like a lifetime. And where else could she have been? There were no remnants, no flashes or shreds of some other, more mundane reality.
Perhaps it was just that terrible.
Any number of hours later, a pillbox leaned in and gave her the stink eye. She glared at him, but didn't say anything. Wordlessly, he walked into the room and forced her onto her feet, locking several straps onto the back of the straitjacket. Like a horse on a lead, the pillbox pulled Sasha out of the room and paraded her down the hallway. Wide, glassy eyes followed them, and Sasha's face started to turn red.
"How's the box?"
It was the first time a pillbox had spoken to her, and boy, did it hurt. Sasha bit down hard on her lip.
"Oh yeah. You're the quiet one, aren't you?"
The pressure was building. A hot stone sat in her stomach.
"Can you talk?"
A fist balled up behind her back. In another second, she was going to twist around and body slam the arrogant young man into a wall. She didn't care what happened to her; all she wanted was to knock some respect into the insolent boy. Fortunately, before her temper snapped, the straps loosened and the jacket came off. A rough hand pushed her through a door, and she was back in her dorm room.
The sudden quiet and peace was jarring. She was alone; Jill must have found someone in the rec room to listen to her drivel.
With a long, deep breath, Sasha sat down on her bed and put her head in her hands. Her fingers caressed the long, puffy scars running down her face, and she remembered the story of every single one. The one that went from her eyelid to her temple had come from the birdlike talon of a Spider Splicer, who had fought with her over a bread crust. The one that went across the bridge of her nose had been from the handle of a gun, bashed into her face by her own husband.
Rapture was real. She knew that, and no one else did, but she couldn't tell a soul. She was trapped. Whatever path she took, there was a different but equally terrible monster ready to swallow her.
She couldn't take it. It was hopeless.
Later, as the sun was beginning to filter orange and red through her barred window, she found the strength to stand. Unthinking, cold and stiff, Sasha brushed her teeth and washed her face, taking refuge in the slow, even pace of mindless work. Mechanically she left the room at the dinner bell, hungry and looking for some sort of distraction.
The cafeteria was crowded, but silent, as it always was. A pillbox walked her to her seat and presented her with a meal, and she noticed he was actively trying to avoid eye contact with her.
Jill gave her a cheerful, robotic smile as she settled in. "Where were you, Sasha? I missed you. Doctor Roy said that I need a support system."
Sasha didn't respond. She only stared daggers into her soup.
"Sasha? Are you angry at me? Oh, what did I do now?" Jill pressed. Still, Sasha stayed quiet, and that upset the little woman very much.
"Maybe you're just too good for me now. You think I'm crazy, don't you?"
"No, I don't think you're crazy, Jill," Sasha said. "I'd just appreciate it if you shut up your big fat mouth for once in your life."
Tears formed in Jill's eyes. Sasha felt bad, and tried to put a comforting hand on her shoulder, but that only started chaos.
Jill gave a feral scream, pushing Sasha away, which caused a domino effect all down the line. More screams filled the air, and pillboxes started taking down anyone that moved. Once again, Sasha was seized in a iron grip, then two, then three. Her shoulders and each arm were instantly restrained.
This time, she wasn't going to go down without a fight.
One foot went into a pillbox's shin, making him cry out in pain. The others fought to regain leverage, but that allowed Sasha's left arm to get free. She threw all her body weight into a punch to another's eye. But soon, another only took his place, and her valiant effort was beaten by brute muscle.
The grabbing hands. The screams. The smell of blood in the air. Something stirred inside Sasha that had been dormant for three years. An acrid scent seared her nostrils, and a fierce, wild buzzing filled her whole body with boundless energy.
All the pillboxes holding her, without warning, collapsed. They didn't move. They weren't breathing.
"Oh my God!" Someone shouted. Within a second, another ten pillboxes were piled on top of her, and the world was comfortably dark.
###
Well, at least they had to believe her, now.
A few hours later, Sasha was back in solitary, but her accommodations were much more suited to keeping her from moving at all. Huge straps and metal chains kept her bound to one corner of the room, and under a regular straitjacket she had on an indestructible swaddle of thick cloth. Breathing was almost impossible.
She didn't know that she had killed three men. She had no idea what had happened. All she knew was that she was in solitary again.
This time, she didn't waste energy on introspection. She only focused on breathing and not contemplating what was going to happen next. These things kept her alive and sane during the seven hours she spent tied to that wall in that filthy room in that horrible hospital. The only exception she made was to wonder if Jill would ever forgive her for being to awful to her.
Hours and hours went by. Sasha's limbs started going numb, but she didn't notice. Eventually, her whole body seemed to go numb, and she became detached from reality. She drifted in and out of dark, twisting dreams, and each time she woke her body was more exhausted. Reality and dreaming began to run together.
So totally disconnected she was, Sasha failed to notice strange sounds in her cell. Thuds, skittering, the sounds of crawling up in the vents. She didn't hear the screws of the air vent coming undone, or the grill crashing onto the floor. It wasn't until she felt a hot, foul-smelling gust of air hit her in the face.
"Good morning, sunshine!"
Gasping, Sasha came awake. Horror of horrors, what was in front of her?
Two brown, stained marbles stared at her, lolling in their sockets like a doll's. Wrinkled, warped flesh wrapped around bony features, clay-like. Crooked teeth, corrupt breath, and a hunched, animalistic stance made her assailant more like a huge wolf than a man.
A hand went over her mouth, keeping her from screaming. A wicked smile spread over the man's face as he quickly sliced through the straps holding her to the wall and unlocked the buckles on the back of the jacket. Gently, he helped her up.
"Now you gotta promise you won't scream, okee-dokee?" He asked. Sasha, panicked, nodded slowly.
The man's eyes were cheerful as he nodded back vigorously. "Alrighty, pretty lady. Now I'm gonna let you go, and we're gonna get out of here."
He took his hand off her mouth and let go of her arm. For a few seconds, Sasha contemplated screaming anyway; who knows what this strange man was planning. Then she realized how completely silly this was: there was no way this man was real! She was hallucinating, dreaming. This was some sort of awful flashback to Rapture, or whatever really happened to her.
A wide, manic smile cut the man's face ear to ear. "You good? Then I'm good. Let's go now!"
Giggling wildly, the man led her to the place in the ceiling where he had entered. With inhuman strength and grace, he jumped up and vanished into the darkness.
"C'mon, I'll help you up. We gotta go!"
Sasha swallowed dryly. "I can't," she said dreamily. "My leg doesn't work."
"Then I'll help you all the way! Now now now, pretty lady! They'll be coming along any second!"
Numbly, Sasha allowed the strange man to pull her up into the vent. She couldn't process what was happening-only the creature's pungent stench managed to reach her brain. Was this a dream? It had to be.
"What's your name?" She asked. It seemed to make sense.
"Leroy."
"Leroy," she parroted. They were going forward now, and Leroy was turned backward so he could reach to help her through the difficult turns. Leroy was incredibly silent in his movements for such an awkward looking thing.
"Where are we going?"
Leroy smiled again. "To Mama Tenenbaum's house. She told me to come and rescue you."
Tenenbaum. Tenenbaum has sent a Splicer to rescue me.
The realization didn't connect, not one hundred percent. Right now, she only needed to either escape this hellish place or wake up from this hopeful dream. Leroy didn't seem to understand why she was so distracted and afraid.
"What's the matter, pretty lady? Don't you wanna meet Mama Tenenbaum?"
"I... I do, Leroy. Just get us out of here."
This had to be a dream. If Sasha didn't think that, she would have never followed this madman. Any moment now, she was going to wake up, safely back in her padded room and swaddled in her cozy straitjacket. Leroy was a figment of her imagination, created by her growing madness. A relic of this imaginary city from her imaginary past.
She kept thinking this while they slowly worked their way through the vents and across the building, right under the pillboxes' noses. Eventually, alarms began to go off, but by then they were so lost in the labyrinth of passages that it would take hours to find them.
All the while, Sasha only acknowledged the growing chaos with sleepy disinterest. That stopped very suddenly.
Barely awake, she was hit with a sudden rush of cool, fresh air and natural light. Leroy was pulling her onto the roof and into the night.
It was real. That was the first and only thought she could afford before all Hell broke loose.
Shots went off, rubber bullets whizzing within inches of their heads. Pillboxes were pouring out of every mouse hole in the building, shouting and waving flashlights, many of them still in their pajamas. A flare lit up the woods around them like a lightning bolt, blinding Sasha for a few seconds while Leroy scooped her up and loaded her onto his huge, bulging Spider's shoulders.
They went off like a rocket. Instantly, they were leaving the hospital far behind, flying thought the trees at a thousand miles per hour. Now real bullets were starting to fly, blasting apart tree limbs in showers of splinters. Flares ruined their cover, and the trees were even starting to burn. Jeeps were screaming though the forest below.
Instinct kept Sasha glued to her savior. Now she could only wish this was a dream.