The Ten Thousand Doors of January - Alix E. Harrow Page 0,62

best behavior. Mrs. Jacobs, Mrs. Reynolds, if you please—”

The door opened behind me. The sharp steps of the nurses clicked across the floor. A week?

I flung myself across his desk and seized the slick smoothness of the doctor’s pen. I tore it from his grasp, spun away, barreled into the nurses—and then they had me, and it was over. A starched white arm crushed itself against my throat, quite dispassionately, and I felt my fingers being peeled inexorably away from the pen.

“No, please, you don’t understand—” I scrabbled, bare feet sliding uselessly across the floor.

“Ether, I think, and a dose of bromide. Thank you, ladies.”

My last sight of the office was Dr. Palmer placing the pen fastidiously in his pocket and tucking my book in his desk drawer.

I hissed and cried and screamed down the halls, shaking with hate and need. Faces peered out at me through the narrow door windows, pale and blank as moons. It’s funny how quickly you descend from civilized young lady to madwoman; it was as if this beastly, boundaryless creature had been living just beneath my skin for years, lashing her tail.

But there are places built for holding beastly women. They hauled me into bed, fastened the cuffs around my ankles and wrists, and pressed something cold and stickily damp over my mouth. I held my breath until I couldn’t and then I drifted into tarry blackness.

I don’t want to talk much about the next few days, so I won’t.

They were dull and gray and long. I woke at odd, arrhythmic times of the day with the sick tang of drugs on my breath; at night I dreamed I was suffocating but couldn’t move. I spoke to other people, I think—nurses, other inmates—but the only real company I had was the silver queen on her coin. And the hateful, stalking hours.

I tried to hide from the hours by sleeping. I lay very still and closed my eyes against the dull sameness of the room and made my muscles go slack and soft. Sometimes it worked, or at least I achieved a stretch of time that was even grayer and duller than the rest, but mostly it didn’t. Mostly I just lay there, staring at the pink veins of my eyelids and listening to the shush-shush of my blood.

Nurses and orderlies appeared every few hours, slate schedules clutched in their hands, to unfasten me from bed and prod me into motion. There were meals to be eaten under close supervision, starched white gowns to be worn, baths to be taken in rows of tin tubs. I shivered beside the fish-pale nakedness of two dozen other women, all of us made ugly and unsecret, like snails pulled from their shells. I watched them furtively—twitching or weeping or silent as tombstones—and wanted to scream: I’m not like them, I’m not mad, I don’t belong here. And then I thought: Maybe they didn’t belong here, either, at first.

Time went strange. The hour-dragons stalked and circled. I heard their belly scales susurrating against the tile in my sleep. Sometimes they crept into bed and stretched out beside me the way Bad used to, and I woke wet-cheeked and terribly alone.

At other times I would be engulfed instead by righteous rage—How could Locke betray me into this hell? How could I let them hurt Bad? How could my father leave me here, alone?—but eventually rage burns out and leaves nothing but ash, a muted landscape drawn in charcoal gray.

And then on the fifth or sixth (or seventh?) day of my imprisonment, a voice said, “You have a visitor, Miss Scaller. Your uncle came to see you.”

I had my eyes screwed shut, hoping that if I feigned sleep long enough my body would give up and play along. I heard the click of the door, the scrape of a chair. And then a voice drawled, “Good lord, it’s half past ten in the morning. I would make a Sleeping Beauty joke, but it’s only half-true, isn’t it?”

My eyes snapped open and there he was: alabaster-white, cruel-eyed, hands like white-gloved spiders resting on his cane. Havemeyer.

The last time I’d heard his voice, he’d been ordering his men to get rid of the mess that was my dearest friend.

I lunged for him. I’d forgotten that I was despairing, weak, cuffed to my bed; I only knew I wanted to hurt him, bite him, rake my nails down his face—“Now, now, let’s not get excited. I’ll have to call the nurses in, and you’re