Deceptions
Page 116

They led me up the stairs. I looked down at myself. Long dark hair lay straight over a miniskirted dress. Tiny, gleaming shoes. From what I could see, I wasn’t more than four.
The man reached for my hand and pushed open the door. When he did, my legs locked. I seemed to waver there, in control of the body and the mind. Then it was like falling into that grave. I stumbled and pitched forward, and this time, when I recovered, I was still there, still standing, but my thoughts had been pushed to a small corner of my brain, and hers had taken over, and all I could feel was absolute terror.
“Come on, baby,” the woman said. “I know you don’t like it here, but your aunt Isolde will be so happy to see you.”
“She doesn’t know me,” the girl whispered. “She doesn’t know anyone.”
A firm hand gripped my shoulder. “Of course she does. Now, none of that.” The man bent and whispered in my ear. “This is important to Mommy, Pams. Do it for her. Please.”
Pams.
I could no longer move the girl of my own volition, but I could see the woman out of the corner of my eye. See her face, soft and pretty and worried.
I know that face.
Grandma.
A stream of memories shot back, of a kind, quiet woman in a long skirt. Grandma Jean. She’d called the man John. That was my grandfather’s name, though he’d died before I was born. John Bowen. Daere Jean Carew. Which made me . . .
Pams.
Pamela.
My mother.
They led me into the hospital, and it felt as if I was me again, that gut reaction when I caught those antiseptic medical smells. But the smell was faint and the feeling was more terror than hatred, and I knew it wasn’t my reaction, it was hers, Pamela’s. Her shoes felt made of lead and her legs ached, but she forced them to move.
Do it for Mommy. Do it for Mommy.
But I hate it. Hate, hate, hate it!
My grandfather checked in at the front desk. Pamela stood at his side, clutching his hand. She couldn’t see over the counter, but I could imagine it, having seen the ruins. After a few words to the nurse, he led Pamela down equally familiar corridors, so dingy and worn they didn’t seem far removed from the ones I remembered in the abandoned version.
We climbed the stairs and walked into a huge ward. I remembered this, too. Even the beds were as I recalled them, two rows of metal cots. Only a few were in use, the rest exactly as I’d seen them, bare and rusting.
“It’s so terrible,” my grandmother whispered. “I can’t believe they’ve let it go like this.”
“Funding cutbacks,” my grandfather said. “I hear it’ll close soon. They haven’t taken new patients in over a year.”
He led Pamela to the last occupied bed. A young nurse stood beside it, holding a wrinkled hand. When the nurse turned and smiled, her face seemed to ripple. Beneath her eyes, light poured, bright light. Her skin glowed with it. Her doughy features sharpened, pocked skin smoothing, teeth straightening, and inside Pamela, I stared, thinking how beautiful she was, but the thought formed only in that corner of my mind that was still my own, and the overwhelming thought instead was hate.
Get away from Aunt Isolde. Don’t smile at me. Don’t pretend you care. It’s your fault. All your fault. I hate you. Hate you all so much.
Pamela gripped her father’s hand tighter, as if to keep from launching herself at the woman, and the hate roiling through her was unlike anything I’d felt before. Black fire, consuming everything it touched.
“How’s she doing today?” my grandfather asked.
At the side of the high bed, Pamela couldn’t see more than that wizened hand, and I mentally swallowed, remembering a hand just like it, on another hospital bed, when I’d gone to visit Pamela after her attack. My first vision.
“She’s comfortable,” the young nurse said. “That’s all we can hope for at this point.”
“Is it . . . ?” my grandmother asked.
“She’ll be free soon,” the nurse murmured. “Her passing will be comfortable. I’m sure of it.” The nurse squeezed the old woman’s hand. “She’s had such a hard life. It’ll be better soon.”
As I listened to her voice, I heard only genuine compassion. I saw it in her eyes, too. But Pamela didn’t. The hatred scorched through her.
Your fault. It’s your fault. You did this to her.
The nurse was fae—I was certain of that. Whether Pamela knew it or not, she could see though the mask and knew it as a mask, and it filled her not with fear but with a loathing I wouldn’t have thought possible for a girl her age. One that chilled me to my core.
“Come see your aunt,” my grandfather said.
His hands went around Pamela, and she squirmed, her hate liquefying into fear, making her protest and her father whisper, “Please, Pamela. For Mommy.”
He lifted her up, and I saw the figure in the bed, and I recoiled, a scream exploding in the corner of Pamela’s mind that was still mine, a scream that mirrored her own, the one screeching through her head as we both saw the figure.
It was the old woman from the hospital. So thin she seemed a skeleton wearing skin and a nightgown. Her eyes were covered with a thick bandage, but I knew what I’d see if that bandage was removed. Empty sockets.
Hair fanned out over the bed. Gray hair streaked with dark, and when I saw it, I saw another woman here, in the hospital. A woman rising from the murky water of a deep tub. A woman straitjacketed in a chair. A woman with bloodied bandages over her eyes and a mouth with no tongue . . .