White Space

That’s the knob House showed me on the slit-door. “Oh Jesus,” she whispers, and another fit of trembling sweeps through her as her mind jumps back to her first thought when she found herself here. What if this is the real-world detail House plucked from her mind? Skull plates or not, what if I really belong here?

“Emma!”

Kramer’s shout breaks the spell. Her head jerks up, and she sees the men only twenty feet away. There are more crowded at every single grate. Figure this out later, you nut; move, move! She spots a small latch-bolt protruding from the bottom edge of the lock-plate and thinks, Push it. Jamming the small bolt to the left with the ball of her thumb, she hears the lock catch with a crisp snap.

“Emma, stop!” Kramer says as he and the others crowd against the iron grate. Shaking out keys, Kramer reaches through the grate. There is a scrape of metal on metal as his key stutters on iron, and she realizes that she must have hit some kind of dead bolt that can only be opened from her side.

“Emma.” Jasper wraps his hands around the iron bars. “Please, let them help you.”

“If you refuse to listen to me, pay heed to John, your guardian,” Kramer says, still struggling with fitting the key. “You’re only making this more difficult for yourself, Emma.”

Oh, I don’t think so. Wondering, though: John? Why had Kramer called Jasper by that name? Something important there …

But she has no time to think anymore about it. Turning, she scuttles to the grate to her immediate left and jams the privacy bolt to. That will have to do; no time for the others. From all the wards now come muffled hoots and shouts and bangs as patients hammer their locked doors. Behind her, Kramer is shouting, “Porter! Porter!” and Emma thinks: Uh-oh. Scurrying to the head of the central staircase, she makes out denser shadows hustling over marble: the night guards coming to get her.

And there is yet one more sound, distant but so familiar, that snags her: a kind of mad, booming, howling chorus rising from the depths of this building to seep through brick and open-worked iron grills: Matchi-Manitou, in his cave under Devils Island. And then she thinks, What?

Out of the shadows below, a phalanx of seven men swarms for the stairs like an army of black spiders, and she backs away. Can’t get out that way. She won’t let them take her either. She won’t go down there. Down may be the way out, but down is also bad. Deep underground, in the dank basement of this asylum, there is …

Matchi-Manitou, in his deep dark cave …

A room, a sundry room, the words suddenly popping in her brain with the clarity of a flashbulb. The sundry room is padded with cork and India rubber for violent people like her. There is the rotary chair and thick, sickly sweet rust-red medicine and cold-water baths and more that is much, much worse.

But how do you know this, Emma? And why is she thinking of Devils Island? That’s in Wisconsin, and she’s … She doesn’t know where she is, but she can feel the scream rising from her chest. How do you know what happens here?

“Here now!” From far below, a very large man, round as a billiard ball, leads the charge, lumbering up the stairs and using a heavy stick for balance. “Stay there, Miss!”

No way in hell. To her left are arched windows, and because there is so little light behind her, she makes out the open space of a very large courtyard or garden. Protruding immediately below is the snow-covered roof of some other building she can barely see. Flanking the garden on either side are extremely long wings, which must be more wards.

I’m on the second floor. Her hand tightens on Jasper’s sturdy walking stick. Break a window. Climb down. And then she thinks: Seriously? She was no monkey in gym, and even if she manages it, she has no way of knowing how far the grounds extend and she can’t go fumbling around in the dark. It’s winter; she’ll freeze. Barefoot, she won’t get far anyway, and snow means tracks. But I have to get out, find a road and people. Figure out exactly where I am.