Shaking. He couldn’t stop shaking. The card trembled in his fingers as he lifted it closer to his face and nearer to the light. If he was mad and hallucinating this moment, it would make more sense, he decided, reading the name over and over again.
Desmond, Pierce Andrew
Self-Admitted
Insomnia, MPD, restlessness, suicidal ideation
Deceased, 1967
And on the back: Closest.
Brookline was consuming him, devouring him, eating him alive. The walls were coming for him, crushing in on all sides. He couldn’t sleep and couldn’t move to toss. Blue walls neared him on every side, shot through with white, like sheer glaciers on a collision course. He had been trembling and delirious when Nurse Ash came to put him back in the cuffs. Unmoving. She had shifted him around but he refused to speak or even make a sound.
There was no sleeping after what he had found. His father. His father had died here, not one year ago. What if he had been in this same room? And he had seen him . . . Oh God, he had seen him cowering on the floor, pits of black despair where his eyes should have been.
Ricky shook his head, trying to make sense of it all. When he shut his eyes he saw that horrible, hollow face of his father huddled on the floor, and so instead he kept his eyes wide open. Shadows moved along the floor, bouncing, the trees outside his window shaking in a nighttime gust. A shadow on the opposite wall darkened, and he fixated on it. It looked denser than the others, darker, a firm, black shape that grew larger as he watched.
Just a trick of the darkness. Just a figment of his sleeplessness. His mind was being stretched thinner and thinner, led to even bleaker places. But that didn’t seem to matter to the shape across the room. It coalesced into a silhouette, fuzzy on the edges. He couldn’t be imagining it. He blinked and it remained, growing, humming, breaking through the stone, forcing its way through something meant to hold it. But it shook free, moving not along the wall but toward him across the floor.
A person. A figure. She had come through the wall. It was her, the girl who was all dingy dark hair and tattered white cloth. She was coming for him now and he could do nothing but watch, secured to the bed. The girl dragged her way across the room toward him with her head drooping on her shoulders, slow, inexorable, her hair so long it almost brushed the tiles. There were black spidery cracks along her skin, that odd, unnatural halo of flickering black light surrounding her.
He screamed. Fighting the restraints did nothing but make his wrists ache. She was coming. She was close now.
“L-Leave me alone,” he said, and it came out in a sob. “Please, just leave me alone. What do you want? I don’t have anything. I have nothing. Just go away. Please go away!”
When she was close enough to touch him her head snapped up and she was grinning, a huge, horrible grin too big for any human’s face.
“Dead, dead, dead,” she hissed. “Just like all of us.”
Ricky could barely hold his head up to follow the swing of the pendulum. Its eerie glow didn’t captivate him anymore. He looked beyond it, glaring as best he could with lowered, bloodshot eyes, at the warden.
His father’s killer.
The path forward eluded him, but he could only focus on that one, deadening fact. His father had come here of his volition to try to get better. He had trusted these people to help him and instead they had killed him.
Ricky hadn’t spoken a word to Nurse Ash despite all her concerned frowns and coddling. The words in the notes from Kay slipped right through his mind. What did they matter? What did she or the nurse or any of it matter when the warden had killed his dad? He would probably end up killing Ricky, too. Ricky’s body didn’t contain enough energy for his rage, and so instead he was quiet, boiling away inside, letting the knowledge and the secret fester until he felt ready to vomit all over the warden’s expensive shoes.
“Pierce Desmond,” he managed to groan.
The pendulum slowed, the warden’s beady eyes focusing tightly behind his round spectacles. “I beg your pardon? Ricky, I need you to focus, please . . . You’re all over the map today.”
“Pierce. Desmond.” Then he did have enough energy and he flew out of the chair, his cuffs still loose from breakfast, throwing himself at the warden and flailing, beating him with his fists. He heard the orderly thunder across the room while Crawford tried to hold off the assault, flinging the red stone aside and grabbing Ricky’s wrists. Ricky was too weak, too tired . . . They overpowered him, but not before he got in a few solid hits.
“YOU KILLED HIM! YOU KILLED HIM, I KNOW YOU DID IT!”
“Jesus Christ, sedate him, will you? Could we get more assistance in here!?” The warden ducked out from under Ricky’s body, scooping up the stone and stumbling away. He adjusted his askew spectacles, watching the orderly wrestle Ricky to the bed and force his arms behind his back, pinning him until the room filled up with people.
Ricky ignored them and ignored the pain in his wrenched arms. He spat and struggled, attention pinpointed on the warden’s bewildered face. “He was here. He trusted you and you murdered him! He didn’t want to do what you wanted and you killed him for it!”
“Sedatives, yes, thank you,” the warden calmly directed his staff, ignoring the screaming boy on the bed. It only made Ricky more furious. “And have his new prescription at the ready when he wakes up! Not those, these.” The warden’s cool veneer shattered and he dashed for the bed, fumbling in his coat pocket for a bottle of pills that he handed off to Lurch. Nurse Ash arrived and others, and Ricky could hardly hear what they were saying over his screaming.
“Just a bad episode,” Warden Crawford was saying. His spectacles blurred in front of Ricky’s face. They had stuck the needle in. Everything was fading. “There now, just a bad episode, mm? This will all be sorted soon, Ricky. Trust me. Trust me.”
He couldn’t remember waking up, but they must have forced him out of sleep. Was it possible to be awake and unconscious at the same time? He felt it. Limbo. Strung up between waking and sleep. Ricky couldn’t move. They had secured him to some kind of strange chair, locking down his arms and legs. The red stone swung in front of him and he could do nothing but watch it go back and forth; digging, metal claws kept his eyelids peeled back. No moving. No blinking. Occasionally he felt a cooling drip in his eyes to ward off the drying.
There was no telling how many people were in the room. All was blackness except for a focal point of light directly in front of him. A lamp, maybe? And the lamp illuminated the red stone going back and forth, lulling him, beckoning him away from the pain and confusion.
He drifted. This couldn’t be real. None of this could be real, so that meant he must be asleep. The warden’s voice melted over him. How long had this been going on? There was no sense of time passing, his entire world condensed down to the red pendulum and the warden’s soothing tone.
After a while, it was the only sound he wanted to hear.
You’re safe now, Ricky, you’re safe.
Follow what I say, follow my voice, it’s the only way to stop this, the only way to stop the pain . . .
Yes. He wanted the pain to stop. He didn’t want to be locked in a chair. He didn’t want a gag in his mouth or his eyes forced open. The lamp was so, so hot, burning his skin, sweat pouring down his face and soaking his pajamas.
You’re so special. To be the first, to be Patient Zero, it’s a privilege, Ricky, don’t you like being special? I don’t think you need fixing, Ricky.
That sounded true. He didn’t need fixing. Finally, someone was listening to what he had been saying all along.
You’re perfect as you are. But you need to listen. You need to obey. Perfect boys obey. You want to be perfect just as you are, don’t you?
I am, he thought, a cough of pain lodged behind the gag, aren’t I?
Journal of Ricky Desmond—July
Ain’t too much sadder than the tears of a clown when there’s no one around . . . That’s it. That’s all I can remember. It’s all going.
I live at 335 Hammond Street, my mother is Kathy Anne. My father is . . . My father is. I don’t know. I remember Butch. I remember Mom. Where did it go? These aren’t things you forget. Nurse Ash told me not to forget. She told me not to trust. But I just can’t remember everything, it takes too much energy and when I try it puffs into smoke.
I just want to sleep. I wish he would let me sleep.
When the warden visited next, Ricky felt like he was peering out through a stranger’s eyes.
They sat facing each other, Ricky on the bed this time, the warden in a chair across from him. An orderly hovered by the door, but Ricky didn’t have the energy to speak, much less fight. They had fed him gruel and water for so many days now that he couldn’t count them. His stomach hurt constantly, but when he asked for more or for something different he was ignored.
The medicine left a tremor in his hands and a sour, chalky film in his mouth. He knew it wasn’t just aspirin anymore. It had only been a few days, hadn’t it? He couldn’t stand this much longer.
“I can tell you’re coming around, Ricky,” the warden said softly. He pursed his lips, leaning forward to place a hand on Ricky’s knee. “Punishing you is a punishment for me. It hurts me to treat you this way, but I should have known. Perfection is never easy. It demands sacrifices. Your father was like this, too, sometimes. Worse, even. He resisted because he didn’t want to be part of history. Part of science. That’s very selfish, don’t you think?”
Ricky didn’t think it was selfish at all. His lips tightened into a grimace as soon as the warden mentioned his father. His father was . . . gone. For some reason that didn’t seem real.
“Things will be easier now,” the warden assured him. His face had new lines on it, the masklike surface cracking. “I just need to know you’re with us. With me.” Leaning to the right, he grabbed his leather doctor’s case and set it on his lap, clicking open the latches and reaching in. Ricky watched him produce a scalpel and place it on the bed next to his hand.
He stared at the scalpel and flinched. In the warden’s hands, that was an instrument of pain. Of death. Ricky thought he was doing better. Why would the warden need that now?
“Do you want to hold it?” the warden asked.
“No,” Ricky replied, but it was partially a lie. He didn’t have any feelings at all about the shiny little knife at his side. “I don’t know.”
The warden nodded and took a clipboard from his case. He unscrewed a pen and began to scribble notes, placing the doctor’s suitcase back on the floor.
“Could I have something to eat?” Ricky asked. “I’m starving.”
“Soon. When we’re done here you can have a treat, mm? A reward.” The warden continued jotting notes and then pushed his spectacles up the bridge of his nose. “You don’t want to pick up the scalpel?”
“No, I want to eat.”
“You don’t want to attack me with it?” the warden pressed. A flame leapt in Ricky’s chest. Attack him? Why would he do that? There was a reason. There must be a reason. A wall had been built around the reason. It was hiding somewhere in his head, concealed, but he couldn’t access it. It had just been there. Something about . . . Something about someone . . . Why was it not important anymore? His head pounded when he tried to reach for memories.
“It’s right there, Ricky, and I assure you it’s extremely sharp. You don’t want to take it and slash me?”
“No,” he answered, working his jaw. Maybe he did, but even if that was the case, he knew it was the wrong answer. The wrong answer would put him back in the chair. “No, I don’t want to touch it.”
Nodding, Warden Crawford muttered something to himself and wrote down another few lines of notes. His handwriting was long and looping cursive, too stylized for Ricky to read at that angle. The only word he could make out was “Progress.”
“And what happened to your father, Ricky? What happened to Pierce Desmond?”
It was like someone in the next room over shouted the answer, right away, almost before the warden had finished asking the question. Too loud. Too insistent. It felt false, but it was the first thing that came to mind so it had to be true.
“He committed suicide.”
“Where?”
“Here. Here in this room.”
“That’s right, Ricky. You have an excellent memory.” The warden grinned at him, proudly, beaming, and Ricky mimicked the expression. Yes, he did have a good memory. He was doing well. Progress.
“Your friend Keith has been very disappointed, you know. I had ended his aversion therapy but we had to revisit that decision after your outburst. Perhaps you will consider his comfort and fate going forward. It really is unwise to make a deal, Ricky, if you have no intention of holding up your end of it.”
Keith . . . Who was Keith? No, her name was Kay. Kay was his friend. Kay was his friend and she was suffering because of him. The thought almost broke Ricky out of his stupor. Once, what happened to her had meant something to him, though even when he concentrated now he struggled to think of what mattered. No more songs in his head. No more jokes. And friendship? That seemed too distant a concept to matter at all.
“I . . . don’t know,” he said truthfully. He wanted to cry. Something was his fault. A Very Ugly Thing was his fault. People cried when that happened, didn’t they?
“You’re all right, Ricky. Don’t worry about any of that now. Focus on my voice and what I am saying to you, yes? Just give me your attention and your focus, and all will be well. Listen: I want you to pick up the scalpel.”
His hand reached for it before he could think it over. “Why?” he asked, almost as an afterthought, because he was doing it, his body obeyed even if his mind questioned.
“Because I said so.”
The knife was warmer than he expected, like the metal was alive. He grasped the slender handle and picked it up, holding it at a safe distance from his leg. There was another twinge in the back of his head. He would say a word or conjure a thought and forget it a moment later. He had already forgotten about the scalpel in his hand.
“Good, now lift it. Yes, higher. Now I’d like you to hold the blade to your throat.”
This, at least, he knew was wrong. But Ricky couldn’t stop his hand from obeying the commands. It was dangerous, one slip and he could kill himself, or maybe that was what the warden wanted. He didn’t understand. Ricky was doing everything he said! A desperate sound broke out of his throat, a whimper and a cry. Why was he being punished even when he did what he was told?
The warden met his eye and gave him a reassuring smile. “Are you afraid, Ricky?”
“Yes.”
“Are you afraid of what I might ask you to do next?”
“Y-Yes.”
“Don’t fear me,” the warden said gently. “We have a kind of pact, don’t we? You are becoming my vessel. My right hand. I would be foolish for hurting something that’s part of me, wouldn’t I?”
Ricky nodded, forgetting the scalpel was there and flinching, feeling the metal kiss the column of his throat. Squeezing his eyes shut, he wished for it all to be over.
“Just one more question, all right?” The warden continued with that warm smile, but it did little to comfort Ricky. His hand trembled and so did the knife.
“Okay.”
“Is Nurse Ash assisting you? Has she been sneaking you things? Telling lies about me?”
No, no, no. Tell him no! She helped you so much, you know she did . . . Don’t betray her now, not when you need her more than ever! Jocelyn is your friend. She and Kay are your only friends here.
But that warning meant nothing when the warden was asking. Why couldn’t he just lie? Why couldn’t he just save himself?
“Yes.”
The warden wasn’t angry. He wasn’t anything at all. He nodded solemnly and sucked in his cheeks, thinking in silence for a long moment. The knife grew slick in Ricky’s hand, covered in his nervous sweat. “You can put the scalpel down now, Ricky. I think it’s quite clear that we’r
e done.”
The water was torture, cold and then burning hot, the pressure so high it left his skin a furious red. Behind the nozzle of the hose, Ricky could see the blank face of the orderly who controlled the temperature, tormenting him, hot and then cold, back and forth, oblivious or maybe numb to Ricky’s pain.
Finally, when he was scoured from head to foot, the orderly shut off the water. Freezing, Ricky dripped against the wall, rubbing his arms and then his chest, trying to stave off the violent shivers that made his teeth rattle noisily in his head.
“Sparkling clean,” the orderly said, coiling up the hose and stashing it in the corner of the room. The small, cold bathing area was just down the hall from his cell, with high, unbarred windows that were well out of anyone’s reach. White tile lined the room from floor to ceiling, and it was empty except for a rusted drain in the floor and the dreaded hose in the corner.
“All ready for your Big Day,” the orderly added. It wasn’t Lurch this time, but a shorter, sandy-haired man in his forties or fifties. He looked like a shrunken version of the warden but without spectacles.
“Big day,” Ricky repeated the words, waiting for them to take on meaning. Had he forgotten something, again? What was his Big Day? The morning had started like most others, his nightmares interrupted by a nurse coming to give him his morning medicine and meal. Only it wasn’t Nurse Ash anymore and Ricky knew that the swapped-out aspirin was just a distant dream.
He didn’t know what the warden was giving him in those pills, but it left him in a perpetual fog. Or maybe that was the restless nights. Or being secured to a bed for most of the day. Or submitting to the warden’s frequent hypnosis sessions.
“You’ve got visitors, Ricky, my boy,” the orderly chirped. “Aren’t you lucky? The warden’s favorite. Of course you get visitors. Had to clean you up, didn’t we? Can’t have you looking like a slob on your Big Day. If you do well, I bet he’ll give you another chance at the next gala. Wouldn’t that be special?”