CHAPTER THREE
I stood in front of room Z15 – the patient room just across from my office. The watch on my wrist told me it was nearly eight o'clock. Darkness would have already fallen on Silent River, but Ward Z still looked the same as it had when I arrived early this morning. The hallway white, sterile, yellowed from the stained overhead lights. I stared up at the one that separated my office from this patient's room. There were dead crickets inside it. Their little bodies a lifeless shadow enmeshed in yellow.
I took a deep breath and looked back at Z15. It was stupid to be nervous. I had worked with criminally insane people for the last six months, and in that time, I had witnessed patients smearing their feces all over their bodies, the walls, even me. I'd found a patient on my second day, who had managed to strangle himself with his night shirt. I'd seen shit and death, and that was in a ward where I had a minimum of twenty patients to oversee on my own.
These were just four patients. Four.
I got this.
I held a small remote in hand. I pressed the red button once. Earlier in the day Christopher and the orderlies had shown me how to use this cool gadget. Each room had its own remote – the remote connected to the bracelets I'd seen Cannibal Ray wearing, each patient having their own. The bracelets could not be removed, fixed to the patient's wrists and ankles for the remainder of their lives. A press of the red button sent chains sliding out of the fancy steel walls, connecting to the patient. The patient would then have twenty-five seconds to position themselves in their chair, before the chains tightened, forcing them to sit down if they weren't already there. The light above the patient's room would turn from soft blue to green when it was safe for me to go in.
It was probably too late to start seeing my patients. I should have waited until tomorrow, calling it a night and heading back to my new home in the woods of Silent River. But after everything, all the suspense of these patients, the urge to face one, meet them and have my typical introductory chat seemed like a necessity.
I pressed my palm to the white pad. The door made a soft hissing sound before opening inward. I took a deep breath and moved forward.
A man sat facing me, in his chair like I expected. I moved slowly, casually, like I'd been taught, taking the seat across from him. I picked Z15 because he'd been the leader of a crime syndicate in Detroit, a volatile gang known as the Purgatory Brotherhood. Ward N had been the home specifically to those whose psychotic problems related directly to gang activity.
Start with what you know, right?
"Hello Mr. Whitman. I'm Dr. Adeline Violet. I'm going to be your new psychiatrist. I'm sorry for coming in so late, but—" I stopped when I met his gaze. He stared at me with wide, twitchy eyes. Gray eyes with a ring of solid black around them. Perceptive, intelligent eyes that seemed to peer into the nooks and crannies of my insides. His lips moved as he watched me, singing unintelligible words of a song. A quick glance at his file had said he hummed all the time, singing a song, what sounded like the same one, over and over again constantly and had since he was admitted to Ward Z three years ago. But I hadn't expected it to sound so pleasant. "—it's been a long first day." I smiled.
He tilted his head to the side, tapping slender fingers on the table, they seemed to follow the pattern of his song, providing rhythm.
"I just wanted to come in and get acquainted with you since we will be working together."
He continued tapping and humming, his gaze unnerving. Tattoos covered his arms and crawled up his neck, out of the white jumpsuit he wore. There were more on his face, framing his brow was the word Purgatory in some sort of script – for the brotherhood. There were other words, more script down his jawline, but I couldn't make them out. I had to squash the urge to touch them.
His black hair was relatively short, but it pointed up and to the side in the very front, as though he'd run his hands through it over and over.
"I know it's been awhile since you've had someone come in and speak with you. There were some minor issues with personnel change. I'm sure you know how it can be in a hospital." I chuckled nervously, "but I will be in to meet with you several times a week." I realized I was rambling, something I didn't usually do.
What the fuck are you doing, Adeline? Get it together.
"How are you doing today?" I asked, hoping for some sort of a response.
He stopped humming. "You're young."
I frowned and tucked my hair behind my ear, feeling abnormally self-conscious. My mom said I was getting too old, that I'd let the better part of my twenties get away from me with medical school.
"You'll never get those years back, Adeline. Never."
I didn't feel old though, twenty-nine felt the same as twenty-two. Still single, alone. More debt, though.
"Well, thank you, Mr. Whitman. Is it okay if I call you Aaron?"
"I want to guess your age." His head was still crooked to the side his gray eyes never leaving mine.
I pressed my lips together. His gaze watched the movement. He was humming again.
"Okay."
"Hmmm." He leaned forward as far as the chains attached to his wrist would allow, they scraped along the metal table top. He sized me up. "You should stand up and spin around."
I narrowed my gaze, but kept my voice light. "We're here to talk about you, Mr. Whitman."
His lips spread across shockingly white teeth, whiter than his pale skin. "Don't you want to play with me?"
Heat spread across my chest, and I was thankful the beige top I wore covered up to my neckline. I tended to get red splotches across my chest when I was angry, nervous, excited, or any sort of intense emotion. I was usually pretty good at controlling my emotions so that wouldn't happen – especially when it came to patients – but today I seemed to already be failing in that department.
"No games, Mr. Whitman."
"You're no fun." But he was still smiling, his restless eyes following my every movement, making me feel like a bug under a microscope. "But you're also wrong."
I lifted my brows in surprise. "Am I?"
"Oh, yes. This is all a game." His voice flittered somewhere between deep and airy.
"Is it?"
"Didn't I just say so?"
He wasn't humming anymore, but his fingers continued to tap a rhythm on the table.
"Why do you think that?" I asked. I flipped to a clean page in my notebook.
"Think what?" Both hands were tapping now, in sync with one another.
"That this is a game?"
"There are always new pieces, new players."
"Like me?"
"Are you new? Or just an old piece back on the board?"
I chewed my lip and considered his words. "Well, you already said that I'm young, so I'm not an old piece, am I?"
"You know what's interesting?" His voice rose an octave.
"Tell me." I wrote notes on my notebook.
"Your name, Violet. An interesting name. Don't you think?"
I looked up, meeting his twitchy, yet somehow unwavering gaze.
"A flower. Five petals. A color. Six letters." He leaned in, pressing his palms flat against the metal table that separated us. They were large hands, dark engravings covered both. Words. His fingers bounced still, both hands in perfect sync. "One letter away from devastation."
"Devastation?" I asked.
"Violent." He smiled again, making the tattoos that outlined his face, crinkle. "I like violence."
I shifted in my seat, my skin still hot underneath my tight shirt, and yet my legs were chilled.
Should've worn pants, Adeline.
"You're just one letter away from being my most favorite thing in the world."
My heart sped up in my chest. The urge to smack my smack myself grew. What the hell is wrong with me today?
"Violence is your most favorite thing?" I jotted down more notes.
"Just one letter. Just one letter. Just one letter away. So close. Too close."
"Mr. Whitman, why do you think violence is your most favorite thing?"
"Too close." He started to sing again, looking away.
The right side of his head revealed a mangled ear, the fleshy cartilage almost completely gone. There was hardly any hair either, from his sideburn up about four inches above his ear the skin looked thick, twisted, like someone had taken a weed eater to his flesh. Remnants of a tattoo could be seen, but not completely.
His fingers drummed faster, clinging to the edge of the table. He wouldn't meet my gaze again, looking everywhere in his small room, except at me.
I chewed the inside of my lip, listening to his quiet humming.
"What song is that?"
No response.
I leaned forward, straining to hear. I recognized it. The rhythm. It was familiar. I could almost hear the words in my head, but they were just there out of reach.
I sat and listened to the soft lilting melody as he sang and re-sang it. It had to be some sort of comfort mechanism. I hadn't looked through his file yet – not completely, so I didn't know what sort of conclusion my previous colleagues had come to.
"Aaron, will you look at these for me?" I pulled out my basic psychiatry package, or at least that's what I liked to call it. It contained my Rorschach inkblots. They seemed cliché, though I couldn't deny that they were the first thing I wanted to explore when I got to medical school. Movies and television hadn't failed me – I still found them equally as fascinating today. The very idea that how a person described ink on a page could give access to their mind and could reveal something they might not even know about themselves – it made my heart race with excitement. Not everyone in the field agreed with me. A lot of new psychiatrists turned their nose up at the century old practice and never used it.
But they weren't me.
"Aaron," I repeated. "What do you see when you look at this?"
He stopped humming, his eyes gazing down at the inkblot in front of him while his fingers continued to tap. He looked for so long I almost asked him again.
"Well, this is complicated, Violet."
I frowned. "No need to make it complicated. Just tell me the first thing that comes to mind when you look at this."
"Ah, but everything is complicated. Even old Herman Rorschach and his little ink blot test."
I sighed. Since inkblots were so popular, I often ran into this problem, with patients being familiar with the test.
"You see, Violet, this test does not truly describe what I see, but rather it better describes what Hermann himself wanted us to see when he created them a hundred years ago."
I shrugged my shoulders and fingered the edge of the image. "That's an interesting observation, Aaron, however, not everyone sees the same thing when they look at the different ink blots."
"Don't they, though? Don't we only see what we are told to see?"
I frowned. "But I haven't told you to see anything. I only asked what it is you see."
"I know what you want me to say, Violet." He smiled revealing straight white teeth. "You think I'm going to say two elephants dancing, and if I don't, then I'm crazy. Isn't that right?" He leaned forward, his twitchy gaze boring into mine. "So it doesn't matter what I say, what response I give, I'm either crazy or I'm not." He paused. "But you already know I'm crazy, Violet, so this test is pointless."
"I never said you were crazy."
He smiled and leaned forward. "No, you didn't. But I'll go ahead and save you some time. I am, crazy that is." His gaze locked onto mine, the black center like a bottomless pit, unnerving. They seemed to peel back all the layers of my skin, my body, my soul, until I was nothing, no one. "I'm getting out of here, Violet. Out. Out. Out." He laughed. A full-throated laugh that filled the room, closing in the space, sucking the air out. "This is just a phase of the game, Violet." His laughter continued. There was something shrill about it. I wanted to clap my hands over my ears to shut it out. To stop it.
"Aaron."
But his laughter grew louder, his wide eyes on me all the while, his fingers tapping their rhythm, unfazed by his noise, the song played on in his head. His mouth spread wide revealing all his shiny white teeth. Purgatory crinkled. The words down his jaw distorted more than before.
I said his name a few more times, but I couldn't hear my own voice. His laughter drowned me out, where I was nothing but a fly on the wall – that's how small I was. Just a shred. A remnant.
I tried to stay, I intended to. But my hands fumbled with my things and my feet carried me to the door, his laughter pressing against me while I let myself out. I wanted to run. I didn't. My walk was calm. Cool.
When the door closed behind me the noise was gone. The vacuum turned off and suddenly there was too much air. Too much space in the hallway, surrounding me. I sucked a deep breath, letting myself slide down to sit on the floor.
"Dr. Violet?"
I didn't jump. I slowly looked up to meet the gaze of the man standing over me. He was tall – a mountain of man, though that could of just been because I was sitting on the floor. He had a short, dark, beard and a buzz cut. His eyes were blue, soft, kind eyes. Familiar. Immediately I felt better.
"Ahem, yes. That's me." I took a deep breath, letting the air seep out of my lungs slowly as I allowed him to help me to my feet.
"I'm Richard, the night shift orderly down here. Are you okay?"
Embarrassment swept through me. For the second time on my first day I'd been reduced to a heap on the floor.
Way to go, Adeline.
"Um, yes. Hi Richard. It's nice to meet you." I shook the hand that had helped me up. It was still clasped in my palm. I let go awkwardly.
"Likewise." He smiled, revealing slightly crooked teeth. "But are you okay?" He gestured to Z15.
"Oh, uh, yeah, I'm okay."
"That guy can be pretty intense."
"Yes." I nodded, rubbing the back of my arm. "I didn't know we had a night staff orderly."
"Yeah, they tend to forget about me, but that can be a good thing. I stay out of trouble." He smiled. "Well, it's great to meet you. Let me know if there is anything I can do for you." He wore black scrubs. They were like a black hole in the middle of all the white.
"Sure."
He gave me a reassuring smile. "I mean it, really. This place makes you feel a little crazy, especially at first."
"Really?"
He nodded, running a hand over the back of his head. "For sure. It's not like the rest of the hospital, being that we are pretty secluded – and procedures are different—" he leaned in, still towering over me, even standing "—and the rest of the staff is awkward as fuck. It's easy to feel alone."
I chuckled, but smothered the sound when another man came down the hall.
"Here one of them comes," he whispered before turning away. He nodded at the man who approached and made a beeline for an office down the hall. The man was the night nurse, Henry, I quickly learned, who merely grunted at my greeting seemingly uninterested in my presence.
When I gathered my things to leave a little later, I felt lighter. Richard had hung around, making me feel the most normal I'd felt all day. When I got to the foot of the stairs that would lead me up and out of Ward Z, I stopped and glanced over my shoulder. I should've gone on, not looked back, but some part of me wanted to bask in the end of my first day. I'd survived as the one and only medical professional of Ward Z, where the most violent, psychotically disturbed criminals in the United States dwelled.
The face of Raymond Smithers was pressed against the thin window of the glass. It was feet away, Z01, the closest patient room to the stairs. The window clouded around the black muzzle, his breath fogging it. The window had been crystal clear earlier, free of smudges, imperfections. His gaze pinpointed mine. Black as the scrubs Richard wore. Laughter filled the air, the laughter of Aaron Whitman. It was impossible, but it was there, closing in on me.
I ran up the stairs.