not the Disturbed song. though I did rip off the song's name, because it partially inspired this. it's the beginnings of a book I'm writing. thought I'd run by you-all before I post it up on my writing forum. And I'll be more patient this time, Ravyn 
. So don't crusify me! Note: 'tis long, so be warned.
…Before…
Running through the streets, someone chasing her. Someone with a knife, or a gun, or a rope. Only a little girl, with a little boy by her side, running as fast as they can, but what if they can’t run fast enough? And his tiny hand slips from hers, because he’s stopped running. She turns to scream his name, the name she can’t remember now, and she sees their pursuer standing over him, lunging down with a shining blade, his crazed eyes glinting in the moonlight, foam around his mouth. But the little boy is calm, and while the man is coming down, he is moving to the side, his small hand rising to somehow catch the knife out of the man’s hand; and with a seemingly practiced motion he stabs the man in his medulla. Then he turns to the girl, eyes black and somewhere between unknowingly innocent and expecting praise. His hand is still on the knife’s handle, and the girl cannot breathe. She is alive, he is alive…but he has killed. He has done the very thing she feared would happen to him. She begins backing away from him, from his tiny, bony body, and he, confused, comes towards her.
She screams and runs from him…
ONE
And again, Sarah Grey wakes herself up screaming. She sits up in bed, fists clutching at the covers, looking around the shadows in her apartment as though someone is going to come busting out of them with a knife. After a second, she falls back, hands relaxing.
That nightmare again…
She’s been having the exact same nightmare since she was a little girl. Now she’s twenty-six, plenty old enough to stop having it, in her opinion.
Sarah rolls over to look at her alarm clock. Quarter to six; it’s about time to get up anyway. She sits up, finger-combing her blond hair. She reaches over to her bedside table to flip on a lamp, and gets up, stretching.
The calendar taped to the wall over her bed tells her it’s November third, 2008, and she remembers celebrating the night before. What about, she isn’t sure yet…her friend Sandy had brought a mysterious brown bottle that she all but force-fed Sarah. Another memory surfaces: puking in the bath tub.
Sighing, Sarah rubs her sore eyes and walks across the room to turn on her stereo. Instantly she jumps and turns it down; Sandy’s half-deaf boyfriend, Jake, must have been in control of the volume.
30 Seconds to Mars’s “The Kill” playing softly is Sarah’s background music as she brushed her teeth, until she turns the water on in the tub to wash it out. Thanks, Sandy… She also has her answering machine playing seven messages from her mother, all of which she heard last night but ignored. That’ll cost her. He mom doesn’t like being ignored
Then, she suddenly remembers why she was celebrating.
New job.
Oh no, don’t let me be late on my first day.
A little later Sarah is in a cab. The driver is gesturing wildly and urgently saying something in incredibly bad English, and Sarah nods absently at, apparently, the right places. Her mind is on her new job, the job she has wanted as long as she can remember. As Sandy reminded her last night, the job her entire life has led up to, all those years of psychology and nursing classes.
All her life, Sarah has wanted to help sick people. Not physically sick; mentally sick. She has a memory – her mother calls it a ‘product of her overactive imagination’ – of being in an insane asylum. She remembers being in a room with another girl, a teenager, who was strapped at her wrists and ankles to a chair. The girl’s eyes had been wide and panicked, and she had been convulsing as much as her constraints had allowed her to. Then a man in a long white coat – a doctor – came in and gave her a shot…and she subsided into a peaceful sleep. A miracle-maker, Sarah had thought. A peace-bringer. Ever since then – whether it was imaginary or not – she had dreamed of being able to give people such peace. Her dream had matured when she realized that drugs, like the ones the doctor in her memory used, were not a permanent solution. Sarah wants to be able to fully rehabilitate her patients.
Now the cab is pulling up in front of the Blacksburg Mental Patient Home. BMPH is really the place they send the hopeless cases, which varies from the innocent but irrevocably bonkers, to the criminally insane. Sarah sees it as the perfect place for her; if she can bring one of these people back from over the edge of sanity, she will have proven herself right: anyone and anything can be healed.
If only she hasn’t arrived late on her first day…
She tips the cabbie and rushes off before his mangled Spanglish can hurt her ears anymore, clutching the long, brown wool coat her mom gave her for her birthday last year over her dark blue sweater and blue jeans. There was a moment of panic before she left her apartment, until she remembered that she wasn’t given a uniform.
Sarah pauses at the door, takes a deep breath, and walks in. Instantly confronting her is a tall woman with short, curly blonde hair, a clipboard, and an outfit that looks suspiciously like a uniform. Sarah’s mind races; no, no, no, I wasn’t given a uniform, was I? I wouldn’t forget…
In exactly the tone one would use to say, ‘You’re late,’ the uniformed woman says, “You’re early.”
“Um…” Sarah swallows. “Is…um…is that a problem?”
Sniffing, the woman replies with, “You are Sarah Grey, I presume?”
“Yes.”
“Hmpf.” She shrugs her starchy white uniform around and shifts her clipboard. “I am Mrs. White.”
Mrs. White looks Sarah up and down disapprovingly, and Sarah decides it might be time to start with the excuses. “I – I wasn’t given a uniform, so –.”
“Hmpf.” Mrs. White responds again. “There isn’t a uniform.” She motions down the long hall, and as if on cue, someone deeper in the building screams bloody murder. “They don’t care much what we wear.”
Sarah’s eyes shift slowly away from the woman, to down the hall. Somehow she feels a little misplaced. Mrs. White knows her name, but is it possible she’s in the wrong building? “They…?”
“The patients.” Mrs. White says stiffly, turning to walk in the direction of the scream. “Come along. You might as well make yourself useful since you’re here.”
“Mrs. White!” Sarah runs after her, trying to keep in stride with the woman’s long legs. “Um…Mrs. White, what do you do here?”
Mrs. White looks at Sarah coldly out of the corner of her eye. “I coordinate you caregivers. I will assign to you the patients you will work with every day.”
“You mean…I won’t work with any one person for long periods?”
“If you so desire, you may visit with them on your off-hours.” Again, Mrs. White seems disapproving. “However, it is not recommended.”
“Why not?”
Mrs. White’s face contorts into an ugly grimace. “These men and women are insane, Miss Grey. There is no hope for their return to society. How long to you expect the government to support them?”
Sarah walks the rest of the way in silence.
Mrs. White takes Sarah to a round room where five other people – all women except one – sit around a rectangular table. It’s an otherwise barren room, except for the door on the opposite side. After Mrs. White’s departure, one of the women smiles at Sarah and points after with her thumb.
“Don’t worry about her.” She says. “She doesn’t want to be here, but she’ll leave you alone if you leave her alone. Come on, have a seat.”
Sarah sits down. “You’re the other caregivers?”
Almost in unison, they nod. The one man, who has dark brown hair under a beat-up baseball cap, says, “And whatever she said about assigning you patients, don’t believe it. She never goes near the people.” His deep-South accent is almost laughable, but he certainly sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. He adjusts his cap authoritatively.
Another of the women introduces them. The man, Jonas; a thin, young woman with glasses and long black hair is Rachel; Clareece is the kind-looking black woman with very white teeth; the beautiful, impatient Hispanic is called Jessycat; and she herself, with tangled blond hair and a tired but cheerful expression of a new mother, is Jazmin. After Sarah introduces herself, Jonas stands up.
“Come on then. What’re we waitin’ on? We’re all here.”
The others stand up, and Sarah uncertainly follows suit. She follows them out the other door and down several staircases. Finally they come to a chain-link gate, where Jessycat types in a code.
“It’s 2342562782910.” Clareece says. At Sarah’s look, she smiles. “It’s long, I know, but there’s a pattern.” More slowly, she repeats, “234, 256, 278, 2910. See?”
“Oh! Yeah, I see. Thanks.”
“No problem. With luck, you’ll have plenty of time to memorize it.”
Jazmin turns to Sarah seriously. “I hope you know what you’re getting into here, darling. Some of the people are dangerous. I mean, Stacy, the woman whose spot you’re filling now, her personal charge was…not a pleasant man. Multiple murders, many more attempted. Uncountable charges of assault. They decided he was insane in court because he had no compassion for his victims; didn’t hate them, didn’t love them, didn’t love killing them. Don’t get me wrong, most of them are harmless, but there are those…”
“The Crims.” Jonas states ominously.
Sarah frowns. “Isn’t that a gang or something?”
Jazmin laughs. “Not in here. That’s just our little pet name for the bad ones. We call the good ones the Innocents.”
Sarah nods to herself as they step into a large, white room. There are couches and soft chairs scattered around, gathered around tables and three television sets, and in one corner a stack of board games is next to a table where a man sits, smoking a cigarette and playing solitaire. He looks up at their arrival.
“Hm. Here, are you? You certainly took your time.”
Clareece smiles at him. “We had to welcome our new friend, Wall.” To Sarah she says, “Sarah, this is Wallace, our head of security. None of the officers are here yet, but without fail, Wall shows up before any of us.”
Wall scowls good-naturedly. “And until my men get here, none of those loons are coming out. So you lot may as well just sit down and play quietly.”
Jazmin sighs, laughing. “The loons can come out, Wall. The Crims will stay in their rooms until all your big strong men get here with their tazers, but the Innocents are allowed. You know the rules.”
“Hm. Don’t have to like it.” Wall stacks up his cards, snaps a rubber band around them, and drops them in his coat pocket. “Very well, then. Send in the clowns.”
Jessycat holds up a hand.
“I’ll go.” She says with a heavy accent, and walks off through another door.
“Jazmin.” Sarah motions for Jazmin to come sit on a couch with her. “Can you tell me more about the man you were talking about before?”
“Stacy’s charge? Why?”
Sarah shrugs, though she knows exactly what her interest in him is. If she can cure someone like him, surely anyone’s mind can be healed.
“Hmmm…well, like I said, not a pleasant man. Quite young, though, younger than you, I’d say. About…oh, well, we actually had a birthday party for him last year, because he’d been being so good and cooperative. Clareece? Do you remember?”
Clareece looks up from her cell phone. “Hm?”
“Stacy’s personal charge. His birthday party?”
“I remember.” Jonas says solemnly. “Child went mad. Didn’t like the candles on the cake Stace made him, if I recollect rightly. Fire makes him antsy, it does.”
“Uhm…yeah, I remember.” Clareece says, closing her cell phone. “Look, I gotta go.” She smiles apologetically. “My son – he’s getting into trouble at school.” She shrugs sheepishly. “Teenagers. Speaking of which, the boy you’re talking about, he’s not much more than one. When we had the party for him, he was twenty-two. That was the year before last, though, not last year. Cause Stace retired last year.”
“Oh, that’s right.” Jazmin says. She waves goodbye to Clareece and turns back to Sarah. “Twenty-four, then. About your age, like I said. He’s something else, though: very intelligent, very quiet while Stace was here. You could’ve mistaken him for an Innocent while she was around. But at that party, she seemed very edgy, and when Stace brought out that cake…”
“Child went mad.” Jonas restated dramatically. Maybe it’s just his accent, but he seems quite melodramatic to Sarah.
“Mm-hm.” Jazmin agrees. “Lost it. Went on a rampage. Injured some of the Innocents, scratched Stace’s arm so bad it needed stitches. Took three of Wallace’s men to restrain him long enough for me to sedate him.” In the corner, Wallace grunts at the reminder of his men’s failure. “Well, the rules said he had to spend three months closed up away from other after a display like that. Stace was allowed to see him, but she was busy fighting the system to keep them from having him ‘put down,’ as they say.” Bitterly, she continues,” Put down like an animal, but less humane.” She sighs. “She kept them away from him, but her husband convinced her that the job was too dangerous. Now no one wants to go near the poor boy; I’ll admit I’m afraid of him, no matter how much I pity him. My pity goes out the window when I look in those eyes.”
“Wait – you said Stacy retired last year? It’s November. It’s almost next year. No one’s been inside his room since then?” Sarah asks incredulously.
Jazmin shake her head regretfully. “Men’ve slid food trays under his door, pull them back out after an hour. That’s the closest anyone wants to get.”
This could be harder than I thought… “Well, that settles that.”
“Settles what, dear?” Jazmin queries.
“I’m going to see him. Where is he?”
Jazmin just stares at her. “Honey, have you not heard a word I’ve said? He’s pure evil. Only one who ever had any effect on him was Stacy. If you go into that room with him, I’d lock you in, because you’d have to be crazy.”
“He needs help.” Sarah protests. “That’s why I’m here; I want to help people.”
“Maybe you should go somewhere else, sweet pea. These people are incurable. That’s why they’re here.”
“I believe that any damage can be healed.” Sarah says softly. “I believe I can heal those who other can’t. I don’t know why. I just feel like this is what I was born to do.”
Jazmin sighs.
“If you’re so determined.” She stands up and point at the doorway Jessycat went through. “Go on through there. You’ll probably pass the Innocents coming back with Jessycat. Now the doors are numbered, and you want to go into door thirteen. Then go down the hall. The numbers is that row start with six hundred fifty, and Stace’s boy is…well, I feel ridiculous saying it, but he’s number six hundred sixty-six.”
“The devil’s number.” Jonas intones. Jazmin shoots him an annoyed look, and in the corner, Wallace snickers.
“There’s nothing in the room he can hurt you with except for his bare hands.” Jazmin frowns. “And they’re cuffed together.”
“Cuffed –?” Sarah chokes. “His hands have been cuffed all this time?”
Jazmin shrugs, as though there was nothing she could do.
“You know,” Sarah growls, “that if he wasn’t crazy before, he will be by now.”
Again, Jazmin just shrugs.
Angrily, Sarah sets off.
. So don't crusify me! Note: 'tis long, so be warned.…Before…
Running through the streets, someone chasing her. Someone with a knife, or a gun, or a rope. Only a little girl, with a little boy by her side, running as fast as they can, but what if they can’t run fast enough? And his tiny hand slips from hers, because he’s stopped running. She turns to scream his name, the name she can’t remember now, and she sees their pursuer standing over him, lunging down with a shining blade, his crazed eyes glinting in the moonlight, foam around his mouth. But the little boy is calm, and while the man is coming down, he is moving to the side, his small hand rising to somehow catch the knife out of the man’s hand; and with a seemingly practiced motion he stabs the man in his medulla. Then he turns to the girl, eyes black and somewhere between unknowingly innocent and expecting praise. His hand is still on the knife’s handle, and the girl cannot breathe. She is alive, he is alive…but he has killed. He has done the very thing she feared would happen to him. She begins backing away from him, from his tiny, bony body, and he, confused, comes towards her.
She screams and runs from him…
ONE
And again, Sarah Grey wakes herself up screaming. She sits up in bed, fists clutching at the covers, looking around the shadows in her apartment as though someone is going to come busting out of them with a knife. After a second, she falls back, hands relaxing.
That nightmare again…
She’s been having the exact same nightmare since she was a little girl. Now she’s twenty-six, plenty old enough to stop having it, in her opinion.
Sarah rolls over to look at her alarm clock. Quarter to six; it’s about time to get up anyway. She sits up, finger-combing her blond hair. She reaches over to her bedside table to flip on a lamp, and gets up, stretching.
The calendar taped to the wall over her bed tells her it’s November third, 2008, and she remembers celebrating the night before. What about, she isn’t sure yet…her friend Sandy had brought a mysterious brown bottle that she all but force-fed Sarah. Another memory surfaces: puking in the bath tub.
Sighing, Sarah rubs her sore eyes and walks across the room to turn on her stereo. Instantly she jumps and turns it down; Sandy’s half-deaf boyfriend, Jake, must have been in control of the volume.
30 Seconds to Mars’s “The Kill” playing softly is Sarah’s background music as she brushed her teeth, until she turns the water on in the tub to wash it out. Thanks, Sandy… She also has her answering machine playing seven messages from her mother, all of which she heard last night but ignored. That’ll cost her. He mom doesn’t like being ignored
Then, she suddenly remembers why she was celebrating.
New job.
Oh no, don’t let me be late on my first day.
A little later Sarah is in a cab. The driver is gesturing wildly and urgently saying something in incredibly bad English, and Sarah nods absently at, apparently, the right places. Her mind is on her new job, the job she has wanted as long as she can remember. As Sandy reminded her last night, the job her entire life has led up to, all those years of psychology and nursing classes.
All her life, Sarah has wanted to help sick people. Not physically sick; mentally sick. She has a memory – her mother calls it a ‘product of her overactive imagination’ – of being in an insane asylum. She remembers being in a room with another girl, a teenager, who was strapped at her wrists and ankles to a chair. The girl’s eyes had been wide and panicked, and she had been convulsing as much as her constraints had allowed her to. Then a man in a long white coat – a doctor – came in and gave her a shot…and she subsided into a peaceful sleep. A miracle-maker, Sarah had thought. A peace-bringer. Ever since then – whether it was imaginary or not – she had dreamed of being able to give people such peace. Her dream had matured when she realized that drugs, like the ones the doctor in her memory used, were not a permanent solution. Sarah wants to be able to fully rehabilitate her patients.
Now the cab is pulling up in front of the Blacksburg Mental Patient Home. BMPH is really the place they send the hopeless cases, which varies from the innocent but irrevocably bonkers, to the criminally insane. Sarah sees it as the perfect place for her; if she can bring one of these people back from over the edge of sanity, she will have proven herself right: anyone and anything can be healed.
If only she hasn’t arrived late on her first day…
She tips the cabbie and rushes off before his mangled Spanglish can hurt her ears anymore, clutching the long, brown wool coat her mom gave her for her birthday last year over her dark blue sweater and blue jeans. There was a moment of panic before she left her apartment, until she remembered that she wasn’t given a uniform.
Sarah pauses at the door, takes a deep breath, and walks in. Instantly confronting her is a tall woman with short, curly blonde hair, a clipboard, and an outfit that looks suspiciously like a uniform. Sarah’s mind races; no, no, no, I wasn’t given a uniform, was I? I wouldn’t forget…
In exactly the tone one would use to say, ‘You’re late,’ the uniformed woman says, “You’re early.”
“Um…” Sarah swallows. “Is…um…is that a problem?”
Sniffing, the woman replies with, “You are Sarah Grey, I presume?”
“Yes.”
“Hmpf.” She shrugs her starchy white uniform around and shifts her clipboard. “I am Mrs. White.”
Mrs. White looks Sarah up and down disapprovingly, and Sarah decides it might be time to start with the excuses. “I – I wasn’t given a uniform, so –.”
“Hmpf.” Mrs. White responds again. “There isn’t a uniform.” She motions down the long hall, and as if on cue, someone deeper in the building screams bloody murder. “They don’t care much what we wear.”
Sarah’s eyes shift slowly away from the woman, to down the hall. Somehow she feels a little misplaced. Mrs. White knows her name, but is it possible she’s in the wrong building? “They…?”
“The patients.” Mrs. White says stiffly, turning to walk in the direction of the scream. “Come along. You might as well make yourself useful since you’re here.”
“Mrs. White!” Sarah runs after her, trying to keep in stride with the woman’s long legs. “Um…Mrs. White, what do you do here?”
Mrs. White looks at Sarah coldly out of the corner of her eye. “I coordinate you caregivers. I will assign to you the patients you will work with every day.”
“You mean…I won’t work with any one person for long periods?”
“If you so desire, you may visit with them on your off-hours.” Again, Mrs. White seems disapproving. “However, it is not recommended.”
“Why not?”
Mrs. White’s face contorts into an ugly grimace. “These men and women are insane, Miss Grey. There is no hope for their return to society. How long to you expect the government to support them?”
Sarah walks the rest of the way in silence.
Mrs. White takes Sarah to a round room where five other people – all women except one – sit around a rectangular table. It’s an otherwise barren room, except for the door on the opposite side. After Mrs. White’s departure, one of the women smiles at Sarah and points after with her thumb.
“Don’t worry about her.” She says. “She doesn’t want to be here, but she’ll leave you alone if you leave her alone. Come on, have a seat.”
Sarah sits down. “You’re the other caregivers?”
Almost in unison, they nod. The one man, who has dark brown hair under a beat-up baseball cap, says, “And whatever she said about assigning you patients, don’t believe it. She never goes near the people.” His deep-South accent is almost laughable, but he certainly sounds like he knows what he’s talking about. He adjusts his cap authoritatively.
Another of the women introduces them. The man, Jonas; a thin, young woman with glasses and long black hair is Rachel; Clareece is the kind-looking black woman with very white teeth; the beautiful, impatient Hispanic is called Jessycat; and she herself, with tangled blond hair and a tired but cheerful expression of a new mother, is Jazmin. After Sarah introduces herself, Jonas stands up.
“Come on then. What’re we waitin’ on? We’re all here.”
The others stand up, and Sarah uncertainly follows suit. She follows them out the other door and down several staircases. Finally they come to a chain-link gate, where Jessycat types in a code.
“It’s 2342562782910.” Clareece says. At Sarah’s look, she smiles. “It’s long, I know, but there’s a pattern.” More slowly, she repeats, “234, 256, 278, 2910. See?”
“Oh! Yeah, I see. Thanks.”
“No problem. With luck, you’ll have plenty of time to memorize it.”
Jazmin turns to Sarah seriously. “I hope you know what you’re getting into here, darling. Some of the people are dangerous. I mean, Stacy, the woman whose spot you’re filling now, her personal charge was…not a pleasant man. Multiple murders, many more attempted. Uncountable charges of assault. They decided he was insane in court because he had no compassion for his victims; didn’t hate them, didn’t love them, didn’t love killing them. Don’t get me wrong, most of them are harmless, but there are those…”
“The Crims.” Jonas states ominously.
Sarah frowns. “Isn’t that a gang or something?”
Jazmin laughs. “Not in here. That’s just our little pet name for the bad ones. We call the good ones the Innocents.”
Sarah nods to herself as they step into a large, white room. There are couches and soft chairs scattered around, gathered around tables and three television sets, and in one corner a stack of board games is next to a table where a man sits, smoking a cigarette and playing solitaire. He looks up at their arrival.
“Hm. Here, are you? You certainly took your time.”
Clareece smiles at him. “We had to welcome our new friend, Wall.” To Sarah she says, “Sarah, this is Wallace, our head of security. None of the officers are here yet, but without fail, Wall shows up before any of us.”
Wall scowls good-naturedly. “And until my men get here, none of those loons are coming out. So you lot may as well just sit down and play quietly.”
Jazmin sighs, laughing. “The loons can come out, Wall. The Crims will stay in their rooms until all your big strong men get here with their tazers, but the Innocents are allowed. You know the rules.”
“Hm. Don’t have to like it.” Wall stacks up his cards, snaps a rubber band around them, and drops them in his coat pocket. “Very well, then. Send in the clowns.”
Jessycat holds up a hand.
“I’ll go.” She says with a heavy accent, and walks off through another door.
“Jazmin.” Sarah motions for Jazmin to come sit on a couch with her. “Can you tell me more about the man you were talking about before?”
“Stacy’s charge? Why?”
Sarah shrugs, though she knows exactly what her interest in him is. If she can cure someone like him, surely anyone’s mind can be healed.
“Hmmm…well, like I said, not a pleasant man. Quite young, though, younger than you, I’d say. About…oh, well, we actually had a birthday party for him last year, because he’d been being so good and cooperative. Clareece? Do you remember?”
Clareece looks up from her cell phone. “Hm?”
“Stacy’s personal charge. His birthday party?”
“I remember.” Jonas says solemnly. “Child went mad. Didn’t like the candles on the cake Stace made him, if I recollect rightly. Fire makes him antsy, it does.”
“Uhm…yeah, I remember.” Clareece says, closing her cell phone. “Look, I gotta go.” She smiles apologetically. “My son – he’s getting into trouble at school.” She shrugs sheepishly. “Teenagers. Speaking of which, the boy you’re talking about, he’s not much more than one. When we had the party for him, he was twenty-two. That was the year before last, though, not last year. Cause Stace retired last year.”
“Oh, that’s right.” Jazmin says. She waves goodbye to Clareece and turns back to Sarah. “Twenty-four, then. About your age, like I said. He’s something else, though: very intelligent, very quiet while Stace was here. You could’ve mistaken him for an Innocent while she was around. But at that party, she seemed very edgy, and when Stace brought out that cake…”
“Child went mad.” Jonas restated dramatically. Maybe it’s just his accent, but he seems quite melodramatic to Sarah.
“Mm-hm.” Jazmin agrees. “Lost it. Went on a rampage. Injured some of the Innocents, scratched Stace’s arm so bad it needed stitches. Took three of Wallace’s men to restrain him long enough for me to sedate him.” In the corner, Wallace grunts at the reminder of his men’s failure. “Well, the rules said he had to spend three months closed up away from other after a display like that. Stace was allowed to see him, but she was busy fighting the system to keep them from having him ‘put down,’ as they say.” Bitterly, she continues,” Put down like an animal, but less humane.” She sighs. “She kept them away from him, but her husband convinced her that the job was too dangerous. Now no one wants to go near the poor boy; I’ll admit I’m afraid of him, no matter how much I pity him. My pity goes out the window when I look in those eyes.”
“Wait – you said Stacy retired last year? It’s November. It’s almost next year. No one’s been inside his room since then?” Sarah asks incredulously.
Jazmin shake her head regretfully. “Men’ve slid food trays under his door, pull them back out after an hour. That’s the closest anyone wants to get.”
This could be harder than I thought… “Well, that settles that.”
“Settles what, dear?” Jazmin queries.
“I’m going to see him. Where is he?”
Jazmin just stares at her. “Honey, have you not heard a word I’ve said? He’s pure evil. Only one who ever had any effect on him was Stacy. If you go into that room with him, I’d lock you in, because you’d have to be crazy.”
“He needs help.” Sarah protests. “That’s why I’m here; I want to help people.”
“Maybe you should go somewhere else, sweet pea. These people are incurable. That’s why they’re here.”
“I believe that any damage can be healed.” Sarah says softly. “I believe I can heal those who other can’t. I don’t know why. I just feel like this is what I was born to do.”
Jazmin sighs.
“If you’re so determined.” She stands up and point at the doorway Jessycat went through. “Go on through there. You’ll probably pass the Innocents coming back with Jessycat. Now the doors are numbered, and you want to go into door thirteen. Then go down the hall. The numbers is that row start with six hundred fifty, and Stace’s boy is…well, I feel ridiculous saying it, but he’s number six hundred sixty-six.”
“The devil’s number.” Jonas intones. Jazmin shoots him an annoyed look, and in the corner, Wallace snickers.
“There’s nothing in the room he can hurt you with except for his bare hands.” Jazmin frowns. “And they’re cuffed together.”
“Cuffed –?” Sarah chokes. “His hands have been cuffed all this time?”
Jazmin shrugs, as though there was nothing she could do.
“You know,” Sarah growls, “that if he wasn’t crazy before, he will be by now.”
Again, Jazmin just shrugs.
Angrily, Sarah sets off.
