Page 28 of Antihero (Tregam’s Fractured Souls #3)

Wasn’t it? Was she dying before I killed her? I remember her, so gaunt, eyes so huge and mad. I think of the crime scenes in her wake. Perhaps she was on a deathbed, after all.

“There was a time,” I find myself saying, “Before… a lot of things. That she was getting better. Finally, she was… I don’t know, finding her way.

Then she went missing. Presumed dead.” When Cocooner, then Caleb, had taken her.

He’d intended to kill her. But he’d seen something in her.

Some kindred spirit. Spared her to be some sick paramour, instead. And boy, did she live up to it.

“I didn’t want to accept it. I put up missing posters, searched the city, got to know some scary types…

” Scary types who would later be invaluable contacts as Needler.

Types that knew who was killing whom. They didn’t know I was the same man by then, of course, but I knew how best to deal with them the second time around.

“I wouldn’t give up. I would’ve given anything to give her another chance.

My own life. The lives of others.” I look down at my palms, thumb scraping over the burn, acquired when that first life went out in my hands.

“And then she came back. She was alive.” My words fade, giving way on the last words, strengthening again as I admit, “And it would have been better if she'd died when I thought she did.

She wasn't… something that should be alive.”

My eyes sting with unshed tears. A single one escapes, falling into my palm.

Charlotte lets the quiet extend. The wind sifts through the grass around our bench.

She begins slowly. “The dead aren’t around to alter our opinion of them.

You don’t need to block out what she was like in the end.

But you, and only you, can choose which version of them you choose to keep. In your memory, or your heart.”

I look at the tear in my palm, fallen on the edge of the scar, obscuring the line between burn and unblemished skin.

Maybe that’s what this is. Not a wiping away of a burned past, but a way to mend it with the chances of a future.

***

Wraith

I stand in the black archway. What lies ahead is darker than any night behind me.

My hand curls into a fist, nails biting into my palm as every fibre of my being begs me to turn back.

I could turn away, go home, or go knock on Tristan’s door.

He’d just hold me if I asked, do something more distracting if I asked for that, too.

I could be warm, safe, happy. Just for the night.

But they would still be there in the morning—the questions.

The demons. There’s only one left now. One left to kill.

Then it’s done. I’m done. My body can betray me in whatever way it likes after that.

Mortality can catch up to me like it’s been threatening to.

Ever since they did those things to me on the other side of that door, up those narrow, crude stairs.

That’s not what tonight is about, though. It’s about killing or being killed.

I’ve already cranked open the door, red rust raining down in a powder.

My mind, my hands, my very body, protests as I yank every inch of the way.

Because this very door is the one they brought me in through—the one they brought us all in through.

The back way. The passage into the East Ward that couldn’t be seen by anyone who cared enough to look and wonder why so many young girls needed to be brought into the asylum.

But tonight, it’s my only way in. And I need… I need to know.

In what moonlight manages to intrude on the narrow hall, I can just see the ascension of the stairs, out of sight and into blackness. So narrow, so low and dark. Like those damned MRIs, and the host of other machines I’ve been forced into because of this place.

No, tonight there’s no safety, no comfort. Only this harsh, cold memory. I’m alone. Just like we all were then.

Tristan was right- as he so often seems to be. I’m not myself. And I found something in the mountain of documents Pastryachi was safekeeping in his safe the night that I killed him.

The fucking and revenge at Filan’s, while giving me a nice afterglow that lasted for the next day or two, soon faded away to be outshone by the thing that’s been on my mind since last week.

When I had Nick Pastryachi, he offered me the key to his safe, to answers, he said.

I killed him all the same, but among the cash and jewels in there, I found stacks and stacks of archival documents entrusted to him as the asylum director.

Too many to read quickly, some of them were redacted, names lost. But in them, I went looking for the final bit of evidence.

Evidence that I found, before I went to Mr Filan’s mansion.

Without a doubt, Mr Filan had been here, and he’d been at the orphanage.

He’d browse us like his own personal catalogue.

But I found something else, too.

So that’s why I’m here, in the dark of night, on the forever-mad, East Ward of the asylum.

I step across the threshold, and I’m fourteen again, frightened, wishing I could believe the people when they told me nothing bad was going to happen. Didn’t I want to see Molly again? She’s inside, just inside…

I push back against the fear that threatens to shake my hands, and pull my hood tighter over my head, as though that will shield me from the ghosts.

I tug the bandanna up over my nose and mouth.

The stairs climb up for so long that I start to wonder if I’ve missed the door.

Then it’s there. That notable greenish colour of oxidised iron.

With a little encouragement from my crowbar—just like the other—the disused door cranks open.

My torch beam shines through the disturbed dust. They’ve taken the stained mattresses and piled the metal cots over on the other end of the long room.

You wouldn’t know this place used to be a dorm.

All of us crammed into our lumpy little beds, the only light by night coming from those arrow-slit windows halfway up the wall.

I don’t want to be here, much less stay here for long.

To remember the younger ones, scared of the dark, or to think of who didn’t come back, and sometimes, who did.

The horror movies I watch don’t compare.

If only they could truly capture that waking nightmare, the pain of waiting your turn.

Constantly wondering if you’d be one of the ‘lucky ones’ to come back.

If you wanted to be one of those, with their blank stares and their shaking, their laughter at odd times.

Like they were listening in on a different room or conversation.

That was worse than the ones who came back bleeding too much. The other girls rushing to roll up sheets to staunch the flow and hoping it would stop. I was one of those, mind intact but body aching so deeply. One of the ones who could still feel pain.

I cross the space and the foul smells that still seem to linger in the very cement of the walls.

I shine my torch up at the ceiling, at the small square hatch, the wood over it long since rotted.

We’d take turns sometimes, lifting each other up.

Back when it let out to the wall, not to escape, but to see the sky, to breathe fresh air.

After the orphanage burned down, we survivors were forgotten, cast to the wind like so much chaff.

Without the girl’s home, there was no front.

Some still didn’t make it, and most left, unable to stay on the island.

For the younger, cuter ones who hadn’t been through the asylum yet, homes were found away from here.

But I stayed. I always knew I wasn’t done here.

I hope the others are happy and healthy.

So few of their names or faces stay with me now.

Perhaps I should’ve preserved them better.

Shouldn’t have let them fall so faceless and devoid of personality, the way the men who dictated our fates saw us.

I’ve seen enough of the new additions to this place to know that hatch no longer lets directly up to the wall, but rather into a storeroom.

The level above is now the new ward, shiny and fresh and clean.

While down here has been forgotten until they need the space again.

Then it’ll be scrubbed and tiled, the shadowy corners eliminated with bright white lights.

I cast around the beam of my torch, and it snags on one of those old iron bedframes.

The ceiling is low enough for that to work.

I drag it away from the wall, the sound too loud, the scraping so harsh.

I find my palms are sweaty. With every twitch of my torch beam, I’m expecting to find one of them, huddled into a corner still, filthy, shaking, rocking.

My breath trembles out as I imagine their spindly fingers reaching for me, asking me why I got out, and they didn’t.

I don’t find a ghost as I drag the bedframe away from the wall.

Rather, I very nearly miss what is revealed, caught on the edge of my light.

I step closer, squinting, and crouch down close to the wall.

The scratches carved into the wall are letters, drawled in an ever-looser script going down the wall. My blood chills as I read it.

I am made now into a man’s perfection; I am,

a woman who wants nothing,

feels nothing

and is

nothing

I straighten up as the chill grips me deep in my chest, step back, and bump into something. The shock pulls a scream from me before I whip around and find only the bed.