At the Edge of Waking Read online

  Now then. Here was a question. Where did the sedative come from?

  The realization was like a second awakening: she was in a hospital room, bare of furniture and fixtures but unmistakable for its tiles and its sickly paint. Struggling with the weight of her limbs, she hauled herself up to sit against the wall, hugging her knees, trying to listen past the thudding of her heart and the ringing in her ears. Silence. That was wrong; that wasn’t the hospital she knew. The color of the paint on the door was wrong, too, cream instead of green. Everything was wrong—broken tiles—cold radiator—old mittens instead of restraints—

  And she remembered being taken out of her cell by a male orderly. She remembered it vividly and all of a piece: his soft, stupid face; his hard hand on her arm; her arm bare under the sleeve of her scanty smock. She had been drugged no more than usual, had been left alone for several days, had almost recovered herself. Had known that the appearance of a male orderly in the women’s ward was a dreadful sign.

  She couldn’t really remember the passage through the hospital, it was a pastiche of all her other trips through the halls, the unlocked and relocked doors, but she remembered being taken out into the courtyard. It was the kitchen yard, with the laundry steaming away on one side and the ambulances parked along the wall by the tradesman’s entrance. It had been cold. She had been surprised by the cold, having forgotten the seasons, and she wore nothing but her smock. The air was shocking on her shaved scalp, her bare feet and legs. Her attention had been caught by the clouds of steam from the laundry, the steam of her own breath, the billowing exhaust from the big olive-green car idling by the kitchen door. They’re taking me away, she thought without hope as the orderly handed her over to the two men in uniform. But the men in uniform, holding her by her arms, took her across the yard, past the laundry—through the wet clouds reeking of lye—and out a small door to the back of the hospital grounds, and then she knew for sure.

  The wintry ground hurt her feet. Frozen grass gave way to frozen twigs and pebbles and leaves as they entered the bare-branched wood. She balked, and they hit her without waiting for a struggle. One hard punch on the back of her neck, and she could still feel the cruel ground scraping her feet as they dragged her to the ready-dug grave under the trees. They dropped her on her knees; she caught herself with her hands on the lip of the grave. There were roots protruding from the rough clay walls, black roots, brown clay. Her breath still steamed. There was a shot, two shots. A hard hand again on her arm, the hard ground again beneath her feet . . .

  And a hospital room. And drugs. And bugs beneath her skin. Was this a rescue?

  It was difficult—the gimbal that had spun the room was now inside her skull, spinning her brain—but she got herself onto her feet, and rather than dare the open floor she slid her shoulder against the wall, one corner and another, feeling the rough places in the tiles snag her sweater (sweater? over orderly’s pants?) until she achieved the door. It had a round handle. The mitten slid and slid. She knew it was locked. She tried both hands and the mechanism rattled and the door opened a crack. She pried it open with her mittened fingertips. A long hospital corridor stretched before her, very long, very empty, lit only by a window at the far end. It was silent, and cold, and she could hear the emptiness echoing throughout. An empty hospital.

  Was this a rescue? Or what was this?

  The cold grew worse as the sedative wore off. She huddled on the floor with her shoulder propped against the wall, trying to minimize her contact with the icy tiles. She had periods of lucidity when she knew she should escape. To stay when the door stood wide open was the worst kind of self-betrayal; it made her the canary who clings to its perch when the cage door is left ajar. But she had been drugged for a long time, and imprisoned for a long time too, and achieving even enough lucidity for that recognition took everything she had. The insects did not come back, but she had moments of severe dislocation when up became sideways and even so familiar an object as a door became merely a plane, a color, an angle, without meaning or name. Clinging to her sense of self was all she could do, and she did it for hours, unmoving, staring out the door and down the endless hall.

  The light changed. Dusk filled the air with a tangible blue.

  The empty hospital was not as silent as she had thought—perhaps the ringing in her ears was easing off. Sounds echoed down the empty hall, sounds she might have called footsteps or voices except that one never heard just one footstep, or a voice that said half a word and fell silent. Be— And the clink of a hypodermic syringe dropped into a steel dish, a sound she knew too well. Sometimes one of the voices would seem to speak its syllable directly into her ear—Fa— and she would wonder if she could still be sane after all the drugs, all the “treatments” that had no aim that she had ever seen but to drive her mad. She had never known anything worth betraying, and they had seldom asked her that kind of question. They had often not asked her any questions at all, but they had told her, endlessly, about her rebellious nature, and how disloyalty was a disease. But they had not cared about that either. She was a hostage for her family’s good behavior—she had always known that—and they had only tormented her because she was there, and that was what they did there.

  The footsteps were back. Not just one at a time, now, but a whole chain of them, one after another, tap, tap, tap. She had been listening to the phantom noises so long she was slow to realize these footsteps must come attached to actual feet walking up a flight of stairs—she could hear the echo. Then she heard a door open, and a yellow light fell across the middle of the empty hall. The light slid about so smoothly on the gritty floor that it surprised her. It was like oil, a pool of golden oil running down the hall that as a consequence had a definite tilt to it, so that she was sitting at the foot of a slide, or the base of a chute with the oil sliding down. The light sliding down. Footsteps tapping. A mental effort forced her perceptions back into their right order, and then he was at the door, shining his flashlight in her eyes.

  “You’re awake,” he said, and dropped the light so it no longer blinded her.

  She blinked tears out of her eyes—her pupils were sluggish and she was dazzled—and saw, before anything else came clear, the stiff shapes of the epaulets on his shoulders. He was in uniform. She scrabbled away from him. Her heels caught in the cuffs of the too-long pants. She got herself into the corner somehow, and wondered with a pounding heart what good she thought that was going to do.

  “It’s all right,” he was saying, “be calm, I’m not here to hurt you. I got you away from those men, remember? You’re not going to be shot. You’re all right. You’re all right.”

  He set the flashlight on its end so it made a circle of brightness on the ceiling and illuminated the room as a lamp might. While her eyes adjusted, he took off his officer’s cap and smoothed his hand over his cropped hair. There was something familiar about the gesture, something that caught at her memory like a hook, and she had a flash of riding in a car, the backseat of a car, with that head in profile against the windscreen.

  “Are you cold?” he said. “I’m sorry I had to leave you so long, I have to be careful not to be missed. There’s some soup heating downstairs. I brought you up here so you wouldn’t hurt yourself, they must have given you the devil’s own cocktail of drugs, but you look like you’re doing better now. Would you like some hot soup? How do you feel?”

  “What is this place?” She had to force her voice to make any sound above a whisper. “Why am I here?”

  “It’s just for a little while,” he said. “Until you’re better, and the hunt dies down. Then we can see about getting you out.”

  Out of here? Out of the country, she supposed.

  “You shot those men,” she said.

  “I hope it won’t be too long,” he said. “We had a good organization, but it’s a bit disarranged just now.”

  “You shot those men.”

  “Our usual system had a bit of a breakdown.”

  “They were wearing the same
uniform.”

  He looked down, and as if he had just discovered it in his hand, rubbed the shiny bill of his hat and put it on. It changed his face, making it dangerous and hard.

  “They were killers,” he said. “Would you like some soup?”

  He had made a snug place downstairs, in a windowless room like a secretary’s anteroom that could only be reached through another room. There was a canvas camp bed with rough wool blankets, a table against the wall and a single chair, and a cubbyhole with a toilet and sink.

  “There’s water,” he said, “I jimmied the main valve. But the tank takes a while to fill.”

  There was a camp stove on the table that he warmed a tin of soup on, and afterwards a saucepan of coffee that he poured into a thermos bottle for her to drink later. There was something about the way he moved, the way he hung his hat on a spindle on the back of the chair, that made her think he had used this room before. Other rescues? He pulled the jar of instant coffee from a box under the table, and before he pushed the box back out of the way she saw the spines of several books. This was his place; she became convinced of it, watching him move. He had made this place for himself, a secret place, a place to hide. Yet there he was, in his neat brown uniform, his pistol holster as well-polished as his shoes, his hair freshly cropped and his face as clean-shaven as a monk’s. She could not make sense of it, it was too disjunctive. An officer in Internal Security hiding in an empty hospital. An officer in Internal Security hiding her.

  “I’ll come back when I can,” he said. He left her with the flashlight and the camp stove, but took away the matches and the fuel.

  She spent a long time, more than a night, wrapped in rough blankets and dreaming violent, extravagant dreams. She was often nauseous, plagued by itches and pains, and constantly sweating; she thought the vomiting and the sweating and the dreams were all parts of the same thing, her system purging itself of her long incarceration. Three years? It had been spring when she was arrested, so it was almost three years, or almost four. She thought almost four. In the hospital—the other hospital—it had been better to lose her sense of time, to make every day one day, because she could survive one day in that place, but not years. Nobody could live for years that way and stay sane. If she had been sane when she went in. She thought she had been; she was pretty sure.

  But if she was sane now, then this hospital was haunted.

  There were always noises; the silence of the place was compounded of sounds, small, stealthy, edge-of-hearing sounds. An old building succumbing to damp: wood creaked, plaster flaked, linoleum peeled away from the floor. Air ticked its way through the pipes, too, and echoed her as she retched, helpless and aching, her stomach empty even of bile. But as she lay there in her woolen cocoon, sometimes a voice would speak over her, a single syllable—Su—that would jolt her awake. There was no question it was a voice, not a building sound. The footsteps might have been something else; the quiet click of a door closing might have been just that, a door swung by a draft. But she heard a gurney wheeling down a corridor, its wheels needing oil and its tires sticking to the floor. She heard the quiet, soothing murmur of a woman’s voice, a nurse’s, flowing on and on like a tap left running, no words, just the sound of comfort. Comfort, only it went on and on, until she had to wonder what procedure it was that was taking so long, what suffering the voice was trying to subdue. And then there was the scream.

  She had drunk rusty water from the tap and managed to keep it down. She drank some of the coffee, tepid and sweet with evaporated milk, and kept that down as well: one thermos lid, she didn’t want to push her luck. Daylight had been filtering in from the next room for some time, probably hours, and she switched the flashlight off, though its batteries were almost dead. Ho— said the voice in her ear. She imagined a magnetic recording tape unwound from its spool and scissored into confetti. The voice didn’t frighten her, but it oppressed her a little; it was so present, and it robbed her of some much-needed privacy. She resented it, resented all the hauntings, because she was fairly certain they came from inside her head. She would have preferred ghosts, would certainly have preferred the ghosts of this place, because they could not have had anything to do with her. So she was thinking, when the scream happened. It leapt out at her from mid-air—that was what it felt like. It was there, in the room, loud and clear and sudden, and suddenly gone, bitten off as short as any of the broken words. But a scream, shocking as any scream always is.

  “Leave me alone!”

  Her voice, after vomiting, after long disuse, was nothing but a scrap of itself. Even from the inside it seemed much weaker than the voice that spoke the bits of words, the voice that screamed. Her mouth stretched and she put her hands to her face as if she was going to weep, but she couldn’t. She didn’t have that much feeling left, or maybe she was saving her self-pity for larger things. She gave up the attempt and climbed off the cot, taking the blankets with her. The floor was cold and dirty under her feet, and she had the cunning idea of using the mittens as socks. They had been too big for her hands and fit her feet well enough, though the empty thumbs looked absurd, like monkey toes. She shuffled into the outer room and peered out the window. It was a safe window, according to her rescuer, looking not on a street, but on the hospital’s central courtyard.

  From this view, the hospital was clearly deserted. The flagstones were almost buried under weeds and trash, and saplings of a few years’ growth were forcing their way up from the larger gaps. The brick walls were blackened as if by fire, and there were broken windows and sagging gutters. Windows and doors on the ground floor had been boarded shut. Seeing that, she wondered how he came and went—how he had got her inside. It seemed as though she had materialized here, like a ghost. That was the first time it occurred to her to wonder if she was dead.

  The outer room led to a narrow hallway, the sort of hallway that kinks and bends its way through the interior of a building, contorting itself so that most of the rooms it services have some access to natural light. She shuffled her way around some of the corners. It was dark, sometimes very dark, most of the doors were closed. She opened several; the ones that looked out on the street were boarded up. She was standing at one of these, her cheek pressed to the plywood, listening for the sound of a car, a bird, a living voice, anything of the outside world, when she heard the footsteps tapping again. Leather soles on dirty linoleum, tap, tap, tap. Wa— said the voice, making her jump. It’s him, she thought, and though she should have been afraid of him, and was, she was overcome by such a longing not to be alone that she shuffled back to the hiding place. They met in the outer room where the window was. He had just looked into the inner room.

  “Where were you?” he said in a voice that matched his uniform.

  She had mocked the men who arrested her, she remembered that. She remembered being whimsical and brave.

  “Looking,” she said in her rag of a voice. “Where were you?”

  He looked at her. His eyes were so hard, so well-defended, they gave an impression of darkness, but in the light of the window she saw they were gray. She saw that his whole face was a deception: a priest’s face pretending to be an officer’s. None the less frightening for that.

  “Running,” he said, and as he said it she could see the quick motion of his chest beneath his coat.

  “Why?” she said.

  He looked at her—had never stopped looking at her—and then gave a start, as if the hospital’s voice had spoken its syllable in his ear instead of hers. He turned into the inner room, and as she followed him, went on into the lavatory where he turned the tap at the sink and held his hands under the flow. There was blood on his hands; the water was red with more than rust as it swirled down the drain. She retreated to the cot and pulled the mittens off her feet, pretending to herself that she hadn’t seen.

  He had brought the fuel tank back, the matches, and a tin of soup, some tins of meat, half a loaf of bread. He opened one of the tins and gave her a crude sandwich before he reassembled
the stove and set the soup to heating. The warmth of the small gas flame was tangible even from her corner. It made her feel the cold. He set the chair in the middle of the room, between her and the table, and wolfed down his own sandwich.

  “Eat,” he said, “you’ll get sick if you don’t.”

  She could smell the bread and meat in her hand. “Are they after you?”

  He got up to stir the soup. She could hear the sound of the spoon scraping the bottom of the pot. One spoon, one bowl, one mug. One chair. She hadn’t looked at the books yet.

  “Will they catch you?”

  He moved so suddenly she thought he had been scalded, burned. But he only turned about the room—not pacing—he made the hard, fast turns of an animal in a cage. She recognized the movement, felt it in memory, recorded in her bones. But the door was open.

  He made three turns of the room, then went back to the stove and poured half the soup into the mug, which he brought to her. He was breathing quickly again, or still.

  “Eat this, at least,” he said. “You’re half starved.”

  She took the mug in the hand that did not hold the sandwich. “Who did you kill?”

  Leaving the stove burning for the sake of the heat, he poured the remaining soup into the bowl and drank it without troubling with the spoon. She was too fascinated by his hunger to be bothered about her own.

  “Who did you kill?”

  He sat in the chair with his head bowed and the bowl in his hand, sucking broth off his lips. His eyes looked at nothing.

  “Can I go?” she said.