Psychosis (Wildfire Chronicles Vol. 3) (3 page)

She
stood a moment, trying to collect her thoughts. She remembered the attraction she had felt for Michael days earlier.
Before Victor.
Remembered too how she and Jason had turned to him for protection, and felt shame. Now though, in a world of constant terror, how would they manage travelling with a man who could not walk?

Rachel stared into the darkness beyond the trees, and found no guidance there. She couldn’t see how they could survive what seemed like a suicide mission, couldn’t see how to proceed for the best.

Couldn’t see the pair of eyes staring back at her intently.

Lying on the dew-wet grass, blinking up into the light creeping slowly across the sky, the huge, deformed man tried to piece together the snapshots of blood and chaos that made up the days before he had fallen unconscious, only to wake covered in blood in the middle of nowhere.

He had no idea how much time had passed, and jumbled, confused memories jostled in his mind, some his; some not. Time itself had become something of a conundrum. It seemed no longer willing to abide by its own rules.

The chaos had begun - however many days earlier - when the deformed creature had just been a shadow in a dark corner of another man’s mind.
A man sitting in a carefully sculpted doctor’s office that followed textbook instructions on creating a relaxed atmosphere to the letter.

Soft music, copious amounts of indoor vegetation.
Framed pictures depicting soothing landscapes, rolling hills and still waters.

It started with Alex.

*

“And how do you feel about that?”

Alex gave
the therapist a baleful glare, and was gratified to see her squirm a little. He did his best to allow none of the clichés so rife in her profession escape censure.

“How do I feel about the fact that it’s me here instead of
him
? I feel like life is unfair. One long, remorseless kicking.
He
is the one that needs to be locked up, not me.
He
could handle this place far better than I could. And I know why it’s not him in here, but me: it’s because
he
would be running the place by now.”

Dr
Deborah Jackson, attractive and young – far too young for Alex to believe she was any sort of authority on the subject she claimed to be – nodded slowly, eyes focused on the forms and pamphlets in front of her; on her notes.

Alex felt impotent anger try
ing to rise up inside him; felt the drugs squash it for the feeble rebellion it was. She wasn’t even listening, just looking to tick the boxes that needed ticking so she could get out of the place. Friday afternoon. Doubtless she’d be shaking her perfect arse in some stranger’s liquor-stupid face within hours.
That’s
what she was focused on, not on Alex. If it had been
him,
such an affront would not have been permitted.
Then
the forms would have been the last thing she looked at.

Alex sighed and slumped back in his seat.

“We’ve discussed this many times, Alex. You understand that he
is
locked up – even more so than you?”

Alex nodded, and sighed again, defeated. The conversation was no different this time than it had been on the previous hundred occasions he h
ad attempted to have it with Dr Jackson. She understood, but she didn’t
understand
. Couldn’t. What she read in her textbooks and reports bore no correlation to actually living through it. Jackson had no idea what it was like to be locked away in the place by authorities who knew perfectly well that he hadn’t committed the crime.

Well,
technically
, he had.

The place in question was the Moorcroft Hospital. A wonderfully generic name that gave the residents of the neighbouring towns
a slender chance of forgetting just what kind of people they had locked up on their doorstep. It had previously been the Moorcroft Centre for the Criminally Insane, but that left nothing to the imagination, and it had become rare for a Town Hall meeting to pass without mention of the place, accompanied by clucking and head-shaking and dramatic sighs.

Eventually it had been renamed to keep the peace. That was just how it was with mental illness these days in Alex’s opinion: the more people actually acknowledged that mental conditions weren’t just someone putting on an act, the more things got relabelled; sanitised. That way it was possible to discuss them, without actually
talking
about them. He himself had been relabelled: no longer was he schizophrenic, or suffering with multiple personalities. No, now he suffered from
Dissociative Identity Disorder.
Bland, uninspiring. Confusing and vague enough to allow those dealing with the issue to feel safe.

“Yes D
octor, I understand that he is locked up in this place, if you want to be pedantic about it. But he is not in any way
doubly
locked up, as you believe. The drugs are not a prison cell; they are an escape. It’s me that sits in here day after day watching the paint fading on the walls. Me who has to eat the slop you serve up. Me who feels the side effects of the fifteen different tablets I have to choke down every day. It’s me that spends every waking moment locked up with drooling lunatics.”

He saw a touch of alarm in her eyes then. It was speaking like
him
that did it, even just a modicum of that man bleeding through to the surface made her clench those relentlessly gym-worked cheeks a little tighter. Deep inside somewhere, he almost felt something to go along with the words, some vague simmering, like someone had run a hot knife under the pool of rage that he knew still sat in him, caused a slight ripple. Her response, that moment of fright, was delightful, but he knew he’d regret it in the long run.

The pen was scrambling across the paper, falling over itself, and he could imagine the gist of the message:
up the dose.

He felt his heart sink a little. He knew his presence in the place was inevitable: it was his hands that had done the deed
–
deeds
– and he didn’t deny that. Once they had come to understand that he was two people, once the authorities were aware of the malevolent presence of another, that he cast two shadows, and still they remained obstinate in their judgement, he accepted his fate.

It wasn’t the fact that his body was here: it was his mind. It could have been Alex enjoying some dope-fuelled vacation in the foggy recesses of his brain, while the true perpetrator paid for what he had done. Instead it was Jake, hiding out somewhere
in the bowels of his psyche, laughing while Alex suffered. It had always been the same: the body was a timeshare – Jake fucking wrecked the place and Alex had to clean up the mess.

They made that choice, the authorities. Made it not because Alex needed curing; he wasn’t naïve enough to believe it would ever happen. No, they took the easy option.
They could have provoked Jake out of hiding, but being locked up with Jake would have been murder. Maybe literally. So they plied him with enough drugs to bewilder an elephant, and left Alex, doped and pliant, to suffer the consequences.

Alex
had always spent a lot of time inside his treacherous mind. Far too much, one way or another. Anything that took him outside, locking him back into the real world for a moment was to be cherished.

So he watched with keen interest as movement entered his field of visio
n in the large window that overlooked the hospital grounds behind Dr Jackson’s pert rear.

The movement was unusual for two reasons: firstly because the grounds of the hospital were off-limits unless escorted by staff, and secondly because Moorcroft Hospital existed in splendid isolation, almost fifteen miles away from the nearest town. Close enough to piss off the residents. Not close enough for anyone to visit on foot.

In point of fact, the hospital wasn’t just isolated: it was about as lonely as it was possible to get in the UK. It had been built nearly three centuries before as a stately home for some Lord whose family had long in-bred themselves out of existence right in the middle of Northumberland, England’s least populated and most forgotten county. Northumberland offered rolling countryside and not much else. A wilderness that few ever thought about and fewer still visited.

The handful of towns that the county boasted, barely-populated relics with quaint names like Cramlington, Ashington and Haltwhistl
e, clung to the southern border like children clinging to skirts, drawn into the orbit of the larger cities to the south. Most of the county was dominated by the Northumberland National Park, which presented the perfect place for the UK to hide away unwanted detritus like Alex.

A quarter of the park was off limits to the public, owned by the Ministry of Defence and used for no-doubt shadowy military tests. England’s own
Area 51
, the only difference being that people actually gave a shit about the American version. Maybe the presence of the military, all
No Trespassing
signs and forbidding barbed wire, was enough to put off potential visitors, who knew.

Moorcroft Hospital riding the military’s coattails into convenient obscurity was just a bonus.

So why was there a figure, running at full tilt toward the hospital from the east, where there existed nothing other than forests and fields of bored cows for mile after tedious mile?

To someone
that had been subjected to the excruciating boredom of the place for three years, the sight was an electric shock of excitement, and highly perplexing.

What kind of lunatic wanted to run
towards
Moorcroft?

*

Head uncomfortably positioned on a rolled-up sweater that quickly absorbed the cold damp from the floor beneath, Rachel dreamed of the bunker, and of those five days spent satisfying the sick whims of a demented psychopath while Michael had lain unconscious and her brother had remained locked somewhere inside his own mind. The memories haunted her during her waking hours too, lurking somewhere just behind her eyes, but at least when awake she was able to suppress them. In sleep, helpless and vulnerable, the putrid memory of Victor clawed at the fragile structure of her mind. She slept with clenched fists, knuckles turning white.

She woke in darkness feeling hollow and drenched in cold sweat, and took her turn on watch, perched next to the fire, scanning the trees for movement.

His watch over, Jason stretched out next to the fire, and allowed sleep to take him.

In his dream, Jason was a child again. A
toddler, sat in a high chair in a warm, bright kitchen, listening to the soundtrack of his childhood: the gurgles and bangs of the hot water pipes that seemed to have a life of their own, thrumming against their moorings, trying to break free.

The smell: baked beans. Just the memory of it tickling his nostrils, and he smiled. The high chair was safe; steady, he liked to lean his tiny bulk against the sides, liked the way the chair felt like it might move but never quite did. The way the tray pressed up against his stomach, anchoring him in place like an embrace.

He could hear his mother humming along to the tinny radio that sat in the corner of the kitchen; a cheerful tune by a girl group long since forgotten.

Jason’s
face split in a toothy grin, and his gurgle of happiness merged with the gurgling in the pipes and the sunlight spilled in, making the world seem happy, and then his mother was in front of him, sending a spoonful of beans on its meandering journey toward his waiting mouth…

And then Jason was frozen in terror, and his mother was a blood-soaked horror, black blood oozing from the twin voids under her brow, torn, ragged flesh peeling away from her bare torso, and the high chair was a prison.

And he was screaming.

His massive body, barely lit by the flickering embers of the fire, twitched spasmodically.

Rachel watched him, the flames barely illuminating his expression of deep anguish, and felt a stab of hopelessness.

Michael dreamed of the door. That nondescript red door
that stubbornly refused to be dethroned as his principal memory of his time spent as a police officer in Cardiff. The entrance on the wall he had attempted to build in his mind. When the nightmare was a door, building a wall was a useless exercise.

I
n the dream, he was approaching the door without being aware of moving, without being able to focus on anything but that cracked, weathered wood and the lock, ringed by scratches, the fossilised remains of a thousand fumbled attempts to insert a key.

As always, the door began to swing open of its own volition.
An invitation into the darkness beyond. And when the light pierced that darkness, it was there as always, the corridor of blood and hair and bone, filled with the sound of an infant squealing in pain and -

Michael woke with a start, the sheen of sweat on his body stinging as the bitter coastal breeze hit it. For a moment, he la
id on his back and breathed deeply, pushing the nightmare back into the shadows. Looking up at the clouds passing across the sky through gently swaying branches, listening to their soft rustle, he was almost able to believe the world was normal.