The Fall of Never(101)

I’ve come this far, she thought and knocked on the door.

Nothing.

Looking back over her shoulder she noticed a few more women had turned to watch her. Most of them stared at her with blank expressions, their distant eyes traitors to the severity of their psychological instabilities.

Of course she won’t answer your knock, a voice spoke up in her head, you didn’t do it correctly.

Code. The secret knock. Two knocks, shake the knob, two more knocks. Wasn’t that it? It’d been six years, but wasn’t that it?

To her consternation, a small grin tugged at the corners of her mouth. Kelly administered the secret knock, then waited. And at first it seemed that nothing was going to happen. Was Mouse even in the room? But then she heard the advancing shuffle of feet across the floor on the other side of the door. Kelly’s trembling became more pronounced. In her mind, she held onto her mental picture of Mouse, or Jennifer Sote, and wondered what she looked like now. Moreover, she wondered what the girl—the woman—acted like now, what she thought like. Back then, Mouse had been slipping. Her mind had been slowly deteriorating, leaving her for some remote corner of an infinite void. After these six years, had Mouse’s mind finally retreated for good, given up the ship? Even as a teenager, her brain’s gradual degeneration was most prominent not in her actions but in her eyes, practically foreshadowing her doomed future. Her fingers were always scabbed because she chewed at them. Her skin, particularly her legs and neck, always boasted a variety of colorful bangs and bruises.

“I can’t do this,” she breathed.

Yes-yes-yes, her mind insisted.

The shuffling feet stopped but no one came to the door. Secret knock? What was she thinking? After all this time, did she honestly expect Mouse to remember something as ridiculous as a secret knock?

She probably won’t even remember who I am, she thought.

More women from the lounge were watching her now. One of them appeared to be making her way in Kelly’s direction, although she moved with the hesitation associated most often with curious forest animals. Very few women seemed interested in the television now. Anxious, Kelly searched the hallway for a nurse. Found none.

She knocked again. “Hello?”

There was definitely someone inside; she was certain she’d heard movement.

“This is where they make the ice cream,” a woman said from behind her, shambling along the hallway like someone lost in a dream.

“Yes, okay. Excuse me.”

Kelly turned back to the closed door. She took a deep breath, turned the knob, and pushed open the door.

It was a small, single-occupancy room with a solitary bed tucked into one corner and a simple white throw rug in the center of the floor. A few arbitrary drawings were taped to the walls, each of them at waist-height. A single window stood opposite the bed, through which the muted rays of daylight filtered. No details of the outside world could be made beyond the wire-meshed, frosted pane.

An undernourished woman in a white cloth gown stood in the middle of the room, half-poised to look out the window, but was instead staring at the wall. Her hair was as black as fresh tar, stringy like cobwebs, and framed her pale, ghostlike face with matted tendrils. She looked emaciated, the knots of her elbows and knees bulging from inside her skin with painful exaggeration. Her feet were bare, the ankles ringed with bruises.

Herself moving dreamlike now, Kelly entered the room, shutting the door behind her. She expected the room’s occupant—Mouse?—to turn around at the sound of the door closing, to at least acknowledge her arrival, but the woman did not move.

“Jennifer Sote?” Kelly stepped around the small room trying to get a better view of the woman’s face.

As if reading her mind, the woman lifted her head and stared at Kelly. It was Mouse; there was no doubt about it now. Mouse. At least, what was left of her: Mouse’s face was jaundiced and sallow, her eyes two bruised pockets of flesh. Her lips were dried and peeling, a pale blue. A fading discoloration on the left side of her face just above the jaw-line suggested some sort of physical abuse.

“Jennifer?” Her voice shook. “Mouse?”

To her astonishment, Mouse’s peeling lips broke into a skeletal half-grin. With painful lassitude, Mouse backed herself up against the bed then proceeded to ease herself down onto the mattress, not taking her eyes from Kelly for a single moment. It seemed her bones might snap. That half-grin remained, unflinching. Something fluttered behind Mouse’s eyes and it wasn’t merely recognition. It was something else, something almost devious. Kelly was suddenly afraid…

How can this be Mouse? Mouse was so virile, so intense, so active. This can’t be Mouse, can’t be the same person. She would have never allowed herself to go this far.

But Mouse had never possessed control over her mind; rather, it was the other way around. It was an unraveling—that was the simplest way of understanding it. In a way, Mouse had lived her life as a slave to the bizarre inclinations of a faulty mind. It owned her. Perhaps the same sickness that had satisfied her youth with a dramatic imagination and a profusion of energy had, in adulthood, crippled her into the vapid, feeble woman that now sat on the edge of a hospital bed, watching her from across the room.

“You don’t remember me,” she said. “It’s me, Kelly. We used to be friends. Long ago.”

“It’s warm,” Mouse said, her voice rusty and out of practice. It didn’t sound like it should be coming from this woman, Kelly thought. “I need help to open the window.”