A-Splendid-Ruin(67)

“Help!” I rasped again, breaking on a sob of frustration and fear. “Please! I’m here! Help!”

I heard someone vomiting, very close, and then a man called, “Did you hear something?”

I scrabbled more urgently. “Here! I’m right here!”

Now the crunch of footsteps settling debris, the scraping slide of things dragged aside. The crack of light widened, and then widened again, just as had the ceiling in my room. This time there was no foot punching through, but instead a man peering down, the sky behind him. The brightness blinded briefly before I made out his rough and craggy features.

“You all right, miss?” He looked over his shoulder, gesturing, calling, “Come here now! Hurry! I got a woman!”

Slowly, they managed to pull me free, and I was out of my tomb and into the morning. My head throbbed, my back and my hips ached. I coughed so violently and painfully I thought I might split my lungs.

I had no time even to thank them as another man called and they went hurrying off to help, one of them pausing only long enough to glance at my forehead and say, “You’d best find a doctor.”

Gingerly, I touched my forehead. My fingers came away covered with blood. The severed foot, I thought, but no, this was my own blood trickling down my cheek. I choked on filthy mucus that I spat into the wreckage as I stumbled forward, my bare feet tender, gray with dust. The entire side of Blessington where my room had been had collapsed upon itself, four stories now only crushed brick, broken glass, twisted metal, splintered wood. The wall that had surrounded the asylum lay in pieces, the iron railing mangled. I stared at what was left. A half-formed building, exposed rooms, jagged bits of flooring and plaster hanging. Impossible to imagine that it had ever been anything to fear.

Everyone looked as I felt; we were like ghosts haunting the aftermath of a tragedy. A woman huddled in a blanket. A man in underwear and a tattered coat blinked as if he’d just awakened—one of the groundskeepers. The silence was eerie, a city gone mute when before it had sung joyfully with activity. The only human sounds were the grunts of the rescuers, the cries for help, others hacking and sneezing in the dust.

I expected someone to call out, There you are, miss. Come now, but no one spoke any such thing. It occurred to me then that no one was watching; there was no one to call me back. No one yet had grasped who I was. But at some point they would.

I pressed for the reassuring lump in the waistband of my drawers beneath my nightgown. Yes, there it was, secured in the pocket I’d forced into the seam. My uncle’s vest button. What was left of my confusion vanished with the sharp reminder of my purpose. This was not how I’d imagined things to happen, but I was no longer the fool I’d been. I would not miss an opportunity when it presented itself. I had to get as far from Blessington as I could, as quickly as I could, as unobtrusively as I could.

A burst pipe spilled water into a gurgling course over loosened cobblestone, creating a sudden stream in the center of a city street. The water stung the cuts on my feet, but I did not rush my step, not yet, though I wished to run.

Once again, the earth beneath my feet shrugged. I steadied myself against sudden vertigo—no wall, nothing to grab on to. It was soon over, and other patients emerged from the rubble, injured and bleeding, one of them crying, “She’s dead! I saw her die! Oh God, save us!” I did not slow to discover who was dead, because now attendants were coming to themselves, chasing after bewildered patients and tying them with sheets and straitjackets and leather belts to whatever secure thing they could find.

I ignored the pain of my injured feet and the gash in my forehead and kept walking, losing myself in the people massing in the streets, moving with them away from Blessington. Thankfully I was no longer wearing inmate gray, but my pink nightgown. Only a nurse or another patient would recognize me as belonging to the asylum, but that was enough. I didn’t want to call attention to myself. Do not look at me. Do not see me. I am no one.

A ghost. Smoke and dust and shadow. Nothing substantial until I chose to be, and when I did, no one would ever underestimate me again.





It was no longer a city I recognized. The street before me had cracked into great fissures running helter-skelter, the sidewalks bordering it broken into slabs like candy brittle. Rail tracks twisted. Horses lay dead in the streets, downed by falling walls or bricks. A woman stood crying before a house that had shifted off its foundation and tilted into the one next door. The exterior wall of another had crumbled away, leaving it exposed like a dollhouse, and the man inside rushed about picking up shattered dishes. The fronds of the palm in the yard below wore a chair and a crocheted throw.

Keep walking. Don’t stop. I bowed my head against any curious glances, but everyone was too dazed to care who I was. No one would be looking for me yet. They would think me dead until they didn’t find my body in the ruins.

Now, I was only one of hundreds of others coming into the morning, another woman wearing a pale nightgown, having awakened to a nightmare. All of us dazed, most half-clothed, or bizarrely dressed in bits and pieces grabbed in haste. One man had on a woman’s skirt as he worked to free someone in the debris. Another wore a nightshirt and heavy work boots. Some still wore the gowns and evening wear that said they’d not yet been to bed. All staring in disbelief at the chaos, at streets frozen in mid undulation, their cobblestones popping, alleys blocked by rubble, houses that were only piles of matchsticks or sliding into sinkholes or with folded walls looking flimsy as paper. Windows shaken free of glass, leaning telegraph poles, and electric wires hanging loose or snaking and hissing and sparking on the ground. A church spire was only metal scaffolding. Grass on a hillside slid apart in great patches like pieces of carpet. My nose and lungs itched at the hovering cloud of dust and the increasingly pervasive stink of gas and oil.