A short story from a series I wrote a few years ago based loosely on fairy tales. A young woman’s hallucinations may be more real than her carers want to believe.
They call it the tower, though it’s been so long since a tower actually stood there people forget why. Now it’s just a concrete block in a city of concrete blocks, a hospital with white walls inside and out that bears no resemblance to the red brick watch tower that once stood there. Legend has it a princess jumped to her death from the top of that tower, but Nate’s never believed in legends. The legendary rarely do.
He arrives to a fanfare of camera shutters smothered by the smog. The manager waits to greet him. She’s serious – grey suit, grey hair – and when he smiles his trademark smile she doesn’t smile back.
The tower doesn’t open its doors to non-residents.
Nate’s father says this is an exercise in political likeability. Nate thinks of it as an exercise in futility. The manager is irritable, unhappy with her role as guide, and the patients’ just stare. But he smiles and shakes their hands and makes small talk.
They break. He corners his PR man. “This is a bloody waste of time. Half these people don’t know who they are, let alone know me.”
The man shrugs, apologises, mutters something about Nate’s father and likeability, and Nate throws his hands in the air in exasperation.
They go upstairs and everything changes.
Nate’s supposed to be following the manager, smiling and shaking hands and making small talk, but a flash of red catches his eye and his footsteps falter. Most of the doors up here are closed. These aren’t communal areas. One swings open in the breeze and he looks through it at a girl.
She kneels on the floor, wide green eyes staring back at him. She looks early twenties, but he guesses she’s older. It’s the hair. The bright red hair so long it spills onto the floor around her. It makes her look younger.
He tries his smile. Says, “Hello.”
She tilts her head to the side and her lips curve slowly, seductively. “Hi.”
“Mr Harper?” The manager’s heels clack against the wooden floor as she races back. “Cayleen, is everything okay?”
The girl – Cayleen – glances to her side, like she’s listening to someone. “Fine,” she says, looking back at Nate. “Thank you.”
The manager closes the door. Turns away. Leads Nate further along. His footsteps drag and he sees Cayleen’s smile in his head and he asks, “What’s wrong with her?”
The manager bristles. “I’m not at liberty to discuss individual patients.”
“No, of course not.” He glances back at the door. “How long has she -?”
“Cayleen’s parents left her here when she was a child. It’s been twenty-two years.” The manager stops abruptly and scowls back at him. “She’s still a child, Mr Harper. Maybe not physically, but she’s still a child where it matters.” She taps her head.
The PR man says it could have gone better. On the ride home, he outlines where Nate went wrong, but he brushes over the Cayleen episode. He hardly mentions it at all. Nate leans back and closes his eyes and plays her smile over and over in his mind.
Nate’s father has a motto: if something doesn’t work, forget about it and move on. He doesn’t believe in lingering in the past. Nate must forget the tower. They have other tactics to secure his political future. Kissing babies is American cliché; he is British, therefore he must have a puppy. The voters like puppies.
“I like kittens,” Nate says, and his father shakes his head as though he’s disappointed him in the worst possible way.
The next day, he mentions visiting the hospital again and his father forbids it.
“The manager wasn’t happy. The last thing we need is an irate mental health representative telling the entire bloody world you hit on a sick girl.”
“I hardly hit on her. I smiled. I said hello. Isn’t that what I’m supposed to do?”
“I don’t care what you did, I care what she says you did. Don’t go pissing this woman off, Nate. Stay away from that place.” He smiles. Warm. Fatherly. “We’ve got a Q and A. Try not to fuck it up.”
Nate sits alone backstage at a large venue in his city. The smog’s come right up to the door, like it’s knocking for him. There are a hundred people out there. And cameras. There’s always cameras, they follow him like storm flies, clinging to his every move. The smog has an orange glow. It makes the entire world seem a little bit off key.
He does the only thing he can think of to ensure he doesn’t mess up his answers. He leaves.
The smog swallows him but he knows his way around like a map is seared across his eyes. They’re used to the clouds of pollution here. This is a city of industry. Always moving forward. That’s his campaign slogan. He’s not sure who came up with it.
The tower may not be a tower any more, but it rises out of the smog and calls to him.
The manager doesn’t like him. He knows that. So he’ll go around the back, to the small garden blocked on all sides by buildings. He’ll count the windows. He’ll climb the walls. He’ll –
She’s in the garden, sat on a bench, and she grins at his expression. “They do let us outside, you know.”
The smog gives her an otherworldly glow.
He forgot how beautiful she is.
“I’m Cayleen,” she says. “I live here. What’s your name?”
“Nate.”
“Hi Nate.” She glances back at the building and when she looks at him her smile is playful. “You’re not supposed to be here.”
“I don’t really know why I’m here,” he admits.
Cayleen shrugs. Then tenses. She twists away from him, whispers something to the air over her shoulder, and then snaps back to her visitor. “I’m sorry. They don’t like you.”
“Who?”
“My hallucinations.” Her tone is matter-of-fact, but there’s a slight dryness to it. A nod to her own opinions on the matter. “They say you want to take me away.”
He laughs. “I only met you yesterday.”
She spreads her hands out over the bench to lean closer. For a second he can’t breathe. Everything slows. She smiles that beautiful smile and says, “But you came back to meet me again.”
It’s easy after that. She makes him comfortable. She laughs and jokes and even though she hasn’t left the tower since she was a child, she’s an adult now, in mind as well as body.
“They can’t stop you growing up,” she says, glaring at her unseen friends. “Hard as they might try.”
He’s himself. For the first time in months there’s no one telling him what to say or how to say it. And Cayleen is so easy to talk to. She has this habit, this nervous tic, of tucking her long hair behind her ears. To listen to him. To listen to the other voices. He doesn’t care which.
When he leaves, he turns his phone on and lets it ring to its heart content. He lets it ring until the sound can’t get any shriller, until surely, surely, there can be no sound in the world more annoying. His PA’s voice proves him wrong. He’s in trouble. His father’s on the warpath. Does he know what he’s put her through?
His father told the media and voters Nate was taken away by a sudden illness. Tomorrow, his miraculous recovery is planned.
Behind closed doors, he’s not so forgiving. “Where the hell were you? Do you think this is some sort of joke?”
Cayleen talks to the air, but she’s the sanest person Nate’s met in a long time.
* * * *
He wakes to the phone. Not his. Ever since the election started his father and mother have forced him to move back home. They like to be a part of it. They like the bustle and the planning and the cameras. Nate’s happy to indulge them, but the PR team and PA and everything in between are driving him mad and when the door opens and his PA peeks in he has to choke down the urge to chuck the pillow at her.
“Yes?”
“It’s the hospital.”
“What? What’s happened? Mum –?”
“No, Mr Harper. Not that sort of hospital.” She smiles uncertainly. “Not that type of call.”
It’s still dark out. There’s nothing to see but the glow of street lamps adding to the glow of the sky. Nate grabs his car keys and tells his PA to let his parents know he’s taking the day for himself.
The tower is calling.
He drives dangerously. Speeding. Swerving. His wheels shriek and he doesn’t care. Cayleen’s smile is clearer than the road ahead. They’ve met twice. Just twice. He was with his ex for five years and he never, in all that time, had this heart-clenching pain.
The manager meets him outside. She’s still not smiling but her eyes are softer.
“We found her a few hours ago,” she explains, leading him in. “She keeps asking for you.”
“What’s wrong?”
“An episode. She has them some times.” The manager shuts the door to the outside world and everything is deadly quiet, like the smog has wrapped itself around the tower and smothered any noise. “Never this violent. It looks like – but she was in a locked room, Mr Harper, we know she was alone.”
“She asked for me?”
“She’s still asking.” The manager smiles wryly. “Whatever you said when you snuck back here yesterday must have made quite an impact.”
Cayleen’s been moved to the secure part of the hospital. It’s a single ward. Six beds. Restraints. There’s a security guard on duty, and a nurse. Any of the four doctors working overnight are easily reachable at the touch of a button. She’s in safe hands.
The bed’s too large. It swallows her.
Nate sits down in the chair beside her. Her hair spills down the side of the bed and onto the floor, a waterfall of fire. Or blood. He’s not sure which. Yesterday he would have said fire but today, with her face so pale, he thinks of blood.
When she sees him, she smiles. “Hi.”
“Hello.” Nate glances at the manager and nurse and security guard. All watching. Waiting to see what he’ll do next. He clears his throat. “How are you?”
Cayleen laughs. Her hand goes to her stomach and before he can stop her she pulls her top up. He’s halfway to yanking it back down again when his eyes land on her ribs.
A bruise.
A footprint.
“They think I did this,” she whispers, nodding at their audience. “But I’m not a contortionist.”
“Or a size nine.”
It’s all Nate can think of to say in his deadened, dulled state, but it makes Cayleen laugh, properly laugh, and she lowers her top and takes his hand as he just stares.
“I’m all right.” She clenches his fingers and her grip is the most natural thing. “But I didn’t do it.” She raises her voice. Looks over to the manager. “I couldn’t have done it.”
“Cayleen,” the manager says, “You were alone in a locked room.”
“I told you, Nate, I told you.” Her grip tightens. Almost painfully. He’s shocked back to her, back to the present, away from the memory of that horrible vivid bruise. “They don’t want me to leave.”
His eyes widen.
The manager shakes her head and moves closer. “Cayleen, they’re not real.”
“I told them I wanted to go. To see the world. To see –” Her eyes flick down to the bed; her cheeks flush. “To see you. But they won’t let me go.”
“It’s not like that,” the manager tells Nate. “We’ve told her she has to stay because of the visions, and now she believes her hallucinations are physically making her stay.”
Her voice is weak. Her blue eyes tremble.
She’s not sure any more.
Nate runs his thumb along Cayleen’s fingers. Not really aware he’s doing it. Not thinking it strange. She has to sleep. That’s what the nurse says. But Nate doesn’t want to go far and he lingers on the edge of the opposite bed, watching her heavy eyelids flicker until her breathing evens into dreams.
The manager perches beside him.
“Mr Harper?”
“Yes?”
“The doors are locked.”
“What?”
“The doors. To the street, the garden. Even the windows in the bloody kitchen. They’re all locked.”
Nate tears his eyes away from Cayleen. “I don’t understand.”
“No one on my staff locked them, Mr Harper.” A touch of hysteria now. “We’ve been trying to get them open ever since you arrived but they won’t budge.”
He looks back at Cayleen. Peaceful. Sleeping.
“Can we break them down?”
“They’re like steel. I don’t understand how. Those doors are old, half the time I’m worried the slightest bit of wind will blow the damn things off and now they’re trapping us.” She pauses, seeming to think over her words. “They’re trapping her.”
He darts a look at the manager. “Are we still talking about the doors?”
She tries a smile. “What else would we be talking about?”
In the flickering light, with the smog wrapped around the building, it’s easier to believe in ghosts than the world outside. Nate tries the doors. He thumps against them until his shoulders ache. HE tries his phone. It burns his fingers and won’t wake again.
Trapped.
The word is a whisper, teasing against his ear.
The manager makes him a drink and he goes to sit back with Cayleen. There’s nothing he can do downstairs. Here, at least, he can keep a vigil.
“I’m sorry,” the manager says, sitting down beside him. “I don’t know what’s going on but I’m sure we’ll sort it out soon enough. I know you’re a very busy man.”
He smiles, thinking of his father and mother and the poor PA trying to fend them off.
“Not as busy as you might think.”
The lights dance overhead. The manager shuts her eyes, but Nate looks up at the ceiling to watch. Flickering lights don’t scare him. He’s more worried by what might be lurking in the dark they leave behind.
* * * *
Cayleen’s surrounded by figures. Shadows. They writhe and twist around her, touch her, whisper to her. They’re kind and gentle but when they look at him their eyes are fire and the writhing shadows grow more solid and their hate is tangible in the air, suffocating, all-consuming. And Cayleen’s lost somewhere behind that hate. She’s trapped in the tower.
“Nate!”
He jerks awake. The scream rings in his ears. He doesn’t know whether it was dream or reality and now his eyes are open but the darkness still surrounds him. The lights have given up the ghost. It could be night outside; the smog’s so thick it’s like a wall separating them from reality.
Cayleen’s bed is empty.
Nate staggers to his feet. He’s alone. The guard, nurse, manager, all gone. He’s not used to being alone. Between the PA and the PR team and his parents and the cameras and the public, alone-time has become a thing of the past. Now he wishes someone was with him. His PA. His mother. Even his damn father. Anyone to hold his hand and lead him into the darkness.
The corridor is another world. The ghostly glow of smog haunts it. Yells from patients rooms – confusion, anger, madness – echo around him, smothered into a dull quiet. Their doors are locked. He tries a few but none of them budge and the sound of the handles rattling is too loud in the eerie quiet.
“Cayleen?”
His shout’s swallowed by the darkness.
He doesn’t know the manager’s name. He’d call for her, but he never asked, she never offered, his PR man’s not here to remind him.
“Anyone?”
Every twist and turn takes him further away from the ward and further into the unknown. The manager showed him around only two days ago. Now the place is a maze and the maze is unkind. He starts running, like a man possessed, determined, desperate, to reach some sort of familiar territory.
A thump. He sprawls across the floor.
“Nate?”
Nate’s eyes open to the side view of Cayleen’s pale face.
“Thank God – I thought –”
“Shh.” Her hand presses over his mouth and he realises she’s whispering. “They’re everywhere.”
Slowly, silently, he sits up. His heart thumps so quickly he can’t feel the separate beats but it slows as he pushes back against the wall and puts an arm around her.
She nestles closer. “I’m so lost.”
“I know. It’s a maze.” Her wide eyes look up at him in shock. “What?”
“You see it too?”
“I see it.” He glances over her head and into the darkness. “Not that there’s much to see.”
“They’re hiding,” she whispers. “Toying with me.”
“What do they want?”
“For me to be like them.” She smiles but there are tears in her eyes. “They like to have new company every now and again, you know?”
Nate tightens his grip on her.
“What do you mean, like them?”
“They want me to jump. Like the princess in the story.” Cayleen shakes her head. “Only she wasn’t a princess, she was just a girl who lost her husband and then her baby.” She lowers her voice until he can hardly hear her. “And then she jumped. Because she was lonely. And the others jumped too, because she didn’t want to be lonely anymore. But it’s not enough. She wants me.”
She’s shaking. Nate grasps her shoulder. Tries to wrap his head around the situation.
“We should find a way out?”
Cayleen nods and takes his hand and lets him lead her forward like he knows where she’s going.
“Do you know what happened to the manager?”
His voice is swallowed by the dull silence.
“No. I think … maybe …” A deep breath. “They got her. I think they got her.”
He nods but doesn’t say anything. Just keeps striding forward and hoping they’ll find something. The sounds of the other patients have faded now. They pass a corridor he’s sure he recognises; he tries a door and it opens and there’s a body on the other side. He slams it shut before Cayleen can see.
The only constant is the hush of her hair dragging behind them and the thump of their footsteps.
And then the hush stops.
Cayleen tugs at his hand. Nate falters, lets his footsteps fade so there’s only the silence.
“What is it?”
He looks over his shoulder.
It’s not Cayleen looking back.
He tugs his hand away; the smiling face jumps back. Cayleen. He hears now and when he looks past the creature she’s there, on the floor, being dragged away from him. He tries to follow. The creature blocks his path. And with every second that smiling face is becoming more real, more solid. Harder to shake away as imaginary.
Her teeth are bloody. They cut through her skin. But still she smiles.
Nate stumbles backwards. He can hear Cayleen screaming as she’s pulled away from him but he can’t do anything. The creature casts her own shadow now in the orange glow of the smog. She’s real. She’s there. This is the creature that Cayleen knows, as alive and solid as he is.
One gnarled hand reaches out. The closer it gets, the smoother and younger it becomes.
He can’t move.
Her eyes are bright blue. They sparkle. In a face matted with blood, they’re so brilliant they blind him. He can’t fight. He doesn’t want to. Her smile is pretty now. Her face re-knitting itself.
“Nate!”
“Nate.”
She whispers the name. There are others around them now. More shadows. More creatures. But they, too, are becoming solid.
He’s going crazy. Or maybe he’s dying, and becoming one of them. Just like Cayleen said.
The hand is a millimetre from his cheek.
“Nate, move!”
Cayleen.
He staggers forward. Dives out of the way of that groping hand, that grotesque bloodied figure. Cayleen grabs his fingers and pulls him into a run, their feet pounding against the hard floor.
“What are we -?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” Cayleen yells, her voice high, panicked. “I’m making this up as I go along.”
The shadows writhe around them, threatening to take form.
“Cayleen.” She’s there. The shadow princess. No longer bleeding and broken and grotesque, but beautiful, ethereal, her blonde hair trailing down the stairs to the entrance as she blocks their path. Her lips curl into a seductive smile and she whispers, “Cayleen.”
They could be twins.
Cayleen’s grip tightens until it hurts. She juts her chin out, stands tall, squares her shoulders. “I’m leaving.”
“No.”
It’s just a whisper, but it crawls over Nate’s skin and he turns, vomits. His insides writhe. He wants to scream but can only gag. Somewhere above him Cayleen sways, but she doesn’t fall. Just stands there. Facing her hallucination.
“You can’t stop me.”
Nate claws at the ground in front of him. He can’t see straight. Everything’s blurred and Cayleen and the princess who always watched over her become one, then separate. Blonde hair; red hair. The two blur, the only thing setting them apart merging.
“I’ll never be like you.”
Cayleen strikes. The princess twists out of the way but Cayleen grabs her hair. The creature screams. Even though he’s bent over, unable to look, he hears it a thousand times and that’s just as bad. The scream. The sound of hair ripping out of the scalp.
And then there’s only Cayleen standing there. Alone. Lost. Confused. The limp blonde hair still in her hands.
Nate staggers to his feet and pulls her down the stairs.
The doors are locked but the light in the lobby is on. There are people here. Real people, just as lost and confused as Cayleen.
“She’s gone.” They reach the bottom step and Cayleen drops down onto it, dragging Nate with her as the blonde hair dissolves into dust in her hands. “She’s actually gone. I can’t feel any of them.”
“That’s good, right? It’s over.”
Cayleen’s bottom lip trembles. “It’s so quiet.”
“Then I’ll make some noise. I’ll bloody well sing if that’ll make you happy.”
She leans forward and rests her forehead against his. “I want to leave now,” she whispers. “I want to leave with you.”
The doors open. There are cheers, sobs of relief, screams at the suddenness. Nate hardly hears them. There’s only Cayleen.
“You can leave with me,” he says. “We’ll go together.”
“Is it always so quiet? Out there?”
He shakes his head. “Most of the time it’s too noisy.”
Cayleen looks into his eyes. “I want to get my hair cut.”
“I can do that.”
“I don’t know if I trust you.”
He smiles weakly. “I’ll pay someone to do that.”
She nods. Lets him pull her upright. “Are we leaving now?”
“Yes.”
No compromise. No hesitation. They’re leaving, before the doors slam shut and she’s trapped here forever.
“And you’ll sing?”
“If it’ll make you happy.”
Cayleen smiles, and leans into him. “Yes,” she says. “I think it would.”
He carries her though the doors, her hair dragging behind. She’s weak. Exhausted. The clash of the doors swinging shut slams through them and Nate’s sure, distantly, he hears an angered scream.
Cayleen hears it. She doesn’t look back.