“Well…all right then.” The nurse frowned at her as though she was a naughty child. “Just watch yourself, Ms. Morrison. The day shift staff told me that you’ve been having some episodes today. I will sedate you if I have to.”
Torri felt a helpless kind of anger come over her. She was a grown woman being treated like a misbehaving child. She had no agency here—no free will. She had a right to feel angry, damn it! But she couldn’t show it—showing any emotion at all was likely to get her sedated.
And who knows what O’Toole would do to me if I couldn’t move to push him off me or run away, she thought, feeling sick. The nurse might as well be threatening her with that date-rape drug men slipped into unsuspecting women’s drinks at bars.
“I’ll be fine,” she said tightly to the nurse. “I’m just going to watch TV.”
She would have preferred to go back to her room, but she would be alone in there. She tried to avoid being alone as much as possible while the big orderly was on duty—though of course, once it was lights out, she couldn’t help it.
So she went to sit and watch TV mindlessly in the lounge, not seeing a thing as she stared at the lighted rectangle on the wall. Instead, she was thinking—a single thought that looped through her brain over and over and over again.
How am I ever going to get out of here?
Six
Ten o’clock was lights out, so at nine thirty, everyone lined up at the plastic window in front of the nursing station for evening meds. Torri lined up as well, though she always refused what was offered. You had to line up, so everyone could be accounted for and they could mark it down if you refused your medication.
Every single night—and every morning, for that matter—the nurse on duty tried to hand Torri a paper cup filled with pills and every single night and morning, Torri refused. The nurse on duty would shake her head and frown and put a big black X next to Torri’s name. It stood out in the long line of neat check marks that marched down the medication list next to all the other patients’ names.
Tonight was no different, except that it was O’Toole handing out the meds. When Torri shook her head, refusing the little paper cup he tried to hand her, the big orderly grinned at her.
“That’s all right, darlin’—I’ll be in later to tuck you in,” he murmured and blew her a kiss.
Torri’s stomach clenched as she turned quickly away. Could none of the other staff see how he acted? Or did they just turn a blind eye? Maybe O’Toole was supplying them with drugs too.
Either way, she was more afraid now than she had been since she’d first unwittingly caught O’Toole’s attention by seeing that blowjob in the soft room. He knew that Chuck wasn’t happy with her, which wasn’t good—her husband was her last line of defense here at St. Elizabeth’s. But saying, “Leave me alone or I’ll tell my husband,” didn’t carry much weight if the husband in question had abandoned her.
Of course, she’d called Chuck the minute O’Toole had started making nasty remarks to her, but he had brushed it off as her imagination.
“Don’t you think you might be overreacting, Torri?” he’d asked, sounding impatient to get off the phone and get back to work. “I mean, reading things into it? I can’t interrupt your treatment just because some guy is looking at you funny.”
“It’s more than that!” Torri tried to tell him, but then Amanda interrupted the call to tell him he had someone important on the other line so Chuck had made an excuse and hung up on her.
She’d called again, after the first night O’Toole had groped her, thinking surely Chuck would come and get her. But her husband had disappointed her again.
“He grabbed my breast in the middle of the night when he was waking me up from one of my night terrors, Chuck!” Torri had told him in a low voice, her hand cupped protectively over the receiver. “You have to come and get me out of here! I don’t know what he might try next and I don’t dare tell anyone because I think he might be selling drugs to some of the staff!”
“Do you have any idea how paranoid you sound?” Chuck had demanded. “Honestly, Torri, he was probably trying to defend himself from all the flailing you do when you have a night terror and his hand landed on the wrong spot. Cut the poor guy a break!”
“Cut him a break?” Torri hadn’t believed what she was hearing. “I’m your wife, calling you to tell you that I’m in danger here and you’re not listening to me!” she’d exclaimed. “Don’t you even care what happens to me?”
“Of course I care, honey, but I have work to do.” Chuck’s voice had gotten even more impatient. “Besides, I was warned that you might say anything at all in order to get out of there. But you have to get well before you can leave and Dr. Burrows tells me you’re still refusing your medicine.”
“Because it turns me into a zombie!” Torri had cried. “And it doesn’t make the night terrors go away—it just makes it so I can’t wake up from them! Chuck, please—”
“I’m sorry, hon, but I really have to go now,” her husband had said briskly, and hung up the phone.
That was the last conversation Torri had had with him before the awful one today. She wondered if he had been ducking her calls out of guilt or just because he was tired of dealing with her “drama” as he called it.
Either way, it was the same. She had been abandoned by the one person in the world who was supposed to care for her over everyone else and there was a predator lurking nearby.
She doubted if she would sleep a wink tonight.
Seven
Despite her efforts to stay awake, Torri eventually drifted off to sleep. She had a few hours of uneasy slumber and then it started.
The night terror crept up on her, as they always did. It started with a feeling of being stuck in place—frozen to the spot—completely paralyzed. Then the bad feeling began—the feeling that something horribly dangerous was coming and she couldn’t run from it.
Suddenly, she was standing in front of a pair of double doors that looked to be four or five stories high—they stretched up into the yawning shadows of an unseen ceiling. They were dark grey metal with strange designs etched in glowing neon green.
Torri knew what lay behind those doors, and she didn’t want to go—didn’t want to see it. But she couldn’t help herself—the doors slid ponderously open and she was dragged inside by some unknown force.
A feeling of dread came over her—the knowledge that the dark room she had entered was filled with an evil force which wished her harm. She wanted to turn away, to go back. But the same force that had dragged her into the room now dragged her to the foot of a long, broad series of steps made of black stone.
She found herself standing in front of a massive metal throne, etched in the same glowing, neon-green markings she had seen on the doors. The being sitting on the throne was cloaked in shadows and Torri knew instinctively that the awful feeling of dread and horror and despair was emanating from him. He was exuding the negative emotions—breathing them out into the air with each foul breath he exhaled.