As my vision cleared and adjusted to the light, the nothing faded into a something. The source of the light was a giant, circular arm of bulbs that hung over me like a medical examiner’s lamp, so powerful that I could feel heat radiating from them. As I blinked, I began to pick things out in the brightness: corners and ends high above me that were slightly grayer because of shadows. I heard someone breathing sharply in and out, only to realize that the reverberating sound was coming from my own mouth.
The beep continued. I still could not find its source.
So I attempt to roll over, only to find that the motion was impossible. I looked down, unable even to lift myself more than to tilt my head at a slight angle, and saw to my horror that my arms and legs were held down by black straps.
Being unable to move sent a jolt through me. All at once it hit that I was lying on a gurney, arms and legs and neck strapped down to the table like I was an experiment. My head jerked from one side to the other. Everything in the room was white, from the thin sheets under me, to the metal bars that held up the bed, to the tiny tables with vials and needles and sharply edged tools shining in the glare.
I heard the click of a door behind me, hidden in my blind spot. I instinctively tried to look but was unable to do more than twist my neck up, vision blocked by the edge of the pillow under my head. In the strained corner of my eye, I saw the white-jacketed outline of someone moving around the room behind me, reaching onto my other side and clicking a button. The droning alarm ceased.
I turned to look but wasn’t fast enough to see the person before their form disappeared behind me again.
“Hel-lll-lo?” I said. Even forming the single word was a struggle. It didn’t sound right, it was all slurred and messy. I didn’t even say the full thing, like I’d groaned it halfway and then let it trail off.
“Hello?” I tried again, saying it slower, enunciating it out this time. But the person behind me did not respond, moving to type something into a keyboard with a steady stream of clicks.
I slid down painfully, noticing more of my surroundings with every second. My arm hurt and when I looked down, I saw there was a needle poking from the inside of my left elbow, attached to a long tube that went up to a nearly-empty bag of liquid. On the wall to my left were small diagnostic screens with meters and buttons, something else monitoring my pulse. There were no windows, no skylights or any clue where I was. The room itself was anonymous.
I moved my other hand to pull the needle out, but of course my arm was still stuck and didn’t move more than a half-inch. My efforts only made me dizzier.
“What’s going on?” I said, all of my words clear now. I could still see the person in the white coat hovering just out of my eyesight, still engrossed in the computer. I saw long, blonde hair—not Wyck.
“Please, tell me something,” I said, breathing heavily. “What are you doing to me?”
Still, no response. I wanted to scream, hoping that a doctor outside the door behind me might hear the noise and check in, someone who’d at least say a word to me. I couldn’t plead with someone who didn’t listen.
But my senses had been slow in their return. All at once, before I could open my mouth to cry out, I realized where I was. The white room. The same room that Callista had told me about, the room where she’d been kept a prisoner.
No…!
I was fighting against the straps again, kicking and flopping and bending trying to break free. I knew screaming was of no use because no one would hear me, but I shouted as loud as I could anyway. The bed shook and its screws creaked as I moved, the sheets coming off from under me as I tried to roll over. The pillow fell to the side and off the bed, the tube in my arm shaking like a whip, but I could not move to free myself, and when I finally fell exhausted again, the only result was a raw redness left on my wrists and ankles.
“Let me out!” I shouted at the person. Finally I heard her stand. I relaxed unwillingly, my eyes following her as she came around my right side. But she wasn’t moving to attend to me. She pushed a rolling table around the edge of the room, its wheels creaking against the hard tiles.
Her face looked almost like that of a cat, puffy cheeks and giant lips below a straight nose that looked like it’d been traced on by pencil. Her skin was frighteningly lineless, like old movie stars’ after plastic surgery disasters, even down to the skin on her hands that showed the frailty of age disguised behind medical stretching. Her hair was bleached and straightened and went past her shoulders, a sickly-thin frame obvious even beneath the jacket. She didn’t look at me as she passed.
“Please?” I begged. “Where am I?”
Still no answer. It was almost as if she wasn’t even in the room with me at all, looking ahead and not reacting in the slightest to my voice. I lay in aback as she rested the table against the wall across from my feet. On it were two television screens.
The woman turned around, but didn’t look into my eyes, just over to my arm where the needle was, face not showing any reaction.
“Are you a doctor?” I asked her. “You have to tell me what’s going on!”
She walked up to me and readjusted the pillow behind my head. She started to disappear so I resumed my shouting and thrashing, demanding that she turn back and respond. My pillow fell again so she returned, but only pick it up from the floor—humming disjointedly to herself—and push it back under my head.
She reached behind me and adjusted a dial on the drip going in to my arm. I felt something cold going through the tube.
“Please…” I begged, voice falling even though I’d tried to continue in a shout. The liquid made me lightheaded. I felt my muscles relaxing against my will. No!
In seconds, I was a shell again, breathing in and out madly, unable to lift my limbs or fight anymore. The woman continued humming to herself as I became silent, the rumble of an air vent clicking on to make the room even more refrigerated.
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t speak. They’d taken away all of my control.
As the panic set in, I heard a new, gentle buzz behind me, like a cell phone on vibrate. The woman arose from her stool, crossing the room again to go back to the table she’d pushed across from me. She clicked buttons and the screens fizzled on, then she turned to me and adjusted my bed so that I was angled higher.
One of the televisions gave a high-pitched sound and I tilted my head to look. The screen on the left had come to life, fizzling with static before its picture appeared. At first, the camera was unmoving and focused on a pile of torn papers and broken glass spread in a mess on a floor. It was day there, dim because of window blinds, but I saw someone’s fingers as they lifted the camera up, turning it around to face them. I heard a scrape across the microphone, which popped static through the TV.
It was Wyck. His back was to a blank wall. He sounded out of breath.
“Hello?” he called, that awful voice stinging my ears. He appeared grainy in the bad lighting of where he was. He tapped the lens on the camera.
“I can see you but can you see me?” he said, playfully again. I didn’t reply, but he caught my eyes flicking around nervously from his voice, and he smiled.
“There you are,” he said, face brightening but eyes nearly dripping with his tainted enjoyment. “You’re very lucky today, because today you’re getting television straight to your bed. And you don’t even have to worry about changing the channel if it gets boring.”
He was looking straight at me. I noticed a tiny camera poking from between the two televisions. Sweat rolled down my forehead as his words crackled through the screen. The most movement I could muster was to tremble and to lick my lips that had split dry in the chill of the room.