Nightingale Read online

  If this is what drugs do, June thought, then I hope to never have them again. What is that awful sound?

  Was she really still on her bed, tripping out, or was this actually happening? June knew there was no way it could be true, but at the same time, the tunnel felt so incredibly real. She could no longer hear anything but the sound of water dripping, and whatever was making the strange sound somewhere in the bowels of the space. If she was really just in bed, shouldn’t she have been able to hear Eleanor still? It was almost as though June herself had made the tunnel come into existence.

  June crawled and crawled, only getting nervous once she made the first turn and was no longer able to look behind her to see the opening. What a trip this is! she thought, challenging it as hard as she could, trying to do something that would finally dissolve the vision and bring her back to reality. But no matter how far she crawled, no matter how much she dwelled on every detail as intensely as she could, the tunnel only felt more real. The stones beneath her knees were smooth, but still they wore and marked the skin there as she went along. She could smell the dankness, hear the echoes of whatever was up ahead.

  When I see what’s making the sound, I’ll snap out of it, she knew somehow. Surely that will be too much for even my make-believe senses to bear.

  The noise was much louder now. She would be reaching the source soon. She felt wetness underneath her hands and saw that the stone had little pools of blood all over it. She studied the blood on her hand, bringing it close up to her face. She could smell it, like water that was tinged with pennies and dead mice.

  June was afraid now. The sound was very wet, very loud. Crunching, ripping, tearing. Nothing you see in here can hurt you, June reminded herself. You’re back in your bed, drooling with rolling eyes, sleeping even. It’s not real. It can’t be.

  And so she went forward.

  She made another turn, crawled for a bit more. Whatever was making the sound was just at the end of this stretch, shrouded in shadow. June was only able to make out a few things from so far away. There was a person crouching—she could tell that much. The person was moving in quick, frenzied shudders. They were wearing white, maybe. Crunch. Rip. Snap.

  There was a rectangle of bright light coming from a spot on the ceiling of the tunnel, about halfway between June and the shuddering person at the end of it. June took a breath and moved forward, up to the small opening, and looked out, too curious not to.

  Through a metal grate that was painted white, June realized that she was looking into the office where she’d seen the doctor and Nurse Joya earlier. She recognized the furniture, as well as the old man that sat silently behind the desk. He stared ahead at the wall across the room, unblinking, his expression slack, his hands folded neatly in front of him. There was nobody else in the room with him. He looked like a machine that had been turned off.

  “The doctor,” June whispered accidentally, still feeling high. While the man behind the desk didn’t seem to hear her, the wet crunching sound at the end of the tunnel stopped abruptly. With her heart seizing in her chest, June slowly lowered her eyes away from the vent.

  There, at the end of the tunnel, crouched the person, looking directly at her. It was Joya, her crisp white uniform dress hiked up obscenely over her thighs, her sneakers planted on opposite sides of the dimly lit tunnel. The nurse’s hands were curled into claws. The holes in her face from before were still there, huge and black, stretching all the way down to her mouth. As June watched, something poked out of one of Nurse Joya’s eye holes, some sort of weird, pointed appendage that curled forward like an elongated finger.

  “June Hardie?” the Joya-thing asked, her voice just as perky and bright as it was when she looked like a human, although she did sound very caught off guard. The eye-hole appendage shivered ever so slightly.

  Just in front of the nurse lay the remains of a human. The head was torn off, the torso ripped open. An arm pointed upward at an unnatural angle. A pile of guts glistened in the dark. June remembered the sounds she’d been hearing and her stomach threatened to empty itself, one way or the other.

  “How did you get in here?” Nurse Joya sounded completely shocked, utterly fascinated at the sight of June. June’s knees trembled painfully against the stone floor of the tunnel. “How on earth did you manage such a thing?”

  “I—I’m tripping,” June stuttered, feeling as though she was going to faint. Never in her worst nightmares had she seen anything like this. “I’m tripping from the drugs you gave me.”

  “But I locked your door,” Joya said, a strange clicking sound coming from somewhere in the darkness of her face. “Very curious indeed. What a brain you have, June Hardie. What an absolute marvel!”

  June was very much trying to fight the hallucination. She thought it’d be easy to break, like a dream that you realize you’re having early on, but it was unbreakable. The sights, the sounds, the smells—it was too real. She would have lain down exactly where she was if not for the blood on the ground. On instinct, June threw a quick glance upward, out the vent again.

  The doctor was staring directly at her.

  “Come here,” Joya whispered, and now an appendage was coming out of her mouth, too. “Tell me how you did that nifty little trick.”

  June started crawling furiously backward, wincing at the pain in her knees and hands. The nurse crawled after her, slowly, as if to follow rather than to chase. June didn’t care: all she wanted was out and away. She looked down at the ground instead of at Joya and didn’t look up again.

  It took just as long to get out as it had to get in. Since June was too afraid to look up, she didn’t know if she was still being followed. There was a turn and then another one, and June was becoming clumsy in her exhaust and fear. Finally, finally, she noticed a change in the light; the opening must be near.

  “What in the world?” came a voice from behind her. Eleanor!

  You’re almost there, June told herself, still able to smell the blood on her hands. Just keep going...

  And then, just like that, she was back in the hospital room, tumbling backward away from the mouth of the tunnel, colliding with Eleanor, who yelped in pain.

  June sat back up as quickly as she could, finally brave enough to look up into the tunnel again. Nurse Joya was still there, about ten feet away from the opening, totally still. But the appendages were gone, the holes in the face were gone. It was just her regular face, peering curiously at June. “Fascinating,” June thought she heard her say, but already the hole in the wall had disappeared and become just a wall again.

  the institution

  June and Eleanor slept in June’s bed all the way through until the next morning. When June woke up, it took her a bit of time to remember whose arm was wrapped around her waist, whose soft middle was cradling her back, whose feet were pressed up against the bottom of hers. Tiny wisps of breath puffed on the skin behind June’s ear.

  She thought of her first night here, and of how Eleanor had refused to talk to June at all besides the occasional announcement that she was dead. It’d only been a very short time since then, but June felt like Eleanor was all she had now, the only person she knew. And she didn’t even know her! Regardless, as long as June had Eleanor, she wouldn’t be alone. June settled into the embrace, soaking it in, surprised at how much comfort it offered.

  Then she remembered the tunnel and her body stiffened. What in the world kind of drug could pull off something like that? She sat up quickly, waking Eleanor in the process, and stared at the place on the wall where the opening had been. What had they done after the trip had ended? June could vaguely remember them crying together, June about the monster she’d seen, Eleanor about the ants. At that point, June had felt how she might expect drugs to make her feel: loopy and heavy and strange. She might even have enjoyed it, if not for the terrible trip that had come before.

  It dawned on June just how awful and stran
ge it was that after being drugged up yesterday afternoon, the girls had been locked in here without being given food, water, or access to the toilet. Just one more thing that she was convinced would be looked down upon by a legitimate institution.

  “What did she give us?” Eleanor mumbled, rubbing the area around her eyes with her fingertips. “What was that...”

  “What do you remember?” June asked, pulling the blanket off herself. Her knees were bruised, badly, and crusted with dried blood. A little bit of skin had been scraped off and was now scabbing, but it looked like too much blood to have come from the scrape. “Oh, holy shit!”

  “What?” Eleanor squirmed out of the bed and stood over June’s knees, staring at them with her mouth slightly ajar. “How did you do that?”

  “What was I doing while you were seeing the ants?” June stood up from the end of the bed and went over to Eleanor’s. She checked the floor all around it, looking for blood from her knees but failing to find any. “Did you see me at all?”

  “No,” Eleanor said, and crossed her arms over her chest. “I looked for you after you’d gone quiet for a while. But you weren’t there. I told myself you were under the bed or something. Because where else could you have gone?”

  Without speaking, June pulled Eleanor’s bed away from the wall, getting down on the floor to look for blood from her knees. There were handfuls of dust bunnies, but no blood, no disturbance to the thin layer of grit that covered the floor. She scooted the bed back and looked at Eleanor in bewilderment. “What happened to my knees?”

  “You hurt them,” Eleanor said. “In that hole you crawled backward out of.”

  “You saw the tunnel?” June took Eleanor by the shoulders. “Don’t you dare lie to me about this, Elle, or I’ll never be able to trust you again.”

  “It had to have been the drugs,” Eleanor said, wriggling out of June’s grip. “I like that you called me Elle.”

  “You never even wanted me to know your name,” June reminded her, feeling absurd for following such a change of direction. “I would have thought a nickname would irritate you.”

  “Well, it doesn’t.”

  “Did you see Joya in the tunnel, too?” June went back to the place at the wall, leaned over the bed and put her hand over the spot. “Did you see her chasing me?” Following, her mind corrected, which was chilling.

  “Joya? No,” Eleanor answered. “I was barely even able to see you before you ran your ass into my face and knocked me backward. I had finally gotten off the bed to look for you underneath, but...then I saw something in the wall. I looked in there, and I saw you, hurrying out.”

  “No,” June said, and started pacing the room. “No, goddamn it! It was the drugs that did it. We got the same thing. It’s totally possible.”

  “I’ve been medicated more times than I can count since I came here,” Eleanor remarked quietly. “There’s never been anything like that.”

  “Tell me something,” June said, a painful lump forming in her throat. “How often do new people come into the hospital?”

  “How often?” Eleanor repeated, then looked up and bit her lip in thought. “You mean, before you? That’d be, um, never.”

  Never? Not in the three whole years since Eleanor was placed here herself? That couldn’t be possible, June knew. Then she remembered how all the other girls had treated her at the first breakfast, so curious and desperate, and her stomach did another flop.

  The things that replaced Mom and Dad brought you here on purpose.

  There came the sound of a shifting bolt, and then the door to their room was open. “Checks,” a nurse who was not Joya said, the same loud nurse who’d woken them the day before. “Good morning, ladies. Glad to see you’re ready to go. Meds in five.”

  She left the door open when she left. And just like that, they were free.

  “I need to clean up,” June mumbled as they hurried out, and Eleanor followed closely. After they’d both used the toilet, washed up, and changed into the fresh dresses and sweaters folded in piles on a shelf near the door, the girls came back for their daily blood-red capsules.

  “What do these even do?” June asked after Eleanor had thrown hers back. “If they’re supposed to help keep us calm, they sure as hell didn’t work yesterday.”

  “They never tell us anything,” Eleanor said, her voice low, as they headed to breakfast. “These red ones are kind of new, though. Whenever the doctor talks to me about my condition, he always goes about it as if there’s some singular thought that can make it all go away, just like that.” She snapped her fingers. “I want him to be right, but I don’t know. Nothing triggered it, that I can remember anyway. I just...woke up dead one day. I think. It was so long ago now, it’s hard to even recall.”

  At the mention of the doctor, goosebumps spread over June’s back. “The doctor talks to you? Not Joya?”

  Eleanor raised a brow. “Well, yeah,” she said, sounding self-conscious. “He’s the doctor. Why would it be Joya?”

  June said nothing.

  “You seem awfully obsessed with that nurse,” Eleanor said after a few minutes. The girls made their way through the back hall to get to the cafeteria. “First you asked me if I saw her while we were tripping, now you ask if she’s treating me and not the doctor. Maybe you have a crush on her.”

  June felt her cheeks get warm. “That is not the case at all. I’m very suspicious of her, if you’re really wondering.”

  “She’s very pretty.”

  “Eleanor,” June said in a tired voice. “Stop.”

  “Don’t tell me you haven’t noticed. I know you have.”

  Both girls went through the line, each collecting two hard-boiled eggs, a piece of toast, and a small mug of steaming hot tea. They had both missed dinner last night, what with being locked in their room and all, and June couldn’t wait to devour every last morsel of what she considered to be a surprisingly high-quality breakfast. With everything she’d seen so far, it felt almost shocking that they weren’t being served curdled milk and moldy fruit.

  June and Eleanor made their way to the same table they’d eaten at before, and June noticed right away that something was wrong with Lauren, the pretty girl who was obsessed with eyes. Her soft brunette waves were gone, replaced by thickly wrapped beige bandages. In some places, a pinkish clear fluid stained the fabric. Everybody else at the table was completely silent.

  “No,” Eleanor said, nearly dropping her tray onto the table. “Lauren, please tell me they didn’t.”

  Lauren didn’t say anything. She didn’t move. Instead, she sat in a wheelchair with her back hunched, her lips parted just the slightest, her eyes staring through the table. Her sweater hung crookedly on her shoulders; her fingers were twitching. Lobotomy! June’s mind screamed.

  “Nurse Chelsea brought her over to us like this,” Adie said without looking up from her plate. The other girls were a showcase of nerves: Jessica bit at her nails; Cassy turned her unpeeled egg over and over in her hand; Simpson twirled her hair around her finger agitatedly. Eleanor’s devastated expression lasted a few moments before she sat down at the table. She took an egg from her tray and slammed it down against the cold metal of the table, pulling the pieces of shell off and throwing them onto the floor.

  June sat by Eleanor, unable to resist sneaking a sideways peek at Lauren, whose lips were chapped raw. She remembered how lively Lauren had been not so long ago, with her bright eyes and sweet smile and her promise not to tell whatever she saw in June’s future. Now, her chest moved in little heaves as she took quick, shallow breaths.

  “How drugged is she?” June asked quietly, and all the girls looked at her.

  “It doesn’t matter.” Adie’s eyes were enormously sad. “Once they end up like this, they never come back. Just watch. In a few days, she’ll be gone, and they’ll tell us that she’s been discharged.”

  “Discha
rged?” Anger flashed within June. “They think this is better than who she was before?”

  None of it made sense. The way the place was run or the impossible drug trip where she’d seen a monster nurse in a tunnel that simply couldn’t have been there but was. June ran her hands over her knees under the table, wincing at the sting.

  “It’s the worms,” Simpson said, still twirling strands of hair as if she were trying to pull them out. “It’s our brains. They want our brains.”

  June remembered what the nurse monster had said in the tunnel. What a brain you have, June Hardie. What an absolute marvel!

  “Why do you say that?” June asked Simpson, taking a sip of her tea, wondering if there was poison in it. “Why do you think they want our brains?”

  “Because they put a worm in mine,” Simpson said. She turned to June, biting at her lips. “One night while I was sleeping, some nurses came in and held me down, and I felt something go into my ear. I can hear it eating every so often—I swear I can. I can hear it crunching. And just look at what they’ve done to Lauren! She isn’t the first, and she won’t be the last. Discharged, my ass.”

  Eleanor was already on her second egg. Cassy and Jessica had started in on their breakfasts at last, all while Lauren just sat there with her jagged breaths and glassy gaze. June’s stomach growled, so she ate, delirious with fear and wonder at how different her life was now, compared to when she’d been living at home and dating Robert. The two realities seemed worlds apart, and thinking back to those times of grocery shopping and learning to make meat loaf and writing her story made something in her head feel buzzy.

  Mom, Dad, Fred, Robert, Mr. Dennings. Did she miss them? Not exactly, but home seemed like heaven compared to this. The things she had considered problems back there paled in comparison to what was happening now.

  But what was happening now? What had she ever done to deserve being locked up in such a place? Why had her parents changed like they had, who had done it to them, and, most importantly, why?