The Book: Chapter 50

The room was sterile, though Mick had tried to make it homely with a few personal touches, but there’s only so much you can do against the colours he affectionately called prison bleak and institutional beige. He wasn’t allowed to bring Erik in, so he’d brought a framed photo of the rat. In it, Erik was sitting on Mick’s shoulder, giving him kisses, and Alice was grateful that Erik had survived the book’s wrath.

She’d walked through this room as a doctor. Now, she was the patient. The irony was laughable, if not so utterly cruel.

She sat in a chair by the window, staring at nothing. She’d been here, in the place she used to call work, for three months. Her face was marred with the burr of angry scars. Isolde had left her brand—twisted, uneven ridges ran down the side of Alice’s cheek and along her jaw. They’d bandaged her hands, but the tightening in her tendons would remain forever. The pain had dulled, but the memories of it—the heat and suffocating smoke, the way her skin had blistered and peeled—all that was intact. It came back to her in agonising detail. She was still in there. She heard, saw, felt, but she couldn’t—wouldn’t—engage.

She didn’t cry or speak. She existed in the place they’d assigned her, a ghost inside her life.

The doctors—people she knew and had respected— spoke in hushed voices just beyond the door. She knew what they were saying. That she was broken. Calvert said she had set fire to herself during a psychotic episode. What about my knee, Calvert, she thought, did I shatter that myself, too? She was lucky to be alive. Most of all they said she was damaged and very sick. Mick had told them the truth, but they didn’t believe him, so they’d put him on tablets, too. They gave him a therapist to talk to. He had no job, no life, just therapy. The crazy stuff had all stopped—just like that. So nobody believed him when he talked about curses and evil. The book had kept its promise—belatedly. It was gone after ruining their lives. But Alice knew it lived to torture somebody else.

Mick visited every day. He tried to make her talk, but after the first week, he’d stopped pushing. He just sat with her, sometimes for hours. She knew he was waiting for her. But she had nothing to give him.

Nothing for weeks, until the fractured words that had been eating at her since the flames had died down and the truth had settled into her agony. And then she only had one thing to say.

‘It was the girl.’

Mick flinched the first time she whispered it. He understood. Alice had encountered something that should have stayed buried behind those cursed pages. She thought a lot about the monk and what he’d done to Isolde to fill her with enough rage to last centuries. The monk was vile and evil, but he wasn’t the exiled slave stuck in the book, to wreak centuries of malicious havoc.

Isolde, the scribe was. She’d been an innocent child spawned by a devil and chained in the crypt to fester with hatred. And Alice, in her arrogance, had tried to end it. You can’t fight that kind of power.

Maybe for them, it was over. It had stopped. But the book survived. Where was it now?

She’d heard the whispers crackle in the flames that night. But the book had lived through fires before. It had endured centuries, slipping from one hand to another. And Alice thought she could stop it. Well, look at you now, girl. In the absence of the book to mock her, her mind did it.

Betty was the first to break through her barriers. She came into Alice’s room one morning, her back ramrod straight, her fake pearls not daring to move against the padding of her chest. Nothing dared anger Betty. Alice would have smiled at the situation if she could.

‘They said you were here, but I didn’t believe it. What a to-do.’ The familiar voice cut through Alice’s silence like Mick’s hunting knife. ‘You silly girl. What a state you’ve got yourself into. It’s not good enough, you know. Somebody like you in a place like this. It’s a drop in standards, that’s what it is.’ She tidied Alice’s bedside table as she spoke and went into her drawers to look for snacks. Mick had brought chocolates, and Betty’s face lit up like a child seeing the first snow of winter.

Alice blinked. She’d been staring at the same chrysanthemum in the hospital’s Garden of Hope for days—maybe weeks. It had budded, blossomed, died and desiccated, just like her. But now she had to come back. Hope. It was a big word in a scary world, but Alice wanted to embrace it. She turned her head enough to see Betty settling into the visitor’s chair and opening the chocolates with the joy of a child. As she opened the lid, Alice expected her face to light up from the reflection of all the wonder inside.

‘Well, don’t just sit there gawping,’ Betty huffed, dragging her chair closer to Alice’s. ‘Say something. I haven’t got all day. I’ve got to look after that lot, you know. Albert’s swanning about, making a fuss, and Simon—well, he was ever so excited to hear you’ve come back. He can’t wait to see you.’

Alice swallowed, remembering Simon. As if summoned, Betty put the chocolates down, stood up, and lowered her head. When she lifted it again, the small boy had taken over Thomas’ body—wide-eyed and staring up at her. His hands twisted the hem of Betty’s blouse, his voice soft.

‘You can come out now, Alice. The bad one’s gone.’

Alice wanted to form a question, but she was broken. How do you ask a child with a fractured mind what he means by gone when your own head is in a million pieces?

Simon shuffled forward, his face solemn. ‘The bad headmate, the one that made everything horrible. She's gone now. It’s all quiet.’ He looked at Albert’s broken fingers. They all still wore the bandage and suffered the pain.

Alice clenched her fingers against the arms of her chair. The alter—the one that had terrorised Thomas from the inside out and turned the collective’s mind into a battlefield—was gone.

She wasn’t sure why, but the words sent a shudder through her.

Simon smiled. Then he jumped onto the chair beside her and rested his head against her arm, like a child curling up with their mother. She felt his warmth, his small presence in a large body. He was so utterly real against her broken skin, and her broken pores, and the broken hairs on her arm, and her scars. She’d spent so long feeling like a hollow nothing, but Simon’s weight proved she was there. She blinked and closed her eyes, just for a second. She was so tired all the time.

When she opened them, Betty was back, taking the seat she’d been in earlier. She picked up the chocolates as though she’d never glitched, and chose the strawberry cream. The box was almost empty, and she didn’t speak until she’d finished both layers. ‘I won’t lie to you, Alice,’ she said around a fudge diamond. ‘You look like hell. But scars fade. They aren’t that bad. And they aren’t the worst part of you lately. Pull yourself together, child. You don’t belong here.’

Alice let out a breath.

Betty leaned in, fixing her with a pointed stare as if she’d replied. ‘No, you don’t. And I think you know that. You let yourself get lost. But I know you, Dr Grant. You aren’t a frightened creature hiding away from life and festering in this hospital. This is just a blip, that’s all.’

Alice looked away. The world outside the window was grey and muted, but Betty was in full colour, like a Pixar character in a psychedelic dream. What if I am too frightened to come back?

Betty burped and snorted. ‘Look at you. If you let this apathy win, you aren’t the woman I thought you were. And that would be a damn shame. We all have our problems, dear. Look what I have to deal with, sharing the physical with that rabble. Do I give up and curl into a ball? I do not. Not on your Nellie, my girl. And I have a penis to deal with, two if you count Albert.’ Even in her normal state, Alice probably wouldn’t have had an answer for that. She wasn’t sure what shocked her more—Betty’s attempt at a pep talk or the fact that she’d eaten an entire box of chocolates without pausing for breath. She liked Betty.

The silence stretched, but it wasn’t empty. Betty looked as though she felt sick and Alice figured she needed to sit quietly and digest for a while. It wasn’t often that she was quiet. But it was filled with something warm and close to familiarity. She wasn’t alone. Not completely. Hope. The word was a beacon to follow out of the darkness.

Betty let Simon back in. He shared the same body, but Simon hadn’t eaten a whole box of sickly Black Magic, and he didn’t feel sick. Alice felt her mind healing. She hadn’t had many thoughts up to now—there was no space left for thinking in her void. But although there was no response, she woke enough to be amazed at the mind of somebody with dissociative identity disorder. It was incredible that one of the headmates could be ill while the others, including Thomas, felt fine.

Simon came back as he left, half-asleep against her arm. He murmured, ‘It’s over now, isn’t it? The bad part.’

Alice’s lips parted, but the words wouldn’t come. She wasn’t sure.

Simon’s face was solemn as he leaned in close. ‘The king’s coming,’ he whispered. Alice was alarmed for a second before remembering that his version of reality included dragons and invisible castles. He was playing a game. ‘He is. He’s coming to Barrow, and Albert says the town has been given the Royal Charter. I don’t know what that is, but now we’re called the Royal Port of Barrow. Albert says it’ll be great for the new marina. I don’t understand that stuff. But Betty says I can wave a flag at the king when he comes. Do you think he’ll have no clothes on, like in the story?’

It was okay. Life went on. The good and the bad, a king’s visit, and another meal to sit on her tray untouched. Mick wouldn’t give up on her, and Erik was waiting at home. They’d had the decorators in. It was just life.

Isolde was still out there. The book never died. Maybe somebody else had it. God help them.

Alice closed her eyes. The answers would come.

For now, she let Simon curl against her. She let Betty’s presence anchor her. And she let herself be.

For the first time, she felt something close to human. Hope. Mick would be here soon. She loved him and would come back from the brink to show him. Maybe she could start with, ‘Hi.’

The Book. https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0F2J7QYCQ