The Book.
Chapter 1

It’s dark. I’m trapped.

Let me out.

No, seriously. Get me out of here.

I can sing for my supper. Am I living in a box? Am I living in a cardboard box? I start singing and a dozen people tell me to ‘shush.’ They don’t really, it’s just in my head. Everything’s in my head because I’m non-verbal, and that pisses me off.

The air is stale with the dead atmosphere that clings to boxes stuffed with forgotten crap in an attic—that’s where they dumped me back then, and I was there for years. It’s what I am, somebody else’s unwanted crap. Thrown away—Worse—the last woman sold me to the highest bidder and sent me off like a relic to jolt and bang through the postal service for three days. So much for twenty-four-hour tracked delivery. I was important once, but they boxed me up after gathering mustiness in the dark for a decade, and then they discarded me.

But this place is new. I hear footsteps. Somebody’s coming. A drum of soles thudding against a hard floor cuts through my thoughts like a padre walking down death row. If it was a priest his hanging rosary beads would hit his hips as a crucifix banged against his chest. I doubt it’s a man of God but my hearing is that attuned. I miss nothing.

It’s a woman, but it doesn’t sound like pretty shoes. However, I can tell from the smell of her perfume invading the box that she’s sexy. Her footfall is heavier than it should be for her stature, enough to suggest she’s tired. I can intuit a lot. Maybe she has too much stuff to do. She sighs. My heart—yeah, I’ve got one—leaps at the sound. Come on, whoever you are. Free me.

The footsteps pause, then get closer. I’m holding my breath—figuratively because that’s in my head, too. Scissors slice across the top flaps, missing my skin and delicate insides by millimetres, and the box shudders, letting light stream in. It’s pulled open with the brutal efficiency reserved for diving into takeaway bags. I hear her breathing and the beat of her heart. She’s pumped to see what’s inside and she’s excited to see me.

A pair of hands plunge in. They’re pale and thin, the nails kept shorter than I like on a woman and they’re unpainted, but they’re clean and smell of medicated soap. A faint scar runs across the knuckles, the kind you get from years of picking at life.

One hand grips me while the other cradles my spine. I’m alive, baby. I feel you. She lifts me out and holds me gently, turning me over twice. She pauses to read and then rights me. Her hmm tells me she’s deciding whether I’m rubbish or treasure.

What’s going on here, then? Come on, sweetheart.

She dumps me onto a table, hard enough that my back hurts. Careful, lady. Cold hands. I hope the adage of a warm heart applies or we’ve got a problem.

That’s better. I can see now.

The room is big and lined with shelves that suffer under the weight of too many books. Rows of them, suffocatingly close. It reeks of a surge of overwhelming knowledge and a wealth of know-how. A library then. I’ve been dumped in the epitome of heaven for dreamers and a graveyard to the ignorant and restless. I’ve been put in one before and it wasn’t a bad old time. I saw inside many homes but it always ended just as it was getting fun and I’d be cast out within the month.

I’m bad—my bad.

I take stock. There’s a smell, stale coffee, industrial-strength cleaning products and something tangy that lurks beneath the other odours, sweat mixed with fear and paranoia. This isn’t like anywhere I’ve been before. What is this place? I catch a flicker of movement by the open door. Hesitance.

‘It’s okay, Ann. Come in,’ my woman says.

Another woman shuffles in and ignores her. She has bare feet and walks past the table, taking tiny steps without moving her hips. She mumbles, her hair a wiry halo of nesting lice and neglect. Ann shuffles like a pound-shop zombie, the kind that looks terrifying until you realise they couldn’t outrun a toddler. ‘They’ve locked me up,’ she says to nobody. ‘Ann’s not ill. She’s fine. Ann doesn’t need pills.’

I’ve been in a place like this before. Shit.

What is this shambling monstrosity? The sights you see when you haven’t got a camera. She looks like somebody shagged her through a hedge backwards. Hang on, though, she’d be pretty hot if she had a shower and wasn’t out of it. Her eyes dart around the room and her hands tremble as though she expects a shooter to run in shouting, ‘Get down. On the floor. Now!’ A terrorist—or somebody with a syringe? Ann, huh? Sorry, babe. You’ve got a date with padded walls and a cup of anti-psychotics and you’re already three hours late.

My woman—yeah, I’ve claimed her—puts her arm around the patient’s shoulders and Ann drops to her knees whimpering. ‘No. Don’t hurt me. Please. You can do whatever you want.’

Kinky, sweetheart. I like it. But you might want to clean up a bit first.

‘Ann, it’s me. Remember? Alice. Dr Grant. It’s okay, I’m not going to hurt you. Come on, stand up for me. That’s right. Look. I’ve bought some new books for the library. Do you want to see?’

I watch as she guides the human excrement to her feet.  

‘Look at this mystery box, it could have anything in it. I got it from eBay and thought it might be fun.’ She talks in a sing-song voice about nothing as she soothes the tattered breakage of a human being. It makes me want to hurt her. ‘Somebody complained that there was never anything new to read. But after a quick glance through them, I think I’ve been conned,’ Alice said.

Rude.

As she talks, Alice leads Ann across the room to some chairs near the table.    

It looks like a normal library, but what is this hell? The walls are institutional, dreary coffee and beige, but they look freshly painted and modern. It’s the kind of decor that screams serenity. But I’m not fooled. Along with the don’t-freak-out paintwork and the bolted-down furniture, the dead giveaways are the red alarm buttons on every wall. Signs above doors say, This door is alarmed. Everything is alarmed. So am I. There’s nothing calm about this.

A man in a white coat leans against a desk in the corner. His expression is a cocktail made up of three parts exhaustion to two parts empathy with a mixer of minimal attention as he flips through a clip chart. Orderly? Doctor? Whatever he is, he doesn’t look as if he’s there to save anyone’s soul.

‘What am I doing here?’ Ann asks.

That’s self-explanatory, lady. You’re a hot mess.

‘You’re not well. So, we’ve brought you in for a rest while we sort out your medication and get you in a calmer frame of mind. We told you yesterday, remember?’ Alice says.

She thinks about it and looks even more like the village idiot. ‘Glen Vale?’

‘We also call it The Annexe. We’re the psychiatric unit attached to The Lady of the North County Hospital. You’re safe here.’

So this is where fate’s dumped me—the library of a psychiatric unit. Between the institutional paint and the scent of broken humanity, this place screams holiday brochure for the damned. What kind of joke is this? Of all the places I could end up; luxury apartments, penthouses, bookshops with murals of artisan coffee—I get stuck here, among the damaged and the dead-eyed crazies. But I can work with this. Alice is interesting.

She tells the man she’s walking Ann to her room, then returns five minutes later. She scoops me up and her hands are brisk but not unkind. She takes me to one of the shelves. Oh, no. No, you don’t. You can’t do this to me. I sound like Ann and straighten my spine. Or at least I think how it would feel. I  have my limitations. I’ve just escaped one prison, you can’t put me in another. I yell at her, but it only comes out in my head.

She slides me onto a shelf where I have a back blurb and a front cover brushing against me.

Well, hello neighbours.

The one on my left is thick, leather-bound, and smells of that sexy aroma some books have. It reeks of self-importance, like the posh git that insists on using Latin phrases in casual conversation. The other one is a slim paperback. Its cover looks creamy and glossy. She’s a closed book waiting to be discovered. They are beautiful but, given the light dust beneath us, veterans of the shelf wars, it seems.

A threesome? Don’t mind if I do.

The leather-bound book shifts against me, and it feels as if it’s alive too, but it’s just displacement caused by me muscling in. There’s only one like me. But spending years in a box has done things to my head.

This place isn’t so bad once I lower my expectations. It’s better than the attic where nothing ever happened, and even if it did, I was stuck in a box. I can see everything from here.

Patients bumble past, some talking to themselves, others staring ahead. A woman with tear-streaked cheeks clutches a paperback like a lifeline and screams the place down if anybody tries to take it. And there’s a man with a shaved head and so many scars. He keeps singing Looking for Linda, by Hue & Cry, and he seems to be. He has a twitchy face and rattles on the locked fire door, his leg bouncing with frenetic energy. And every so often, a fight or a meltdown breaks out. The drama, man. It raises my heart rate and makes me want to act out. I could get used to this place. Dr Alice will make a good subject.

Alice? Alice? Who the—

It’s my job to find out. I taste her name in my mouth and I like it. She’s fun, and if she doesn’t read me soon, I’ll write myself into her nightmares—nobody leaves me unopened for long. Dr Alice, bless her. So naïve. She has the determined air of somebody arranging deckchairs on the Titanic when they’re already ankle-deep in water.

Some of the staff are no better than the patients. The soap opera. I can pick out the good ones from the tired, the harried, and the too wrapped up in their pathetic lives to notice the people they’re supposed to be saving. One nurse yawns so wide that her jaw cracks. She types at a computer for an hour, until the room pulses with the noise of her officious words. Her face, illuminated by the cold glow of the screen, shows frustration and what she has to say in that document needs no thinking time. My first task? Go on, if you insist. The woman finishes the letter with two words she never intended to type—I quit. Like I said. My bad.

And I watch, newly free and caged again. I see it all with disgust and amusement. That is my life. Overseeing the madness, soaking in it and biding my time.

Because let me tell you: I’m not just any old book. I’m special. And these people—the patients, the staff, the whole damn hospital—and Alice, have no idea what she’s unleashed.

Katherine Black Amazon Page. https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/Katherine-Black/author/B071JW51FW?