Lord Loss Read Online Free PDF Page B

touches the bruise on my forehead with two soft, gentle fingers. “You've been through hell, but you're OK now. It's all uphill from here. Now that you've snapped out of your delirium, we can work on …”
    I lose track of what Leah's saying. Behind her, in the doorway, I imagine a pair of demons — Vein and Artery. The sane part of me knows they aren't real, just visions, but that part of me has no control over my senses anymore. Backing up against one of the padded walls, I stare blankly at the make-believe demons as they dance around my cell, making crude gestures and mimed threats.
    Leah goes on talking. The imaginary Vein and Artery go on dancing. I slip back into the shell of my nightmares — almost gratefully.
    In and out. Quiet moments of reality. Sudden flashes of insanity and terror.
    I'm being held in an institute for people with problems — that's all any of my nurses will tell me. No names. No mingling with the other patients. White rooms. Nurses — Leah, Kelly, Tim, Aleta, Emilia, and others, all nice, all concerned, all unable to coax me back from my nightmares when they strike. Doctors with names that I don't bother memorizing. They examine me at regular intervals. Make notes. Ask questions.
    “What did you see?”
    “What did the killers look like?”
    “Why do you insist on calling them demons?”
    “You know demons aren't real. Who are the real killers?”
    One of them asks if
I
committed the murders. She's a grey-haired, sharp-eyed woman. Not as kindly as the rest. The “bad doctor” to their “good doctors.” She presses me harder as the days slip by. Challenges me. Shows me photos that make me cry.
    I start calling her Doctor Slaughter, but only to myself, not out loud. When she comes with her questions and cold eyes, I open myself to the nightmares — always hovering on the edges, eager to embrace me — and lose myself to the real world. After a few of these intentional fadeouts, they obviously decide to abandon the shock tactics, and that's the last I see of Doctor Slaughter.
    Time dragging or disappearing into nightmares. No ordinary time. No lazy afternoons or quiet mornings. The murders impossible to forget. Grief and fear tainting my every waking and sleeping moment.
    Routines are important, according to my doctors and nurses, who wish to put a stop to my nightmarish withdrawals. They're trying to get me back to real time. They surround me with clocks. Make me wear two watches. Stress the times at which I'm to eat and bathe, exercise and sleep.
    Lots of pills and injections. Leah says it's only temporary, to calm me down. Says they don't like dosing patients here. They prefer to talk us through our problems, not make us forget them.
    The drugs numb me to the nightmares, but also to everything else. Impossible to feel interest or boredom, excitement or despair. I wander around the hospital — I have a free run now that I'm no longer violent — in a daze, zombiefied, staring at clock faces, counting the seconds until my next pill.
    Off the pills. Coming down hard. Screaming fits. Fighting the nurses. Craving numbness. Needing pills!
    They ignore my screams and pleas. Leah explains what's happening. I'm on a long-term treatment plan. The drugs put a stop to the nightmares and anchored me in the real world — step one. Now I have to learn to function in it as a normal person, free of medicinal depressants — step two.
    I try explaining my situation to her — my nightmares won't ever go away, because the demons I saw were
real
— but she refuses to listen. Nobody believes me when I talk about the demons. They accept that I was in the house at the time of the murders, and that I witnessed something dreadful, but they can't see beyond human horrors. They think I imagined the demons to mask the truth. One doctor says it's easier to believe in demons than evil humans. Says a wicked person is far scarier than a fanciful demon.
    Moron. He wouldn't say that if he'd seen the