The nightmares hadn't started until just before his death. I don't remember them, specifically - but I remember waking up, screaming in a child's high-pitched shriek of terror. I'd scream in the darkness, scrambling to squeeze into the smallest space I could find. My father would come looking for me, and find me, and pull me into his lap. He would hold me, and make me warm, and soon I would fall asleep again, safe, secure.
"The monsters can't get you here, Harry," he used to say. "They can't get you."
He'd been right.
Until now. Until tonight.
The monsters got me.
I don't know where real life left off and the nightmares began, but I thrashed myself awake, screaming a scratchy, hollow scream that made little more noise than a whimper. I screamed until I ran out of breath, and then all I could do was sob.
I lay there, naked, undone. No one came to hold me. No one came to make it all better. No one had, really, since my dad died.
Breathing first, then. I forced myself to control it, to stop the wracking sobs and to draw in slow, steady breaths. Next came the terror. The pain. Humiliation. More than anything, I wanted to crawl into a hole and pull it in after me. I wanted to be not.
But I wasn't not. I hurt too much. I was very painfully, very acutely, very much alive.
The burn still hurt the most, but the sweeping nausea running through me came in a photo finish second. My hands told me that I was lying upon a floor, but the rest of me thought I had been strapped into a giant gyroscope. I ached. My throat felt tight, and burned, as though seared by some hot liquid or chemical. I didn't want to dwell too long on that.
I tested my limbs, and found them all present and functional. My belly twisted and roiled, and for a moment locked up tight, jerking me into a tight curl around it.
The sweat on my naked body went cold. The mushroom. The poison. Six to eighteen hours. Maybe a little more.
I felt thick, dry mouthed, fuzzy with the same aftereffects of the vampire venom that I'd felt before.
For a minute, I stopped fighting. I just lay there, weak and thirsty and hurting and sick, curled up into a ball. I would have started crying again if I'd had that much feeling left in me. I would have wept and waited to die.
Instead, some merciless, steady voice in my head drove me to open my eyes. I hesitated, afraid. I didn't want to open my eyes and see nothing. I didn't want to find myself in that same darkness. That darkness, with hissing things all around me. Maybe there, still, just waiting for me to awaken so that they -
Panic swept me for a moment, and gave me enough strength to shiver and push myself up into a sitting position. I took a deep breath, and opened my eyes.
I could see. Light seared at my eyes, a thin line of it surrounding a tall rectangle - a doorway. I had to squint for a moment, so used were my eyes to the darkness.
I looked around the room, wary. It wasn't big. Maybe twelve by twelve, or a little more. I lay in a corner. The smell was violently rotten. My jailors, apparently, had no problems with letting me lie in my own filth. Some of it had crusted onto me, onto my legs and arms. Vomit, I guessed. There was blood in it. An early symptom of the mushroom poisoning.
There were other shapes in the dimness. A lump of cloth in one corner, like a pile of dirty laundry. Several laundry baskets, as well. A washer and dryer, on the far wall from the door.
And Justine, dressed in as little as I, curled up and sitting with her back to the wall, her arms wrapped loosely around her drawn-up knees, watching me with dark, feverish eyes.
"You're awake," Justine said. "I didn't think you'd ever wake up."
Gone was the glamorous girl I'd seen at the ball. Her hair hung lank and greasy. Her pale body looked lean, almost gaunt, and her limbs, what I could see of them, were stained and dirty, as was her face.
Her eyes disturbed me. There was something feral in them, something unsettling. I didn't look at her for too long. Even as bad off as I was, I had enough presence of mind to not want to look into her eyes.
"I'm not crazy," she said, her voice sharp, edged. "I know what you're thinking."
I had to cough before I could talk, and it made pains shoot through my belly again. "That wasn't what I was thinking."
"Of course it wasn't," the girl snarled. She rose, all lean grace and tension, and stalked toward me. "I know what you were thinking. That they'd shut you in here with that stupid little whore."
"No," I said. "I ... that isn't what - "
She hissed like a cat, and raked her nails across my face, scoring my cheek in three lines of fire. I cried out and fell back, the wall interrupting my retreat.
"I can always tell, when I'm like this," Justine said. She gave me an abruptly careless look, turned on the balls of her feet and walked several feet away before stretching and dropping to all fours, watching me with an absent, disinterested gaze.
I stared at her for a moment, feeling the heat of the blood welling in the scratches. I touched a finger to them, and it came away sprinkled with scarlet. I lifted my gaze to the girl and shook my head. "I'm sorry," I said. "God. What did they do to you?"
"This," she said, carelessly, thrusting out one hand. Round, bruised punctures marked her wrist. "And this." She held out the other wrist, showing another set of marks. "And this." She stretched out her thigh to one side of her body, parallel to the floor, to show more marks, along it. "They all wanted a little taste. So they got it."
"I don't understand," I said.
She smiled with too many teeth, and it made me uneasy. "They didn't do anything. I'm like this. This is the way I always am."
"Um," I said. "You weren't that way last night."
"Last night," she snapped. "Two nights ago. At least. That was because he was there."
"Thomas?"
Her lower lip abruptly trembled, and she looked as though she might cry. "Yes. Yes, Thomas. He makes it quieter. Inside me, there's so much trying to get out, like at the hospital. Control, they said. I don't have the kind of control other people have. It's hormones, but the drugs only made me sick. He doesn't, though. Only a little tired."
"But - "
Her face darkened again. "Shut up," she snapped. "But, but, but. Idiot, asking idiot questions. Fool who did not want me when I was willing to give. Nothing does that. None of them, because they all want to take, take, take."
I nodded, and didn't say anything, as she became more agitated. It might have been politically incorrect of me, but the word LOONY all but appeared in a giant neon sign over Justine's head. "Okay," I said. "Just ... let's just take it easy, all right?"