That must be the way I came in. She was in a new Now? The hard eye of her titanium skull plate burned. Wincing, she pressed the heel of her left hand to her forehead, then heard herself drag in a sickly gasp. No gash. She pressed harder, her fingers searching through muscle and skin. Wait a minute, where’s—
“Now, now, are you in pain?” A different voice, female, much clearer, the static starting to fade. The words were clipped, a little dry. “Another of your headaches?”
Oh God. Her heart iced. Was there an accent? No, you’re imagining things; this is House, up to its old tricks. With a fresh blast of panic, she pressed harder, using the fingers of her left hand and the heel of her right because she was … clutching something, a pen or stick or maybe a fork. She couldn’t tell, but for whatever reason, she didn’t relax her grip; felt as if that was the wrong thing to do. Where is it, where is it? It had to be there. She felt the plate burning in her mind. Give her a pen and she could ink its exact margins, every curve, even where the screws were. But under her fingers there was only skin and muscle and bone.
No plate. How can that be? I feel it. Gasping, she fought a rising tide of black horror as she ran her fingers over the rest of her scalp. No scars. But I had them just a few seconds ago.
“Elizabeth? You are there, yes?” The guy with the whisper-man lisp again, right in front, behind that hole in her vision. God, if she hadn’t just seen the thing die—with Eric and Casey and Rima, and Eric, oh Eric—she’d have sworn she pulled that monster through with her. “Come now, no need for a fuss. Let’s all be calm, shall we?”
Calm? Oh, that was a good one. “Wh-where …” Her mouth tasted awful, like she could scrape mold off her tongue. “Where am I?”
“Oh my, disoriented again”—although, from her tone, the woman sounded more put-out than sympathetic. “Poor dear.”
“Doctor, I thought you said she was well enough to withstand this.” A second man: older, gruffer, with a note of impatient authority. “You assured me mesmeric interventions would help, not hinder our work. This is the best you can do?”
Mesmeric. She knew that word, an old-fashioned term. He means hypnosis.
“Thus far, what you’ve obtained is nothing but fantastical fabrications: ravings of doubles, body-snatching, animism.” Gruff sounded disgusted. “What good your work if nothing you unearth is of the slightest merit? I’ve murders to investigate, and she is the only living link. I need what she knows, what is locked in the stronghold of her mind, Sir, not the hysterical rants of a lunatic.”
“Please do recall that she has refused or purged herself of her medicines,” the first man said, the one who could’ve doubled for the whisper-man. “Even if the Lunacy Commission gives us license in these extreme times, we are doctors, not barbarians.”
Extreme times? Doctors? Lunacy? The words kicked, as if someone had planted a boot in her back and given her a hard shove. She felt the sudden slam of recognition and memory, and then it was as if the machinery of her mind whirred into overdrive. The world firmed, that dark mote at the center of her vision cleared, and everything rushed to a crisp, colorful, painful focus.
Oh shit. She felt her legs trying to fold. I’m back.
2
THE GALLERY WAS both the same and very different. Above, the whitewashed iron plates of that strange ceiling stretched not to a dead end but a T junction. Ceiling-mounted gas lamps hissed, and the light from wall sconces, mounted high on dingy, soot-stained walls, was yellow and too bright. The hall itself was long and very stark, with no pictures, bric-a-brac, or floral arrangements, and only a few stuffed birds, like the snowy, still cockatoo poised on a branch made of wire and covered with coarse brown cloth, trapped under a bell jar on a small table to her right. Every door was closed and locked, but she could hear the muffled cries and shouts of the others on this and every floor, a continual background yammer that steamed through iron grilles set low. The smell was right, but much stronger: a choking fug of overflowing toilets, unwashed skin, and old vomit.
They ranged before her as they had when House whisked her here, but with a few differences. While Nurse Graves, rigid as a post and decked out in her navy blue uniform, seemed unchanged, neither she nor Kramer wore panops this time around. A long white doctor’s smock hung from Kramer’s bony frame instead of a suit coat. Jasper was nowhere to be seen, although Weber, the blunt-faced attendant, held a strong dress clutched in one huge fist and seemed poised for a grab. She caught only a brief glimpse of another ward attendant—younger, with muddy brown hair—in a slant of shadow just behind Weber, and felt her attention sharpen. That kid … I know him.
She thought the same about a young man to her far right: not much older than a boy, really; tall and lean and a little hungry looking, although his face was square and his neck thick, like he’d once been a linebacker in high school and then decided working out was too much trouble. His skin, pallid and pinched, tented over his cheekbones. A brushy moustache drooped from his upper lip. His hair, a lank mousy brown, was slicked back from a broad forehead and plastered to his scalp with a pomade or oil that gave off a slightly rancid odor, like he might not have washed his hair for several days. He wore some sort of military-looking uniform, navy blue with big buttons and numbers done in tarnished brass on a high collar.
Towering over them all was a much older man. Burly and thick-necked, Gruff was a study in gray: dark gray checked flannel trousers, with a matching vest and jacket and a light gray houndstooth coat. A steel-colored bowler firmly planted atop a thick mass of salt-and-pepper hair made him seem much taller than he already was. But it was his eyes, piercing and bright, that drew her most: so light blue they were nearly as silver as bits of mica.
“Elizabeth.” Her eyes ticked back to Kramer. She couldn’t shake the feeling that Kramer was, somehow, even more different than before. His face was … off, a little out-of-kilter and unnatural. She couldn’t put her finger on what was wrong. Hand outstretched, Kramer eased toward her. “Come now. You’re back with us, Elizabeth.”
Why does he keep saying that? And Jasper, where was … Still staring in wonder at Kramer, that’s when she saw. That’s when she understood why his voice was so odd.
When Kramer spoke, only the right half of his face actually moved. She saw now that the entire left side of his face, from forehead to jaw, was waxen and immobile, and there was something wrong with his nose, too. He looked, she thought, as if he’d had a stroke.