Now she could die.
Shivering,she let out another breath and shook her head. “Damn it.”
Algernon nuzzled her cheek, clearly worried about her.
She petted him gently. “Thanks. I’m all right. I’m just—yeah. I could see why I wanted to pretend none of this ever happened to me.” But now she knew what she was looking for. Wandering through the basement, she searched for something that looked familiar from her memory of the place. It wasn’t exactly a straight line—she had to go up to the first floor a few times to find another way around where the floor above had collapsed into the basement.
And the first floor carried even more memories for her. Images of cowering in the corner of rooms or playing checkers with other more stable patients. But as she walked along the walls of flaking paint, chipped wood, and rusted metal, she realized that not all her memories were bad ones.
There was some laughter. Some friendship. And the smiling face of the man she now knew as Harry. A patient alongside her, he had always been there to hold her after a particularly painful bout of treatment. At the time, he hadn’t had a name. Just “John Doe.” Because they were both amnesia patients, they were kept together. Nobody cared that they were different genders. Patient-on-patient violence, especially of the sexual kind, was overlooked. Nobody cared. Nobody had the time to care.
Not that Harry ever looked at her that way. He couldn’t. He was just her friend, always beside her, always there to hold her hand and be her support when she needed it.
But I’m never there for him, am I? What did I do to deserve him? She shook her head and frowned. Yeah, she listened to him complain from time to time, and she loved their time together, but it wasn’t the same. He went through so much for her sake. Why?
Another mystery she wanted to solve. No, that she needed to solve.
One thing at a time.
Finally, she knew where she was! The place really was a maze when it was in one piece, let alone when bits of it had fallen into the lower floors, or collapsed entirely, making it even more confusing to weave through. But now the doors and rows of rooms looked familiar.
Finding her way back down to the basement, she found the storage room she had shoved the talisman quarter inside. The storage boxes that had housed all that paperwork were still there, but now had rotted and fallen apart. Water clearly found its way down to this room frequently, judging by the pile of pulpy mess in the middle that sat almost waist high. It wasn’t just paperwork, however. Some of the things she could see in the mess were old pamphlets advertising the services of the asylum.
Promising cures. And hope. And healed families. “State of the art treatment!” read one brochure in huge letters.
“Fuck you,” she muttered to the pieces of paper. “Just fuck you to Hell.” Walking to the wall where she had found the loose brick, she held her breath for a moment. What were the odds that it had been left alone? That at no point in the remaining seventy years of the asylum’s history after she had hidden the talisman that the stupid brick hadn’t been removed or resealed?
But it seemed the building was just as neglected as its patients had been. Because there, just where she had left it, was a brick that was missing its mortar. Crouching, she pulled it out. Sensing her request before she even voiced it, Algernon jumped from her shoulder and crawled into the hole, searching for the fragment.
She didn’t exactly want to touch it and get sent back into another memory while there was a brawl going on outside.
Algernon came back out from the hole, a quarter of the talisman in between his teeth. She smiled. “Thanks, little guy.” Algernon climbed into the pocket of her hoodie to deposit the fragment before scrabbling back up to her shoulder.
“Let’s go get the boys before they wreck the joint, huh?” She stood and brushed the dust and detritus from her knees and let out another breath. She was close to the top of the mountain, but there was still more to climb. And she knew it was only going to get harder as she went. But she smiled at Algernon and kissed the side of his head. At least she wasn’t alone.
She had never, ever been alone. Not really.
Small favors.
“Three down. One to go.”