90A/N: Yes, the plot has changed slightly. I pushed the thing with Aya back a few chapters because it would be too cluttered otherwise; all you need to to is re-read the end of the last chapter - Luke's chapter - and it'll all make sense. Sorry about that. But here you go! A chapter. Finally. I slack far too much - thank you to everyone who kept bugging me for new chapters, I'm sorry I'm so slow at this! -N
A Heaven of Hell
Chapter 4: Will's Way
The Normal is the good smile in a child's eyes - all right. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills - like a God. It is the Ordinary made beautiful; it is also the Average made lethal.
-Peter Shaffer
"Lessons," Mia said. She looked grim.
Breakfast had come and gone. Watery milk and cornflakes that looked a shade too green to be healthy, eaten in a hall so empty our voices echoed as we talked about dreams and things in low voices. "Even the walls have ears," Mia had said, and I don't think she was speaking figuratively. We all looked pretty similar, dressed in the dark blue long-sleeved clothes supplied by the hospital to make us all look as anonymous as possible. It was almost funny. Aya, Mia, Ben and Kieran would stand out no matter what they wore.
"He came back in the night," Ben told Mia and I while I gagged trying to eat the cornflakes. He was pointing at Kieran, who was shuffling towards us with his bowl and looking deeply repulsed by what was inside it. "It was better this time. Apparently all they did was give him an injection and let him sleep. No dreams, no monitoring, no inquisition, nothing. And when he woke up, they brought him back, and he was perfectly fine."
"Hmph. I wonder what they did to him while he was out of it," Mia muttered.
Ben shrugged. Kieran came and sat next to me and he seemed perfectly normal, for someone who appeared to have had a major breakdown and a drug-induced sleep and a late-night return to his shared room. His eyes were dark and his skin so pale it was almost translucent. His nails were ragged where he'd bitten them. There were faint red marks around his wrists too, chafe marks, and when he turned to greet Aya I saw a small mark like a mosquito bite on the back of his neck. It made me feel more ill than the breakfast did.
We'd woken earlier than everyone else and so we'd eaten (or tried to) long before time for our lessons to begin. While they ate their revolting cereal we sat around a low table in a room just off from the dining hall - the 'Games Room', though it only had board games and packs of huge playing cards - and spoke while we put a jigsaw puzzle together. It was a jigsaw of a country scene, a small cottage with a stream and a stone bridge. Mia was putting the front of the house together while Aya and Kieran looked for the pieces to make up the stream; I was doing the bridge and the gate. Ben just sat beside Mia and watched in silence, his left elbow resting on his knee as his fingers flexed as if he held an invisible guitar in his lap.
"This whole set-up is dodgy. There's a lock on the outside of my door and that's all the security I've seen. No bars or gates or padlocked rooms or anything. I've never seen such a random place in all my life," I muttered. "Is this place super-ultra-low security or something?"
Mia snorted. "Sweetheart, they're the most devious buggers in the world. You won't understand just how closely we're monitored until you get into trouble. Which," she added, smirking, "is pretty unpleasant."
"If you misbehave you get carted off to the Lab," Aya added with a grimace. "It's horrible."
Mia nodded. "It's all right here, in the main buildings, but there's a lab just across the way. In the Tower."
I blinked at her. "The Tower?"
"Of course. It's huge, and white, and pristine. Everyone gets taken in there at least once. It's so white in there it burns your eyes. And they stick a big needle in you and it's like you're paralysed, alive in a dead body, and it stops your memories or something - you know they've done something to you but you don't know what, but you remember being there. You remember the feeling of it," Aya said, her voice falling to a whisper. Her eyes were glazed as if she was staring not at the puzzle but at the room, at a memory she couldn't properly grasp.
"And the pain," Kieran said.
"Ahh," she muttered, shifting pieces. "That too."
I paused. There was something horribly obviously out of place about all of this, but because it was so obvious, I couldn't see it. It was infuriating. I wanted to claw my face off in frustration. "What's so different about us?" I asked slowly, watching their reactions.
Kieran glanced up at me and away. "You'll find out," he said, and that was all.
We were silent for a while, fitting the pieces together at our leisure. It wasn't a big jigsaw but it was complicated, with lots of stone fragments and flowers and bricks and tiles. I was taking a long time over the bridge because they all looked fascinating as they found their pieces and worked out where they went. Mia was stern and focused, Aya and Kieran shared private giggles when they reached for the same piece, Ben just sat and played a guitar that wasn't there. Everyone worked together on the same goal yet they did it separately, working on their own corner that didn't quite make sense on its own, building it up until they could put it all together to make a cohesive whole.
"Engaging your brain cells, are we?" someone drawled from the doorway. "I wondered where you were."
We all looked up, startled. Kieran dropped a jigsaw piece.
He should have been glowing or something, but no, he just stood there, looking as normal and unimpressive as the rest of us in the unremarkable dark blue clothes and flat electric light. His hair was mussed and he looked pale, tired, but his half-smile was real and his eyes were glittering like those tinted glass beads that have been cracked and frozen so that they glimmer from the cracks inside from every angle, yet they don't break easily at all. His hands were in his pockets, his shoulders hunched as if he were cold.
"What do you want?" Mia asked warily.
"You're going to need my help," Luke said, shifting from foot to foot. He wasn't wearing shoes. None of us were, but the floor was warm so we didn't really mind. He looked as if he hated standing still, hated being in contact with the ground. His unease was deeply unsettling. I think that's why people didn't like being around him much. He made you feel as if the world had warped around you just enough to make it uncomfortable, like when you put on twisted tights or you try to put on a coat that has a sleeve inside-out.
"Yours?" Mia snorted, sitting back on her chair and glaring at him. "Your help? Luke, you are the most dangerous patient in this entire fucking place. You're the last person we'd go to for help, even if we needed it. Sod off and play with your goblins, you stupid self-important git. We don't need the trouble you stir up!"
"Me? Stir up? It's not my fault that... that... bastard keeps picking on me, Mia!" he spat, catlike and vicious.
"Oh, come on. You wind him up all the fucking time!" Ben exclaimed, raising his hands palms up as if pleading for sanity.
Luke crossed his arms and went completely still. He was sulking. Even slouching he looked almost impressive, broad-shouldered and tall, his movements decisive and steady. His hands were nice too. Not calloused like Ben's, but the sort of hands you could imagine with a hammer and chisel or a paintbrush. I remember a daydream I had at school, during art lessons, when the teacher casually mentioned Michaelangelo and showed us a small picture of the statue of David. He'd made the statue with large hands and feet, our teacher said, to make it look more graceful. I thought about Michaelangelo. What were his hands like? Were they like a thief's? Thieves had to be quick and nimble. They had to steal things out of pockets and bags fast, like artists stole shapes and images from the world around them. Long, thin fingers, quick movements like the fluttering of a butterfly. Luke had a the hands of a thief. They were also, I decided, the hands of an artist.
"You could help us by attracting attention elsewhere," Mia said coldly. "Go away."
But Luke wasn't listening to her anymore. He was staring at the puzzle under my fingers as if it were the Holy Grail.
Kieran sighed.
"What?" I asked defensively, intimidated, glancing from him to Mia to the puzzle. My hand itched where his eyes feel, a hot crawling feeling, almost how flames would feel if you could hold them without burning. I snatched my hand away. The back of my hand from my wrist to my knuckles was reddened and sensitive.
Yesterday, at dinner, the blaze had been outward. Defensive. Frightening Knull away, or trying to. This was how he usually was. It was invisible, yet so much more focused it affected real, physical things. It wasn't just a glaze when he was afraid or fighting something. It was something tangible. There was something there. Something that made the hairs on the back of my neck rise and scalded the back of my hand with a look. Something unnatural.
"It isn't me he's interested in anymore." His voice was as cold as Mia's and he didn't once look away from the puzzle. "It's Zara. You know it. And she isn't strong enough to fight back yet, so you're trying to protect her for now, but it won't work. You know it won't."
No one said a word. We could hear the noise of chatter and cutlery from the dining hall like the buzzing of insects from a long way away. Someone was walking down the hallway in squeaky shoes. Outside, someone was mowing the lawn. One of the lights was flickering with an intermittent hum. Everyone was scared.
"What the fuck does he want with me?!" I muttered, hopelessly confused and utterly convinced that everyone was insane and at any moment one of them would start trying to plan world domination using remote-controlled monkeys and murderous carrots.
Then, with perfect timing, a bell rang. And it rang like the screeching of a hundred tortured pissed-off banshees and it made everyone in the Games Room jump.
"Lessons," Mia said grimly. She rose. "Come on, we're going. And you," she snarled, pointing at Luke with a real animal grimace on her face, "if you want to help, then meet us by the Well at lunchbreak. I want to hear everything you know. Every fucking syllable, do you understand? I don't trust you, I don't like being near you, and I don't like being noticed by these fuckheads, understand? So don't wind them up. Any of them. Especially not around me or Zara - or ANY of us. I don't care what you do when you're on your own but I know you're right about Zara and Knull and if you take one wrong step here I'm going to kick your arse into the deepest pile of shit I can find, understand?"
"Of course," Luke said quietly. "I'll keep a low profile and tell you everything."
"Lessons. Or we'll be yelled at and we'll all be higher profile and Mia will get steam coming out of her ears," Aya said pointedly, waving her arms in the direction of the door.
Mia took my arm and dragged me from the room, moving past Luke as if he simply wasn't there. I turned to look at him and his face was perfectly composed; closed and emotionless and perfect like the face of Michaelangelo's David himself. But then there was a hint of a smile at his mouth and a glint of his eye and then he was gone, and I was off being dragged down a corridor, and no one had answered my question. I felt adrift at sea with a horrific storm looming on the horizon. I was completely lost.
"He's going to get one of us killed one day," Mia muttered to herself as she tugged me along behind her.
"You underestimate him," Ben told her quietly, calmly.
"How can you tell?"
"How else could he still be a threat to Knull after being here for so long?"
Mia sniffed, saying nothing in reply.
Our classroom was huge. It faced east so the rising sun dazzled us as we entered, reflecting off the nearly-white floors and walls and tables so it all seemed radiant but empty, glowingly warm but dead and cold. Some sections of the walls were smothered with the garish colours of painted, clumsy artwork or collages, while to my right a large table was festooned with sculptures from clay and plasticine. Right above our heads as we entered the room was a mobile, three dented silver coathangers interweaved and laced with strange abstract shapes made from coloured felt and decorated with costume jewels. Huge rolls of coloured paper, glittering materials and bright plastic leant against the wall in one corner while in another a computer hummed quietly to itself, the monitor splattered with cartoon stickers.
"Welcome to the art room," Kieran said cheerfully.
"Wow," was all I could manage.
Mia laughed and lunged through the room towards the table of sculptures, scattering the other students as they drifted into the room beside us. I didn't realise she was still clutching my wrist until it felt as if my shoulder had been wrenched from its socket and I almost tripped over a chair, but I righted myself, and followed her lead.
"Mine," she told me, grinning. She pointed to the array of figures and scenes on the table before us, brimming with glee. "Most of them are mine. Not the plasticine. The proper clay ones. Mine!"
They were exquisite. Each figure was unique, each face recognisable. The boy with a guitar in one hand and his other hand raised to shield his eyes from an invisible sun was Ben, and so was the boy doing a handstand with his shirt ruffled about his neck to reveal his stomach. The dancing figures - there were eight or so, all slightly different - were always Kieran and Aya, dressed in proper ballgowns or costumes so varied I couldn't put a name, time or place to any of them. And there was another, half-hidden, of Ben sitting on a chair, thinking. It was so beautifully crafted I thought it would come alive and speak to me, or sing.
"Good lord," I whispered, afraid to breathe because if I did I might shatter something about them. "They're amazing!"
"I know," Mia said, pride ringing in her voice.
I knew it too. Something else about the figures, something else about their form. Something even she didn't quite know.
"Which one is missing?" I asked, even quieter, turning to look into her eyes for the truth in her reaction.
The pride evapourated and she stiffened, eyes hardening, staring at me as if I had just asked her to kill someone. The world slowed around us as if we were in a seperate capsule of time.
"What do you mean?" she asked, her voice tight and controlled.
"One of them should be here and it isn't. It won't be complete until it is. You tried making lots of others but that won't hide it's absence properly, you know."
She swallowed. "I don't know what you mean."
"Yes you do," I said, my voice and thoughts smooth with certainty. "You're still making it though, aren't you?"
"You're scaring me," she said, her voice ragged as she looked back to the table.
"Don't cry. Just make it. It's what you need to do."
"Is is?"
I nodded.
And then the world seemed to explode back to life as I half-turned away from her, the sunlight burning into the back of my eyes, the colour and the life bursting back into motion around us. I'd spoken the truth and I didn't even know that the truth was about. But I knew it. Ben sat me next to him and watched me out of the corner of his eye as I tried to draw, mucking it up brilliantly with my lack of skill. I don't know what I tried to draw because the whole time I sat there, charcoal in hand, trying to work out what I didn't understand and yet instinctively knew. It only have me a headache and a blackened hand.
Mia was sketching something into a small notebook and she was completely at piece. Ben was playing with plasticine. Aya was painting a woman looking out of a window - the teacher, a beautiful young woman with dark hair and eyes like golden coins and a face like a pre-Raphaelite painting - with three colours, and the painting was fantastic. Kieran was talking to someone else called Lucy, showing her what he was doing with chalks - smudging them around into a pretty multicoloured mess. "It's a dream," he said, and she giggled and put her hand into a pot of white paint before slamming it down in the middle of his picture. "Now it's my dream," she said happily. Kieran laughed and wrote To Lucy from Kee at the top before placing it gently on the drying table behind him. "Remember it before you go," he told her, giving her a one-armed hug, and she smiled at him.
All the while, Luke sat across the other side of the room. He was drawing goblins.
How I knew I could not tell.