Ghost Image...3

The smoke curled around Booker, like a gentle blanket of some sort, caressing skin though he couldn’t actually feel its touch; he perceived it with his mind and that was enough to make him want to recoil. But it was everywhere. He could hear the Founder’s library choking in the smoke.

“Stop!” Booker tried to yell, but his voice was caught in the smoke, in the fog—the smog, smothering the landscape of the inside of the library. He thought he heard maniacal laughter to go along with it, but perhaps that was just his imagination.

Come, explore.

Booker felt his eyes close, but he could still see through them, see the smoke and the tinged landscape of the library. Felt the surge of fury and frustration that couldn’t have come from within. He raged inside, without a reason why, and when the smoke finally settled out to the sides, when he was no longer forcibly drawn into something greater than himself—

“Where am I?” Booker asked. The smoke walls rebounded the question, echoing it until his voice split into hundreds of little pieces, fragments that ricocheted off the walls and back at one another until they had smashed into pieces. It took a long time.

“Where—“ Booker began to ask again, but he stopped when the voice came hurtling back at him, as though it had been thrown. His own voice assaulted him, hitting him around the ears like it was gone mad. Booker covered his ears and yelled for it to stop. The fury only grew.

Now his voice was everywhere, assaulting him, laughing, screaming, shouting in surges of anger that were louder and softer by turns. The louder he was, the more it hurt, but once you crossed a certain threshold, pain no longer registered. So he was loud enough for long enough to not...

Having fun?

“No!” Booker said, and then his ears hurt again. His voice splintered against the walls of the room, the white room, the mad room. An asylum, sanitarium.

The walls were grey, concrete. There was a window, but it was small, too small to pass through. He was tied down, back against the flat of the board, arms bound at the wrists near his hips. His legs were buckled down at the thigh, and his head pinned back. But he could see.

Booker struggled. There was laughter, maddened laughter, and the glass shards on the floor sparkled. Someone had broken the window.

“Why are you trying to get free?” a man wearing all white asked. He looked at Booker. Booker stared at him. The man looked halfway like Holt, insofar as the carriage and presentation. Exception of the white and blood-less-ness. The sheer not-dead that was associated.

“What’s going on?” The words did not hurt his ears this time.

There was more laughter. Mad laughter, suicidal laughter.

“You’re filling in for me,” the man said. He leaned nearer, and grinned. Put a hand on Booker’s arm and petted it gently. The man’s hand was warm and damp. There was something wrong with his eyes, how they were mostly pupil and he was grinning. The floor of the sanitarium was old, weather beaten. Hardy.

It smelled like stale urine and fecal matter—like anger and fear and mold. The mold annoyed Booker’s nose. He sneezed.

The man screamed and jumped forward, his hands pressed against Booker’s throat, holding but not squeezing. The light of sanity that most people had was not in this man’s eyes. Booker stared back at him, not sure what was happening. The hands at his throat were frighteningly real.

“Who are you?” Booker asked when a full minute of stillness had passed and the man neither moved to kill or moved away. “Who are you?”

The hands tightened, ever so slightly. Booker wondered if it was the end. If he had made a mistake by asking such a delicate question. But there was nothing for it now.

He stared into the not-sane eyes of the man whose hands were so warm, and moist, almost the inverse of clammy. And cold.

“Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?” the man whispered. Then, “A man of genius is privileged only as far as he is genius. His dullness is as insupportable as any other dullness.”

“Who are you quoting?” Booker asked. They were familiar—

“Colleges hate geniuses, just as covenants hate saints.”

“Emerson,” Booker said.

“Romeo,” the man said, grinning. His eyes were not sane, but then, it seemed right for madness in a peculiar time.

“Emerson,” Booker said again.

“Romeo,” the man said more forcefully this time. His hands clutched about Booker’s throat.

“Romeo,” Booker said.

“Emerson.”

Booker frowned.

The man laughed, and let go of Booker’s throat to claw at the air and shriek. He looked like what a horse might look like, had it gone completely out of its mind, changed shape into human form and attempted to rear whilst in a body that was balanced to stand on hind legs. Forelegs pawing at the empty air with no intention of coming back down. Gravity was nothing to fight, anyway.

“Let me go,” Booker said. “I don’t know where I am, and I need to go.”

The man laughed again. He only laughed. It was mad laughter, too. No chuckles or chortles or gimmicky false laughter. Genuine and full-bellied, with wildness to accompany it, the laughter that was too loud for the circumstances and too small minded.

“You are not going anywhere,” the man said. Then, “I am Emerson, I am Romeo, I am a mistake in two parts held together by a whole, I am yes and I am no, I am the undercover hardcore—did you know they’re following us? Like, really following us? They’ve been waiting for years, and I want you to know now that they know about you and your madness. They know you’re mad, you know. It’s okay. They’ll just cut it out of your head, like they did with me.”

Lobotomy.

“I don’t want to lose my mind,” Booker whispered.

“It’s okay,” Romeo Emerson said, turning around and then standing on his tippy toes. Booker could tell—he was suddenly taller. “They won’t hurt you too much—you don’t need a mind to be sane.”

“What?” Booker asked, but his question was cut off by Romeo Emerson’s hand over his mouth.

“Shhhh—“ Romeo Emerson said, holding a finger up to his own lips. “They will hear you.” A grin spread across his face. “And then they will come to get you. They love to come to get people who are new. Don’t worry—I’ll keep you safe.”

A secret, something else promised, but Booker was sure it hadn’t been speech. Just a sensation, a feeling, a connection his mind made that he didn’t want to admit. Just—something. Something impossible.

If it was impossible, it shouldn’t have been done, but things that were impossible happened every day.

It was like someone outside of them was watching. And suddenly Romeo Emerson started to scream at the ceiling if Booker could have jumped, he would have; the ropes were too tight, and he realized he could not feel his fingers anymore. He was shaking in a death trap.

“Let me go,” Booker said.

Rome one Emerson started shrieking with laughter again. “Let me, go,” he imitated. “Let me go.” Then his face became ugly, curled into a snarl. “Let you go? What about the rest of us?” He motioned towards the walls of the sanitarium which had gone grey, closing in, ever nearer. “Why do you think they won’t let us go? We’re more right than they know. They don’t want to hear about how the world is failing, and broken. They don’t want to know what we know. Did you know you can hear your parents’ voices when they die? If you kill them you can. I should know. I killed mine.”

Booker wondered why he was caught in a place with a murderer who was insane. Was it something he had done in a past life? Some ill that had rendered him incapable of escaping madness such as this? Something—

“You’re going to die,” the man named Romeo said. “Painfully, cut into as many pieces as you’ll let them make out of your body after they kill you.”

“I’d be dead,” Booker said, not thinking. He thought too late, rather.

“Dead?” the man named Romeo began to laugh, a dark sinister laugh that shook the air. It did not reverberate around the enclosed room of the sanitarium. “Look at the ceiling and tell me if you’re dead,” the man growled.

Booker was going to say he couldn’t look at the ceiling, that his eyes were stuck facing towards the window, that nothing was going to change—then the man named Romeo came over and hit the end of the board that Booker was tied to hard enough to tilt it backwards, letting blood rush to Booker’s head and far enough so he could see the ceiling, staring at him.

There were names all over it, written in black sharpie, and every one of them had a cross mark through it. Every single name stared back down like it had eyes, and the names began to move on the ceiling, to reform themselves into something demonic and demented and precious and beautiful and so goddamn fucked up that there was no escaping it.

Booker tried to look away, to close his eyes, but the names were burned under his lids and his eyes were cemented open in any case. No use trying to pull at the lines holding them open. It hurt too much, the way his head was staring to hurt, like it was going to break open, just crack and let out everything he kept inside, from memories to painful encounters from childhood that weren’t quite memory yet. That had never been, and probably never would be.

There were moments he wanted to hold onto that he couldn’t think about even letting go, but the way the blood was pounding in his ears, and the way it felt to realize that there was an end mark in sight, though he didn’t quite understand what that sight was—

“You’re going to die,” Romeo Emerson said.

“But not now.”