Plain: Book 2

Wanting to Not Want

Gene already had my hand in a vice like grip. He pulled me, up, down, through—all at the same time, through a space of foxfires. His gaze was elsewhere and narrowed, but his mouth merely pursed, as though troubled for sympathetic reasons rather than danger.

But he blurred. The foxfires flickered in and out. Voices clouded out whatever he said, voices from outside of me as well as within.

And then a high keening note broke through it all. The foxfires fell away, though Gene did not. He held on too tight.

A room came back into focus, one I didn't recognize. Bunk beds filled one end, and a few wardrobes fill the other. Everything in the room had been colored on a pastel or pink scheme, leading one to believe that this was a bunkhouse for girls.

But only one girl was in here, surrounded by older teenage boys. As soon as I noticed her, I was near, and could see that she could be no older than twelve, with her womanhood just budding. Her beautiful dark brown hair fell in thick waves down her shoulders, and her almond blue eyes spoke of many broken hearts in her future.

But she was pale, and her lips colored too roughly with cheap lipstick. She wore only her bra and panties, and several hands had her by her arms, ready to push her down.

Gene's grip, which I had momentarily lost in my strange transportation, snapped back around my hand and yanked me back, up and up into the safe, foxfire lit darkness.

"You're not seeing that," even in spirit, his voice shook. "You will not. You won't."

His arms turned me around and clutched me to him, blinding me to everything but a sense of something like fire burning gently against my face.

But the budding horror took me forward, through Gene, past him, for he, after all, was only a guide, and a spirit at that. I didn't have to look back to know he trailed after me in alarm.

The next room was one I recognized as the old hospital's ER room, though not so old anymore, but bright and clean. Emergency personnel and two doctors clustered about a bed, where the only thing I saw of the occupant was pale legs and a spread of dark brown hair, sticky with blood. Instinctively, I knew this girl had suffered a blow to the head, but that wasn't what the doctors muttered to one another.

"...multiple times..."

"How did no one notice?"

It was the same girl, although two years older. Two years in the same pink room, with the same group of boys.

Gene was less than gentle when he tugged me back this time. I could almost feel his hands reaching to truly touch my soul.

"Stop! Mai, please!"

"Who is this girl, Gene?"

And ever that faint keening, wavering, wailing.

He pulled me to the black abyss, swept foxfires around me, eyes wide, desperate. A great strength rose within me, not a happy one, but not a bad one either.

"Gene, what are you so afraid of?"

Because it couldn't just be this girl's horrible past. It had to have something to do with that noise, because I had never seen him like this, so pale, so aggressive in his efforts to keep me from wondering.

"She's not a safe place," he murmured. "Orphanages..."

But what did orphanages have to do with this? What happened to the girl? Did she die in the ER room? Was she the medium?

I pulled, but he held tight.

"Let me go, I just need one more clue."

He bit his lip, but then suddenly his face twisted into something much more grave, much more like his brother Naru.

"You will regret it," he said.

"Why?"

"Because people are evil."

It wasn't just Gene speaking. His voice changed, split, into several, and even his visage seemed to shiver with the effort. His fingers uncurled from my arm and waist and he slid back till only our fingertips touched.

"I'll bring you back," he said, more of a promise than a threat.

And then I turned, and as though it had been waiting for me, another room came out from the darkness with familiar green wallpapered walls and aluminum bed. The curtains still hung and were a grey plum, but curtains covered the windows and the flowers in the corner were fake. The room felt off, and it took me a moment to realize that the only furniture in there was the bed, which was bolted to the floor.

"'ello."

I flinched and turned to see the same beautiful, heart-breaking blue eyes staring out at me from a thin face. The long brown hair had been cut short, though what length it did have she had combed into one curtain in front of her face. The white hospital gown did little to cover up the soiled undergarments she wore.

She could have been fourteen, in active growth into her womanhood, but she smiled at me like a child.

"You're different," she said airily. "Tip down the po po, big girl. Think you're so special."

"You...you can see me?"

The girl flashed her teeth, yellowed, but all there. Neither the grin before or this one were kind, though they made a mockery of it. "You can see me?"

I clutched my hands to my chest. "Awful things have happened to you..."

"To the pee pee," she said, all too seriously. "You get me?"

"What?"

"They'll cut into you, show you just how mortal you are, show you the great worm within...feeding you...craving you..."

I seized up on hearing my own thoughts come out of the pee-smelling girl's mouth. The blue eyes looked right into me, right through me.

"Over and over," the girl continued, "showing you what's inside, promises promises, you won't be hurt—oh, but you'll get better. It's natural. It's all natural."

I stumbled back, something great and hollow yawning within my gut, threatening to engulf me as the realization dawned on me. But then my back hit the room's wall—my fingers brushed against peeling wallpaper. Everything aged before my eyes to the filthy, boarded up room of the present.

The girl, though, turned to the side, hunching up against the wall, pulling her legs in...

"Small, small, into the wall, they won't find me, won't reaching inside, won't cut inside, won't..." she stopped, her hands going between her legs than up to her face, covering her cheeks with her own urine. "You're weird. Not like the others. Lots and lots walk in and out. Dead dead, I want to be dead. Hard to see your organs when you're dead, hard to be hungry. No giant worm to ground boners into your bread—all the food you eat, all dirt, all puke, all for the giant worm."

"Stop." I couldn't find my own thoughts anymore. Why had I come here? How could there ever be anything more pitiful than this?

"Let my hair suck in light. Let my lungs breathe out silence. My limbs have already melted into my flat body, no more breasts, no more hips, no more waist or nose or chin."

Nothing to be cut into, nothing to bring them to you, nothing for them to demand of you. But how awful it was, how awful, to be so hungry, be so need.

"Stop." I could just hear myself.

The girl rubbed herself hard with a sensual moan. "In the wall, against the wall—"

"STOP!"

But her moan turned to that high, climatic keening that had been background noise all this time, which went on and on as she wobbled back and forth against the wall. I slapped my hands to my ears, but it did no good. On this plain, no physical ears could be covered, nor no physical eardrums be blocked.

Hands reached through the wall and pulled me back so roughly, for a time, I knew nothing. Something that could have been Gene, pale and faint, drifted across my consciousness.

Evil. People had made that girl out of their own lusts and game; then to be forgotten in that room to disappear in her own filth.

Because how did you ever fix someone that broken?