Matters of the Heart

Chapter 21: Internal Affairs

Chapter 21:

Internal Affairs

Emily knew something was wrong when she woke up. Her body was achy and she felt groggy. She could hear voices, but they were distant. She felt like the ground was moving beneath her. She wanted to sit up, but she felt a force on top of her body that was keeping her down. It's like she was riding a rollercoaster and it was going so fast that the weight of the wind was pushing her against the seat, rendering her paralyzed.

"Hold on, Emily. Just hold on," she heard a familiar voice. But it wasn't the voice she wanted to hear.

When she looked over she saw Elliott sitting next to her. His presence confused her.

"What's...wha..."

"Em?" It was Alison's voice this time. Emily looked over to her other side and saw Alison staring at her with tears in her eyes.

"Ali, what's going on?" She thought she'd said the words out loud, but she didn't hear anything come out of her mouth.

She tried to remember something...anything that would explain what was happening. She thought she recalled being with Ali and Elliott somewhere. Dinner, maybe?

No, that wasn't right. Why would Elliott have been with them at dinner? Maybe they had run into him. Or maybe they had met him. Emily had been having trouble sleeping. Had Ali convinced her to seek help?

Her head was throbbing. Her brain hurt trying to figure it out. Eventually, she just let go. She heard a loud noise that shattered her eardrums and then her vision went black.

"Emily..." Ali's voice was the last thing she heard before the deafening silence.

The darkness was overpowering. The silence was staggering. She felt like she was fading out of existence. She fought it for a while. But there was only so much she could take. A warm sensation flooded her body.

When she opened her eyes she was blinded by a fluorescent light above her head. She could hear the incessant buzzing noise from the bulbs. She looked around. She didn't recognize where she was, but she felt the strangest sensation that she had been there before. The room looked an awful lot like a medical facility.

She was at the hospital? Why? What had happened? Emily immediately started touching her body, feeling for bruises or new incisions. After the panic dissipated she looked down and saw that she didn't have an ID bracelet on. And she was in her normal clothes.

Where the hell was she?

"Ali?" Emily sat up, freely, in bed.

She knew there was no way Ali would have left her alone if something had happened. But there was no answer. She looked around. She wasn't hooked up to any machines. She was just sitting in the desolate room, alone. No doctors, no nurses, not even anyone from the janitorial staff. Something felt off. She stood up, though her legs felt weak. The floor was freezing beneath her bare feet.

The room was big. The hospital bed was up against the back wall. A blood pressure cuff hung loosely on a shelf above the bed. A medical waste bucket was fixed to the wall next to it. There were two matching end tables on either side of the bed and a chair sitting in the corner of the room. There was a set of drawn curtains on one side of the room and two identical doors on the other side. Emily assumed one was the bathroom and one led out into the hallway.

She walked over to the first door. It was locked. When she reached for the second door she felt a sinking feeling in the pit of her stomach. When her hand touched the doorknob she realized that she wasn't in the hospital. The room was too pristine. It's like someone had set the stage for something. All at once, the room flooded her memories. She had been here before. But instead of the hospital bed, there had been a table. That table. The steel cold table where she'd woken up next to her friends after Charlotte drugged them after they'd nearly escaped from the dollhouse. Emily yanked on the door, but it didn't budge. She paced across the room, ripping the curtains aside. The windows were sealed with cement on the outside. Emily whipped around, spinning on her heels.