ROOM 211

PART THIRTY SEVEN

43.

For all there is a reason and there is a reason for all.

Bonnie lost herself for a moment. In her daze, her trance like state there is something, a memory, she sees it clearly in her mind's eye, she sees it so clearly that she sees nothing else, including her blond-haired visitor.

This room she is in, the one with the eight beds, it looked, looks a little different, it looks cleaner, brighter, just as if she has been physically transported into a moment from before now. Bonnie sees Maggie moving quickly towards the double doors. They are locked and she cannot get out. Maggie is scared, panicked, for she cannot remember why she is here. Her short-term memory is fried, and she is here to have that fixed. William moves to be with Maggie. He seems familiar to her, and she calms right down in his presence. Once calm, she remembers.

Blue and Red are sitting on separate beds and looking at one another, part of why they are here has already been seen to. Their individual injuries are healed, not completely healed but so far along the road to being healed that such recovery must be impossible though here they are. There is no way that injuries as severe are theirs should have come along as far as they have in such a short amount of time, but they have. It is amazing, ridiculously amazing they both agree.

Sue too is here, amazed at what she can see. She is also on a bed but fully laying upon it. She swings her legs to the side of this bed and sits up straight, a bed with which in time she will awake upon with a certain struggle to recall anything. This is unreal and cannot possibly be something of fact, but it is. There is a wheelchair on this side of her bed, and she is sure she does not need it.

She had needed it; her fall and subsequent injury at the swimming pool had led her to needing it, surely, she would need it for the rest of her life, anything else would be quite impossible. Things had got to a point where she could not even operate the wheelchair herself and now, she has no need for it.

Archer is here in this room too. He does not want to be here. He wants to be somewhere else though he is grateful for what being here has done for him. These people here, the names she knows are not the names which belong to them, all apart from William that is. Looking at these others Bonnie, not her own name either, she knows this too, is sad and a little frightened. A time is coming to an end and a different time is not far from becoming something real and different.

She had at some point had this want to leave this place and now in her regressed moment, she doesn't. All she has come to know, and love is here in this room, as has Henry, Henry, not his name either. Henry tells her all is well; they all are healed; all will be fine only all will not be fine for Bonnie. She does not want to go back to the real world, once a change in her has been set in effect, leaving something else to be left behind. She wants things to remain as they are, as they have been in this collective room, so she moves to embrace Henry and as she does this, she also kisses him for a moment.

Bonnie has come to develop feelings for Henry. Henry knows this so he has allowed the kiss to happen, and it is only after it has come to an end that Bonnie realizes she cannot have this feeling. Henry is married, he has children, and he will be going back to them. What has Bonnie got to go back to? A darkness had grown in her, it had become personified and took her over. Now that has gone, she is one more free to be herself, only now she feels incomplete.

Her trance has come to an end, and she is back in her current moment, back within a room she did not want to leave. Her blond-haired visitor had gone. He is no longer in the room. Someone else, however, has come into the room. Henry has come to be here, and he stands quite still having come in a few feet beyond those currently opened double doors.

'I fell in love with you in this room, you know' she tells him. 'I guess, I did if anything, I did this the moment we first met. You looked after me, you made me feel ... safe.'

There is silence for a moment as they both regard one another. Bonnie's eyes well up and her throat feels every ounce of emotion with which her whole being is stirring up.

'All is well, we are healed' is what he simply says.'

'Yes', she nods and tears begin to flow. 'You remember ...' she moves to embrace him, no kiss this time no matter how she wants to express her feelings for him. 'When we met again, you once again made me feel ... safe.'

Archer and Sue slowly move into the room. Something is returning. Sue glances over at what was her bed, and she can be sure that the bed she looks at is one she had occupied, for on day one of memory loss she woke within or rather upon this bed. She remembers that moment and she also has a momentary thought about that wheelchair of hers. It is not currently in the room, and she is glad of that. She never wants to see it again then becomes unsure as to why she had needed it.

Bonnie sees movement outside this room, the others don't, for they are facing her, and their backs are towards the movement. Initially what she sees makes her smile but then something else stirs within her and she feels that this something else is not all so pleasant. The movement, it moves down the hall heading to the left.

'What is it?' asks Henry noticing how Bonnie's expression is changing.

Before an answer can be given, one or two nose bleeds begin as do four returning headaches, all of which soon become intensive. Out in the hallway and to the left, down those twenty or so steps, within that incredibly large, darkened room a light comes on, lights bright enough to illuminate the entire room. What is revealed within this room is frighteningly disturbing but for the moment at least will go unseen by Henry, Archer, Bonnie, and Sue for they each have passed out on the floor of the room with the eight beds.

In room 211 of The Mulberry Hotel, Mandy waits patiently. The longer she waits the more hopeless and helpless she becomes, for there is nothing she can do. Alone in her silence she cannot help but consider the possibilities that a similar fate has fallen upon all eight of the forgotten. Then surely, they each are at the town hospital, this is where Maggie and William surely must be ...