Delirium - Lauren Oliver [128]
“That’s where she was,” he is saying. “Number one-eighteen. Admin hasn’t coughed up the dough to get the walls patched, yet, so for now we’re just leaving it as is. Not a lot of money around here for improvements. . . .”
Alex is watching me. All his control and confidence has vanished. His eyes are blazing with anger, or maybe pain; his mouth is twisted into a grimace. My head feels full of noise.
Alex holds up his hand like he’s thinking of blocking my progress. Our eyes meet for just a second and something flashes between us—a warning, or an apology, maybe—and then I am pushing beyond him into cell 118.
In almost every way it is identical to the cells I’ve glimpsed through the tiny hallway windows: a rough cement floor; a rust-stained toilet, and a bucket full of water, in which several cockroaches are revolving slowly; a tiny iron bed with a paper-thin mattress, which someone has dragged into the very center of the room.
But the walls.
The walls are covered—crammed—with writing. No. Not writing. They are covered with a single four-letter word that has been inscribed over and over, on every available surface.
Love.
Looped huge and scratched, just barely, in the corners; inscribed in graceful script and solid block lettering; chipped, scratched, picked away, as though the walls are slowly melting into poetry.
And on the ground, lying curled up against one wall, is a dull silver chain with a charm still attached to it: a ruby-encrusted dagger whose blade has been worn down to a small nub. My father’s charm. My mother’s necklace.
My mother.
All this time, during every long second of my life when I believed her dead, she was here: scratching, burrowing, chipping away, encased in the stone walls like a long-buried secret.
I feel, suddenly, as though I am back in my dream, standing on a cliff as the solid ground disintegrates underneath me, transforms into the sand in an hourglass, running away under my feet. I feel the way I do in that moment when I realize that all the ground has vanished, and I am standing on a bare blade of air, ready to drop.
“It’s terrible, you see? Look at what the disease did to her. Who knows how many hours she spent scrabbling along these walls like a rat.”
Frank and Alex are standing behind me. Frank’s words seem to be muffled by a layer of cloth. I take a step forward into the cell, suddenly fixated on a shaft of light, extending like a long golden finger from a space in the wall that has been chipped clear away. The clouds must have begun to break apart outside: Through the hole, on the other side of the stone fortress, I see the flashing blue of the Presumpscot River, and leaves shifting and tumbling over one another, an avalanche of green and sun and the perfume of wild, growing things. The Wilds.
So many hours, so many days, looping those same four letters over and over: that strange and terrifying word, the word that confined her here for over ten years.
And, ultimately, the word that helped her escape. In the lower half of one wall, she has traced the word so many times in such enormous script—LOVE, each letter the size of a child—and gouged so deeply into the stone that the O has formed a tunnel, and she has gotten out.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Food for the body, milk for your bones,
ice for the bleeding, a belly of stones.
—A folklore blessing
Even after the iron gates clang shut behind us and the Crypts recedes in the distance, the feeling of being penned in on all sides doesn’t go away. There’s still a terrible, squeezing pressure in my chest, and I have to struggle to suck in full breaths.
An ancient prison bus with a wheezing motor carries us away from the border, to Deering. From there Alex and I walk back toward the center of Portland, staying on opposite sides of the sidewalk. Every couple of feet he swivels his head to look at me, opening and closing his mouth, like he’s pronouncing a series of inaudible