The Iron Thorn - Caitlin Kittredge [2]
She held my wrist, and my gaze, for the longest of breaths. I felt cold creep in around the windowpanes, tickle my exposed skin, run fingers up my spine. A sharp rap came from outside the doors, and we both started. “I know you’re not making trouble for your lovely daughter, Nerissa,” said Dr. Portnoy, the psychiatrist who had my mother’s care.
“No trouble,” I said, stepping away from Nerissa. I didn’t like doctors, didn’t like their hard eyes that dissected a person like my mother, but listening to Portnoy was preferable to listening to my mother shout. I was relieved he’d appeared when he had.
Nerissa’s eyes flickered between me and Portnoy when he stepped into the room. Anxious eyes, filled with animal cleverness. Portnoy patted the breast pocket of his white coat, the silver loop-the-loop of a syringe poking out.
“I’ll kiss you goodbye,” my mother whispered, as if it were our secret, and then she grabbed me in a stiff hug. “See, Doctor?” she shouted. “Just a mother’s love.” She gave a loud laugh, a crow sound, as if it were a colossal joke to be a mother in the first place, and then she backed away from me and sat in the window again, watching the dusk fade to nighttime. I turned my back. I couldn’t stand seeing her for another moment.
“I’m very concerned about your mother,” Dr. Portnoy said. He’d walked me to the end of the ward and had the mountain of an orderly open the folding security gate. “Her delusions are becoming more pronounced. You know if she continues this behavior we’ll have to move her to a secure ward. I can’t risk her infecting the other, trustworthy patients if her madness worsens.”
I flinched. My mother was undeniably mad, but a secure ward? That meant a windowless room and a bed with straps. The contents of the syringe in Portnoy’s pocket. No visitors.
“Now, I know you’re a ward of the city,” Portnoy continued. “But she’s still your mother, and you have a better chance of connecting with her than I. You must impress upon her the urgency of her situation, the need for improvement in her diagnosis.”
I put my hand on the big front door of the madhouse. I could feel the cold air seeping in around the cracks. “Dr. Portnoy.” I felt the stone again, dragging me back, back to my mother no matter how I struggled. “Nerissa doesn’t listen to anyone, least of all me. She’s been crazy my entire life.”
“The preferred term is ‘virally decimated,’ ” he scolded me with a smile. “Those poor souls who lose their mind to the necrovirus can’t help it, you know. No one would choose to have viral spores eat her mind away until only delusion is left.”
I did know. Too well. Before the necrovirus had appeared and begun its spread across the globe, seventy years before Nerissa was even born, I supposed the mad occasionally got better. But never in my lifetime. Never my mother.
Done talking, I pushed open the door, letting in the roar of Derleth Street at the foot of the granite steps and the smell of cooking from the diner across the sea of jitneys and foot traffic. Steam wafted from exhaust pipes in the pavement and the vents of wheeled vendors’ carts alike, making a low mist that hung over the asylum like a cloud of ill omen. Far away, just a whisper under my feet, I could feel the din of the Lovecraft Engine as the great gears in the heart of the city turned and turned. Trapped aether powered the machine that gave the city steam and life.
Portnoy waited for an answer like an unpleasant professor in a class I was already failing. I sighed in defeat. “However you call it, she’s mad and I can’t help you, Dr. Portnoy.”
I stepped out the door, and he caught me. His grip was hard, but not desperate, not like Nerissa’s. This grip was hard like the grasp of a foundry automaton lifting a load of new iron. “Miss Grayson, you have a birthday coming up.”
I swallowed the millstone in my throat. Panic. “Yes.”
“And how are you feeling? Any dreams? Any physical symptoms?”
His grip tensed as I did, and I couldn’t get away. “No.”
Portnoy frowned at me and I looked at my shoes. If he couldn’t