The Seeker - Isobelle Carmody [40]
“Fear of the doctor?” I asked.
“Fear of something. I cannot say what,” Dameon said, frowning.
Two nights later, Cameo was moved into my room, an extra bed having been put in to accommodate her. The reasons given were that a new group of Misfits would soon be arriving and extensive repairs were to be carried out in some areas of Obernewtyn before wintertime. Whether this was true or not, I was glad of the opportunity to spend more time with her.
On her first night, I was awakened by her scream. Sitting upright, I stared across at Cameo writhing in her bed. Then I looked in astonishment at the others, who were all still soundly asleep. Finally I realized that I had heard a mental scream, which I alone had been capable of receiving. I probed the others lightly to make sure they were truly asleep before getting up and padding across the cold floor.
Cameo was lying with her back to me now, whimpering softly. The moon fell across her pillow. It gleamed whitely in the light, but I could not see her face. She moved sharply and muttered something in an odd, deep voice. It didn’t sound like her at all, and the queer thought came to me that it wasn’t Cameo lying there, but some other person with soft blond hair.
She moaned and rolled over, and I could see of course it was Cameo. I sagged against the side of her bed, grinning like an idiot at my stupid fright. Then her eyes opened and my grin froze, for the eyes looking out of Cameo’s face were the wrong color! They were a hot, sickly ocher hue and full of amusement.
“You’ll never find it,” she rasped in that same deep, strange voice.
I was petrified, but then I realized she was not actually speaking to me. She was in a trance, and it struck me that I might be able to question her in this state.
“Tell me about the doctor?” I asked softly after checking the others still slept. “What does he do to you?”
“Find it if you can. I’ll not show you,” said Cameo in the unfamiliar voice. She gave a sneering old woman’s cackle of laughter.
I frowned. Her answer made no sense. Looking into her eyes, I wondered with a chill if a demon had taken possession of her. Louis insisted there were no such things, but seeing Cameo transformed like this, I wasn’t so sure. All at once, she closed her eyes and dropped into a sound sleep. Returning to my own bed, I had to pinch myself to make sure I hadn’t dreamed the whole thing.
“Poor Cameo,” Dameon said the next day. “But I do not know what we can do to help her.”
“Do you think a sleep drug would help, if we can manage to get some?” I suggested.
Dameon said he did not think sleep drugs were the answer. “She would still dream,” he said. “We have to find out why she is having so many nightmares and take away whatever is causing them.”
That brought us back to the doctor’s treatments, but how could we stop them when we did not even know what they were? It occurred to me that night, when Ariel had again led Cameo away, that I could enter his mind. He might not know much, but he would surely know something.
But the next morning, Ariel did not take us to the farms as he usually did. When I asked where he was, one of the girls whispered that three people had tried to escape the previous night, and he was involved in the search. Later I heard the Norselander twins had been captured and were now locked up in cells beneath Obernewtyn. I was not surprised that they had attempted to escape. Had I not heard them plotting to do so? But I wondered who the other person was who had succeeded in getting away, and I hoped he or she would manage it unscathed, for it came to me that the only way to look after Cameo might be for us to escape with her.
Dameon and Matthew were as interested as I was in the identity of the escaped Misfit, and we spent midmeal and nightmeal that day speculating on who it might be.
Afterward, when I returned to my room, I found Cameo alone, sitting on her bed. Going to sit beside her, I asked her gently where she had been