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“Nick,” she whispered, tugging on his sleeve so they lagged behind the group, which was moving to the next room. “Nick, let’s leave. Patrick can write the report. Come, you need fresh air.”
Nick was shaking, staring about him in confusion. She held his hand so tightly she knew she would leave nail marks.
“You were right. This was a mistake. I can see now that it wasn’t a stubborn whim—that you honestly can’t do this. It’s deeper than that.”
“Too late,” he said. “Too late, Alice. It’s beginning. I can feel it.”
“Nick?”
He staggered like a drunkard, lurching ahead, away from her and toward the group. She raced after him, but his legs were so long he quickly caught up with them.
Nick heard the shuffling of feet, he heard the thoughts of the asylum patients in the room, he heard their apathy and their outrage, dulled into resignation.
He heard everything with such sharp clarity.
Alice calling his name.
Coleman’s swift intake of breath, like a man’s dying gasp.
An elderly man with white hair that stuck straight up held out his hand.
“Barrington?” Nick asked.
The man spit in his face and Nick didn’t even care.
“Stay back,” one of the attendants said. “Old Mason is dangerous.”
Another man, younger, chained to the wall in a loincloth and nothing more, scraggly hair and mottled skin, purple with bruises.
This is me,Nick thought. This could be me. He laughed then, a wild, desperate sound that spiraled to the rafters.
An answering clamor arose from the patients.
Laughter and shouting, a sound like the battle cry of an army.
A clanging of spoons on tin cups and the rattle of labored breathing.
Coleman with his arms crossed watching with ill-disguised glee.
Where was Lear? Where was Patrick?
Alice at his side.
Alice with the turquoise eyes and the tender smile.
She wanted something from him. “Nick, please, talk to me. What’s happening?”
He averted his gaze. No tenderness for him. No hope.
“Maybe instead of writing reports, Lord Hatherly should be committed,” Coleman said with a jeering smile.
Nick had thought the onset would be more gradual, as his father’s was... losing memory here, feeding himself on delusions, imagining the voices getting louder.
Now there was only this roaring in his ears and the darkness closing around him.
He’d thought he would have years to crumble slowly, but this was no slow fade, this was a landslide and it swept everything away.
Madness dragging him down. Smothering him.
