Chapter 11: The Morning Inspection
The silence after the lock clicked was different from the silence before. It was a lived-in quiet, pregnant with the memory of broken sound. Susanna’s skin felt too tight, buzzing with the aftershocks and the drying sweat. The smell of sex had faded, overpowered once more by bleach, but it lived under her skin, in the sticky dampness between her thighs.Lisa stood by the door, her forehead almost touching the steel, a statue of containment. The first grey hint of dawn bled through the small, barred window, painting the room in shades of ash and corpse.Then, a sound.The jangle of keys in the corridor.Lisa turned. In the weak light, her face was all stark angles and shadows. She moved with a predatory swiftness, crossing the few feet to the bed before Susanna could even process the movement.“Open,” Lisa commanded, her voice a low scrape.Susanna’s lips parted, a question dying on her tongue.
Lisa leaned over her, still restrained.She hovered, her mouth inches from Susanna’s. She worked her tongue behind her teeth, gathering a thick, viscous mouthful of saliva. Her eyes locked onto Susanna’s, holding her in a vice of absolute will.With a soft, vile sound, she let the spit fall from her lips into Susanna’s open mouth.
The warm, bitter salt of it hit Susanna’s tongue. She gagged, reflexively, but Lisa’s hand clamped over her mouth, fingers digging into her cheeks.“Swallow,” Lisa whispered, her breath hot against Susanna’s ear.“That’s my mark inside you. Deeper than any fucking they can imagine.”
Outside, a key slid into the lock.
Susanna’s throat convulsed.She swallowed. The act felt more intimate, more violating, than anything that had happened on the bed.It was a claim on her insides.
The door swung open.Two different orderlies stood there, silhouetted by the harsh corridor light.They looked bored.
Lisa was already two steps back, her hands clasped demurely in front of her, her face a blank slate.Susanna lay still, her mouth now clean, her body rigid.
“Observation period is over,” one orderly said, his voice monotone. He stepped forward and began unbuckling Susanna’s restraints.The leather fell away. The blood rushed back into her wrists and ankles in a painful, prickling flood.She sat up slowly, her muscles screaming.The other orderly gestured to Lisa. “Move.”
They filed out into the hallway, the clinical brightness a shock to the eyes. The world outside the white room seemed unbearably loud, full of echoing footsteps and distant, muffled announcements. They were marched, single file, back towards the main ward. Susanna’s legs were unsteady. Every step reminded her of the persistent, cooling wetness in her underwear, a secret slickness that glued the fabric to her skin. She felt exposed, convinced the evidence was a glowing stain, that the orderlies could smell it, that Dr.Wick would know with one glance.
They passed the nurses’ station.A nurse looked up from her charts, her eyes scanning them with routine assessment. Susanna held her breath.The gaze passed over her, noting nothing more remarkable than two patients returning from isolation.The mundane indifference was its own kind of humiliation.
At the entrance to the women’s dormitory, the orderleys stopped.“Medication in fifteen,” one said, before turning away.
The heavy door sighed shut behind them.Lisa didn’t look back. She walked to her own bunk and pulled the curtain closed with a sharp zip.
Susanna stood alone in the middle of the room. The sounds of morning were beginning: someone coughing, a faucet running, the soft, hopeless weeping that seemed a permanent part of Claymoore’s atmosphere. She shuffled to her bed, her body aching with a deep, skeletal fatigue. She sat on the edge of the thin mattress, the springs groaning under her weight.She could still taste it. The metallic tang of Lisa’s spit.It was inside her, mixed with her own fluids, a part of her now. She thought of Lisa’s words: I’m in your blood now. It wasn’t a metaphor.It felt like a biological fact.A virus. A symbiotic, crawling thing that had taken root in the hollow spaces of her bones.
She reached down, her fingers hovering over the waistband of her trousers.She should clean herself. She should find a washcloth, try to scrub the night from her skin.But her hands wouldn’t move.The wetness was the only real thing. The only proof. Everything else—the white room, the straps, the indifferent orderlies—that was the dream.This damp, aching truth between her legs was reality.
From behind Lisa’s curtain, there was no sound.No movement.It was as if she had ceased to exist.
Susanna slowly, carefully, lowered herself onto her side, curling her body into a tight ball. She pulled the rough blanket over her head, blocking out the creeping dawn. In the dark, salty cave of her own breath, she replayed the final, searing moments.Lisa’s guttural cry. The terrifying silence afterwards that was, as Lisa had said, theirs.
She knew, with a cold certainty, that she would never be free of it.The mark was inside her. And it was hungry.