I looked back at Brooke. “That’s right,” I said. “The Withered are evil, and you’re not one of them. ‘Nobody’ was a monster and she possessed you, but she’s gone now. She’s dead, and you have her memories, but you’re not her. You’re Brooke.” I looked at her, wondering again—for the thousandth time—how to help her. Her mind seemed to come and go like a breeze, ethereal and impossible to predict.
“Possessed” wasn’t really the right word for what had happened, but it was close; possession implies a spirit or a ghost, but Brooke was taken over by a physical entity—a monster made of ash and grease, a black sludge that, in her more lucid moments, Brooke called “soulstuff.” The demon known as Nobody was made of it and crawled inside her bloodstream and moved her like a puppet. I suppose the best word would be to say that Brooke was “invaded,” but honestly, when you’re talking about a bodily invasion and using words like “best,” things are pretty screwed up and you might as well just not talk about them at all. But that’s life in the demon-hunting business, I guess.
Yay.
Brooke looked over my shoulder, her eyes locked on some distant memory rather than the hospital wall barely ten feet away. Kelly Ishida, the cop on our little team of hunters, had covered the wall with posters of flowers and landscapes, but that seemed almost insulting. Brooke’s mind was buried under thousands of years of nightmare memory, from when her mind had merged with that of a demon who’d spent millennia invading body after body, girl after girl, only to inevitably grow disillusioned and kill itself—and the host bodies—over and over. Were some pictures of flowers supposed to make that go away?
“My name is Lucinda,” said Brooke, stating it almost slyly, like she was telling me a secret. “I used to sell flowers in the market, but now I’m stuck in here.” She paused a moment and then her eyes fixed on me. “I don’t like it in here.” A small tear welled up in the corner of her eye, growing bigger and bigger until it spilled over her eyelid and trickled down the side of her face. I watched it roll down her skin, leaving a thin, wet trail. I focused on the tear because it helped me to ignore all the horrible things that surrounded it. Her voice seemed far away and quiet. “Can you get me out of here?”
Here, as I said, was the lockdown wing of the Whiteflower Assisted Living Center. We traveled a lot, following Brooke’s patchy memories of various Withered; we’d spent about four months in St. Louis, hunting a demon named Ithho who stole people’s fingers, and then nearly seven months in Callister, hunting a demon who could only hear people in pain. “Demon” wasn’t really the right word any more than “possessed” was, now that we knew more about what they were—which still wasn’t much, frankly, but at least we knew they weren’t the typical boogeymen from Catholicism or Judaism or any other big religion. We’d come to Fort Bruce because of an unprecedented two Withered in the same city, and we’d been here about three months, gathering information. And because Fort Bruce didn’t have a real mental institution, Brooke was in Whiteflower with a bunch of dementia patients. She was the youngest patient by several decades, but aside from that it was a pretty good fit: her room and the floor were locked, she was under constant surveillance, and the staff was experienced with both memory problems and suicide risks. One of the few things Brooke remembered consistently was killing herself and surviving it tens of thousands of times. Her perception of things was a little screwed up.
“You need to stay here for now,” I said. I said it almost every day, no matter how much I hated it. A year ago I wouldn’t have said anything—I probably would have just left, if we’re being perfectly honest. Being a heartless wallflower had been so much easier than feeling guilty all the time. “You’re sick, and they can help you here.”
“I’m not sick, I’m Lucinda.”
Lucinda was one of the people Nobody had killed over the centuries, and her memories were mingled in with all the others jumbled up in Brooke’s head. Dr. Trujillo, our team’s psychologist, had counted more than thirty different personalities so far, but he said few of them surfaced more than once. Lucinda had popped up three or four times so far, and I wondered what it was about Brooke’s situation here that called that specific girl to mind. Had she been in an institution or a hospital? Few of Nobody’s victims were that modern, if we understood her correctly; most were hundreds, if not thousands, of years old. How had Nobody found Lucinda, and where? What had attracted her to the girl’s life, and what had eventually caused her to end it?
How did Brooke remember dying?
“Your name is Brooke Watson,” I said again. “My name is John Wayne Cleaver.” I hesitated, knowing what I wanted to say and not daring to speak it out loud. I sat with my mouth open, struggling with the words, and finally just said them, softly in case Dr. Trujillo was listening. “I’m going to get you out of here—I don’t know when, but I promise. Out of this hospital, out of the team, out of everything. We’re going to run away.”
“Are we going to get married?”