City On Fire

7

When Ella didn’t show up to breakfast or lunch Benny got worried. Sure she never ate and he covered for her but she was always there. When she didn’t show up at dinner he couldn’t bare it any longer. He swallowed his food all in one go and with a sandwich and two apples walked to her bedroom. The lights were on but her door was closed and there wasn’t a sound from inside.

“Ella?”

He knocked softly but didn’t get an answer. So he knocked again and when she still didn’t respond he opened the door and stepped inside. To his horror he found her pressed up against the far wall in the corner shivering. He dropped the sandwich and the apples and rushed to her side. She seemed almost catatonic and didn’t even notice him.

“Ella!”

He reached out only to hesitated not knowing how she would react but ultimately did when she didn’t respond. Her skin was cold and pale and her breathing was erratic. “Ella?”

She lowered her head and looked up at him but still didn’t speak.

“W...w...what the h...h...hell happened?”

She clasped her hands over her ears.

“So many.”

It was hardly a whisper.

“M...many what?”

She looked up at the far wall but her eyes didn’t focus on anything but instead darted back and forth across the room.

“The voices. It was so loud and every time I opened my eyes I could see all these people. I have never seen them before but it was like I knew them. Like they wanted to tell me something.”

She wasn’t making sense and Benny struggled to follow. Eventually he stopped trying and rather asked a far more obvious question.

“Ella, w...w...what did t...t...t...they do to y...y...y..you?”

The question seemed to bring her to her senses and she shifted to sit on the edge of the bed next to him.

“I was in the water tank. It had these metal doors that closed and then I couldn’t hear or see anything. It was so quiet and dark it made everything louder and brighter.” She still wasn’t making a whole lot of sense but he could kind of make out what she meant. Something to the effect of hydro therapy with a touch of isolation. All of which amounted to treatment of psychosis. Benny was somewhere between shocked and horrified. The reason they were here in the first place was because it was the one place that didn’t torture their patients.

“T...t...they can’t j...j...just do that! T...t...they...”

“They had the right documents.”

Ella cut in before he could finfish. She was cam now and bended down to retrieve one of the apples but now Benny in a state.

“I d...d...don’t b...b...believe that!”

He leaped to his feet and paced about the room.

“I d...d...don’t b...b..believe that!”

Ella had a hard time believing it but she had more pressing matters to deal with. “I’m not going back into that thing Benny. Not ever.”

She stared at the fruit in her hands. Benny knew it and so did she. This wasn’t going to be a onetime thing, there would be more.

“I need out of here.”

He agreed but was very suspicious of one little thing and that was how the hell they got the paperwork. He sat back down on the bed next to her. “T...t...there is s...s...something I want to c...c...check.”

Benny had left the door open and when Duncan came to call them to dinner Elle retreated back to her corner and avoided his eyes.

“Dinner.”

He smiled but the traits of guilt still clung to his eyes. Benny frowned at him and sat forward in an attempt to shield her from him. When the only response he got was Benny’s cold shoulder he turned and left.

Ella sat staring at the apple she had placed on her nightstand. Duncan’s intrusion set her back and again she was cowering in the corner.

“A lifetime’s worth of nightmares and blood on my hand and this is what breaks me.” She spent her life case hardened, you don’t see that much pandemonium and not turn out cold. Having survived all this time as a normal functioning part of society she never imagined she could be this terrified and this pathetic. “Y...you’re not b...b...broken y...y...yet.”

Benny put his hand on her knee and smiled.

“There i...i...is something v...very wrong h...h...h...here.”

He had a theory. One that revolted Ella more than it did anything ells. The theory was that the good doctor never had any true intention of healing her. She was the one case he couldn’t solve, the one file he couldn’t get of his desk and that posed a threat to his reputation and his institution. So he found a way to deal with her instead of a way to help her. If she was a fruit salad he could easily call clinical miracle and send her home with his reputation intact.

At first Ella couldn’t believe that the man who promised her and help, a man she spent so many hours talking to and bleeding her heart out to would try and turn her brain into potting soil. But the more Benny went into depths with his theory the more she believed him and the more she was shocked in herself that she could have been so easily deceived.