Page 25 of Psycho Obsession
“The others… they think I’m punishing you. They don’t understand that this is the only way to keep you pure. Outside this room, you’re just a target. In here, you’re a secret.”
He stands up, looking down at me. I’m pinned to the foam, my arms splayed and strapped, my chest rising and falling in shallow, hitching breaths. I want to scream, to tell him that the silence is worse than the electricity, but the words are buried under a mile of static.
“I’ll be back in the morning to check the vitals,” he says, his hand on the heavy steel door. “Don’t try to fight the straps, Hallow. The leather only bites if you pull. Just be the ghost. Just wait for me.”
The door swings shut. The heavy iron bolt slides into place with a definitive thunk.
Then, the light goes out.
Total, suffocating black. The air is thick and still, smelling of old vinyl and my own fear. I lie there in the dark, the leather digging into my skin, listening to the sound of my own heart—a wet, muffled drum in a padded tomb.
I’m not Hallow Maddix anymore. I’m just a heartbeat in a box.
The blackness is so thick I can taste it. It’s a physical weight on my tongue, tasting of copper and the vinyl padding.
I’m supposed to be a ghost, but my body won’t stop remembering. My muscles, even strapped down and thrumming with the leftover current of the ECT, begin to twitch with a rhythm that has nothing to do with Aris.
It starts in my feet.
In the dark, the cold leather against my ankles isn’t a restraint; it’s the silk ribbon of a pointe shoe. I can feel the ghost-pain of a bruised toenail, the scent of rosin and sawdust, the heat of the stage lights that didn’t burn—they glowed.
I’m back in the studio. The floor is sprung maple, not foam and bone. I can hear the sharp, rhythmic clack of the wooden barre as a dozen girls move in unison. Plié. Relevé. The music isn’t a funeral march; it’s a heartbeat I actually want to follow. I’m eighteen, and the only thing that hurts is the stretch in my hamstrings and the fire in my lungs after a grand jeté.
I remember the way the air felt when I spun. I wasn’t a specimen then. I was gravity’s middle finger. I was a streak of movement that men looked at with wonder, not with a scalpel in their pockets.
The memory bleeds.
The white walls of the asylum dissolve into the dusty velvet curtains of the wings. I can see the silhouette of mypartner—not Aris, not a monster, just a man with steady hands who knew how to catch me without breaking my ribs. I remember the sweat on my neck, the way the applause felt like a physical wave, pushing me back into the light.
Clink.
The sound of the leather strap buckling against the metal frame snaps me back.
I’m not on stage. I’m splayed on a slab in a room meant for the dying.
I try to hold onto the image of the stage, but the electricity has frayed the edges of the film. The applause turns into the sound of the ECT machine’s hum. The scent of the rosin turns back into the smell of my own singed hair. The man catching me in the dark isn’t a dancer; it’s Aris, his face twisted with that sick, reverent joy as he watches my soul leave my body.
I try to move my arm, to find the curve of a third position, but the leather bites deep into my bicep. I’m a broken bird pinned to a board.
The tears start again, but I don’t feel them. I just feel the hollow space where the music used to be. I am Hallow Maddix, and I used to be beautiful. Now, I’m just a collection of triggered reflexes and scar tissue.
The silence in the room begins to throb. It’s a heavy, low-frequency vibration that I feel in my teeth before I hear it in my ears. It’s not a memory. It’s the building.
The facility is groaning. Far below the Soft Room, something is waking up. It isn’t a ghost, and it isn’t a doctor.
It’s the first real tremor of the end.
Chapter
Eight
HALLOW
Two hundred and fourteen days.
I think. Time doesn’t really have a pulse in the Soft Room; it’s just a long, grey smear of vinyl and silence. Aris thinks he’s finally done it. He thinks he’s reached into the clockwork of my brain and snapped the mainspring. I don’t scream anymore. I don’t speak. I don’t even beg for the light. I just lie here in the dark and let the madness crawl over my skin like a thousand busy spiders.
He thinks he broke me. Maybe he did. But that’s the thing about being broken, isn’t it? You end up with so many more sharp edges.
