The Anarchist

6. The Weeping Girl

[Recovered from cell 012b. Date Unknown.]

This is Annie.

The situation has progressed somewhat, in both a positive and negative sense. Most prominently on the negative side, I have found that the frequency of my blackouts has increased in significant measure. This has made it even more difficult for me to retain control of my faculties.

Even more disturbingly, I have found that my blackouts are increasingly accompanied by hallucinations.

I suppose it would be more accurate for me to say that these hallucinations are in fact dreams, but making such a distinction has been difficult, to say the least. It always occurs at a time when I have lost all temporal and spatial awareness and my mind is vulnerable. The visions all take the same form, which appears to play out thusly:

I see a house, lonely and shabby, enshrouded within a thick, grey fog. I am able to move in these visions, so I attempt to inspect the place more closely, but the building remains at the same distance no matter how many steps I take. There is nowhere else to go, however. There is only the house, so I must try to make it there. All I can do is trudge onwards, hoping that perhaps something will change.

Now, I am aware that I should realise after a while that my actions are yielding no results, but for some reason, in the heat of those moments, I never do. Repetitively attempting the same action over and over again is a fool's notion, one that I would never indulge were I lucent.

Such, however, is the nature of my predicament. It appears that my sense of control is increasingly usurped by elements of which I have little-to-no comprehension. I must try to identify the cause, the catalyst, if you will, which began this slide, for it is the way of all things to have an origin. Perhaps if I can locate it, I will be able to undo the damage it has caused.

I have identified two changes in routine which could have initiated my disturbances. One of these has been the substitution of my regular psychologist. While I cannot be certain of the reason for this change, it would give me tremendous satisfaction to think that the previous dolt reached the end of his tether, and had to be reassigned. It's a pity, because he was quite good fun. He had this sort of puppy-dog quality to him, and I found that appealing because puppies can't put up too much of a fight, so I played games with him. There was one occasion where I resolved to answer all of his questions with more questions, changing the topic and derailing his attempts at gaining anything from the session. By the end of it all, he slammed his fists on the table in frustration and - I will never forget this - screamed at me, "You want to play around, Annie? You like games? Why don't we play the one called 'How long before the qualified doctor has you committed to solitary due to non-cooperation?' How about that?"

I told him, of course, that I would welcome that, because I would. Silence and solitude have never proven disturbing to me. He deflated like a set of worn-out bagpipes. That was great.

Perhaps it is that there were far too many of those episodes. Perhaps I was too much for him. In a way, that is regrettable to me, because the new psych is an utter trollop. He is more boring than an instruction manual. In fact, a blank sheet of paper would have more intrigue than a conversation with this odious man. At least the paper can be worked into something better.

Every single session, he asks the same questions.

"What did you do today?"

"What will you do tomorrow?"

"How do you feel about your surroundings?"

"What do you see in this mirror?"

My answers are always the same, though they vary depending on my levels of frustration:

"The same thing I do every day: Rot."

"Don't quote me on this one, but I think the chances are high that it will be the same as it was today."

"The inside of a paper bag would have more appeal."

"Myself."

As if the monotony of the questioning were not suffrage enough, his response always follows the same pattern, as well. Dissatisfied with the answer, he will shut his stupid little file and leave his seat wordlessly. He will then take three paces towards the door, sign a piece of paper, and hand it to the guard. He leaves, uneventfully.

My patience for this is dwindling rapidly. I am not sure what it would be just yet, but I am going to need to do... Something. Anything to break up the mind-numbing bore of these sessions. I will begin working on ideas for this timeously.

The other incident which may have set me off-balance recently is the sudden progress of the stranger in my cell-block.

The person who was once an undefined mass has revealed herself to me at last. It began around three nights ago, when I was awoken to the peculiar sight of a girl, hunched over, her back to me, blubbing into her hands as loudly as humanly possible. Now, what it is that could possibly have caused this outburst is anyone's guess, but that was somewhat immaterial to me when I could not even think loudly enough to shut out her wailing racket. I tried ordering her to shut her howling screamer and go to bed, but that didn't seem to do anything to break her from her preoccupation. Given that I was unlikely to have any sleep by that point, I resolved to examine her appearance.

Her face was obscured two-fold, firstly by her hands and secondly by matted, stringy hair, the colour of which must have been either a light shade of brown or a dark blonde. The darkness made it hard to distinguish, but I noted that the little bit of moonlight that came into the cell block lit the hair a little more than black would have been. She seemed to be in some kind of white night dress, but it seemed child-like. It looked to be made of thick cotton with an even thicker material sewn into the hem. I can only guess at the colour, but my superior instincts told me that it must have been pink. That made sense to me for some reason. I was also able to make out a kind of floral image on the back. A sunflower, I think.

All of these are the hallmarks of a child, and yet the person before me that night was an adult. No mistaking it. This bodes ill for me, because it is highly unlikely that anything meaningful will come out of this person at all. If she wears a child's clothes, she must have a child's brain. That is the only conclusion to which I can arrive.

I have been unable to learn anything more because she seems to be nocturnal. She covers herself in a pile of blankets by day and squeals blue murder at night. I have indeed attempted to communicate with her numerous times, only to be completely ignored. That is unacceptable. I will not be ignored.

Until such a time as I can extract her from her weeping, I will not hold my persistence back. After all, if I do not, then I shall be doomed to nothing but sleepless nights for a long time yet, and God knows what could happen if that continued.