Ripple Effect

Chapter Seventy-One: ...that wasn't them.

Elizabeth

Wednesday, 12th December, 2018

3:31 AM

The shadows in Elizabeth's room hung with the looming rigidity of starched sheets strung from a washing line on an airless day. Elizabeth rolled over again, this time onto her back. No more than a minute could have passed, yet it felt like each second ached through the minutiae of a lifetime. Without the comfort of the cold glare of street lamps outside or the phosphorescent glow of her alarm clock at home, the only light came from the mute glimmer that seeped through the privacy slats that striped the window set two-thirds of the way up the door. The thin yellow rays fell in hazy bars cut with shadows that crept across the carpet, distorted their way onto the end of her bed and stopped just below the knee. She hugged her arms atop the quilt and stared up at the ceiling. Swirls of plaster eddied into oblivion, disrupted only by the occasional jagged peak; stalactites of paint like the ones she used to snap off when she'd been assigned a top bunk in her junior year at Houghton Hall. The faint patter of rain tickled the window, and from the distance there came a subtle squeak followed by a clacking sound, like a shutter wafting in the breeze. The clock echoed out too as it glared down at her from the strip of wall above the door. Each clonk...clonk....clonk... unrolled into a short forever and reverberated off the inside of her skull.

'Thanks for lunch, by the way.' Will's voice circled through her mind, at once clear, and then dying away like the swirls of plaster.

Its fade gave rise to her own. 'Not exactly nice and normal.'

'No... But that's not us.' Will's voice wisped away again.

This time Henry's took over. 'There's a lot riding on your relationship with Will.'

'We're finally in a good place, and if I do this, if I run, everything will change—'

Elizabeth peeled back the quilt and tossed it towards the wall that pushed up against the single bed. She curled her body up to sitting and swung her legs over the edge of the mattress. Her head swam from the movement—it felt like her brain had been dunked in a vat of warmed grape jello and it was drifting in inertia—whilst her ribs groaned and tightened like flexing fingers. She hunched at the edge of the bed, and waited for everything to settle.

When she felt about eighty-eight per cent sure that standing up wouldn't see her vision succumb to starbursts of black hazed with orange coronae nor her legs give way beneath her like dune sand, she eased up from the mattress and stumbled towards the door, pausing only to grab the cardigan that she'd dumped in a bundle on the seat of the spindle-back chair in the corner.

The door opened and closed with no more than a scuff and a soft click as the bottom edge dragged across the carpet and she guided it back into the frame, but in the light-starved hush each sound felt a hundred times louder, as though the gasp of a single breath would ripple out and be heard for kilometres around. Even the tacking of her footsteps against the tract of linoleum expanded to fill the corridor as she padded through the shadows and towards the grungy yellow glow of the stairwell at the end.

Downstairs, her fingers groped across the wall of the patients' lounge until they found the cold kiss of the light switch. Whilst the fluorescent strips overhead blinked into life, she shuffled over to the kitchenette crammed into one corner. It was more of a countertop really, no more than three units long, with a crumb-laden toaster, a white plastic kettle (possibly a travel kettle) and a manual 700 watt microwave which took about half an hour to render a bowl of soup even lukewarm. She flipped on the faucet—the gush of water drowned out the patter of the rain against the window and the churning silence of her own thoughts—and then filled the kettle to the one cup mark.