Panic Room

Part seven; the first

Monday 1998; St Marks mental institution; Luna; 16:37

Luna opened her eyes and tried to gather her bearings. She seemed to be in a small room padded with- Was that- foam? She tried to get up to check, but couldn't move. She wiggled her arms but they wouldn't budge. She looked down and saw the heavy leather jacket that bound her. Her arms were stretched tightly against her sides and her head ached. She looked up and saw a heavy metal door with a small space open at the top. It was laced with bars however, deeming escapes impossible. She heard hushed voices on the other side of the hallway, and what appeared to be a woman sobbing hysterically. She was screaming for someone, a child, and she heard someone gently consoling her. Luna tried to speak, but found herself to be too weak to do so. Instead, she made a dry rasping sound and choked the one word she could manage. Help. The woman on the other side began to scream more frantically than ever and Luna tried once again to speak, but could not manage even a single word. She heard the screams becoming fainter as the woman was taken away and heard keys jangling. Luna was suddenly indescribably tired and so, for the first time in days, lowered her head and slept.

She was awoken in the morning by more sounds of keys jangling and saw a man outside of her room. He slid the key into the lock and opened the heavy door to slide in a food tray. Luna looked down at it and then up at the man and raised an eyebrow. She felt stronger now and so asked, "How, how do I eat?" The man raised the tray and clicked it into the wall next to Luna's head. He then unfastened her arms and looked down at her tray. She looked too and noticed a small green pill. "Take the pill." The man said in a high voice.

"What is it?" Luna wondered and the man smiled.

"Tranquilizer. Keeps you calm." The man laughed cruelly, then turned and left, slamming the heavy door and locking it. Luna choked down the meal of oats and orange juice, but stopped at the pill. Finally, she gathered her courage and swallowed it. She waited a minute in which nothing happened, but then, out of the blue, the entire world swayed. It dipped and screamed and launched back up again in a sick symphony. She sat it out for what felt like an eternity and finally, it was over. Luna looked groggily up, feeling rather queasy, and wondered what the pill really did. It was a rather nice feeling, she decided. It made her calm. For a few moments, she was taken away from the agony of the past few days and brought to an Eden of her own making. Her happy place. Not her sane place. Heavens no. She was nowhere near sane! But happy. For the first time, she wondered how she came to be here. She vaguely remembered being incredibly scared for what felt like forever. She remembered a lot of screaming and a lot of being tied up. She remembered Claire, and Michael and...and Morfran. Just saying the name sent shivers down her spine. She couldn't bear the thought of that torture chamber. Of that hall of nightmares. Of the Panic Room. So much had happened in such a short space of time that it was all kind of jumbling together. She had been almost killed, brought back, captured, released and tortured, all in the space of a few days? It was awful to even think about. And her parents. Had that been her mother? Screaming for her? Or had they, like everyone else, given up? Luna struggled once again against her bonds but, once again, to no avail and she only tired herself out.

Luna was given only two meals every day. Breakfast, and dinner. With each of these, her arms were unfastened and she was given a pill. She began to save them. They always came in a small, polystyrene cup, so, one day, she just kept the cup. The guard didn't notice and so, every day, she would slip the cup from her pocket and spit the pill into it. After a week, she had a whole cascade of them, but she didn't take them yet. She was saving them. If one pill made her calm, made her happy, imagine what twenty pills could do! Or even thirty! Luna, in her crazed state, didn't think about what you or I (Sane as we are) would. Which is, as you could well imagine, what if she became too relaxed. What if she never woke from the Eden of her mind. What if her body simply gave up?