#Chapter 97: Mountainview Psychiatric Facility
Nina
I don’t know how long I was asleep. All I remembered was an immense amount of pain, Edward’s face looming over me, and then… darkness.
When I woke up, I was back in that same room that I was in before. My wrists and ankles were bound to the table, and the lights were blindingly bright. My brain felt as though it was in a heavy fog, like I had hit my head against a wall countless times. I wanted to sleep again, but the lights were too bright — as though he was trying to keep me awake
Even though the lights were so bright it hurt through my closed eyelids, I still occasionally fell unconscious from time to time. I would fall into a half- asleep state, during which I would feel as though my body was floating through space, and then I would come back to consciousness again with a pounding headache from a combination of the electroshock therapy, the drugs that Edward gave me, and the bright fluorescent lights.
I started to cry, but as time went on, no more tears eventually came. I couldn’t even lift my hand to wipe them out of my eyes; I could only lay there and feel them slowly dry on my cheeks and in my ears, where they had pooled up from my laying down position. Was Edward going to keep me like this forever, all over a simple file taken from his basement?
Just as I was beginning to think that I was going to die in here, alone and afraid, I heard the mechanical door slide open. I weakly lifted my head to see Edward standing in the doorway
“Good morning, Nina,” he said. His voice was as sweet as honey, as though I was just another patient sitting in his office of my own volition and not a prisoner being kept in some strange medical facility with no windows. “Did you sleep well?”
“Sleep?” I croaked. My throat felt dry and hoarse from the time I had spent screaming when he shocked my brain. ” How can I sleep like this?”
Edward clicked his tongue
disappointedly as he approached my bed. He stood at the end of the bed, so that I had to continue to hold my head up to see him.
“You’ll find it’s not so difficult to sleep here soon,” he said. “You’re safe here. You can trust me.”
“Where am I, then?” I replied. “Where is Enzo?”
Edward merely shook his head. “Here we go again with the imaginary friends.. Enzo this, Enzo that… You’ve been talking about this person that doesn’t exist for months.”
I furrowed my brow and laid my head back down on the bed, staring up at the ceiling. Enzo was real… He had to be. ” You’re just trying to mess with my head,” I growled.
“Nina, we’ve been over this,” Edward replied. “You’ve been here for months. Why would I be messing with your head, hm?”
“What about Justin, then?” I asked. ” He disappeared for weeks, and when he came back, he was like a completely different person. He said you ‘fixed’ him.”
Edward scoffed. “Justin? As in your old bunkmate?”
“Bunkmate?”
“Unlike you, he was receptive to the treatment, so he went home to his family. You must have been having another one of your hallucinations when you thought you saw him outside of here… He’s perfectly fine, and is likely having breakfast with his family as we speak. That could be you, if you would only stop resisting my help.”
Edward came around the side of my bed then and pulled up a rolling stool. He sat on it and took my hand in his. I tried to pull away, but I couldn’t with the wrist restraints. With a sigh, he took my chin in his hand and turned my head so that I was looking at him.
“Look me in the eyes,” he said softly ” You are suffering from schizophrenic hallucinations and delusions. The university, the werewolves, the talking skeletons… These are all fantasies of yours. Things you’ve made up in your mind to protect yourself from the horrors of your past trauma. None of it is real, and you are safe here I’m only here to protect you.
The longer I looked into Edward’s eyes, the more I started to believe him. Everything he described felt so fuzzy and far away, like a bad dream. Maybe he was right, maybe these were all just fantasies of mine
“H-How long have I been here?” I asked. My voice shook as a lump grew in my throat.
Edward squeezed my hand
comfortingly and reached up to brush a hair out of my eyes. “Four years,” he said.
“So does that mean…”
“Yes,” he interjected with a solemn nod. “Everything everyone that you think you’ve come to know in this fantasyland you’ve created in your head, ‘Mountainview University’, isn’t real. You’re really in Mountainview Psychiatric Facility It’s not a university.
As Edward spoke, more tears came to my eyes and a sob caught in my throat
“Shh…” he whispered, his voice strangely comforting. I began to realize that his voice was so comforting because he had comforted me just like
this so many times — I could remember it, now that I thought about it. Edward was my doctor.
“Repeat after me,” he continued. “My name is Nina Harper ”
“M-My n-name is Nina H-Harper…”
“I am being cared for at Mountainview Psychiatric Facility.”
“I am being cared for at Mountainview Psychiatric Facility…”
“I suffer from schizophrenic
hallucinations and delusions, and have spent the past four years in a fantasy created in my own mind.” “I suffer from schizophrenic hallucinations and delusions, and have spent the past four years in a fantasy created in my own mind…”
“Werewolves are not real.”
“Werewolves are not…” Just then, as I repeated Edward’s words, I realized that it wasn’t right. No… Werewolves were real. I knew it. I had seen them with my own eyes, experienced their powers. I could still feel Enzo’s touch, the way he held me as we slept not even two weeks ago, when I closed my eyes. I could still see the way that Luke looked up at the moon when the witch performed the ritual that gave him his human skin. It was all real, and I knew it.
“Nina…?”
“No!” I snarled. I began to thrash at the restraints, desperate to get free. ” You’re a liar You’re a liar!!”
Edward abruptly stood up from his chair, pulling his hands away from me as I screamed and struggled against the restraints binding me to the bed. ” You’re a monster!” I screamed. “You’re trying to hypnotize me!”
With a sigh, Edward simply reached down and tightened the straps around my ankles and wrists. “Nina, we’ve been over this,” he said, circling around the bed to tighten the other side. “And to think that you were improving…”
“You’re a dirty liar!!” I continued. I couldn’t move now without immense pain in my ankles and wrists from the straps, but at least I still had my voice. Spit flew out of my mouth as I screamed wildly, watching Edward’s back as he briskly walked toward the door
He stopped just as he was about to leave and looked over his shoulder “I’ll return when you’re ready to cooperate with your treatment.”
With that, he left me alone.
And I screamed until my throat couldn’t take it anymore. My screams turned to pained moans, and then… Silence.
