Eyes closed, the girl fisted her small hands, bit her lip.
‘Melanie?’
‘I hate them.’
‘Do they make you sit in the chair?’
‘I hate them!’
‘Do they make you sit in the chair?’
Tears squeezed out of the girl’s eyes, although she tried to hold them back. ‘Y-yes Make me … sit … hurts … hurts so bad.’
‘And they hook you up to the biofeedback machine beside it?’
‘Yes’
‘Why?’
‘To teach me,’ the girl said in a whisper.
‘To teach you what?’
She twitched and cried out. ‘It hurts! It stings!’
‘You aren’t in the chair now, Melanie. You’re only standing beside it. You aren’t being shocked now. It doesn’t sting. You’re all right now. Do you hear me?’
The agony faded from the child’s face.
Laura felt sick, but she had to proceed with the session regardless of how painful it was for Melanie, for on the other side of this pain, beyond these nightmare memories, there were answers, explanations, truth.
‘When they make you sit in the chair, when they … hurt you, what are they trying to teach you, Melanie? What are you supposed to learn?’
‘Control.’
‘Control of what?’
‘My thoughts,’ the girl said.
‘What do they want you to think?’
‘Emptiness.’
‘What do you mean?’
‘Nothingness’
‘They want you to keep your mind blank. Is that it?’
‘And they don’t want me to feel.’
‘Feel what?’
‘Anything.’
Laura looked at Dan. He was frowning and seemed as perplexed as she was.
To Melanie, she said, ‘What else do you see in the gray room.’
‘The tank.’
‘Do they make you go into the tank?’
‘Naked.’
Tremendous emotion was conveyed in the single word ‘naked,’ more than merely shame and fear, an intense sense of utter helplessness and vulnerability that made Laura’s heart ache. She wanted to end the session right then and there, go around the table and hug her daughter, hold the girl tight and close. But if they were to have any hope of saving Melanie, they had to know what she had endured and why; and for the time being, this was the best way they had of discovering what they needed to know.
‘Honey, I want you to climb that set of gray steps and go into the tank.’
The girl whimpered and shook her head violently, but she didn’t open her eyes or break loose of the trance in which her mother had put her.
‘Climb the steps, Melanie.’
‘No.’
‘You must do as I say.’
‘No.’
‘Climb the steps.’
‘Please …’
The child was frighteningly pale. Tiny beads of sweat had appeared along her hairline. The dark rings around her eyes seemed to grow darker and larger as Laura watched, and it was agonizingly difficult to force the girl to relive her torture.
Difficult but necessary.
‘Climb the steps, Melanie.’
An anguished expression distorted the girl’s face.
Laura heard Dan Haldane shift uneasily on the edge of the bed where he sat, but she didn’t look at him. She couldn’t take her eyes off her daughter.
‘Open the hatch to the tank, Melanie.’
‘I’m … afraid.’
‘Don’t be afraid. You won’t be alone this time. I’ll be with you. I won’t let anything bad happen.’
‘I’m afraid,’ Melanie repeated.
Those two words seemed, to Laura, to be an accusation: You couldn’t protect me before, Mother, so why should I believe that you can protect me now?
‘Open the hatch, Melanie.’
‘It’s in there,’ the girl said shakily.
‘What’s in there?’
‘The way out.’
‘The way out of what?’
‘The way out of everything.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘The … way out … of me.’
‘What does that mean?’
‘The way out of me,’ the girl repeated, deeply distressed. Laura decided that she didn’t yet know enough to make sense of this twist that the interrogation had taken. If she pursued it, the child’s answers would only seem increasingly surreal.
First of all, she had to get Melanie into the tank and find out what happened in there. ‘The hatch is in front of you, honey.’
The girl said nothing.
‘Do you see it?’
Reluctantly: ‘Yes.’
‘Open the hatch, Melanie. Stop hesitating. Open it now.’
With a wordless protest that somehow managed to express dread and misery and loathing in a few wretched and meaningless syllables, the child raised her hands and gripped a door that was, in her trance, very real to her, though it could not be seen by Laura or Dan. She pulled on it, and when she had it open, she hugged herself and trembled as though she were in a cold draft. ‘I … it … I’ve opened it.’