The Mansion Incident

Chapter Twenty-Eight

Lisa did not want her best friend to know that she followed her into the rooms underground. Her best friend might be upset, or might try to run away, and Lisa didn’t want that. So she stayed far away, always waiting for awhile before going through the same door the woman went through. Lisa listened carefully to make sure her best friend left each long room before Lisa entered it. She always knew where her friend went because she could hear her moving. Lisa had very good ears.

So far, nothing bad happened to the woman. Lisa still could not decide what to think of her as. Her best friend or her mother? Lisa remembered that her mother was her friend, so she thought of the woman as a friend even though she might also be her mother. Lisa went down the same long white rooms and tried not to think about the bad things that happened there.

She remembered lots of bad things. She remembered, almost clearly now, when the caretakers took her mother and father away. It seemed that the more she thought about the memories, the clearer they became. She remembered her mother and father. She remembered when she first came to the rooms underground. She could remember all the things that they did to her.

Her family came to the big house once, very long ago. Lisa was small then, she remembered, not big like she was now. Her father did something. She remembered that her father was angry, and then the caretakers were angry as well. Lisa recalled a vision of her father yelling at the caretakers, but she did not know why he was yelling. And then the caretakers made Lisa, her mother, and her father all come to the rooms underground.

Lisa remembered the needles. As her memories slowly bubbled to the surface of her mind, she remembered the needles, and the pain, and the sickness. She remembered being so sick that she could hardly move. And then they put her in the room that she lived in for most of her life, the room where she was chained to the wall. Even with her uncertain understanding of time, she knew that she lived in that room for a very, very long time. She was small when they put her there, and that was where she grew up.

When did her memories go away? She knew that when she was in that room, she did not remember all the things she remembered now. She forgot about her father, forgot about her mother. She forgot everything while in that room. When she thought about her life in that small room, she realized some of the things she did.

Lisa remembered killing people. Sometimes, the caretakers entered the room and she would hurt them and take their faces. She realized now that she killed those people, although she did not feel bad about it. The caretakers were bad people, and she was happy she killed some of them.

But most of the faces she took did not belong to caretakers. They belonged to the other people she thought of as her friends. The people who tried to bite her and did not die when she took their faces. Those people were already dead when Lisa met them, but they did not act like they were dead. They acted like they were alive. Lisa saw hundreds of people like that even before the man with the dark glasses released her.

So much lost information and so many recovered memories came to Lisa that she had trouble keeping them straight. It was wonderful to finally remember all these things, even if they made her angry and sad. The one thing she wanted to remember, however, did not come to her. She wanted to remember what really happened to her mother and father.

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