Case Notes 13:

Hades

The sensory deprivation tank was ten feet long by five feet wide, with a height of five feet. The exterior was made of medical-grade stainless steel, without windows. At one end, there was a hinged door; on the other side, filtration pipes disappeared into the wall. Even in the bright blue-white fluorescence cast by the lamp panels, the tank seemed ominous. Like a torture device. Like a coffin.

If used as a coffin, the tank would have accommodated an entire family of corpses. Yet, minutes after he lay down in the shallow water, he felt the confines shrink. The walls caved in like a collapsing artery. The roof fell down. The darkness tightened around him, constricting him until it was as if he were in the belly of a great python.

He thought there could be nothing worse than staying in the serpent. Then as his veins flooded coldly with whatever had been introduced into his infusion pump, he learned there was something a whole lot worse than claustrophobia.

When Hades awakened, for a moment he believed he was once again inside that confining darkness. Uncontrollable shivers racked his body, silent tremors under his skin. He gripped his sweat-drenched arms, searching for tubes and wires. His fingers contacted the scarred track marks lining the crooks of his elbows but nothing else. No wires or tubes. No piercing needles.

It had only been a dream.

Slowly, his eyes adjusted to the gloom of his windowless room. The only light came from the smoke detector above him, which shone perpetually in night and day. Its glow wasn’t bright enough to fully illuminate his surroundings, but he had spent so much time in the room that he could navigate it in absolute darkness. Even now, with the furniture little more than silhouettes against a greater blackness, he knew what he was looking at when he sat up and glanced around. The shape along the farthermost wall was his dresser, and to the right of it, the punching bag hung from the ceiling like a lynched sentry. Then there was the desk where he sat for meals or to draw. And nothing else. No television. No video game consoles or stereos. Just red walls and a marble floor.

Reaching out, he found the light switch near his bed and flipped it on. Cold light flooded the room, pervading into every corner. It should have comforted him to know he was in his own room, in his own bed. Yet as he looked around, the bad feeling in the pit of his stomach only worsened. He clutched at his arms, feeling tension crawling like spiders beneath his skin.

From under the covers, he retrieved the stuffed cat that Elizabeth had given him at their date almost a week ago. He restlessly ran his hands over the soft fur.

Not for the first time, Hades wondered if he had been drugged in his sleep. It wouldn’t surprise him. Every so often, he woke up with the disturbing notion that someone had been messing with him while he slept.

But this was different. This time, the wrongness was outside of him, in his surroundings.

I don’t belong here, he thought, breathing deeply. He was flooded with discontent and the first boiling signs of rage, a searing, all-encompassing fury more blinding than the lamp above.

I don’t belong anywhere.

He walked to his desk, thinking that drawing might calm his nerves. He liked to draw, always had. With only a pen and a scrap of paper, he was able to create anything, and creation was almost as powerful as its antithesis, destruction. In a way, artwork was a kind of evolution—useless components coming together to form something truly superior.

Setting the stuffed animal on the desktop, he took a sketchbook and box of charcoal pencils from the middlemost drawer. He leafed through the thick book, searching for a blank page. Most of his completed drawings were of buildings and landscapes. Others depicted mundane objects rendered in exquisite detail.

Hades turned the page—and froze.

A beautiful teenage girl smiled at him from the paper. She had light hair, light eyes, and the memorable face of Elizabeth Hawthorne. Her hair was shorter than the long curls of the Elizabeth he remembered, but there was no mistaking her.

A sprig of flowers was tucked into her hair, and though he had added no color to the drawing, the blossoms were easily identifiable by the shape of their petals. Forget-me-nots. Vergissmeinnicht.

Impossible.

In the corner of the page, he had recorded the date of the drawing’s completion. Last January. Over a year and a half ago.

Below the date, he had written a title: A-09.

With a low moan, he tore the drawing from the sketchbook, ripped it up, and threw the pieces on the floor.

Elizabeth.

“Not her name,” a voice said, and only after Hades heard it did he realize it was his own. “Not her. Not her. Not her.”

Hades took a deep breath and closed his eyes. He held the air inside of himself for three seconds, then exhaled slowly. After repeating the breathing exercise two times, he opened his eyes, turned to a fresh page in the sketchbook, and began drawing.

He couldn’t focus. His hands kept shaking. The pencil quivered in his fingers and he ended up with a thick serpentine curve instead of a straight line. He turned the paper to the other side and tried again. Instead of just deviating outside of the vision in his head, the lead tip pressed down so hard that he was left with a thick smear of charcoal and a broken point. A dusty scatter spread across the paper, as fine and black as gunpowder.

Who was A-09? Who was Elizabeth? Who was he?

His thoughts grew muddled. The rage and confusion returned. Frustration building, anger mounting, Hades threw the pencil across the room and pushed to his feet.

He shouldn’t be here. He didn’t belong here. This wasn’t his room. This wasn’t the Academy. It wasn’t fair.

Other teenagers had homes or semblances of homes. They had families. They had parents. They went to school and made friends and talked and laughed, and all he had was this fifteen-by-fifteen-foot square.

The rush of thoughts was like adding oil to a fire. Anger raged up in him. The edges of his vision were swallowed by a pulsing blackness.

He wanted Elizabeth. He would never have her. She lived in a world apart from him, and the moment she realized that he was evolving, she would turn in terror from him. It was only a matter of time.

Forget me not? No, one of these days, she would forget him. Everyone always did.

Before he even knew what he was doing, he picked up the chair and hurled it against the wall.

Even though the chair was made of flimsy wood and he had tossed it with such force that one of the legs had punched a hole in the plaster, the chair didn’t break. There was a large crack in the seat, but that was all.

Which only enraged him further, so much that he wanted to scream.

Hades snatched up the chair again and hammered it against the floor until it was reduced to splintered timber. Then he hurled the stuffed animal across the room, tore the desk lamp from its socket, and threw it as well. The metal shade gonged hollowly against the wall, and the lightbulb exploded.

The cacophony of his systematic destruction reverberated against the walls, but nobody came. The room was soundproofed. Even if he screamed and shouted, the sounds would be completely deafened by the foam padding behind the plaster.

He knew from experience. He screamed often.

Rage unsated, Hades seized his ankle sheath from the desk and pulled out the knife. He drove the blade into the desktop, once, twice, several times, punctuating each thrust with a feral snarl. On the fourth time, the blade became trapped in the wood.

Left with nothing within reach to destroy but himself, he rushed across the room. He pounded his fists against the punching bag, hard enough to send pain surging through his knuckles and up his arms. He felt each punch all the way into his shoulder. By the time he collapsed from exhaustion, gasping for breath, his hands felt like they had been dipped in acid. The skin over his knuckles was abraded, oozing blood.

The pain was strangely comforting. It helped distract from the confusion his nightmare had brought. It drowned out the thoughts that weren’t his own.

He rolled over onto his back and stared at the ceiling.

This is happening to someone else. Hades lifted his hands and regarded the way the blood spread across his knuckles. This is not my body.

The ache slowly receded, and every emotion faded into weary indifference. That was right. This was not his body. It didn’t matter what happened to this useless carcass, because the real him was elsewhere. Untouchable.

Washed out, he staggered to his feet and returned to his bed. He picked up his jacket, which he had draped over the iron bedpost. He searched the pockets for his cell phone and turned it on.

As he dialed Elizabeth’s number, he sat down on the mattress. His dream had cast a dark, smothering presence over everything. He still felt the walls closing in on him.

On the fifth ring, she picked up.

“Hello, Elizabeth,” he said, listening to the soft hiss of the open line. In the background, he could hear voices and laughter.

“I’m sorry, Hades, I’m getting ready for practice, and I can’t really talk right—”

“Wait, please don’t go.”

“Hey, what’s wrong?” she asked, her voice soft with worry. “Are you okay? You don’t sound…”

“I…I had a bad day,” he said, to avoid telling her that he had been sleeping during school hours.

“Oh no, what happened?”

Just her murmur soothed him. He closed his eyes, imagining she was here with him now, lying down beside him. He could almost feel her body heat.

“It doesn’t really matter now,” he said, curling his fingers into a fist. His bloodied knuckles stung.

A door slammed in the background, and the voices were replaced by the quiet squeaks of sneakers on linoleum. “Are you sure? If you want to talk about it, I’m still here.”

“Let’s go somewhere.”

“What?”

“Skip practice. We can go for a motorcycle ride.”

“Hades, I can’t just skip it.” She sighed. “There’s a big game coming up next week. Anyway, I’ll see you at the dance tonight, right?”

“I’ll be there in thirty minutes,” he said. “Wait for me out front.”