SLEEP, BEAUTY, by Jennifer Loring page 3/4
River paused outside the front entrance. The steps leading up to it, and the door itself, seemed too small and out of place. No guards here or anywhere that he could see. A deathly silence shrouded the castle and its grounds.
Dead vines clung to the façade. River imagined them as they must have been long ago, lush and green as in the pictures in his book. He glanced around once more and saw the pungent black smoke of fires in the dumps below the hill. Beyond that the husk of the city, wreathed in mist and desolation, like giant splintered bones protruding from the corpse of a broken world. The lock on the front door had long since been broken. Taking one deep breath, River stepped inside.
Tendrils of light pierced through the smashed windows like bloody arrows, illuminating motes of dust. From the collapsed ceilings and peelings walls it appeared to be abandoned after all. Perhaps they had moved further inside where it was safer, or…
Underground. That was where the people who survived the Starfall had hidden.
River navigated several corridors filled with debris, mostly from the structure itself, but also chairs with two large wheels, metal carts, beds with leather straps at each corner. He peered into open doorways but the rooms were mostly empty, some upturned chairs and shreds of paper and little else left behind. Stagnant puddles of water gathered in the corners and in cracks on the floor.
River came upon a door marked “Employees Only.” He opened it, and found a staircase leading into the darkness below. A sign just inside the door, painted onto the wall in red letters, stated:
BASEMENT AND TUNNELS ARE RESTRICTED
AREAS FOR PATIENTS USE
BUILDING SECURITY
River followed the tunnel. Feeble crimson light seeped in from high, barred windows. Low-hanging pipes lined the ceiling, and the walls of exposed brick were bare. He strained to see what lay ahead but could not clearly make out anything more than a few inches ahead of him. Cold, stale air crawled over his skin like mold. Rats skittered across the narrow passage, the only sign of life River had thus far detected. Stairs appeared ahead of him. It was the only way out aside from turning back, so he ascended.
River found himself facing yet another staircase, narrow and made of metal. His legs cried out at the effort needed to reach the second floor after so much walking already, and again the burning in his lungs pushed blood up into his throat. He paused at the top of the stairs to let the wheezing pass. He was in another part of the castle now, for he could see no sign of the front entrance below.
Up here the rooms were smaller; some had beds while others contained wooden desks and metal cabinets. River entered one and pulled open a drawer that screamed as if it hadn’t been moved in a hundred years. It was stuffed full of papers, and the papers full of words he didn’t recognize. River turned his attention to a folder on the desk. He studied the label, DD0874. As meaningless to him as anything else in the room. Still, if he was going to find the princess he needed to decipher any clues he might be given. River slumped down in the chair and began to read.
“August 12. Patient DD0874, Dawn DeCira. Patient is a 16-year-old female suffering acute catatonia. Patient has remained in a catatonic stupor for 4 days. She does not react to any external stimuli and does not initiate any social behaviors. Persistent mutism is interrupted only by occasional outbursts of echolalia, during which she is heard to repeat the phrase, ‘You’re a whore.’ It is presumed that she heard this phrase from her stepmother when the physical abuse was revealed. Biological mother died when patient was 3 years of age.
“Numerous attempts to awaken the patient have been unsuccessful. Prognosis is unknown at this time, but patient may require long-term hospitalization.”
Awaken the patient… It must be her, the sleeping princess. “Patient,” then, meant the same thing. He didn’t understand most of the other words, but that hardly mattered now. River flipped through the folder in search of a room number; instead he found a faded photograph of a brown-haired girl. She sat rigid upon a bed, her eyes vacant and staring at a point somewhere to the left. Her perfectly symmetrical face, free of the tumors and peeling skin River was so accustomed to seeing, betrayed no emotion. She looked like the people in books, the ones who lived before the stars fell. Like angels, some said, who had vanished and left the wicked world to the deformed creatures that took their places.
