The Dickens Mirror by Ilsa J. Bick Page B

I will have to stop you one way or the other,” the girl said in that maddeningly reasonable tone of hers. (God, she was so rigid and proper, she must have a broomstick jammed up her bum.)
    “Are you
threatening
me?” A dart of surprise. This was new. She gave the girl, clad in her assistant’s navy wool skirt, white blouse, and over-apron, a longer look. Elizabeth supposed the girl was pretty, though she was bigger boned and taller, with an angular face and luxuriant coils of copper hair that never seemed out of place. Physically, they weren’t at all alike except for their eyes, which were the same deep cobalt. If the girl had possessed a golden flaw in her right iris, their eyes would’ve been an exact match. In one of her father’s twisted fantasies, they might’ve been distant relations. “What, has meek little Meme found a speck of courage?”
    “It is not courage.” Meme stood next to a rickety table upon which she’d squared a tray of toiletries and two basins: one of cold rinse water and the other hot enough to steam. “I do not enjoy being a watchdog any more than you like having me here.”
    “You’re right; I don’t enjoy you. And see?” She showed a dazzling smile. “We agree on something. Who says I’m not making progress? Now why not leave and make your report of my miraculous breakthrough to your precious doctor?”
    “You know I cannot, not the way you are now. Please”—crossing to stand over Elizabeth’s miserable cot, the girl reached atentative hand—“you would feel so much better if you at least let me give you a good wash …”
    All at once and out of nowhere, the air split with a harsh, shrill sound like nails dragging over a slate school board, sending shivers racing down Elizabeth’s spine and a gasp leaping for her tongue. An instant later, something
pinged
and then
tick-tick-ticked
off brick.
    “Oh!” Meme sounded breathless—surprising for a girl who showed so little emotion—and Elizabeth thought,
Good, she heard that, too
. Her shoulders sagged with relief. That was the problem with this place. Sometimes she didn’t know which sounds were real and which were in her head.
    But now she looked across her room. One of the few privates on this ward, hers was a long and deep brick throat bounded at one end by a high narrow sliver of a window fenced with iron bars. (If she wanted to see out, she had to jump and hang like a monkey at the zoo. Apt, considering.) Everything else—her rickety metal cot, a standing wardrobe with her very few changes of clothing, the stand upon which Meme had laid her tray—was either bolted to the floor or, as was the case with a high shelf, the wall. She now saw that the shelf’s right half dangled, held to the wall only by a single bolt, like a diseased tooth on a fleshy thread of rotted gum.
    The other bolt snapped
. Where had it gone? Her eyes swept the floor. Such breaks and cracks and spontaneous ruptures were common nowadays. As the fog advanced, this bizarre Peculiar no one understood, London was rotting away. Buildings slumped. Roads cracked. Wallpaper suddenly blistered and peeled, sloughing from the walls like flaps of dead skin. That very morning, the top rail of Kramer’s guest chair had split. London and this
Now
were falling down, falling down, falling down.
But the bolt, that bolt
 … Her pulse gave a hard thump as her eyes fixed on a jagged metal nubbin.
Excellent
. That would be sharp enough to—
    “No, Miss. Do not even think of it.” Meme clapped the sole of a boot on that bolt, then scooped up the broken bit of iron to drop into a pocket of her over-apron. “Now, please, let me help you wash. Your hair is positively crawling.”
    “No!”
Elizabeth batted the other girl’s hand away. God, she’d been so stupid, hadn’t moved fast enough, and now her chance was gone, and it was all this girl’s fault! “Don’t tell me what I need! Keep your filthy …” Her throat suddenly clutched, and she felt the