"Devon, Georgina - Lady of the Night" - читать интересную книгу автора (Devon Georgina)

she dropped her hand and focused her eyes on her lap.

The training of a lifetime stilled her quaking limbs. She had gained a
tenuous control when at last her eyelids fluttered up once more.
Careful not to touch herself again, the young woman began a slow
examination of her surroundings

The white backdrop was a sheet; the firm support behind her, a bed. The
light was from a small window to the side. It was covered with heavy
mesh, more than a screen, less than bars. There would be no escape
through it.

Her visual range disclosed white walls, a steel door with a small
window covered with the same mesh. There was nothing else to distract
her. The images were pieces of a puzzle, an old-fashioned cardboard
jigsaw with no picture on the box to use as a model.

Then, finally, there was sound. A low keening came from the side of
the room the woman had not yet examined. As she turned her head by
terrified inches, the source of the noise was revealed.

An old woman sat on a bed like her own, rocking back and forth, her
eyes blank, her body rigid. The old woman's arms tensed as they
spasmodically gripped her body in a

Lady of the Night fierce, unloving hug. Back and forth she rocked, her
rhythm as certain as anything in the universe.

The young qqqoman snapped her head to the front and squeezed her eyes
shut as the familiar terror overwhelmed her. But there was no longer a
void to which she could retreat The sound of her own screams destroyed
the darkness forever.

Joshua Martane quietly closed the door to room 815 behind him as he
stepped out into the dimly lit corridor. Closing the door quietly was
one of those habitual responses that made no sense upon examination.
The two women on the other side of the door would not have cared if he
had slammed it loudly enough to be heard in the emergency room on the
ground floor. Both of them were so out of touch with reality that the
sound would have been completely ignored, if indeed it even
registered.

Old Mrs. Tryon would not have stopped rocking. Years of therapy,
medication and finally electric shock treatments had failed to make her
take notice of the world surrounding her. A loving but resigned
daughter had recently admitted Mrs. Tryon to this the psychiatric ward
of New Orleans City Hospital as the first step toward permanent
hospitalization in the state institution in Mandeville. There she
would probably rock aqvay her days, locked forever from the world that
she hadn't acknowledged in almost a decade