The White Room

The sun was dancing on the horizon, shadows lengthening and the light beginning to fade. Inside the pure white room, only a table and two steel chairs furnishing it, stood a girl no older than sixteen in a shirt and pants the same hue as the room.

She stood, still as a statue, in front of the only window, watching as the sun slowly slipped behind the trees with glassy eyes, half-glazed over with thought. Her dark, waist-long chocolate brown hair was rolled up into a tight bun at the nape of her neck, a blank expression on her delicate china doll face.

A man dressed in a suit of various shades of gray, half-moon glasses, and hair like bleached snow entered the tiny room with its two-way mirror and steel reinforced window, carrying a thick manila folder, walked over to the table and took a seat in the cold steel chair with his back to the two-way mirror. The door closed at that point, thudding closed with a click, the sound insuring that the heavy bolt was locked in place.

The man riffled through the folder pulling out a heavy stack of papers with tiny handwriting and a yellow steno note pad, retrieving a silver fountain pen from his smoky gray shirt’s breast pocket. While the man in gray flipped through the file, occasionally stopping to read a paragraph or to write on his little yellow pad, the girl just stood there, gazing out the wire-reinforced window with unblinking eyes.

She watched the few children playing outside on the grounds, Orderlies not far away and watching with narrowed sharp eyes. In the seven years she had spent there, she had never been allowed outside onto the grounds to play like all the other children, she had never been allowed near anyone other than muscle-bound Orderlies and nurses and doctors in the years she had been kept there; a prisoner in a white world. Once a month, the Orderlies would enter her room before nightfall and restrain her to her bed, despite her fruitless attempts to fight them off.

The man in gray stopped flipping through the file and its many papers, and looked up at the young girl, staring expectantly. He seemed a bit nervous at the way he adjusted the collar of his shirt, the straightening of his perfectly centered storm gray tie.

“Megan…” he finally said, hoarsely. Before he continued on, he cleared his throat hard with some difficulty. “If you could sit down…p-please.” The last words he said were naught but a silent whisper. When Megan didn’t respond, he pushed on more firmly, if still soft, with more conviction. “Megan, if you do not cooperate, I will have to ask the Orderl—” Before he could finish, Megan spun on her heel, walked over to the chair across from the man, and took the seat with a wolfish grace. She didn’t look up at him though, only kept staring with a blank face and eyes at the brushed steel table, as expressionless as at the window.

Noting her compliance on the yellow note pad, the old man spoke once again. “Megan, I have been hearing complaints from the nurses assigned to you that you are fighting them when they try to give you your medication. I prescribed it to you for a reason. It is needed for your……condition. Why have you been fighting the treatments?”

Megan muttered something unintelligible under her breath, but didn’t look up as she said it.

“I beg your pardon?”

“IT’S NOT MEDICINE!!!” she yelled, looking up swiftly, her eyes a colder blue than ice and burning with the rage of a thousand burning suns. Her pale blue orbs held a fire that burned with a previously unknown rage that seemed to scorch the very air before them. In her voice, a primal growl escaped her bow-shaped lips that was far too animalistic for any human to make.

The doctor yelped in fear, leaning back in his chair cautiously. His body froze with the unspeakable terror that made his knees quiver like jell-o, and his heart beat so quickly and loud that he feared the men outside the door may hear it. Megan scared him; she scared everyone at Demented Hills. The doctor opened his mouth to speak, but Megan cut him off.

“I know what it is! It’s chlorpromazine! It doesn’t make me any better; it just makes me sleepy and miserable. No matter how much they give me I never get better!”

Megan’s eyes were cerulean fire. The doctor knew what she could do and fumbled for words that would calm her, that would soothe her, but he never even got the chance. Megan stood sharply, sending the solid steel chair flying to crumple against the wall like it was putty. She reached across the table, grabbing the doctor by his tie and picked him up over her head like a rag doll on a bull’s horn with an amazing feat of strength.

She threw the doctor at the heavy door, blasting it off of its hinges as he hit it. Orderlies swarmed in through the gaping doorway, some carrying full needles of some reddish liquid, others with silvery-plated batons that were sharp at one point.

Everyone saw not a cowering girl in a corner, or a heavily breathing, raunchy teenage girl; what they saw was a furry brown tail disappearing out the smashed window with shouts from the doctor such as “Get her!” and “Don’t let her get away, you fools!”

Sometime after Megan could no longer hear the shouts and the screaming of the alarms, she stopped just on the edge of a moonlit meadow where a small grouping of deer lay resting. Her stomach growled with hunger and her mouth watered like it was Niagara Falls.

She was different. She could barely control the storm that raged inside of her when she turned into that…that…monster! Finally, she decided she would go to London. She just had to hold onto her humanity until she found them. She would seek out her parents and make them pay for leaving her there.

Feeling her skin split and the fur begin to flow across her tiny frame, she ran, off into the woods, chasing the wind and racing the sun to the horizon. A single wolf howled that night, and Megan shivered in her head at the knowledge that no wolf came near that place, and she screamed again. Only the haunting call of a wolf could be heard throughout the valley.