Novella
The Walled Garden
J Nicholas
Patrick wakes in a hospital with no patients, no doctors, and no way out.
The attendants are kind. The rooms are clean. The garden outside has been designed for his recovery. Beyond it stand identical white buildings and immaculate paths, and every attendant insists that Patrick remain where he is.
Every request is granted except the one to leave.
Patrick has forty-seven hours to understand where he has woken and what the people who built it were trying to keep asleep.
Read the opening
The Walled Garden · Opening excerpt
1
White.
Patrick opened his eyes.
Closed them.
Waited.
Nothing changed.
He opened them again.
White.
The ceiling was white. The walls were white. The light was white, although he couldn’t see where the light was coming from. No fixture. No window above him. No glow around the edges of anything. Just light.
Hospital.
They had moved him.
That made sense.
Not a lot of sense, but enough for the moment.
Patrick lay still and waited for the rest of the room to arrive. The beep of a monitor. The whisper of oxygen. Rubber soles in the hallway. A cart with one bad wheel.
Nothing.
He listened harder.
Still nothing.
Hospitals were never quiet. Even when they were quiet, they hummed. Air moved. Machines worried. People whispered outside the door about people inside the door.
This place didn’t hum.
Maybe his hearing was gone.
He rubbed two fingers together beside his ear.
Soft. Dry. Distinct.
Good.
One problem eliminated.
He swallowed. His throat didn’t hurt.
That was new.
Patrick turned his head.
A white table stood beside the bed. No lamp. No water. No plastic cup holding a pink sponge on a stick. No button to call a nurse. The table had no drawer and no cabinet. It was just a table in the same way the room was just a room. An object stripped down until nobody could accuse it of personality.
He looked the other way.
More wall.
“Hello?”
His voice worked.
It worked well.
Too well.
No scrape. No weakness. No chemical fog turning the word into something somebody else had said from the other side of a building.
“Nurse?”
Nothing.
Patrick waited for panic.
It seemed reasonable to panic. He had woken in a strange room after a procedure he couldn’t remember, without a monitor, an IV, or a nurse. Panic would have been appropriate. Possibly useful.
Instead he felt confused.
Confusion was panic waiting for paperwork.
He pushed the sheet away.
2
His legs looked fine.
That was the first problem.
They looked more than fine. Lean. Healthy. A little too pale, but everything was a little too pale in that room. He moved his feet. Ten toes answered. He bent his knees. No pain.
No pain anywhere.
Patrick pressed a hand to his stomach.
Flat.
Not flat enough for an advertisement flat. Just flat. Firm. Unremarkable. The stomach of a man who ate reasonably well and did not spend most of his life estimating jobs from the driver’s seat of a truck.
His hand stayed there.
The hospital had dressed him in a white shirt and white drawstring pants. No gown. No socks. The clothes were soft and fitted well.
Very well.
He lifted his hand.
Long fingers. Smooth nails. No split cuticle on the thumb. No crescent of adhesive trapped beside the index fingernail. No pale hook of scar between his thumb and forefinger where a piece of sheet metal had once introduced itself.
Wrong hand.
Patrick stared at it.
No.
Swelling could change a hand. Medication could change what a hand looked like. Lighting could do anything it wanted. Every contractor knew that. Paint chosen beneath fluorescent tubes became a different paint in a living room. Gray became blue. Cream became yellow. A good morning became three unpaid return visits.
It was the light.
He turned the hand over.
No calluses.
It was medication.
He pressed his thumb into his palm. The skin whitened beneath it and filled with color again.
He had been sick.
Very sick.
Sick enough that the doctor had stopped using words like likely.
Thirty percent.
The number came back without the room that contained it.
Thirty percent.
Not thirty-two. Not twenty-eight. Thirty. A number rounded neatly enough to fit into a sentence and sharp enough to divide everything that came after it.
His wife had been beside him.
He could feel her hand around his. Not this hand. His hand. The other one. The scarred one.
“That’s not zero,” he had said.
Or she had.
He couldn’t remember.
He remembered hope.
That was all.
Hope and a corridor and somebody telling the children they couldn’t come any farther. His wife arguing until the rules bent for her and then discovering they did not bend far enough.
A door.
A mask.
Her eyes.
I’ll be here.
Had she said it?
Of course she had.
Unless he had asked her to.
Patrick shut his eyes and reached for the memory.
It moved away.
Not disappeared. Not forgotten. Farther away. As if the memory belonged to last year instead of yesterday. As if he had remembered it many times already and worn it smooth.
How long had he been unconscious?
He opened his eyes.
White.
“Okay.”
The word sounded confident.
He appreciated the effort.
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