Lily Whites of Steel: The Bittersweet Journey of Two Lost Souls into the Unseen Realms of Spirituality....Where the Line Between Truth and Madness Is Surprisingly Thin.

By Lindsay Evelyn Hamilton

Born into the flaming trenches of a true spiritual hell, Lacey Hart spends her impoverished childhood lost in the strange shadow world between heaven and the demonic underworld in her senses. She uses religion to mold herself into The Perfect Daughter so that she might evade her disturbed mothers malevolence. Lacey is a demure child whose primrose sweetness and white-laced stoicism hearken back to the puritanical era- times when bewitchment infiltrated even the purest breath of beauty. In school she is an idiot savant, and she believes herself to be haunted by the devil. But outside the physical, emotional, and sexual torture chamber of her home, Lacey rarely ruffles feathers.

Then she turns eighteen. Her sexuality, which she has always felt had its roots in evil, blooms like an overripe fruit from the center of her soul. Around the same time, Lacey and her best friend Sabrina uncover the gift that has both defined and isolated them all their lives: intuition. Emerging from the coccoon of their silence into awareness, the two friends find themselves also immersed in the dark side of magic. It is on this spiritual cusp between heaven and hell that they experience the heights of ecstasy- but drift inevitably toward the dredges of humanity on the outskirts of life.

Like twinned flames, Lacey and Sabrina embark upon the bohemian magical mystery tour of their twenties with the quixotic candor and unexpected bravery of the truly eccentric. Then grave illness strikes, unplanned pregnancy arises, and they learn the power of true love to bloom ones spirit into the oneness with all things that is true freedom. The story of two women who dare to submerge themselves completely into any given moment, Lily Whites of Steel is a fearless exploration of the thin line between freedom and destruction, dogma and authentic mysticism, and- perhaps most hauntingly of all- truth and madness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse
• Release date: Dec 18, 2013
• ISBN: 9781491828113

Lindsay Evelyn Hamilton

Lindsay Evelyn Hamilton is a single mother and certified massage therapist who has devoted the last two years of her life to writing her debut novel. She lives in Sea Bright, New Jersey with her three-year-old son.

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Lily Whites

of Steel

The bittersweet journey of two lost souls into the unseen realms of spirituality… . where the line between truth and madness is surprisingly thin.

LINDSAY EVELYN HAMILTON

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2013, 2015 Lindsay Evelyn Hamilton. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

Published by AuthorHouse 01/08/2015

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2809-0 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4918-2811-3 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2013919102

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Table of Contents

CHAPTER 1 A HOLE IN SAMSARA

CHAPTER 2 TALES FROM THE CRYPT IN THE GARDEN OF EDEN

CHAPTER 3 THE CALM BEFORE THE STORM

CHAPTER 4 BEHIND PICKET FENCES

CHAPTER 5 THE STEPFORD HAUNTING

CHAPTER 6 THE PILGRIMAGE TO SELF

CHAPTER 7 THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH

CHAPTER 8 BEWARE THE IDES OF MARCH

CHAPTER 9 THE PROMISED LAND

CHAPTER 10 FALL OF ROME

CHAPTER 11 HOME IS WHERE THE HEART IS, AFTER ALL

CHAPTER 12 THE CENTER OF THE EARTH IS THE END OF THE WORLD

CHAPTER 13 THE SUN BEFORE THE BURN

CHAPTER 14 THE WORLD’S LARGEST CORN PALACE, AND OTHER NATURAL DISASTERS

CHAPTER 15 MATTERS OF LIFE AND DEATH

CHAPTER 16 A FITTING CURSE

CHAPTER 17 SHADOWSCAPES

CHAPTER 18 THE TOWER

CHAPTER 19 HOMECOMING

CHAPTER 20 FROM ASHES

CHAPTER 21 AFTERMATH OF THE PHEONIX

CHAPTER 1

A HOLE IN SAMSARA

T he dark breath of winter ghosted right through Lacey Hart that year, for it was the first year that she had been stripped bare to her transparency. Lying tomblike on a sterile white cot in a preternaturally cold room on the inpatient unit at Robert Davis University of Medicine in Piscataway, New Jersey, the irony of this did not escape her; sealed into a mute silence though she was, she felt that all the world could see the gore of her insides, the dark rot of her core. Her only saving grace from the devil within had been Blake, and the insulated blanket of pristine snow that had shimmered and sanctified the grave of winter with nostalgia. It was January now, but in truth the months had all blurred together once Lacey slipped from the earthly realm where she had lived in a glass house into the flaming trenches of an underworld….a place where she burned. Lying corpselike on the cot she'd come to know as her death bed, she wondered from a distance if Blake, too, had realized that the center of the earth was the end of the w orld.

Haunted as she had been since the too-tender womb of early youth, Lacey should have known that the holy glow of deepest night where she traveled with Blake had a dark side. The dark side of the moon was wont to draw out the wild side of anyone, was it not? Her every inquiry resounded like an echo in the empty well of her soul, and she knew only that she had been gutted somehow from the inside out by a knife wielded second by Blake, and first by the devil himself.

It was a cruel twist of fate that memories still bloomed from the wilt of her rotted corpse; if anything they moved with the fluid ease of cold, dark rivers through the unnatural emptiness of her, for in the decay of her mind she embodied death. And what was death but a hollow vessel through which all time was filtered eerily through? Still, long-dead flesh retained a latent, almost paranormal power to rise and fall with the illusion of life that was mirrored in memories. Like the forlorn cry of a wolf howling torridly at the moon, she was haunted. Haunted by the city where Blake lived, that crumbling tower of her past where silvery plumes of smoke had baked the zombie-like masses on the streets like a corpse in the aftermath of fire. But also Lacey had been ripe with the hearth of a long lost home blooming inside her. Blake. At the very thought of him her corpselike figure twisted on the stillness of the cot as she ached with the whole of her being for her other half.

It dawned on her that perhaps she had ultimately been led by the fates down the black hole that had swallowed her soul in the aftermath of deepest grief…of Blake's departure from her life and her soul. After all she had been only a girl-child when she'd ached for the other half in her mind, dashing sprite like through the enchantment of the deep woods in Pennsylvania where her aunt lived. From childhood the concept of her own wholeness had lived in the dreamscape of a fairy tale where sharp features and sad green eyes cut her soul in two, giving birth to the need that had ultimately her demise. The only cure, she knew, was salvation. And the only man who'd ever held her soul in the fragile palms of his hands and absolved it of sin was long gone, scattered like ashes in the wind.

The first night Lacey was allowed off of the inpatient ward at Robert Davis for a dinner with her parents, she went about the business of making up the mask of her face with great precision. A wild, forlorn emotion howled like the wind in the bottomless depths of her soul. Even she was unaware of exactly why she went about jauntily applying her eyeliner and the old crimson blood to her lips, and she was vaguely aware that she would look absurd even to her monstrosity of a family whom she felt had been born from the bowels of hell themselves.

But no, that wasn't right. The black pit of hatred and disgust for Lacey in the pit of her mother was like a darkness that had leaked into every nuance of Lacey's life and being, turning her inside out and mangling her image in the mirror from an anxious pretty girl with an impending storm in her eyes to a gnarled cretin. But it was Lacey who had been born with the seed of evil implanted in her age old soul; it was she who had the haunted visions glowing demonically within her since she was a small child, stately yards with evil and molestation lingering thickly in air that smelled of honeysuckles and even more coldly terrifying scenes that flashed inside her like a possession.

Lacey's clinician, Nancy Wright, knew all about the dark force that had been growing inside her client since she was a small child, an infant even, her innocence so unlike the Christ Child's as it was bathed by default in sin. Even Lacey was oriented enough within the world outside herself to know that Nancy, a frank if decidedly flaky professional with thinly pressed lips and a canny gaze, did not believe a word she said was real. What mattered, Nancy said, was that it was real to Lacey- and if it the force was real enough to invade Lacey's entire being and impoverish the spirit within, inducing even a slight physical decline in her health, then the only job worth doing was to possibly uncover its origin and subsequently banish it from her mind. Lacey's sorrow was a long lost voice from home when she opened her mouth the first time to tell Nancy in a feeble whisper that it wouldn't go back to where it came from on command, not when her body was burning in flames from hell and her soul was rotting within.

Lacey nearly jolted out of her skin when Nancy gently pushed open the door to her bedroom just then, reminding her in a clipped tone that her parents had just been let in downstairs and were on their way up. All at once Lacey was struck like lightning through the cosmos by a dreadful realization that settled darkly inside her: She had not, in fact, nearly jumped out of her skin when Nancy pushed open the door and invaded the private gray space of her room; it may have appeared that way to an outsider because she was startled, but what had essentially occurred was that she had already been hovering in some awful, unnamed purgatorial space above her physical shell when Nancy walked in. And for the last several weeks, she could not for the life of her seem to realign with her body or even slip back in for a few cleansing moments before the world faltered again to an off-kilter state.

Lacey? Earth to Lacey! the comically crude clinician invaded Lacey's reverie once more, and this time Lacey managed to meet her clipped expression with hollow eyes and a vague smile. I'm…I'm almost ready, she said, casting her eyes to the ground once more as she fought the ominous rising of the fire within her once more. A ghastly, burp-like noise escaped from her throat like the hiss of a coiled black snake as she swallowed hard, tamping down the beastly montage of hellish forces that besieged her in even the most mundane elements of her day.

Okay, Nancy said, eyeing her warily. How are you feeling about your first night outside in three weeks? I'm guessing it may have seemed a bit longer to you. I know sometimes your perception of time differs from that of the 'normal mode', Nancy offered, making exaggerated quotations with her fingers as Lacey tried and failed to stifle a roll of her wide eyes, which looked even more large and owlish in the shrinking porcelain edifice of her face as the days wasted by.

But Nancy's reaction was one of curiosity that bordered on abject voyeurism, a rare quality for a clinician that even Regina had noted with surprise. But then her daughter was about two inches away from being buried six feet under society in a long term institution where it was recently discovered a few severely schizophrenic patients had been raped, so she sappily entrusted her daughter's life to the less benign evil that was Nancy and her slimy psychiatric counterpart who had felt up Lacey's leg. The latter part of the story was shunned by her mother as a delusion of her supposedly monstrously inflated ego, but Lacey found she couldn't muster up the strength to reject her mother's acerbic presence from her being anymore; it was simply too exhausting, and so she steeled the rage she felt at not being believed and simultaneously insulted deep within the cavernous emptiness where her soul used to be.

What was the eye roll for? What did I say now? Nancy inquired in her tart, tactless voice. I only said something we already know. Look, Lacey, as I'm sure you know by now, I'm fond of you. Melodramatics and all, I've come to see you almost as a grandmother would her grandchild- except you're schizophrenic. Or schizoid-something, now there's a mystery only God has the wherewithal to solve- if you're religious, that is. Anyway, I'm getting off-track here. What I'm trying to say is that it's a plain fact that your mind isn't functioning normally and that you aren't operating in the same world everyone else is right now- that's what we're trying to fix, but it's obvious the root of the problem is deep and I'm not one to sit there and lie to anyone about what may and may not be possible. Point blank, I don't know if you'll get better or not. But I do plan on having an honest rapport with you, so I hope I didn't offend you when I said that your perceptions of time are a bit…distorted. You know that already.

Lacey just stared unfathomably at her clinician who, crudely lacking in boundaries, seemed almost as deeply affected as her family l did sometimes by the declining state of Lacey's mental health. Nancy met her gaze in the thick, dark silence, and Lacey could feel Nancy's thoughts like electricity, resounding with her own in the same old tired circles: A couple of months ago, Lacey was possessed of a Harvard graduate's robust vocabulary, and she was a fighting force, a tornado of sorts. When the handsome, slick Dr. Rupert had caught her like a fly in his cunning gaze and commented upon the paradox in her feministic flamboyance- according to him, she obviously sucked in her stomach, which was an unhealthy flipside to her fixation with sexuality- Lacey had let loose with a tirade to his face as well as to the director of clinical psychiatry. Nancy had reluctantly- albeit very privately- agreed with Lacey that the doctor had stepped grossly out of line and would be reprimanded, but that it was her order of business to focus on her mental health rather than her disturbed outrage with the incident.

Oh, yes, it had given rise to a rather manic episode in which Lacey had spontaneously responded to a kiss from a soft-spoken bisexual girl whom she was not even attracted to, but Nancy confided that her threads to reality were at least tied thinly in place because she had known and reacted to the immorality of her psychiatrist's behavior. Dr. Rupert was, however, back on Lacey's infinitely mysterious case by popular request: Regina had requested that he be assigned to it, ignoring the horrified look in Lacey's eye when she was informed of the decision. But this new Lacey, muted steeply in the silence of all-encompassing darkness, had protested with a flatness that had spread from her soul to her voice and mannerisms like the plague, and thus little effort was made to reconsider.

I'm not offended by your perceptions of me, Lacey said now in a stunningly clear tone. What does scare me, she said blankly, sounding anything but afraid, is how callously and tactlessly you refer to my life. I am, after all, a life, aren't I? Not just another illness or case number on your sheet of hopeless maniacs who ultimately get buried underground.

Lacey was shaking as she said the words, the stark magnitude of them possessing every fiber of her along with the haunting within, and she felt like a mere skeleton of a human being. But something in her chest clenched tight and she knew with the same steely certainty she knew everything else that she would no longer allow this gossipy old biddy of a clinician to objectify her as another file in a musty, forgotten drawer.

Nancy's eyes blinked open wide and for a God-awful moment Lacey thought she was going to reprimand her, to demean or crush her down even further into the filthy bowels of shame. But instead she merely shook her head and said sadly, as if musing to herself, See, this is where the real travesty lies when it comes to you, Lacey. You are an authentically intelligent and elegant young woman when you want to be- or when you can be, I should say. You could even obtain a high education from a reputable school if this mental illness hadn't come over you like a….like a vex. I’ve seen a lot of mental illness, but I've never seen anything like this. It's as you say it is- a monstrosity that started subtly when you were very young and now has your life entangled in a web. You are caught like a fly, my dear, but you do have so very much potential.

Nancy sighed and turned her back, averting her flinty gaze to her watch as she gasped a little and said, Oh, my, your mother and father will be up here any second now. I'd better get going.

As Nancy retreated, Lacey heard the familiar click-clack of her shoes against the stark white floors and she seemed to be swallowed up by a tunnel of sterile white laced with deep gray shadows and Lacey, too, was falling and when she could hold the madness within the vessel of her own body no longer the demonic presence emerged, straining at her skin until it was stretched like a thin bruise on a corpse and-

"Well, on that note", came the dry, sane tone of her voice, seemingly from somewhere faraway and outside her body. I'm sure to have a brilliant first evening back out in the world. Thanks for the pep talk- reassuring as always, Nancy.

Now it was Nancy's turn to nearly jump out of her skin. Well, now, there are your wits. You do have them about you, Lacey Hart. Don't you forget it. Use them, dear, use them to pull you to the surface of this and drag you out into the light.

Now who sounds abstract, Lacey observed in the same dry tone that did not seem to emanate from her own voice, the shell of her body. I will use them, she said, meaning it, envisioning her clever wits like tiny, almost intangible threads that nonetheless connected her world into at least some semblance of sense, like an unfathomable constellation of stars out in the wintry palace of the sky. Darkness moved over her like an omen from outside and she shivered in spite of herself, trying for a brave face and swallowing her hellish terror of stretching another thin veil over the broken shards of herself when her parents walked through the door: the pretense of being sane, the pretense of not being too haunted inside to patch together the unhinged threads of a family quilt that was no longer even majorly intact. This, she found, was the most harrowing mask to wear, as it stirred in her a homesickness that howled like the wind, though there was no land mark in her mind she could attach to the word, home.

And then, like a blink of the devil's eye or a bad spell moving ominously over the small gray room, Regina Hart stood in the ghastly shadows at the doorway, weeping uncontrollably.

Regina, come on, Jack said softly as Regina struggled to pull herself together but continued to bleed tears all over Lacey's room, which suddenly looked to her like a dark, rotted cave within her own core. The fires of hell undulated at the outskirts of the cave in great, venomous licks, revealing talons Lacey knew could seize her in an instant, and then, at last, she would be ashes.

Her father's whispery voice into his wife's ear, an anomaly for him, sent ghostly shivers down Lacey's spine and into the bottomless, dark pit of her soullessness. Lacey's father was not always an overly aggressive character, but he was inherently brute and insensitive by default of lacking any real, tangible understanding of weakness- or at least the sort that showed on the surface, and Lacey knew she looked as though she was outwardly wearing the gore of her insides on her sleeve. She glanced down self-consciously, sensing the stillness come over her again and flatten her horror to steel, yet still it simmered with the flames beneath her surface. Dad, she managed. Just…calm her down before we go, okay?

Lacey's voice sounded heartbreakingly like a child's. The wheedling pitch of it seemed to send some sort of bonified electric shock from her to her father, for Jack paled as his own shell-shocked gaze fell upon his daughter. He can see the devil in me, she thought, shuddering madly within. He can see the dark, rotted core and he knows now, he understands that I've been raped by Blake and possessed by the devil and rotted inside by all the forces that be.

I-I'll try, Jack said over his shoulder to Lacey in a voice meant to be reassuring but was actually thinly laced with panic. Actually, even when Jack was not stunned to his soul in the panic of seeing his first daughter coming undone before him like an unraveling spool of thread, it always sounded forced when he inserted an empathetic tone into his voice. It was like a child imitating his mother's exasperation when he spilled milk all over the floor- Oh my God! But no genuine understanding or emotion behind the mimicking. However, with her grave new eyes that saw even more deeply into the dark corners of the earth than did her old ones, it was crystal clear to Lacey that still waters ran deep with her father. He was a mess who hadn't slept in days, his heart was breaking as though she was dead, and he tried time and again to slay her existence in the family with the same double-edged sword. Now, however, Jack Hart saw his daughter under glaring red lights even in the wintry din of the room on that cold January night- she was sure of it, and she thought she might vomit on the spot. She felt exposed to the very flesh and gore beneath the thinly stretched pallor of her skin.

After a few gushing moments on Regina's part, Nancy came clacking pertly back into the room on her two-inch heels, no doubt having been alerted by the dayroom staff after what little semblance of peace it had was disturbed. Everything all right in here? Oh, Regina, come and sit. I know it's really hard for you to see your daughter suffering. And so needlessly, it seems sometimes. Nancy, who was normally cold and clinical with a brash insensitivity to even the most common spectrum of emotions, had a real weak spot for Regina, even though it was written in Lacey's chart that the woman was sadistically abusive and a key contributing factor to the psychiatric trauma that had led to various hospitalizations.

I just….oh, I'm sorry, Nancy, you must just think I'm a blubbering fool. It's just… Regina trailed off again, her red-rimmed eyes clouded over for the first time with a real curtain of guilt. Lacey felt herself turning over inside out and lost her breath, steeling herself inside for another of the asthma attacks that had been assailing her whenever she stepped outside into the pale omen of winter. She wasn't even outside yet and already a torrent, black force of terror for the vast unknown of the sky mingled with a faraway homesickness in the center of her soul; seeing her family should have perhaps settled her at least somewhat inside, but these two war torn strangers- these two people who looked and felt as apart as she did- were ghosts of the people she had lived with back home- imposters. Regina had never, as far back as Lacey could remember, shown any emotion other than rage and vengeance when it came to her daughter's strange, spiritual hypersensitivity that had manifested over the years into something evil and all-encompassing. But now her bleary eyes were like two thin, breakable mirrors into Lacey's haunted, rotting soul. The reflection she saw in them chilled her to the dark core.

Maybe reentering the outside world was not the best idea so soon, but even with her usually sound rationale blurred in the hell fires of her terror, Lacey was not one to back down from a challenge. Even now she saw the flames of hell fanning her shadow on the wall like some ominous religious monument, a plague of the spirit that had emptied her and one. Lacey wheezed a bit and reached instinctively for the inhaler, briefly glancing at Regina, whose worried gaze roved over her in panic. Honey, is the doctor going to come up and see you again? She never had asthma before, this is new, she explained to Nancy over her shoulder. Bring it with you when we go out, okay? Have you decided where you'd like to go and eat?

Breathing through the flames, Lacey stopped coughing and gulped enough oxygen that the hitches in her breath settled back into their chronic hyperventilation. Um, I guess Burger King, she mumbled for lack of a better idea. To her, everywhere outside was bound to look and feel the same- ominous and frozen and bleak, all the sentimental landmarks of her youth domed with evil. An alternate universe to the safe, flowered one that had been there in summer when she'd made love for the first time with Blake- for the first time at all. In fact, she remembered when the first dark winds of autumn had whistled in on angel's wings while her limbs wound around Blake in her mother's back seat, a ripened chill in even the smoggiest, crime-ridden corners of Trenton as Regina struggled to get back out onto the Turnpike. Lacey had been safe then even in the wake of an omen, shrouded by seraphic light and the melodic lullabies of a thousand angels as she felt her soul eclipse into its mate, the single other person on this earth whose soul matched nearly the exact pattern of hers.

They'd had big plans then, plans to celebrate an eternity of Christmases together and eventually get out of their respective dead end towns, and most of all not to be ill anymore. The traditions they began that first and final Christmas seemed not new but ingrained intrinsically into the winding histories of their souls. All the secret, safe places she uncovered with Blake- like the glow of the crime-ridden streets during the holidays and the sentimental rawness of their innermost souls merged into one familiar whole beneath the stale din of lights in his bedroom- all of those places had been so heavily ingrained in Lacey's soul before they met that her intense bond with Blake had shaped her back to the eternal soul she was.

And yet he had had it in him to extract himself from her painfully and unnaturally- at least to her, anyway. Lacey had donned the foolish hope within her impoverished soul that the light of home sparked deep within her whenever her other half was nearby might extinguish the darkness that plagued her within. But in her final hour when she'd seen vultures swoop down like omens into the blackness of night, the familiar tinny smog of Trenton miles away, the space between Blake and herself like a festering wound that was rapidly eradicating her- he had been off in Pennsylvania with his cousin hatching a plan to be rid of her. He had watched her fall from grace with a derisive snort and a few insidious parting words that had marred her forever on a soul level, and since then she had been a walking corpse with jaunty breathing. And now it was time to pile into the family van in a mask of a face and go to Burger King with the woman who had turned her away in the hellish wake of it all, labeling her a slut and an abomination when Blake let so cruelly iced her out of his life.

Alrighty, then, Jack said nervously to no one in particular, casting a wary, polite smile in Nancy's direction as he brusquely zipped up his winter coat. It was flamboyant, fishy green and the bold orange print on the back read, Marino, as in Dan- the most legendary quarter back to grace the history of football, or so Jack proclaimed it the prime of every football season. Suddenly, an unexpected well of black tears rose from the depths of Lacey, but the two thin sheets of her eyes were imposters and so they simply froze there in the tragic stillness. Jack patted Lacey once on the back and he might as well have smothered her in a bear hug, so disturbingly uncharacteristic was it for Jack to touch his daughter in any way, shape, or form. The team Robert Davis psychiatrists on the adolescent unit had once had the idea that Lacey was so stunted emotionally, almost to a child's level, due to some kind of more sexual trauma in her past. But if something of that nature had indeed been the dark seed, so to speak, that had planted this burning, rotting hell she claimed had possessed her, she kept her lips tightly sealed and Jack Hart appeared genuinely guileless.

Watching them go, Nancy Wright thought she saw a glimmer or at least an artificial reflection of Lacey's old fire flash through her eyes. She wondered what Lacey was seeing then through the darkness that surrounded her: Blake? The so-called flaming hearth of their passion that she claimed had been frozen in the black omen of this darkest winter of her life? She was certainly a poetic soul, and it seemed to Nancy that the shattered, crumbling lives around her lived as deep in the dredges of darkness and desperation as did Lacey. It would have heartened her to see the old wild flame of this beautiful, haunted girl reignited by even the fantasy of the life she left behind. But Lacey had said that going out into the evil omen of winter would remind her of Blake, and the low flame of her love would burn hellishly in the rotted corpse of her stagnated existence. And the reflection of an old flame in the hollows of her eyes flickered only for an instant, for in the second that Regina locked her in her canny gaze, Lacey appeared every bit the frightened, caged animal who had barred herself violently away from the world here once again. But why?

Mom, I can't go with you guys. I'm sorry….I know I said I would try, but I just can't. The escalation of panic in her voice could not help but resonate in even Jack's ears like flames licking their way out of hell. A simple man who saw the world in black and white, Jack Hart had spent much of his childhood locked in a closet or dodging bullets, but it wasn't until now that he felt a true chill of darkness slither like a snake out of hell into his soul. He would never admit it to his wife, whose sanity was hung by such a thin thread that it was no wonder Lacey had inherited some of the crazy, but Jack secretly felt trapped with his daughter's soul in purgatory. He had even driven her, unbeknownst to Regina, to a psychic he'd seen advertised in a local newspaper. This had been, of course, in the flaming trenches of late summer when all the world had damned well seemed suspended in the same muffled gray heat of purgatory that Lacey complained held the ghost of her soul adrift. She had lagged behind him looking for all the world like a spindly corpse.

Jack, who was not an imaginative man, had seen her in a queer new bubble of light that day, and it was a turn of fate for them all: He had painstakingly taken in the awful lethargy with which she seemed to drag herself up the steps and into the musty doorway, where a young blond in a long, sweeping skirt and spit-stained white T-shirt stood with a squirming two-year-old girl in her arms. The woman looked vaguely alarmed at the sight of his daughter, and then she took in the awkward, hulking shadow of Jack behind her and smiled. Later, long after her mother had lit candles over the flaming fires of hell in Lacey's soul and chanted to the gods to unleash the power of evil from the bruised and rotted center of her, the young woman had confided in Jack that she'd been scared of Lacey at first glance. Not her, but the hellish force that had taken up residence in the most vulnerable part of her soul, the pretty fair-skinned woman- Nadia- explained.

And like a bolt of lightning, a memory had struck him darkly then and hung heavy as an impending storm in his mind: Lacey drifting around her mother like some willowy ghost or figment of the ethers, belonging more to the dark jungle of swamps around them than her old vivacious self. Actually, if Jack were to put his finger on a character for his fathomless daughter before she had drifted like a ghost into this new eerie oneness with the dark side she spoke so much about, he would have said she was studious and reserved. Prudish, even, though he didn't like to think of her sexuality at all.

Though he had been raised like an animal by a drunken mother whose instability teetered on the edge of malice and witchery, Jack's family had been religious- at least on Sundays- and had boxed the image of his daughter away long ago in the musty pages of a Bible. His wife, it seemed, had done exactly the opposite. The reasons for this still perplexed and mystified Jack every day as he struggled to remain his trademark composure while his once-demure child's sexuality bloomed from sweetness into an evil, monstrous force.

Jack's family had been strict Catholics in spite of their sins- maybe in lieu of their sins- and he believed almost as fiercely as Lacey did in hellish forces that could worm their way into one's soul if it was left unguarded. The troublesome glitch for him was that to his knowledge, Lacey had asked God for forgiveness. In her own words, she had cried and begged at the wilted alter of her spirit for salvation, but her prayers had been muffled by the dredges of darkness where she now lived on the outskirts of society. Jack had shrugged helplessly and then gotten wasted at the bar that night. His daughter, who was in many ways a carbon copy of himself save for the fact that her face was a softer version of Regina's, had never been an overly emotional child. And now she regularly sprouted prose: She was bleeding out from her darkest center for all the world to see, clad in an eerie circus mask of vampish lipstick and dyed crimson hair. Jack, a man of few words, had found himself feeling unexpectedly homesick as of late, for gone were the stark manners and primrose sweetness of his first daughter.

But that late August day in the sports field surrounded by swamps in the dredges of Carteret's impoverished outskirts, it seemed to Jack that nature had played upon his weaknesses after all. He had prayed to God that her purity would be preserved and that, if it were truly the devil's work as that psychic woman had said, the devil would be exorcised from Lacey's soul. But until that moment in the fields surrounded by an endless vortex of ghastly smog, Jack had never imagined was truly a living force beyond the exact science of its ecosystems. Neither had he ever been a man of imagery, his cerebral existence having been composed neatly of blacks and whites since earliest childhood. But that day, as the pale scorching light of noon was eclipsed in a sultry twilight, he saw with uncanny ease why Lacey- with her new naked eyes, as she referred to them- saw demonic red lights glowing from the televisions inside neighboring living rooms. And to his horror, it looked to Jack as though his sixteen-year-old daughter- her raw flesh exposed to all matter of dark and light realms of the world in her black daisy dukes and lacy sheath of a shirt- had been eclipsed into shadow with the sun. It appeared that she had faded into the dark omen that infested the swampy landscape, and he wondered for the first shameful time why it seemed to him that the core of his newly fragile daughter really was evil, after all.

Now Jack's heart nearly capsized with the memory of that perverse inclination, which- like a storm or other natural disaster- had been the turn of fate for the Hart family that year. Lacey had gone from a strange state of almost serene lucidity that summer to a wound that was bleeding from within its dark core, and since Blake left there had been no way even to thinly patch over the wound of herself with gaws.

It's fine, let’s just choose a restaurant, Jack said now, his voice firm with the sort of remote condescension a teacher used on an unruly student. Only the firmness of his voice sounded as forged and unnatural in Jack's voice as it would had he been a child himself, Lacey thought as her terror mounted as fervently as a fever. She looked around at the shell of her family- of her life- in the dark grave of winter, and in a haunting way the farmland behind the hospital in Piscataway was lit to stark, rich light by the fairy tale of deepest winter. Fifty Cent played from the speaker, conjuring from the hellish flames of her soul images of bright, tinny lights in the inner cities of Trenton and downtown New Brunswick.

I can't choose a restaurant, Lacey said in that ghastly, trembling voice that was not her own. I have to go back to the hospital. I wasn't ready to be out here yet.

Oh, for crying out loud. She's been sick since the day she was born, Jack. Regina cursed under her breath. "The only thing left to pray for is that the next time she gets sick it's with a terminal illness- a real, in-the-flesh disease! This way we can be rid of the darkness of her curse, as she says, Regina sneered. In the backseat Lacey dropped her hands anxiously into her lap and felt the wilt of her soul to rot all over again. She wondered with the blackest abject terror how long she would have to feel it happen again and again when she knew her soul had already been incinerated to ashes by the evil within. It grasped at her from the beyond inside her soul, its gnarled fingers like snakes still reaching for her soul so that it might be further exhumed into the flaming trenches of hell. Apparently, there was still one measly part of her still breathing.

Mom, I can't breathe. Stop saying that, I'm begging you, stop saying these things when I can't breathe! Lacey shrieked now into the eerily thin silence that hung like a purgatorial veil between the ghost of her soul and the movie scene of her family around her. Her mother was still mean- sometimes it seemed to Lacey that Regina had sprouted from the very seed of evil that had molested the most fragile, wilted place in her own soul- but Jack was subdued, and that was rare. Though Nancy Wright had dubbed him a decent, if socially challenged man of very few words, this was not normally an entirely accurate statement. In fact, Jack Hart could be downright verbose about his opinions when he had them- and more often than not he did, though of his so-called passions centered around his Fantasy Football League and chasing all the thriving Indians out of Bollywood. (This was how he famously referred to the town where Lacey went to high school, a large portion of which was flourishing- in Jack's words- with ever Indian establishment from 'curry shacks' to 'cash and carries').

But now he was silent and grim. And Regina's hatred of her daughter was a palpable hellish force of its own, dragging Lacey even further down into the dark realm of evil in her core- in her senses. Her sexuality rose like a monster or a beast into her throat again as she remembered what it was like to be alive in earnest- to feel the blood pulsing like so many dangerous rivers through her veins beneath the candy-coated lights in the artificiality of New Brunswick, where she had crossed with Sabrina into the dark side of the human spirit. Still, even as she was stripped to her skeleton by the eerie realm of darkness and her fragile bond with her best friend frayed apart, Lacey had warmed herself by the fireside of her sexuality. It still glowed safely inside the hearth of her spirit then, for Blake had still been here and the wintry darkness had not yet fully invaded the core of her soul. Blake.

Guys, she said again. I'm not ready to be outside yet. I swear to you, it was a mistake. And it was my choice. I want to go back.

You are not going back, Jack said sharply. He would not have said so, but a black omen had dropped like a stone into his own stomach at the banshee-like keening of his once-frozen daughter in the backseat. He had the sudden hellish feeling that if he took her back now she might never come out alive or in one piece. It would be like piecing back together the broken parts of a doll, to keep her afloat in the world even for an inconsequential dinner. But Jack was a man of determination, and once he set his mind to something he was not easily deterred.

Lacey sighed heavily, felt herself settle back into the rotten blackness at the core of her- the part of herself that was not her so much as it had inhabited her. Sinister and demonic, the force at the center of her raged like a fire, mutilating the doe-eyed vision of her pale face in the rear view mirror when she glanced up to the front seat. But it was not only this strange, evil outside force that haunted her relentlessly, ravaging her most tender insides and possessing her with a blackness that threatened every second to change her into some raging, heartless beast she did not know. It was also the demon called memory.

Lacey's memories of Blake were like a thin lifeline that had not been tossed to her the universe or even the tender hand of a loved one, but rather had been recovered by her own canny survivalism once he was gone- and she was left to plunge wholly into the darkness that had plagued her all her life. The burnt flame of her sexuality, charred by darkness but still aglow in a sinister light deep inside the forbidden core of her, raged once more to life as she nearly choked on the snakes she felt slithering from darkest pitch into her throat. The demonic snakes slithered into her brain and imposed so much pressure there she half-believed that her brain would truly explode, but she squeezed her eyes shut against the grisly, hellish force that had beseeched and claimed her body and soul for its own. And she allowed its only lesser evil to run like fire as fire through her hollow veins, rekindling at least the dim, illusory replication of life.

No one believes me, Lacey said at last into the unnatural black silence that filled her father's Buick, the icy evil inside Lacey that had frozen them all into more stark separate corners than ever. But there really is a demonic force inside me. It is shrinking me- wilting me, even- into my center, and yet I still believe in God.

Lacey, Jack warned through bared teeth, "What did I fucking tell you about bringing this crazy nonsense out into the real world. We didn't get a sitter for our normal daughter to join you in the loony bin-"

"But Dad, you're not listening to me! That's the fucking problem- everyone is sealing me away behind sterile white walls without ever taking time to look into me and see what the real problem is!" Lacey screamed at once, and the unnatural roar of her voice seemed to have shocked her out of the deep-seated dark stillness that had frozen her- and her parents- moments before. Regina rolled her olive eyes so far back in her head that Lacey thought how corpselike she had always appeared, even more so in this alternate universe where everyone seemed to be turned inside out so that they wore their inherit darkness on the outside. She choked back a sob. Even at his inherit core, her father did not appear to have a sinister, malicious intent in his entire body. She felt a wave of homesickness for him pull her under, for never had she felt more estranged from the predictable safety of him than she did in this hellish lower realm of demonic energies that had possessed her from the core- stolen her somehow from the few things she had ever held safe and dear.

"No, you crazy little shit, you are not listening to me", Jack growled out, his voice rising and booming at the end in a way it only ever had when Lacey was a young girl and he was soaked through with his sickness, his own personal hell-born haunting. Alcoholism. Lacey shivered and heaved out a sob.

Sitting there crying like a fucking overgrown baby, Jack raged. I swear to God, Regina, I'll have her institutionalized tonight. We'll say yes to Brisbane, lock her up and throw away the key! Should have known from the goddamn time she was born- wailing like a freak of nature and not shutting her trap for two minutes until she was damn near three- that she would turn out to be a failure!

I know. You should have listened to me all along. I knew from the day I brought her home that there was something wrong inside her, and it tipped me off-kilter, too. It caused these imbalances I deal with…, Lacey heard her mother say from far away as she felt her soul wilt back into the hell-born flames, and the only weapon against death became memory once more.

Regina, let's not take this too far, Jack snapped like a rabid animal. Lacey saw that her mother remained an imposing statue, and her silence made her husband fidget in his seat, flicking the blinker on and off as though counting to ten in his head. You certainly are no walk in the park. No Fourth-of-July picnic, Lacey heard him say.

In the summer everything was fine, Lacey said quite simply to no one in particular, an eerie intonation in her voice- a fathomless blue note of sadness that was incomprehensible to even the disturbed likes of her parents, who had also been hollowed to their skeletons by the demonic force that plagued her.

Her parents did not respond, or Lacey did not hear them as, like a vessel, she was transported from the haunted dead of winter back to the first weeks of her time with the love of her life, who seemed long lost from her now. Feverishly homesick and unbearably hollow inside, she gritted her teeth and closed her eyes, mumbling about needing a nap before they arrived at the restaurant- which, she thought on a blue note of sadness, was true. Living here in this lower realm of humanity where darkness molested the senses and heaven was as lost to her as a single star amid a constellation in the terrifyingly vast dome of the frozen sky……it was utterly exhausting, had drained her of the light of her soul's natural spark. The fires of hell fueled a vicious cycle, for the more exhausted she became- and really, grief had carved her into a seized tent of a person- the more readily that sinister darkness all around her infiltrated her fragile bones.

Lacey was afloat in the gossamer heat of early spring with Blake. In her blindness Lacey sometimes mentally traced the eerie blue glow of the halls at Robert Davis like silver linings, tried to convince herself that they were indeed the same walls in which the gauzy sunlight of early spring where love once bloomed for the first time in her soul. That first day with him was almost haunting, she recalled, when Blake had seemed to lose himself as he peered at her through the somber glaze of sad olive eyes. They had been sitting beside one another in the canteen while the music teacher, who had started out by asking them all what their favorite songs were and why, had been summoned to break up a fight in the hallway. It was like that on the inpatient unit; there was an almost tangible madness trapped in the ghastly blue lights and sickroom sterility of the walls, and young tender souls were trapped like fireflies by it. Blake, who harbored a deep-seated rage that had been planted there like some dark seed in childhood, erupted into the flaming orange madness almost daily.

So you've never told me, he whispered on that first day that their countenance had been planted like its own seed in the sacred hush of the fertile earth outside. "What do you think of me? Obviously you know how I feel about you. I've been watching you like a hawk every day since I first saw you. I lost my interest in Kelliann the first second I saw you. I don't know what it is, woman, but it's turned me inside out. It's like there was this….halo of pale but brilliant light around you, and it felt like the total eclipse of my life. Something happened to me inside when I first saw you, Lacey. It made me believe in God", he said with that heartbreaking candor of the truly mentally ill.

But Lacey was taken. At first she had felt inexplicably sorry for the bare, aching yolk of the sun outside that day, having been stripped like it was to the paleness of spring. But also there was the hopeful hum of frictioning cicadas outside in the cherry blossom sweetness of this first real spring of Lacey's life. She looked down at her lap, felt the newly budded season of her sexuality ache to the sort of over ripeness that made her feel curiously as though she'd missed the mark in life….as if the joy that consumed her at the tantalizing nearness of this strange, almost electrically emotional boy had carried her further rather than closer to home.

So I've laid my cards out on the table, Blake said, eyeing her like a beast who had hunted down his prey. Lacey shivered with the pleasurable humiliation of his palpable hunger for her, unconsciously spreading her legs just fractionally in her checkered capri pants. She placed her palms in her lap and when she dared to look up at the electrified intensity on his face, she saw more than the ravenous beast who wished to not only touch her, but claim and possess the totality of her being. She felt the pale glow of fairy lightness from the sun outside, felt the chill of it in her soul as a true awareness of the Other Side transformed her within. The flickering pallor of the sun mingled with the sickroom restlessness in Blake's hooded eyes and she knew: He was as blind and mad for her as she was for him.

Now what do you think of me? Blake repeated, his impatience thinly masked by the low, seductive tone of his voice as he raised a finger into the air, cannily swept the room with flames in his eyes, and brushed one thumb along the length of her thigh. Oh, God, I want you, he murmured hotly then, inching dangerously close to her as if the dark cloister of intimate space between any two people in such a place was something he could transcend. As if the steely cage around her soul was something he could violate with ease. For the first real time her walls came down and the lavender blooms of spring grew too wild for containment behind the neat white picket fences in her dreams.

Blake wanted her with a beastly fervor Lacey could feel running through her veins; the realm of his lust and familiar intimacy with her was of a primal, fiery realm, an animal product of one's visceral nature. There are many places- memories, almost- that bloomed to life inside of me when I first saw you. First was a ghetto where children danced like sprites in the seamiest rotten corners of a brick tenement. This was a place where people lived inside their animal natures, where plants grew to the wild excess of a jungle on broken-down front porches and the stench of poverty and molestation were reflected in the pale flame of summer sun. I don't know who you were or who I was, or even if the vision was real at all, but I know that when I saw you, this image flashed in my mind. No, it flashed in my soul. And with it came the cataclysmic sense that you were like….another half to me, that within you I would be complete, or at least the memory and knowledge of God would be. And it occurred to me that you are half of everywhere I've ever been. She stopped abruptly, sad blue eyes like broken glass as she cast him a furtive glance. You probably think I'm insane.

If you were, it would certainly make sense given our current place of residence. Blake graced her with one of his wicked, toothy grins that made his cheekbones appear to be set even higher on his angular face, and Lacey felt her lust, a life force all its own now, settle like a raw, molten sunset into the core of her. Sublime's Santeria- Blake's song of choice from the album about which he had been impressively factual and verbose- still played softly in the background. The sultry, daring lyrics and gossamer heat outside had lulled Lacey into a trance of sorts, conjuring a Jamaican sunset in her soul. In Jamaica, Lacey sensed, the orange abyss of the sky would be streaked pink by the heavens, the rawness of it aching terribly in her spirit. Blake hummed softly to the music as he grasped her palm suddenly and began to trace the silver linings of it lightly with his fingers, sighing deeply as a familiar fire built up visibly inside his fragile bones. Your skin is so exquisitely soft, he whispered, licking flames into her eat and nearly eliciting a strangled moan from her tightly pursed mouth. The soul beneath it is so precious and rare, sometimes I succumb to the illusion that you are an angel on earth.

The criminal sight of her hand in his as sunset came and turned the molten sky blood red before ashen gray outside stirred a few anxious or accusing glances their way, but the music teacher- Charlie was his name- was coaxing one of the two petulant bipolar patients who had moments before been a rage-filled tangle of arms and legs and sweat. Both of the teenage girls- Lara and Camille were their names- we bisexual and involved in a triangle with the only other male on the unit, Davy. Their skin shone with the fever of spring and in the same breath glowed eerily blue with the grisly memories of torture and madness locked into the walls from centuries earlier. Back then the building had been a true institution where unspeakable horrors of inhumanity befell the poor lost souls who lived here trapped in the mad flames of their own minds. In the timeless vessel of her mind's eye, Lacey saw the regal austerity of old English courtyards adorned with gardens that should have been heartened by the lily whiteness of pristine flowers abloom in the gated wings, but rather felt cold as a corpse. The gothic societies for former centuries were as sick inside as the patients who suffered crimes of inhumanity at its hands, Lacey thought. She much preferred astral travel to the pristine coldness of a society that seemed almost primal in its riches, so strong was the presence of the supernatural and so firm was the belief in black magic.

But the sickly sweet gardens in her mind over which pure blue skies ached had bestowed upon those eras a courtly elegance that still softened the austerity of the campus courtyards outside the canteen's window. Never had Lacey felt so eclipsed by the celestial presence of spring than she did now with Blake beside her, his soul nearly inside her own in the ultimate act of merging when in truth they had hardly dared to touch. Fragrant dandelion dust sifted in fragile blooms above what appeared from this vantage point like fields of gold, errant poppies flitting like fireflies in the pale flame of the sun. They danced sprite like from the top of one vivid fuchsia to the next, the fairy lightness of early spring a cool wind with the power to bloom one's cherry blossom sweetness to the surface, or chill the soul to the bone. The celestial gardens seemed to bloom from the sacred womb of the earth, inherently fragile.

You want to know what I think of you, Lacey said at last, struggling to keep her tone steady even as she was sucked like the ephemeral heads of those poppies into the all-encompassing beauty of Blake. He, too, seemed stripped to his fragile bones as he panted heavily in her ear like the slave to his desire he was.

Yes, Blake whispered desperately. I do. Tell me what drew your soul to mine like a moth to a flame. There is plenty of time to discover what molds your body to mine even now, as if it is not a structure of its own but an extension of my need for you.

I think, Lacey managed, "that you are a confused soul teetering precariously between darkness and light, trapped like a moth in a flame in your own personal purgatory. You have a reputation around here for living in your animal nature and being very sexually driven, which is not so strange for a place like this. But I think that sex is ultimately a distraction, not a source of fulfillment for the depths of your soul. I see you as very poor in spirit with a strong addiction that has all but dehumanized you and confused your brain even further than it was as a child, when you were a sensitive child who suffered because your thoughts and moods swung too quickly for you to ever get a clear grasp on who you were. Lastly, I think you are on a destructive path. I have every reason to uncage myself from the flame of your soul and run like wildfire away from you….looking back only far into the future when distance casts the illusion that the shocking, celestial beauty of what you see and remember appears rather like a still life painting rather than a real odyssey of heaven on earth. Love would seem a conjecture rather than the terrifyingly real bloom in my soul right now. Right now it is a seed that grows and leads to everything. I should snip it from the fertile womb of the earth and walk away."

Lacey half expected Blake to rage on her the way he had several times earlier in the week when she had tried to shine light on his suffering, the weaknesses he could not abide. She had pointed out that in painting his nails pink and behaving half the time in a girlish manner did not scare women in a mental hospital away, for often people here were more viscerally aware of their own ambiguous natures than the real life members of society who stuffed away the inevitability of nature like