The Break-Up Retreat(77)

Martina lingers on me.

“Why are you even here?” Her lips twitch in disdain. “Who were you going to sell your article to? A celebrity rag?”

“No, of course not,” I protest.

“So—what, then?” Her lips curdle into a non-smile. “An exposé? Who did you talk to? All the employees here have NDAs, you know. It doesn’t matter what you paid them, it’ll pale in comparison to what they will end up paying in court. They will pull their quotes the moment I tell them to.”

“I didn’t talk to anyone.” My heart is hammering painfully away in my chest.

Sandra is sleeping only a few rooms away. If she makes the connection now . . .

“What was your plan, then?” Martina crosses her arms and takes a step toward me.

“We don’t have time for this,” I urge her, refusing to back away. “We need to check on the generator, now. Turn it on. And then you need to let us all leave, before you end up with a much bigger problem than a freelance journalist trying to write a story.”

Martina shakes her head.

“No. Not until you tell me what your objective is.”

I’m sick of being scared of her. I’m tired of falling under her spell.

Maybe she could bully me, when I wasn’t prepared; when her alternating between soulful looks, and understanding, and good old-fashioned cold reading took me by surprise.

But this is not a game, anymore.

There are worse things than Doctor Martina Hastings to be scared of.

“It was to be an undercover article about you mistreating your patients. About the fact that people have gone broke after coming to Himlafall. How they’ve had marriages and families fall apart. How women have gone missing after coming here.”

Martina looks stricken.

“. . . that’s ridiculous,” she attempts to argue.

“No,” I say, making my voice as hard as I can. “It’s not. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen how you pressure and belittle your patients. This may not be a cult, like some think, but it’s not much better.”

“You have no idea what you are—” Martina begins to say, and I interrupt her, near yelling:

“Can we please , for the love of all that is holy, get to the goddamned generator and turn the lights back on ?”

Martina opens her mouth.

Then she deflates.

“Fine.”

She begins walking out of the small, cramped foyer, where a mess of shoes are stacked against one wall and a mop and a bucket of dark, muddy water is leaning against the other. I think I hear her muttering something that sounds suspiciously like “bitch .”

The hallway is entirely laid in darkness. No natural light and fresh, verdant plants for the workers, apparently; there are doors on both sides, all of them closed, and one at the end.

“Christ, what is that smell?” I ask, inadvertently, as we’re halfway down.

It’s strange, thick and heavy enough to cut through the metallic scent of the storm, with an odd sweetness to it; like spoiled meat, mixed with something else.

“I know.” Martina sounds just as disgusted as I feel.

She sounds less like Doctor Martina Hastings, now. More like a person.

“Sandra must have absolutely destroyed the bathroom last night. We might have to get the whole place sterilized. I don’t know what she ate, but it can’t have been good.”

I almost say something—Her daughter had stomach flu —but I bite my tongue at the last second.

Martina stops at the last door, putting her hand on the doorknob.

“Just to be clear,” she says, without looking at me. “You might not like my methods. You might think they are too harsh, or too extreme. You might think this place is cultish. But I have never, ever tried to do anything but help my patients. And I have helped them. Many of them. Trust me. I have a desk full of letters from people who say I saved their lives.”

She lingers, for a second, and then shakes her head.

“Every single time a woman tries to do something,” she mutters, before opening it.

She steps into the dark little room.

There’s a small window, high up on the wall; hardly any light is coming through it, water running so thick down the glass that the outside looks distorted.

The place looks like a storage space; I see the outline of shelves full of extra blankets and pillows, some boxes stacked on top of each other in the corner.

Martina turns around, looking this way and that way, and then she mutters:

“I can’t see for shit,” pulls a cell phone out of her pocket and turns on the flashlight.

At first, the light is blinding. I raise my hand to cover my eyes, blink a couple of times to let them adjust, before lowering it again.

Martina is standing, utterly motionless, a couple of steps away from me. The cold, harsh light from her phone is shining onto the floor and the wall on the short side of the small room.

What remains of the generator looks like it used to be a metal box. Orange and dark gray. An ugly industrial thing, rendered almost beautiful by its own destruction.

There are bits and pieces of it scattered around the box. The cord that used to run into the wall has been severed violently, leaving a deep wound in the cheap wooden flooring underneath.

There are deep, crushing cuts on what used to be the generator, delivered with seeming randomness, malforming and misshaping it, filling the air with the smell of crushed metal.