Chapter Two

Elizabeth

It was just a whisper.

A distant echo, fragile, like a reflection in the water before the ripples distorted it.

A memory.

The girl felt very small at first. No, more like fragments of when she had been a child.

She saw loose, fragmented images, as if she were looking at them through a dirty glass. There was a diffuse light coming through the window on a moonless night. There was the sound of low whinnies and the hoofbeats of horses in the streets pulling carriages. But those sounds did not interest the girl. She was on all fours on the floor peeping, her ear pressed to a door, while someone spoke on the other side.

Murmuring voices.

She didn't understand all the words, but she understood the tone: seriousness, urgency, fear. The door had not closed all the way and the small hand opened the door a couple of centimeters to peek inside.

It was a group of three gathered in a large room, where a fire was crackling in a fireplace and there were several libraries full of books and empty armchairs. Near the large windows were desks with more books, a globe and a pair of telescopes pointing to the sky. All the people were standing around arguing heatedly.

"It's crazy to go just us, we'd have to wait for Jules," said a tall man, with a sharp face and somewhat messy hair, wearing a suit with a frock coat.

"Gespenster," sighed a dark-haired young man, wearing a homespun shirt and tartan pants. "Jules is busy, we don't have time to use the tunnels, we don't have a crossing date for another week. And neither does Alexander."

The girl took a good look at the face that had spoken. She recognized him. It was her father.

"Eddie, you're not going anywhere! Haven't you thought about us?" Who spoke was a young woman with long, wavy black hair, wearing a cream-colored dress. She also recognized the woman. Her mother.

"We can't let a thing like this loose on the streets. If we wait any longer who knows how many victims there will be in days."

"I'm willing to help you, but I still think it's too big for us," said the man named Gespenster.

"No, Eddie. If you're going to go, at least wait for the others. The two of you going alone is crazy. There hasn't been an attack in two days. The ley tunnels for the others to come through should be open in a few days, right?"

"Sissy... and what will happen if there is an attack before that?"

"And what will happen if Lizzy has to grow up without a father? Have you thought about it?"

The couple looked at each other. The man sighed and leaned against a desk.

Gespenster nodded with a somber face. "Virginia is right, Edgar. Let's wait. Maybe nothing will happen. And if we rush into a loup-garou, maybe we'll be the ones who become the next victims."

The woman named Virginia approached her husband and cupped his face. "You know it breaks my heart, but we are no longer those youngsters. We have a daughter."

Edgar looked at her and their eyes locked as their foreheads touched. "I know, I know," he let out in a soft tone trying to calm the woman.

"I know it pricks your conscience and so does mine, but the thought of you two ending up dead terrifies me even more."

Gespenster walked over to one of the couches and collapsed. "Let's wait, Edgar. It's for the best. What would you do otherwise? Tell Scotland Yard? They've never believed us, why should it be any different now? Unless the Queen gives us some credibility we can't ask for help."

At that moment a rustling sound alerted the three people in the room. The girl had leaned too hard on the door and it had been ajar. The three adults looked at the girl in surprise, but their faces relaxed at the sight of her.

Virginia tried to look calm and approached the door. "Look what we found! A spy!" she said in a nervous tone. She bent down and took her in his arms. Her mother hugged her tightly and gave her a kiss on the cheek. "What happened? Can't you sleep?"

The girl spoke timidly. She had thought she would be scolded. "I heard noises."

Her father leaned over to her and whispered something to her, as he smiled weakly and ruffled her hair gently with one hand. "You need to rest, Elizabeth. Tomorrow you'll be sleepy if you stay up this late, and won't be able to play."

Elizabeth.

Elizabeth. Elizabeth. Elizabeth.

Suddenly the scene began to lose consistency. The whole place seemed to be shaking as the image seemed to fade.

The exact words that followed escaped her mind, melting into the air like ash in the wind. But one word remained, clear, unbroken:

Elizabeth. Lizzy.

Her name.

Her parents had called her by her name and one of her nicknames.

From her mother's arms she passed into her father's, who was saying something she could no longer hear.

And then, the memory faded.

***

Elizabeth awoke with a gasp.

The darkness again. She knew where she was. This was her reality. The other, just a memory in a dream.

How long had it been? Would the ordeal ever end?

A sob burst from her throat before she could contain it.

Why?

Why hadn't the dream lasted longer?

Why had her mind snatched it away just when it seemed she would find answers?

Hot tears rolled down her cheeks.

She didn't understand the pain coursing through her, but she felt it in every fiber of her body. A deep emptiness, an unfulfilled longing that burned from within.

Now she remembered her parents. Even if that was almost nothing more than a foggy memory in her mind.

She did not remember her home entirely. Only that memory and other fragments. Disconnected landscapes, green hills, starry skies, sometimes rains in the afternoon. She heard warm laughter and disjointed words.

But that was all.

She didn't remember who she had been before all this.

But now she knew something she didn't have before:

Her name.

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Elizabeth.

***

Two years.

Time had become a blurry concept, a thin thread that stretched and shrank meaninglessly. Most of the time she didn't know if it was day or night, if the season had changed, if the world out there still existed. The voices talking exchanged information and from that she had deduced that days had passed. Days that turned into weeks, weeks into months, and months into two years in captivity.

Her world was this for her.

A cold, gray, metallic room. A stretcher to which she was bound hand and foot. Always immobile. Always trapped.

At times, the gurney would slowly tilt until half of her body was upright, allowing her to see the diffuse glimpses through the bandage on her eyes of the bright lights from the ceiling. That bandage was removed rarely and only for what must have been a couple of minutes, where her eyes were cleaned. But it allowed her to see something, as her eyes burned from the subdued brightness. The neat instruments, the people wrapped in white coats watching her as if she were not human. Then they would cover her again, leaving her lying or half-laying down for hours, days. And then the bandage back on.

She did not speak.

Not because she didn't want to, but because she could not.

The muzzle was still there, trapping her words, silencing any sound she tried to make. She had learned to hate it, to dream of ripping it off her face and screaming until she tore the very air.

The only relief was sleep.

Only in her dreams could she be free.

In them, she was again a child, or a teenager, looking at the stars with other children and friends. She remembered fragments of a former life, glimpses of people who loved her, places that may have once been her home. There she could run in green meadows, she could breathe without that oppressive weight on her face.

But she always woke up.

She always came back to the stretcher.

They kept her alive in the most efficient way possible.

She didn't eat. She didn't drink. She wasn't allowed to do anything for herself.

Instead, she was fed with a tube, a tasteless mixture of liquid mush that was lowered directly into her stomach. It was mechanical, impersonal, a routine repeated with relentless precision.

She was cleaned every day.

At first, the touch of those anonymous hands made her feel fierce disgust. She shuddered as they wiped her skin with a damp cloth that always felt icy, and she was unable to turn away, unable to resist. But time had forced her to get used to it. The horrible sensation of relieving herself in that way brought tears to her eyes, but she had to swallow her pride and leave her dignity in the depths of a tightly closed chest.

The disgust was still there, but now it slept in the back of her mind, like everything else.

The doctors and scientists around her were talking among themselves, while studying her body, but at the same time ignoring her conscience. To them, she was not supposed to be a person.

She was an experiment.

A test subject. A lab rat.

And the experiments were relentless.

They wanted to discover her secret name.

She listened to the conversations debating her existence, the way they theorized about what she was, where she came from, what she could do.

Some believed that her power was tied to her real name, and that if they could get her to say it, they could control her.

But they couldn't. Not with that muzzle sealing her lips.

So they tried other methods. But that didn't work. She knew that, even if they took that thing out of her mouth, she should never say her name to those people. She knew her name had been Elizabeth, but she had had nicknames. Two nicknames in particular. One she remembered as Lizzy and one other.

Nicknames. In a certain way the nicknames had more weight than the name. They conveyed an intimacy that the solemnity of a name often did not. Perhaps the real name was the nickname and the external name was just another nickname but one that sealed the identity. Whether it was the nicknames, or her name, or those of the people she remembered as her parents, she knew she should never say them. Not to those people at least.

Then came the first experiments. So horrible that she even preferred everything else to that torture. As she began to listen to the untying of her restraints she could imagine what was to follow.

She was immersed in icy water for hours, watching how her body reacted to the extreme pressure. In the first few months it was torture, but as time went by it seemed to gradually subside. Her body was placed in barometric chambers, reducing oxygen to lethal levels.

She was sprayed with corrosive acids to measure her resistance.

They injected her with viruses and bacteria, watching as she grew sick, weakened, coughed up blood for days... and how, in the end, she always healed.

After each illness, her body never succumbed to the same pathogen again. The marks of burns, lacerations and wounds disappeared without a trace.

She had been completely shaved. According to what she had heard it was to keep her cleaner, but the truth was that it had been to insert needles into her scalp, piercing her skin, reaching her brain to measure her electrical activity. Not only that, they had also studied her resistance to shocks.

And later, what fascinated them most now was her relationship with water.

They had discovered that she could breathe underwater. The icy water had become something that no longer felt cold.

The first time she was submerged in ice water it didn't happen. Nor did it happen the second time. It was on the third test.

The truth was that, when the third test had come, she had decided that perhaps dying was better than enduring it. To her surprise and that of the others, after about ten seconds when she had stopped convulsing from the lack of oxygen, that change began. She felt a new burning that replaced the ice water and let her body do the rest. Her normal lungs stopped working. But instead she felt a pang a little below her lungs, while she felt a sensation in her neck as if something had opened up. Before she could react her body was breathing underwater.

It provoked astonishment and all kinds of speculation for days. Elizabeth captured those conversations in front of her as if those people really didn't know that she could understand them.

As if her consciousness and pain were invisible to them.

"Maybe it's a marine species like the mermaids the other team captured on Skye," one of the doctors had once said, his voice full of wonder.

"It's similar to sharks and whales. The lungs collapse and a second type of oxygen-filtering organ, similar to gill filaments, is activated."

"But that doesn't explain... the other thing. Her voice…"

"Well, if it really is a mermaid, or more like a siren since she tolerate fresh water too, then it would enter the realm of myth. They said they could charm ancient sailors. But I don't remember reading anything about them causing anything like what happened to those poor sailors."

Poor sailors. What was she then?

The test subject. The subject of experimentation.

For what? What were they trying to achieve? And among those questions, another one she didn't dare to think about too much. What was she herself then?

Many of those conclusions about mermaids and sirens had been carried out in the most macabre way. So macabre, that Elizabeth actually wished she had died in the tank where the test had been conducted. Days later the gurney to which she was strapped had turned over and the horror began.

She had felt the scalpel go through her back. That was the first time she had ever experienced vivisection. They had opened her up to study her. A little anesthesia to keep her from moving but she was still aware of it. After each study she could feel the sting of the wounds closing and then her body was as good as new.

Ready for the next vivisection.

Every part of her body was cut, studied, catalogued.

Because no matter how many experiments they did.

No matter how much they subjected her.

She didn't die.

And that terrified them as much as it intrigued them.

***

Elizabeth woke up with wet eyes every day, the echo of a silent cry still caught in her throat. Every night, the same ritual: a vague dream, blurred like the reflection of a broken moon in troubled waters. Fragments of a past she could not quite retain, just glimpses of faces with names and sometimes without names. Places that vanished as soon as she tried to hold on to them. And every morning, the same bitter awakening, wondering why the dream had not lasted longer, why the only crack in her confinement closed so soon.

Two years had passed, and the cell remained unchanged. Always the same routine. The cleaning, the food through the tube, the experiments. But in her mind, something was crumbling. Every dream was a ruin lost in the mist, a reminder that there was something before that prison, something that mattered, even if her memory could not trace the exact shape of what she had lost.

Sometimes a certain phrase would ring in her head, disconnected from everything else. There were no images but voices speaking in unison, it could have been her voice, but whose were the others? it was very distant and for some reason she felt a pang in her heart when she heard it, although she didn't know why.

Sometimes she wondered if these dreams were real or simply the last vestige of her sanity writhing in an attempt to survive. What if her past was nothing more than a mirage created by her own despair? What if, at some point, all that was had ceased to exist beyond the walls of her mind? But then she would wake up again, with tears in her eyes and an inexplicable pain in her chest. It didn't matter if it was real or not. It hurt. And as long as it hurt, she would keep dreaming.

For the moment that pain and memories kept her more alive than that regeneration of her body.

A part of her wanted to die, but she knew she had to live.

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