Melissa Pace, the former editor and writer for Elle magazine, as well as a past finalist in the Humanitas New Voices Fellowship for emerging television and screenwriters, shares an excerpt from her debut novel The Once and Future Me (out August 19th).

Excerpt: The Once and Future Me by Melissa

Synopsis

Virginia, 1954. When a woman wakes on a patient transport bus arriving at Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital, she remembers nothing of her life before that moment, none of the dark things she must’ve seen and done that forged her into the skillful and cunning fighter she is. Doctors tell her she’s Dorothy Frasier, a paranoid schizophrenic, committed for her violent delusions. She’s certain they’re wrong—until disturbing visions of a dystopian future in which frantic scientists urge her to complete “the mission” and save mankind begin to invade her reality.

Believing it’s Hanover causing the hallucinations, she tells no one and focuses only on escaping—until there’s a visitor. A man whose loving face—and touch—she remembers, a man who knows all about her visions, because he’s spent years helping her cope with them: her husband, Paul Frasier.

Now she’s sure of nothing, caught between two realities. Believe in the future, and she might save the world. Believe in her husband and doctors’ plans for her treatment, and she might save herself. She needs answers, but to get them she’ll have to harness the darkness inside her as she risks her freedom, her mind, and ultimately her life in a heart-stopping quest for the truth.

Content Warning: Violence

Prologue

Death is louder than I thought it would be.

I could have predicted the blinding white light. Some close to the end would speak of a radiant beam that beckoned. And they were right—it is beautiful, shot through with bits of brilliant color that fly by me like heavenly confetti.

But the roar. No one mentioned the roar.

Its vibrations course through me, voltaic and swift, carving what feel like vast networks of roads and tunnels deep into my being. And there’s a taste. Metallic. Just a tinge that hints at conduction. Maybe that’s it, maybe together the thundering light and I complete some sort of vast, eternal circuit, and that’s all there is. No heaven, no hell, just the white roar, everlasting and indifferent.

All my sins, if not forgiven, at least forgotten.

Oblivion. I can live with that.

So we proceed, the white roar and I, hurtling through the cosmos till I lose all sense of time, space, and myself. It’s perfect, and it lasts and lasts—until it doesn’t.

Without warning, the white roar pulls away, leaving me alone in the dark, trying to remember how to breathe.

Trying to remember anything at all.

Chapter 1

My first breaths come guttural and convulsive, like those of a drowning victim finally breaking the surface. But what surface?

Where am I?

The air feels steamy, ripe with the sour tang of damp woolens, diesel, and Naugahyde. I’m definitely in a vehicle. Can feel a rumbling, a sickening sense of motion—and a jagged, ringing pain between my ears, like someone’s wedged a piece of flint deep inside my brain. I want so badly to escape it, to slide back down into the dark and its painless sleep.

But then I hear her. The voice in my head. She’s vigilant and pushy. Issuing her orders like some surly fairy godmother:

Eyes open, this is not the time for sleep.

You’ve got things to do. Important things.

Such as? But like me, the voice appears to have no answers. Just that vague things-to-do edict she won’t stop repeating.

So I open my eyes—

But all I see is a roiling blur of color and shadow, bobbing and weaving across my field of vision. I try to will just a piece of this dizzying sideshow into focus, the swirling mass of red, blue, and green inches from my face, concentrate till at last the image comes clear:

My plaid dress peeking out from under my winter coat.

My sluggish eyes drift slowly across it till they come to my red purse, the one with the shiny gold clasp shaped like a clamshell.

My hand is clutching it so tightly my knuckles are bloodless white. I try to relax my hand’s death grip but find I have no power over my fingers. My head’s no different. It’s slumped against a window, and with each bump in the road, my temple beats painfully against the rattling glass, and I am powerless to stop it.

Why the hell can’t I move?

What’s happened to me?

Urr-creeeeeek! The sound of grinding gears reverberates painfully inside my tender ears, interrupting my alarm. And its distinctive tortured shriek tells me something: I’m on a school bus.

And not alone. There are voices, female voices, coming from the front of the bus. I nudge my eyes that way and see a half dozen students. They’re dressed like me: I can see the bottoms of their dresses showing beneath their long winter coats. While I watch, one of them, a squirrelly brunette, pops up out of her seat. There’s a manila tag hanging from a string around her neck like she’s a rug being shipped to some far-off destination. “My family never said we’d be going on a trip,” she complains in a chirpy voice while she absently twists a lock of her long brown hair around a finger.

“Siddown before I come back there and make you,” the driver yells. Harsh, even for a school bus driver—and as the girl sinks back into her seat, I drag my eyes to the fogged-up window for a hint of where the man is taking us.

That’s when I see the bars.

Bars on the windows. Not a school bus.

I put a pin in my alarm. Use the adrenaline now barreling through my frozen body to focus. Outside it’s sleeting, and we’re driving parallel to a tall wrought iron fence whose pointed uprights stretch into the gray distance like an army of black spears. The bus’s gears groan into downshift and it slows, turning into a driveway and stopping in front of an imposing gate flanked by tall brick columns.

A man in a slicker emerges from a small building just inside the gate, and as he goes to unlock it, my eyes drift back to the brick column, squint to make out the words on its bronze plaque through the steamy glass: HANOVER PSYCHITRIC HOSPITAL

These women are mentals?

Then why am I on this bus with them? I’m not a patient. I’m . . . I’m . . .

And I wait for an answer, but nothing comes.

Why the hell can’t I remember who I am?

I need to get off this bus—!

“The Lord always provides a way,” says someone behind me. I can just make her out two rows back and across the aisle: a woman with auburn hair divided into two braids who’s staring at me with a look of crazed enthusiasm. Grade school hairstyle aside, she’s old, close to twenty-five—just about at her quarter hour.

As the bus rumbles back to life and begins ascending the long, curved driveway, the woman darts across the aisle and slides, saddle shoes first, into the seat beside me. “I told them all God would save me from this place, bring me back to the trains. Someone has to watch over them, signal the Lord when it’s time,” she says, then examines a hank of my hair. “And just look at the perfect lamb He’s sent to do it.”

Lamb?

She reaches out with both hands, touches my ears, then pulls them back to examine the scarlet slick now on her fingertips.

My blood.

“‘For the life of a creature is in the blood,’” she says to the heavens, “‘and I have given it to you to make atonement for yourselves on the altar.’”

Leviticus 17:11. Crazy lady knows her scripture. And apparently so do I.

The woman continues her talk of God, trains, and plans, and I’m trying hard to follow her fervent whispers, but there’s a problem:

little black spots are beginning to spread across my eyes, the ringing in my ears is growing, and my shoulders are getting so heavy . . .

I said not the time for sleep! the voice scolds.

And I fight like hell to stay conscious, but no amount of flight or fight’s going to stop the gathering darkness, and as the woman in braids pulls the red purse from my steadfast fingers, I slip down into the velvety black.

Chapter 2

When I come to, I find I’m sitting upright on the bus seat, knees together, hands neatly folded in my lap. The woman in braids has arranged me like a doll. And taken my purse.

“Up and at ’em.”

Coming down the bus aisle toward me is a sallow, doughy-faced nurse. Under her navy coat, she wears a crisp white uniform—dress, stockings, shoes, and a hat that resembles an elaborately folded dinner napkin. Her name tag reads VIRGINA WALLACE, R.N.

But it’s her wrinkles that have my attention. Most are small, almost invisible—but there. “You’re thirty-five at least, way beyond your quarter hour. How the hell can that be?”

Nurse Wallace doesn’t answer. Too busy staring at my bloody ears. “What the devil have you gone and done to yourself?” she asks.

My eyes flick from one end of the bus to the other. It’s empty now, the patients all lined up outside in the sleet, where a nurse with a clipboard is hastily reading their tags and checking them off her list. But the woman who stole my purse isn’t among them, isn’t anywhere that I can see, and my pulse begins to quicken.

“Where did she go, that woman in braids?” I ask.

“Afraid I don’t know who you’re talking about,” the nurse says as she frees something caught behind my shoulder: a patient ID tag hanging from a string around my neck—just like the others.

Was it always there?

It can’t have been. Right?

You bet your ass that’s right.

I struggle for recall while Nurse Wallace reads the tag: “‘Dorothy Frasier.’ Well, it looks like you’ve reached the end of your yellow brick road, Dorothy. Time to line up with the other patients—”

“Dorothy? No. That’s not mine. I’m not a patient . . . That nutcase bitch with the braids, she must be Dorothy . . . Must’ve put this on me when she stole my purse—”

“Okay, time to go,” the marly nurse says, and her meaty hand grabs my arm.

This woman is not your friend. Do what needs to be done.

And as the nurse starts to hoist me up, my body finally sparks to life, and I twist out of her grasp. She comes right back at me, seizing my wrist and wrenching it up behind me till my knuckles are kissing the base of my neck.

But rather than feeling shock or panic at the pain, I find instead a strange certainty that I am in control. That part of me is letting her do this, gauging her skills, testing her capabilities.

Nurse Wallace shoves me forward, and before I can consider my options, weigh my next move, I discover the choice has been made for me—

By me.

Suddenly I’m stepping backward, closing the gap between us, then throwing my head back till it slams into her forehead with a crunnnnkkkk.

I ignore this newest, sharpest pain and seize Nurse Wallace. My movements are so smooth. Sure. In one fluid action, I pin her arm back and muscle her into a nearby row, shoving her face hard against the window. Then I grab hold of her hair bun, ready in the next moment to smash her temple into the seatback’s metal bar.

But that’s the next moment.

In this present moment, she’s looking at me with frightened bunny rabbit eyes, and I freeze.

What the hell am I doing?

Only what’s necessary to contain the threat.

What did the voice just say?

A wave of nausea now rolls up my spine and time seems to stretch as the sick hangs there, about to break. I drop the nurse and she falls into the seat, where she watches me, waiting for my next move. That makes two of us—till calls for help from the nurse outside pierce my daze: “Gus, come quick! One of the transfers is attacking Miss Wallace!”

Time to go.

I charge through the bus’s open doors into the frozen rain—and find in front of me a mammoth building, so vast it spans my entire field of vision. Hanover State Psychiatric Hospital. It’s a Gothic beast of brick and stone, all peaked roofs and turrets. A looming clock tower rises from its center, flanked on both sides by sprawling, three-story wings that turn a corner every fifty yards or so, corrugating outward into the frosty distance.

Someone’s breathing hard. Closing in on me is a bearlike attendant in all-white—Gus, no doubt. Gus’s steamy breath gathers in clouds on either side of his wet face like a locomotive. He slows a few feet short of me and holds out his hand. “Come, let’s get you out of this nasty rain, dear,” he drawls extra slow, like he’s afraid I might get confused. “It’s nice and warm inside . . .”

A myriad of violent options to deal with him come to mind, but I don’t want a replay of what just happened on the bus. Gus is large, but I sense a softness in him like a three-minute egg. So, I stand my ground and wait till he reaches for me, his balance dependent on success in the grab. When he lunges, I duck out of reach, and the guy tumbles hard onto the wet asphalt.

I run but get only a few yards before someone else grabs me.

“Gotcha.” It’s another attendant, greasier and smaller than Gus. Cocky though. “Why all the hurry to leave us, sweetheart?” he says with a grin, revealing a crooked outcropping of teeth. “You look like someone Lester’d like to see stick around.” Somewhere along the way, this creep has banked a whole lot of confidence, and Lester’s damn sure how this is all gonna play out.

But apparently, I am also sure.

Before I know it, I’m leaning in on him hard, ramming my loafer as far up Lester’s crotch as it’ll travel. As he doubles over in pain, I help his head into my rising knee, and he staggers a step or two before toppling to the ground. Again, it’s all instinct, like I have no choice in the actions my body is gleefully taking.

That’s it. You know he had it coming. Now look for your exit.

But which way?

A hundred yards to the left, under the awning at the top of the hospital’s grand main entrance steps, is a uniformed policeman in what looks like a cowboy hat handing some woman over to a nurse.

So, I sprint in the other direction, across the hospital’s sprawling lawn dotted with trees that retain just a few scarlet leaves, heading for the distant end of the building’s right wing. My penny loafers slip and slide on the icy grass as I tear across Hanover’s grounds. My dress is equally unfit for fleeing—too tight on top but too loose on the bottom, its skirt plumped up like a half-filled balloon by starched petticoats that scratch at my thighs with each stride.

A brief rifling through the two patch pockets on the front of my dress and those of my coat reveals nothing of use, just a crumpled-up ball of yellow paper and a couple sticks of gum.

“Best run like the wind, sweetness!” someone calls to me. I look up and see in one of Hanover’s windows the pale, spectral face of a woman pressed up against its bars. “Before they gets dibs on you!”

I sense she speaks from experience and pick up my speed.

Soon I’m rounding Hanover’s far corner and can see for the first time, down its long back slope, past outbuildings, hedges, and driveway, what I was hoping for: a chain-link fence. It’s at least ten feet high and topped with barbed wire—but unlike the wrought iron in front, chain-link can be climbed rain or shine. I may not recall my name, but some part of me knows this fact with absolute certainty.

I charge down the frozen hill for it but don’t get far before I hear a man’s shouts coming from a couple hundred feet back, “Miss! You need to stop!”

Fuck. I force my legs to pump faster, trying to outrun my latest pursuer. Soon, I’m passing through what must be Hanover’s cemetery. It’s filled with dozens of rusting t-shaped grave markers, each stamped with just a number. At the edge of this dismal field is the thicket of shrubs I saw from the top of the hill. I run along beside it till I spy a narrow break in the bushes. Through it I can just make out Hanover’s driveway and the chain-link fence beyond.

On the other side of that fence is a town I can hide in.

I’m about to cut through the gap when there’s another shout: “Please, miss, hold it right there.” My pursuer is extremely polite. And close. Too close.

Get the hell out of there! the voice scolds.

But I want a look at him. Not sure why I do. Curiosity? The quiet note of decency in his voice? Whatever the reason, it’s a stupid move, but I do it anyway, glance over my shoulder—and see it’s the police- man in the cowboy hat I saw turning the woman over to a nurse.

He’s less than twenty feet away and closing—

I bolt through the break in the hedges, branches full of thorns clawing at me as I stumble past, till finally I burst out onto the driveway—

And see it too late: an old car speeding down the hill toward me.

Amazing the things your mind can ponder in a split second, even as your body freezes up and betrays you. Mine, for instance, is able to gauge that the car whose license plate says 1954 VIRGINA is traveling at a speed that will likely be fatal for me. Also, that its driver, now slamming on his brakes (too late), is wearing a hat. Fedora? I wonder idly, in that last moment before impact—

But suddenly my hand’s yanked back and I’m sailing through the air like a Chihuahua on a preschooler’s leash. We barrel-roll across the wet asphalt, me and the cowboy policeman who’s plucked me from death, and when we come to a stop, I’m looking up at a star- shaped badge that reads DEPUTY SHERIFF, CULPEPER COUNTY, OFFICER THOMAS R. WORTHY.

The deputy looks down at me. “Are you okay? Your ears, they’re bleed—”

But he’s interrupted by the driver of the car. “Tell ’em to get a tighter leash on these lunatics before someone gets hurt,” the guy shouts before driving off.

“He’s wrong. I’m not a mental!” I say. “This is all a mistake. She switched places with me on the transport bus.”

“Who?”

“A patient. Dorothy Frasier. Complete mental, obsessed with blood and atonement . . . and trains. She must’ve put her ID tag on me after she stole my purse,” I tell him. “They think I’m her, but I’m not!”

Officer Worthy’s blue eyes survey mine a long moment, trying to appraise my sanity.

“Then who are you?” he asks. Such a simple question. For which I have no answer. I can feel the existential panic in me rising again, and I look away from the deputy to shake it off. But this only quickens his interest. “Do you not know your name?” he asks.

Stop answering this guy’s questions and get the hell out of there!

“You’ve got to let me go,” I tell him, trying to squirm free.

“I’m afraid I can’t do that, miss.”

You know what you need to do.

I quietly reach for a nearby stone. Won’t hit him hard, just enough to stun so I can make it over the fence. It’s no more than fifteen feet away. But Officer Worthy must sense my plan. As my hand grabs the rock, his comes down on mine, pinning it to the asphalt inches from my face. On his fingers I see a wedding band and a second ring whose elaborate engraving says VIRGINA TECH, CLASS OF 1950.

Something about those words addles me a moment, long enough for him to flip me onto my stomach. Bits of wet gravel dig into my cheek as it meets the ground. Then I feel something cold enclose my wrist, followed by a series of clicks as he locks the handcuffs on.

“The year, what year is it?” I ask as he helps me to my feet.

He looks at me a quizzically. “It’s 1954.”

1954. I guess that’s right . . . It’s just something about it feels off. Then again, my brain’s taken a big hit sometime in the last hour. Everything’s feeling a little off. I need out of these cuffs. Time to beg.

It’s not pretty. The words tumble out in a shameless heap meant to draw sympathy and/or woo. “Please, you’ve got to believe me, I don’t belong in that place. You could still let me go,” I plead as he picks up his sheriff’s deputy hat that fell off during our tussle.

“Sorry, miss,” he says, putting his cowboy hat back on, “I just can’t do that. It’s for your own good—”

“So, you’re just going to hand me over to them, no questions asked, Lone Ranger?”

He cocks his head, surprised by my cowboy crack. “If a mistake’s been made, I’m sure the doctors at the hospital will straighten things out—”

“Go to hell,” I say. Wooing is officially over.

A moment later, Lester, the attendant, emerges from the nearby bushes, still pale from our last interaction. “Thanks for the assistance, Deputy, we’re having a little trouble with Dorothy—”

“Don’t call me that,” I snap back.

“One of today’s transfers from County,” he says to Officer Worthy.

“He’s wrong. I told you, I’m not a patient!”

“She’s a bit unsettled by the new surroundings,” Lester says as he takes me from Officer Worthy. Then the asshole whispers in my aching ear, “But I knew when you thought it over, you’d decide to stay. Make some new friends.”

“Someone at Hanover should double-check her identification,” Officer Worthy says to him. “She said a woman on the bus—”

Lester laughs. “You’re not falling for her story, are you, Deputy?

They all got one, ’bout who they really are. Why they don’t belong at Hanover. They believe it, too. Can’t help themselves. But don’t you worry, we got things well in hand up on the hill. Haven’t misplaced a patient yet,” he says, winking, and he’s starting to pull me away when I hear that distinctive urr-creeeeeek!—the transport bus, heading back down the driveway to the front gate.

It takes a couple of tries, but I wrench myself free of Lester just in time to glimpse the bus as it rumbles past—and there, in the vehicle’s steamy, rain-spattered rear window, I swear I see the ghostly contours of the woman in braids.

I point to the departing bus, about to ask Officer Worthy if he saw her too, when his eyes flick to Lester. “Hey, what are you doing?” he shouts at the attendant.

I turn in time to catch the word TIMEX on Lester’s watch just before it contacts my face. Can feel my whole body fly in the direction of his backhand as everything dissolves in a blur.