The Girl in the Madhouse plunges into Austin’s descent as a cryptic email from Cambitis—"Let wisdom reign... What is the good?"—mirrors his sister Riley’s ramblings at the Orozgo Retreat, where she warns of Illuminati-aligned conspiracies and a hidden queen (Elinda) among homeless tent cities. After witnessing Hollywood mogul Solomon Vine humiliate his ex-lover Jane Janaway, Austin spots her vanish into a monstrous snowstorm, while Riley’s visions—red-eyed creatures, "mad girls," and a book called Another Kingdom—bleed into his own surreal encounters: a wizard in a cemetery, a regal woman’s stare, and scratches that feel like curses. The line between script and reality blurs as the episode’s final credits tease a night of murder in both LA and the show’s world, leaving Austin—and the audience—wondering if the kingdom isn’t just fiction but a buried truth. [Automatically generated summary]
Do you mean the part after you conned yet another Starlet into your bed?
Hey, it was my Me Too moment.
I don't think that's what that means.
Anyway, after that, I saw the mouse girl at the window.
And then you fell through the bathroom floor to the cemetery in the woods, where the wizard told you he had given you a big-time Hollywood career and wiped your memory of another kingdom.
Right, right.
That night.
That night was the start of it.
Another Kingdom, the final season.
Written by me, Andrew Clavin.
Performed by Michael Knowles.
Episode 2.
The Girl in the Madhouse.
That night was the start of it.
Nothing in my perfect life was perfect after that.
Nothing was even good, not even the good parts.
The whole world was haunted.
The next morning, for instance, I was driving my silver Mercedes to the production office, peering gormlessly at the tinted windshield through a mental fog of exhaustion.
All in all, I hadn't slept more than an hour.
Just that last fitful hour before dawn, you know, when sleep is barely worth the trouble.
And now my car was jerking and stuttering forward with the jerking, stuttering vehicles all around it.
I kept trying to tell myself that this, my usual morning traffic jam, was the only real trouble I had.
But my mind was filled with the image of that creature I had seen at the window, that giant rodent with a woman's face, and other images that seemed the shreds of some forgotten nightmare.
Creatures moving toward me through a forest.
Gravestones, a grinning angel, the caped silhouette of a red-eyed man.
The scratches on my leg tingled and itched.
As my Mercedes approached the corner of Santa Monica Boulevard, the light turned red.
The traffic, barely moving, stopped.
I turned idly to glance out the passenger window, and my breath caught in my throat.
There, just beyond the car, was a small tent city, one of those villages of the homeless poor that increasingly blemished the Angelino landscape.
Yellow, green, and blue canvas tents were clustered together in the long, narrow parking lot behind the coffee shop, right behind the street.
Sad, mad, shuffling hobos moved through the morning light.
Bent, gaunt, bearded figures in mismatched rags, warming themselves by trash fires, spraying their armpits with water bottles, relieving themselves in the bushes that bordered the pavement, conversing with the empty air.
But that's not what made me gasp.
It was the woman there, standing there amidst the miserable human carbuncles.
Erect, tranquil, beautiful, and very like a queen.
A fine, full, soft figure draped in a flowing dress of royal blue.
A mesmerizing face with an expression of both feminine sweetness and regal authority.
And she was staring straight at me.
The light turned green.
The cars inched forward.
I went with them, but kept turning back to look at the homeless camp.
And yes, the woman's gaze followed after me.
I moaned softly.
An awful sound.
One hand went to my throat as if I expected to find something there.
A necklace.
A locket.
What?
I didn't know.
But that woman, there was something about her.
An awful familiarity.
Like the rodent at the window.
Like the images from my dream.
I knew her.
But from where?
I couldn't remember.
Then came the email.
This was 20 minutes later.
I was at my desk at the Another Kingdom production office.
We'd rented the space left open by a furniture showroom that'd gone bust.
It was a long, linear expanse behind a glass storefront on the second story of an elegant shopping mall.
The white walls of the main room were decorated with half-finished drawings and charts, set designs and character designs, budgets and schedules and whiteboards full of scribblings.
The offices were elegant little workspaces with leather furniture and glass desks.
Mine was the first one you came to after passing the inscrutable beauty at the reception desk, my old friend Ren Yen, a sometime fashion model and living Eurasian stereotype who rarely cracked a smile or spoke a word.
So there I was, just settling in behind my desk, just gratefully grasping the mug of black coffee Ren had brought me, just scrolling through the morning emails on my computer.
And there, there was one email that set off that uncanny sense of deja vu again, a chill of eerie familiarity that felt as if I'd been stabbed in the balls with an electric icicle.
Cambitis at cambitis.com.
That was the return address.
And I knew it.
I knew that name.
But how?
And why did it make me shudder?
The coffee mug half lifted to my lips.
I clicked on the email and read it.
Let wisdom reign and each man go his way.
Wisdom, which is to love the good, the greater good more than the lesser.
But what is the good, Austin?
What is the good?
Austin's Uncanny Email00:06:55
You must find the answer.
Cambitis.
I sat there, still, my mug hand frozen in air.
I stared open-mouthed at the monitor like some drooling idiot, my stomach churning.
Anger and frustration geysered up through me.
What is the good? I thought furiously.
What is the good?
What sort of question is that?
Who even gives a shit?
My script is being produced.
I had sex with Jennifer last night.
I drive a freaking S-Class Mercedes.
Do you not understand the words that I'm saying to you?
Am I not speaking English here?
Cambitis, whoever you are.
What kind of name even is that?
My hand trembling.
I lowered the coffee mug until I heard it clank down dangerously hard on the glass desktop.
My fingers went to my throat again, then down to my leg to scratch the itchy scratches there.
I swallowed thickly.
What is happening here?
What is happening?
But before I could think any more about it, a movement caught my eye.
I looked up through the glass wall of my office to the glass door near the reception desk.
God had just walked in.
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Thanks for listening to Another Kingdom.
By God, of course, I mean Solomon Vine, who was the closest thing to God we had here in Los Angeles.
He was even better than God, come to think of it.
God could only speak the universe into being.
Solomon Vine could greenlight a picture.
He was richer than God, too.
Did God own an enormous beachfront property in Malibu, as well as an entire skyscraper in downtown Manhattan?
I don't think so.
Was there a god wing of the UCLA Hospital or a God theater in the Los Angeles Music Center?
No, there was not.
There were buildings named after Solomon Vine all over the place, not just in California and New York, but even in some of those empty places in between with names from way back in Indian days, like Minnesota or Kansas or something.
There were superstars in music, movies, and television who owed their careers to the studio he had owned, or the agency he had owned, or the record companies he had owned.
These were A-list celebrities who would answer his phone calls in a heartbeat.
You think they would answer phone calls from God?
I wouldn't count on it.
I didn't know how old Vine was.
I wasn't sure people that rich actually had ages.
But I guess he was 70 or so since he looked about 50.
Tall, slim, fit, elegant in a V-neck sweater and jeans, bald except for the faintest shadow of silver hair around the fringes.
A surprisingly ready and approachable smile above surprisingly magnanimous pale brown eyes.
He strode through the office door.
He strode everywhere, never simply walked.
He greeted Ren Yen with such a bright, friendly grin, she nearly grinned back at him.
Even Ren, I think, might have made the effort for Vine if there'd been a percentage in it.
But of course, this was Hollywood.
He was gay.
Who wasn't?
Vine headed straight for my door.
Right behind him was my agent, Ted Wexler, scurrying and bent over like Igor trailing Dr. Frankenstein.
That was Ted for you.
He may have had the soul of a soulless asshole, but he was a slavish hunchback in his heart.
I leapt to my feet to greet my benefactor.
For so he was.
From Solomon Vine, all my blessings flowed.
After I had returned from finding my sister, after I had lost my reader's job at Mythos, I had hidden myself away in a hot fever of semi-madness and depression.
I barely remembered the weeks that followed.
All I knew was that the next time I stumbled out of my crappy North Hollywood apartment, I had completed the screenplay Another Kingdom, a gripping fantasy suspense story that had come quite suddenly into my fractured mind from I Know Not Where.
When I heard the news that Ted Wexler had finally lied enough and cheated enough and broken enough promises to get promoted from assistant to full-time agent, I begged him to take a look at my work with an eye toward representing me.
The next thing I knew, that phone call.
Solomon Vine.
Aka, God.
Let there be success.
He brought the script and put it into production almost overnight.
Austin! Vine said as he strode through my office door, spreading his arms as if we were old college buddies reunited after way too long.
I came rushing around the desk into his embrace.
He hugged me.
Hugged me, Solomon Vine.
Then he stepped back, smiled proudly down at me from his greater height, gripped my shoulders.
Great news!
We got her!
I'll let Ted tell it since he made it happen.
Wexler didn't exactly stoop and giggle and rub his hands together like a slavering toady, but he somehow managed to project the image of a slavering toady into my mind as he said, Alexis Meriwether, she's committed to play Lady Catherine.
It took no effort for me to display the appropriate wonder and delight.
This was wonderful, and I was delighted.
Even after her last humiliating flop and the likewise humiliating divorce that was still the talk of celebrity media, even with the rumors she had taken to drugs and become unemployable, Alexis remained a genuine star.
She was a name people knew.
She would bring in investment from overseas and garner publicity and reviews stateside.
With Alexis as the female lead, Another Kingdom would be a big picture.
The kind of picture that made news.
Solomon Vine patted my shoulders.
Congratulations, Austin.
Ah, here she is now.
Startled, I followed his gesture toward the front door and saw, to my amazement, the great woman herself.
Everyone in the long showroom stopped to stare at her as she entered.
All the hip young designers and programmers, the poe-faced line producer, the semi-autistic social media geek, all the boys and girls together froze in place and brazenly gazed.
Austin Meets Alexis00:14:26
She was swathed in the hyper-reality of her stardom.
She was spotlit from within.
Her face, with its arch eyebrows and lofty cheekbones, with its naughty lips and infinitely vulnerable blue eyes, was so familiar from the screen, it seemed to break through the veil of the ordinary into a new level of pure presence.
As for her body, how often had I scoured the internet for freeze frames from her few precious nude scenes?
And now here that body was before me, real and somehow more naked than naked in a white blouse unbuttoned to her glorious cleavage and jeans that clung so tight around her lower half, I wished that I were they.
And as I, as we all stood watching her, awestruck, she swiveled with military swiftness on the toes of her high-heeled boots and proceeded to unleash one of the cruelest, most devastating, most demeaning, most lacerating tirades of pure invective I or anyone else had ever heard.
A brutal tongue-lashing, smacking full force into the face of the cringing assistant who had trailed in behind her.
Jane Janaway, the only woman I had ever loved.
It was awful.
As dreadful a scene as I'd ever witnessed.
As sadistic as a human interchange could be without actual physical violence.
Do you think I pay you to be a drooling fool?
Do you?
My office door was open, but I'd have heard her through the thick glass wall.
I'd have heard her through cement.
Can you do absolutely nothing right?
Don't you hide your face from me?
It's bad enough you drag behind me looking like you look, like some superating boil on my ass that's as disgusting as it is useless.
But your incompetence is beyond tolerable.
I'm not even asking you to think for yourself, God forbid.
Just to do simple things I tell you to do the way I tell you to do them.
Is that so hard?
Is it?
Just to do what you're paid your overblown salary for.
You should be ashamed to take my money and display that level of complete and utter stupidity.
On and on.
And even that's a translation.
I've removed all the obscenities, not out of delicacy, although she was calling Jane names no civilized human being should even whisper to another, but just to save space because each savage phrase was tied to the next by such a spate of foul language that the entire harangue seemed to run on forever, like a sort of freight train of a basement.
insult linked to profanity, linked to brutal interrogation, like so many boxcars chugging endlessly along the encircling horizon of humiliation.
Jane, meanwhile, well, what can I tell you about Jane?
She was the sweetest creature I had ever known, the most tender, most feminine girly girl ever fashioned in the girly girl workshops of highest heaven.
That's why I loved her so.
Why every man who knew her, and most women too, instantly respected her and obeyed her quietest request as if it were an imperious command.
She was pure, gentle yin, was Jane, and it was hypnotic, radiant, magical.
Her whispered word of praise could turn your ego to iron.
Her kindest reproach could make your conscience rear before you like Judgment Day.
If her touch could not literally heal wounds, it could, so help me, make them feel all better.
She was the wife men secretly dreamed of, the mother little children pretended they had.
I had forgotten how much, how instinctively I adored her, how she lived in my fantasies as the eve of my future generations.
It had been a long time since I'd seen her last.
She'd been overseas with Alexis when I left town to search for Riley.
By the time she came back, I was immersed in making another kingdom, which is to say, I was in such a blind ecstasy of leasing my new car and renting my new apartment and bedding starlet after starlet in my new bed that I would have been ashamed to have her look at me and see what I'd become.
Now, though, now when I saw her there, my darling Jane, I wished I had died before I'd ever forsaken her.
She stood patient as the saints of old under the movie star's tirade.
Her head was unbowed.
Her expression was calm.
Yes, silent tears ran down her cheeks, but, as I suspected even then, and as I learned for sure later, she was not crying for herself, but for the inner pain and degradation of the woman who was abusing her.
Oh, my plain little Jane, with her face-absent makeup, her hair-absent style, with her fine figure hidden beneath the baggy sweatshirt and baggy jeans she nearly always wore because she did not want to outshine her narcissistic mistress with her own lovely looks.
Those looks that were magnified to beauty by her womanly sweetness.
So help me, I wish I had died.
The merciless harangue went on and on.
I couldn't take it anymore.
I had to stop it.
Without thinking, I took a step forward, ready on instinct to do what a man ought to do, to charge to the defense of his lady love.
I had it in my mind to stride out of my office into the main room.
I was going to plant myself right smack between the two women.
I was going to tell Alexis then and there that she should shut the hell up or get the hell out of my offices.
I was going to take Jane in my arms and tell her she need never suffer such abuse again.
I would take care of her.
I would protect her.
Not just now, forever.
But before I could move any farther, Solomon Vine touched my arm with the tip of his index finger.
Oh, you don't want to get in the middle of that, Austin.
I know Allie.
Believe me, let it go.
It'll blow over.
Our eyes met.
I hesitated.
I had forgotten.
He did know Alexis.
They had been married once, briefly, back in the day, before the rumors about his secret orgies surfaced.
And that was all it took.
That hesitation, that touch of his, those words.
All it took to liquefy my high resolve.
Because now I also remembered everything else I had forgotten in my one moment of courage.
This was my movie.
My big chance.
My big break.
This was Alexis Merriweather, my big star.
This was Solomon Vine standing here, my patron.
It was he who had convinced Alexis to sign on to the production.
If I offended her, I offended him.
If I lost her, I lost him.
He could, he would, shut this whole enterprise down.
He could make it vanish into nothing with a fingersnap.
My car, my apartment, my women, my wealth, and my new status.
It would all be gone, just like that.
Oh, sure.
Go ahead.
Tell yourself in my place, you would have been a hero.
You lie.
You would have done what I did.
I stood there.
I turned back to the open door.
I watched the scene out there.
I listened to it.
And I was silent.
Somehow, I think Jane sensed that terrible moment.
As Alexis continued to immolate her, she, Jane, lifted her eyes like a martyr in the flames.
She looked past her tormentor.
She looked at me.
Her face was full of sorrow.
And it was not sorrow for herself.
It was sorrow for me.
Pity for me.
Me who was standing there, gutted, empty of courage, empty of integrity, empty of even the semblance of manhood.
My eyes met hers.
Oh God, it was awful.
Seeing her like that.
Standing there, useless.
It was an unbearable death to die and go on living.
Finally, the movie star's onslaught ended.
Alexis swept her hand dismissively across Jane's face as if to slap her, but only her words slapped her.
One brutally brusque command.
Now get me my coffee the way I like it this time.
Then Jane, still silently crying, and yet with some impossible dignity of feminine forbearance, turned and walked out.
Walked out and took with her my pride, my self-respect.
Well, everything worthwhile about my life except the one thing.
My success.
I watched her go, thinking, what is the good, Austin?
What is the good?
You must find the answer.
Jane pushed the front door open.
And what did I see there?
I blinked and stared as she stepped out into an impossible snowstorm.
Right there, right beyond the threshold, there was a whirling blizzard.
And, as Jane vanished into the whiteness, I spied the dim silhouette in there of some great beast, some hulking bear of a creature with burning red eyes.
It was that scene.
That scene in my movie script.
The battle between the knight and the abominable snowman.
I squeezed my eyes shut, shook my head.
I heard my own voice shouting a command in my head.
No!
I felt a violent motion of my will.
And when I looked again, the storm outside had vanished.
There was just sad, slovenly Jane, visible for another moment through the glass as she slumped off to fetch a better cup of coffee.
That blizzard.
That vision.
It must have been my imagination.
That's what I told myself.
But there was no time to think about it.
Because now, Alexis Meriwether, still, amazingly enough, surrounded by that aura of stardom and that inner light of fame, now she came marching through my office door, snarling, idiot bitch!
Then in a single second, she transformed herself.
She brightened at the sight of me, threw open her arms, and cried happily, Here's the man of the hour.
She clasped my shoulders and kissed me.
Alexis Meriwether kissed me on the cheek, but so close to the edge her lips touched mine.
Alexis Meriwether's lips touched mine.
Her scent surrounded me and her starry halo too.
Your script is genius.
Really, no exaggeration.
Genius.
That's such a compliment coming from you, I weaseled.
I'm such a fan, I simpered.
I've seen all your films, I sniveled, before I could stop the cliché from coming out of my mouth.
I can't tell you what an honor this is, I gushed.
Oh, stop, it'll go to my head.
I'm already impossible to work with.
I'll be worse.
I laughed, loudly.
I was a disgrace to my own testicles.
This sort of thing went on for the next little eternity or so.
All of us, me, Solomon, Alexis, and Ted, stood together in my office, grinning and flattering and laughing and totally disgusting.
As if the immolation of St. Jane had never happened.
As if she didn't really exist at all.
Finally, after I'd explored every possible variation on the themes of oily flattery and self-abasement, Solomon Vine clapped his hands together.
Well, I think Alexis should sit down with her director and discuss their vision for the part.
We all made our fulsome and contemptible farewells.
Solomon took his ex-wife by the elbow and began to lead her out of the office for her meeting with Andy Brown.
But before they reached the door, he paused.
He turned.
He pointed one well-manicured fingernail at my chest.
Oh, I'm having a little bash at the house Friday night.
I'll have my assistant email you the address.
This would have seemed nothing, a casual remark, to the uninitiated.
But not to someone in the show biz know.
An invitation to one of Solomon Vine's Malibu house parties was to Hollywood what St. Peter's nod was to heaven.
Benediction through the gates of paradise.
In that moment, with that invitation, I became one of the Hollywood elite.
And all it had cost me was everything.
A small price to pay.
We'll get back to Another Kingdom in a minute.
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And now, back to Another Kingdom, the final season.
Friday came, the night of the party at Solomon Vines.
That afternoon, I went to visit Riley in the Madhouse.
Shame and Silence00:15:29
I was a wreck by then.
Thick-headed, lackluster, cloudy-eyed.
Barely sentient as I guided the Mercedes along the whiplashing curves of the road through the Santa Monica Mountains.
At my windows was the eerily forsaken wilderness between the hustling city and the Arabian vastness of the Mojave.
It was the last living image of my desolate inner world.
I could not remember the last full hour of sleep I'd had, or the last moment free of shame or free of fear.
The shame was constant, a burgeoning fungus clogging all the wellsprings of my vitality.
Try as I might, and I tried and tried, I could not rationalize away my failure to stand up for Jane.
Weren't we past the days of white knights, I would ask myself.
Wasn't Jane a modern woman who could fend for herself?
Yeah, I tried selling myself all that crap, but my conscience was buying none of it.
When I was awake, the scenes in my offices haunted me.
In those rare moments when I dozed, I dreamed about it.
In one dream, I stood in a misty forest graveyard.
I watched, frozen in place, as Alexis Meriwether savagely berated Jane.
In the eerie distance, a caped figure observed me with red eyes, grinning.
I tried to move, to go to Jane's defense, but those red eyes held me fast.
And all the while, a gigantic rat-like creature with the face of a woman perched Cheshire-like on a branch and repeated over and over in a bizarre, high-pitched, nasal voice, Be a man.
Be a man.
Be a man.
When I woke up, I was shuddering uncontrollably.
So much for the shame.
As for the fear, it sprung up at odd moments.
I would look at a window, half expecting to see that nightmare squirrel thing staring back at me.
I would hesitate to go to the bathroom at night, worried the floor would disappear beneath me.
And more than once, I paused at a threshold, afraid to step over lest I find myself in a blinding blizzard where a Yeti waited for me with razor-sharp claws.
I was constantly on the watch for impossible dangers.
It was exhausting.
Blinking off sleep, I drove on.
The Mercedes wound through a narrow mountain pass, around a long bend, the final bend.
Then the scenery opened.
On my right was red and rocky wasteland.
On my left, up on the ridge against the afternoon sky, I saw the asylum.
The Orozgo Retreat.
That was the official name of it.
It was a private facility, named after its main benefactor, Sir Gerazgo.
He was a gazillionaire media mogul whom my family knew well.
It was only with Orozgo pulling strings that we could afford for Riley to stay in this place as long as she had.
Six and a half months.
Ever since I'd brought her home from the funhouse in Walnut Creek, my sister had been locked away in this place for six and a half months.
My spit turned sour in my mouth when I saw the place hove into view above me.
The fearfully looming main building was a complex black shadow against the passing clouds.
It was red brick with white trim that should have looked bright and cheerful, but didn't.
There was gloomy gray slate on the dominating mansard roof above the central tower, and more gloomy slate on the pitched roofs that jutted off in several directions.
All the roofs had gabled windows.
All the windows stared like dead men's eyes.
Even the great bays on the ground floor seemed to reveal a perpetual darkness within.
Six and a half months.
While I prepped my movie and drove my Mercedes and drew pretty women to my luxurious bed, Riley had been imprisoned here all that time.
Hilary Bain, the program director, met me at the front door as she did every week.
She was a small, squat, cheery woman in her 40s, her skin caramel-colored, her curly hair dyed an unnatural red.
She had apple cheeks and a kindly voice, thin and high like the voice of a cartoon character.
Her eyes were so big and white, I sometimes imagined they would keep glowing brighter and brighter until they burst into two circles of white-hot flame.
She always treated me with respect, Hillary Bain, even deference, like I was a visiting dignitary on an inspection tour.
I guess this was because of my family association with Orozgo.
She was kind and attentive, and she never spoke a wrong word that I noticed.
All the same, the woman scared the shit out of me.
There was just something deeply sinister about her.
I always had the feeling she was waiting for me to say some untoward thing so she could have me dragged off and locked up in here with my sister.
She led me down an endless empty corridor, the heights of its ceiling lost in shadowed vaults above.
She's doing very, very well, she said in that chirpy cartoon voice of hers.
I think doctor has her medications just right now.
She's so much calmer, and it's helping her get so much more out of the group sessions.
I'm sure we're going to start seeing some real progress in her individual therapy as well.
She smiled up at me.
My guts curdled.
Here we are.
She pushed open the door of what was called the family room, and there was poor crazy Riley.
Dressed in a child's jeans and striped top, my sister was sitting on a brown leather sofa, just sitting there, just staring into space.
The room around her was as bright and pleasant as any bottomless pit of despair could be.
The shiny wooden floors were decorated with Native American throw rugs.
The high windows looked out on rolling lawns.
There were pictures on the wall and flowers on the shelves.
In the center of that broad, bland, institutional space, Riley, who was a tiny little creature anyway, looked especially small and vulnerable.
Plus, she looked dead.
To my brotherly eyes, anyway.
Her cute little pigtails were gone.
Her straw yellow hair was cut short and ragged like a fringed cap.
Her round face was at once slack and jittery, as if the drugs had both tranquilized her and given her subtle spasms.
Her eyes were so deep and hollow, they seemed completely vacant.
Nobody home.
Look who's here.
Riley slowly raised those corpse eyes and saw me.
Her faraway gaze focused slightly, as if she almost remembered who I was, but not quite.
The shame fungus grew inside me.
It stopped up my life force and ate at me.
I made myself smile so I wouldn't burst into tears.
Oh, Riley, I thought, what have I done to you?
Oss?
Well, I'll leave you two alone.
And she left the room.
Thank God.
What a nasty creature.
Oss?
I hurried to the sofa and sat down next to her.
The leather squeaked as it sank under my weight.
I lifted Riley's slack hand off her lap and clasped it in both of mine.
I could practically feel the fungus of shame creeping inch by inch over my interior landscape.
Hey, Rye, how you doing?
I kept my voice as upbeat as I could, cheerful and calm, like the dutiful brother of a mentally ill kid sister.
Riley slowly licked her pale lips.
Fine.
I'm fine.
She blinked dully.
I tried to speak again.
I tried to say, that's great, Ry.
That's great.
But my eyes filled and the words wouldn't come.
In my exhaustion, in my shame-filled, fear-filled state of mind, I could no longer pretend I wasn't seeing what I was seeing.
She was worse.
Every week, every time I came here, she was worse than the time before.
The drug haze was thicker.
Her mind was duller, her eyes emptier.
It's for the best, my parents kept telling me.
It's for the best, my brother Richard said.
But how could this be for the best?
I mean, look at her.
How could it be?
Damn it, Riley.
What the hell are they doing to you here?
Well, I was sorry the moment I said it.
Exactly the sort of thing I was not supposed to say.
Don't get her excited, my parents told me.
Don't get her started on her crazy conspiracy theories, my brother said.
But it was as if the shame, the growing fungus of shame, forced the truth up out of the depths of me and onto my lips.
And it was too late to take it back.
Almost instantly, my words seemed to rouse Riley from her stupor.
Her fingers fumbled to find my wrist.
She clutched it with both hands.
She peered at me with her hollow eyes.
They're killing me, Austin.
I tried to slip back into calm big brother mode.
No, no.
But she wouldn't let it go.
They've drugged me all up so I can't think, so I won't tell.
Riley, don't.
She leaned toward me and her voice dropped to a conspiratorial whisper.
Look at me, Austin.
You know.
You know about Orozco.
Orozco and the Illuminati.
Oh, this was bad.
This was the stuff she wasn't supposed to talk about.
The loony theories from the Ouroboros videos she used to post online.
Her dreamy, childlike rants about a conspiracy of space aliens and elites who had joined forces to take over the world.
This was the very crap that had gotten her stuck in this place to begin with.
I began to shake my head at her.
I was about to try to talk her back to reality, but the look in her eyes, the yearning, the urgency, the desperation, I couldn't bring myself to say what I was supposed to say.
And so Riley went on.
You have to remember, Os.
Why don't you remember?
They're all in it.
Orozco, mom, dad, Richard.
They're killing people, Auss.
You know this.
For years and years, they've been killing them and blackmailing them and ruining them with scandals.
Heads of countries, heads of TV stations and newspapers, universities, movie studios.
Killing them and destroying them and replacing them with Orozco's followers.
Please, Os, please remember.
They make laws and write articles and make movies and teach students to believe that Orozco and his people should run everything, the whole world.
You have to remember the book.
Remember the book you read, Another Kingdom.
Please, Auss, you have to.
This was also part of her delusion.
She kept insisting there was some magic book that I had read and somehow forgotten.
A book with the same title as my screenplay.
It was all confused in her mind.
For another moment, she went on gazing at me urgently, desperately, with such painful hope.
I didn't know how to answer her.
I patted her head weakly.
She gave up.
Her shoulders slumped.
She turned away from me and gazed longingly out the high window at the lawn and the hills beyond.
The mad girls know.
It's not just me.
The mad girls hear their voices.
I didn't want to encourage her, but this was new.
I hadn't heard this part before.
Curiosity got the better of me.
What mad girls?
You mean the other patients here?
My question seemed to reinvigorate her.
When she swung around to face me again, her eyes were very bright, eerily bright.
There was a small smile on her lips as if she were about to reveal a secret to me.
She leaned close.
Sometimes they don't swallow their meds.
Then they hear voices.
They can hear them calling.
I still don't get you.
Calling what?
Calling you, Aus.
The way she said it, and the eerie glow in her eyes, sent a chill of fear through me.
I straightened in my seat, the leather cushion creaking under me.
Look, Rye, you've got to stop.
That's enough, all right?
You're starting to creep me out.
Toritanio is calling for you, Austin.
Tora?
My throat had suddenly gone dry.
That name.
Where had I heard that name before?
And sometimes, the queen, Elinda.
I had to try three times before I could swallow and whisper back at her.
Elinda.
She's waiting for you, Aus.
She's waiting for you to remember.
We all are.
We need you to remember.
I drew my hand away from hers so she wouldn't feel me shaking.
Really, Riley, stop.
You know it upsets me when you talk crazy like this.
It's not good for you.
And then, before I could stop myself, I heard myself ask, what does she say?
The queen.
What does she say to the mad girls?
Riley leaned even closer, whispered even more softly, Let wisdom reign, and each man go his way.
I must have looked like a fish on dry land the way my mouth kept opening and closing.
Those words.
They were the words from the email.
That bizarre email from someone who called himself Cambitis.
Wisdom is to love the good.
But what is the good, Austin?
You must find the answer.
She's hiding, the queen.
She's hiding with the homeless people.
No one would think to look for her there.
A queen hiding in their tents, you know?
No one would think of it.
That did it.
That broke me.
I stood up quickly, the leather sofa letting out a squeal.
Or maybe it was me.
How could Riley know about that woman I'd seen?
The serene and regal woman I'd seen standing among the homeless in the tent city?
How could she know?
Riley lifted her wild gaze to me.
The queen, Toritanio, the mouse lady too.
They're all calling to you, Austin.
They're trying to break through.
They're all waiting for you to remember.
I felt the blood drain out of my face, out of my fingertips and my feet.
All my extremities went weak and cold.
She's crazy, I thought.
Remember, she's crazy.
But then what was I?
I saw the queen too.
I saw the mouse lady.
Riley's Insistent Stare00:02:42
Was I crazy?
Did it run in the family?
Riley went on staring up at me with those wide, bright, mystic eyes.
She smiled her eerie, mad girl smile.
They need you to remember, Austin.
I need you too.
My mouth twisted.
I shook my head at her fiercely.
I snarled and averted my glance from her.
I don't remember, I thought.
I don't.
I'm not crazy like you, Riley.
I'm happy.
I'm successful now.
I'm happy.
I don't remember.
I opened my mouth to speak, but before I could, there was a shocking crack.
I spun around.
The door to the room had swung open so fast it hit the wall.
And there stood Hilary Bain.
The cheery, apple-cheeked demoness was looming at the threshold with one hand on the doorknob.
She grinned at us with her flaming white eyes.
Two large male aides hunkered in the hallway behind her.
Time for your session, Riley, dear.
Then she looked straight at me, still grinning.
You should go now, Austin.
My senses were still reeling as Hilary Bain ushered me out of the building into the evening air.
Disoriented, I paused on the front path and watched as the woman retreated back into the endless hallway within.
The door swung slowly shut, and she was gone.
Alone, I lifted my gaze to the towers and rooftops of the mansion looming over me in the deepening dark.
The day was ending.
The night was coming.
Friday night.
The night of Solomon Vine's party.
It was a night that would be filled with madness and murder, not just here in Los Angeles, but there too.
There, I mean, in Another Kingdom.
Another Kingdom, the final season.
Written by me, Andrew Clavin.
Performed by Michael Knowles.
Voice work for the secretary, Caitlin Maynard.
Episode 2, The Girl in the Madhouse, was directed by Jonathan Hay.