Asylum Box Set

by Sian B. Claven

  Their new home, for they have long removed themselves from the house where their daughter murdered their other children, is a beautiful mansion. From the front it seems almost as large as the Asylum itself. Gardeners are scattered amongst many different plants, tending to each plant’s special needs.

  I was greeted by a server who showed me to the sitting room where the Marx’s waited for me.

  Mrs Winifred Marx is a sad sight. Mourning the loss of all seven of her children, as well as her brother and sister-in-law and their five children, she didn’t say a word to me at first.

  I spoke mostly to Claude Marx during my visit. Once I mentioned that their daughter could be free if treated correctly, I received one reaction I was not expecting - hatred. While Claude Marx seemed happy that his only remaining child could be cured, his wife finally spoke and made her feelings very clear.

  If I want to help Clara, I can with the greatest of pleasure, but she is, under no circumstances, allowed to leave the institution, for the safety of all those that dare cross her path.

  I agreed to her terms, because I am confident that once she sees a healed and complete Clara, she will come around and allow her daughter to leave the Asylum and return into the light.

  I feel apprehensive, I won’t lie; I know I am giving the Marx family hope where there may not necessarily be any. I have ideas as to the cause of Clara’s affliction, but need to conduct several experiments to conclude the best treatment for her. I do not, under any circumstances, wish to disappoint them, especially since Claude Marx has offered to fund the research needed to cure his daughter.

  I am hopeful. I can do this. Now I need Wellbottom to agree.

  8 September 1950

  Wellbottom is not happy that I went to see the Marx family behind his back. He feels I am trying to undermine him and he promised that if I ever attempt as much again, I will find myself with limited to no resources at the institution.

  It is as I feared. Wellbottom is a terrible doctor; he does not truly follow the oath he took to help all those within his care. He is a disease in this institution, something that needs to be cut out like a tumour. I mean to remove him from his status, and I mean to do it quickly and without question. Someone needs to protect the patients treated within these four walls and I feel I am the doctor to do it, especially for the more extreme cases.

  While I figure out a way to remove Wellbottom, he has reluctantly granted me access to Clara for observation. He has insisted that I run all research, notes and treatments past him for approval before I even think of doing anything. This will not do at all; I need the freedom to experiment. A man like Wellbottom, who does not care for his patients, will certainly feel that my unconventional ways are not to be attempted. What’s worse is that Wellbottom gave me his word I will have the freedom to experiment.

  I ask you, when did men of science become so afraid to pursue knowledge, to sacrifice the few to assist the many? We will see who comes out on top.

  Clara has proven an interesting person to observe. She played with one of the many dolls her parents have given her, brushing out the doll’s hair lovingly while she sang to it. I didn’t want to interrupt her play, but she didn’t seem to mind me there at all. She used a pretend tea set, which looked rather expensive, to make her doll tea and sat talking to it, as though it could reply. The conversation revolved around everyday things. The weather, the boys they liked, the dreams she and the doll had for when they were older.

  For all intents and purposes, if one is not aware of Clara’s dark history, someone observing her will wonder why she is in this institution at all. She seems like the model young girl.

  When the orderlies came to give her medication, she simply took it without argument or hesitation, not saying a word to the burly men watching her.

  At dinner time, she was served much nicer food than the other patients. Obviously her parents’ money ensured she received prime treatment in all areas. She had steak with roast root vegetables and mashed potatoes smothered in gravy. It looked and smelled delicious. She was not allowed a knife, so her food had been cut up for her. Given a small plastic fork to eat with, she was supervised the entire time to ensure she didn’t hide the fork, or attack anyone with it.

  All in all, I cannot believe such a small, sweet child can commit such heinous crimes/deeds. I will need to consult the police reports for further information on the murders.

  13 September 1950

  I spent the last few days pouring over the numerous police reports regarding the murders Clara committed. In all honesty, they were brutal and sick. Using the information, I was able to draw up a timeline of what happened.

  Clara started her true killing spree two years ago when she was eleven. The first she killed were two brothers only a year older than her. They were twins and kept mostly to themselves.

  She asked them to take her to play in the forest near their house. Playing a game in which Clara and one twin were hiding from the other, it was there, while they were hiding, that Clara bashed her brother’s head in, spraying the surrounding forest floor and trees with brain matter and blood.

  When the other twin found them, Clara took a pen out of her dead brother’s pocket and stabbed his twin in the throat. Yanking it out, she then stabbed him twice more, once in each eye, and left him there to bleed out. When the police found him, the soft tissue around his eyes was swollen, and when they opened his eyelids, his eyes had liquefied.

  She returned home and found her oldest brother asleep in a chair on the porch. She quietly retrieved a knife from the kitchen and, before her brother could as much as snore, she slit his throat. She then proceeded to kill her four sisters. She started with the eldest, who had been taking a bath when Clara hit her on the head with a jug. She then held her sister’s head under water until she drowned. Paying a visit to her second sister, who was busy with her sewing, Clara used the large, sharp sewing scissors to stab her multiple times in the back, puncturing both her heart and lungs.

  Her final two sisters were playing with their skipping rope to the side of the house. Clara waited until one of them went to the lavatory and then used the skipping rope to strangle her. When the last sister returned, Clara had been hiding, waiting for her, and when she frantically tried to save her sister by performing CPR, Clara withdrew her father’s pistol and shot her in the head.

  She then went to fetch more bullets for the pistol.

  When asked who taught her how to shoot, Clara simply pointed at her father. Her father confirmed that he taught all his children how to handle guns so that they were safe around them in the house and so that no one accidentally got shot. Clara said that no one had accidentally been shot.

  From there, Clara walked through the forest for thirty minutes to reach her mother’s childhood home where her uncle lived with his wife and their five small children. She made her way through the house slowly. First, she shot her uncle in the head. When her aunt entered to investigate, she shot her three times in the stomach. Leaving her aunt to bleed to death, Clara then went from room to room, first suffocating the three sleeping toddlers one by one as the others slept. She then slit the throats of her younger cousins.

  In one day, Clara managed to kill off seven siblings, five cousins and her aunt and uncle. When her parents returned home the next day, they were bereft. The police found Clara at her mother’s childhood home, playing with her cousin’s dolls, sitting in a pool of their blood. She simply smiled at them.

  Clearly something had triggered Clara to commit these acts. One does not wake up at eleven years old and decide to murder an entire family. Something came over the child and I mean to find out exactly what it was. Perhaps then I can start investigating a way to stop it from ever happening again.

  The last few days that I have observed Clara, I discovered she is now paying attention to me. She will stare at me for a moment or two before talking to her dolls again. When they play, she sometimes smiles at me, as though she wants me to join them. Often she simply men
tions my presence to the dolls and confirms she feels safe with me around. This pushes me to know more, to do better for her. I must find a cure!

  14 September 1950

  Today I had a conversation with Clara. It is the first step towards finding a cure for her.

  I sat her opposite me and questioned her gently, but she did not answer. After trying to speak to Clara directly, and then through the means of injecting her with truth serum, I eventually figured it out and asked her doll the questions.

  Now she answers me. She speaks through her dolls. Something traumatised Clara so much before the killings, I believe they were a result of her fragile mind snapping. She uses the dolls to communicate because she is ashamed.

  I am running away with myself.

  Our discussion led to me understanding her a bit better. She knows her full name, her parents’ names and where she is. She understands why she is in the Asylum and what she did is wrong. She does regret killing her family, but what is curious is that she isn’t sad.

  She said the word ‘regret’, but she didn’t even shed a tear.

  I am worried that perhaps she is too far gone to recover mentally, but I am pursuing it nonetheless. I am desperate to help this child regain her mental facilities and re-enter the world as a whole person, capable of love and kindness once again.

  It is too early in our discussions for me to bring up the exact details of the murders, but the fact that she is aware of where she is and why leads me to believe I can help her, that we will make a breakthrough.

  I can save Clara.

  20 September 1950

  I forget about this journal. I am so busy with my conversion therapy treatments and with Clara that I forget I want to preserve my personal thoughts. I do want to preserve them.

  The last few days have yielded many interesting results. Two of my subjects in conversion therapy no longer want to be sexually active at all. Unfortunately, I have been so busy with Clara I haven’t had the chance to fully analyse why, because I haven’t had time to sit down with them. I will certainly take the time tomorrow to do so.

  Clara has proven a lot more open than I thought she will be. She seems to like me a lot and enjoys our conversations, even the ones about the day of the killings. We have discussed most of the murders now, working our way through one each day.

  She refuses to respond to questions about her first brother who was accidentally killed, so I moved on to finding out why she attacked her twin brothers in the first place. Had she planned it? Had she thought about it for long before that?

  Her answers to these sorts of questions are generally the same for each sibling. She was sitting with the sibling, or saw the sibling, or thought of the sibling. Then she would think of how the sibling had wronged her.

  In the case of her twin brothers, they had lied to their mother before she and her father left for their trip and gotten Clara in trouble. The result was that Clara received several hidings from her mother with the cane and was sent to bed without dinner. The twins laughed about it afterwards, and had only agreed to go play with Clara in an effort to apologise. Clara had still been angry, and wanted her revenge. Killing them just seemed logical to her.

  When I asked her what she felt while she was killing the twins, she answered me with a simple word - PEACE.

  She felt utterly at peace as she killed all her family members. She felt as though she was ridding the world of bad people who didn’t deserve to share the sunshine with her.

  I was correct in assuming that something had triggered Clara and this is extremely important. If we can treat her reactions to triggers, then we can cure her.

  I asked her about her other siblings as well. Each one had done something she considered mean.

  Her eldest brother often took her share of sweets, ignoring her cries and whines. Her eldest sister was always teasing her for playing with dolls, and always taking her hair ribbons. When she went to her mother to complain, she warned Clara to grow up or she would remove her dolls.

  The other three sisters had ganged up on her a few days prior and forced her to dress in boys clothes, and teased her. Clara felt humiliated and hurt.

  Tomorrow we will discuss why she attacked her cousins, her aunt and her uncle. I fear there is something darker at play that Clara is not allowing herself to access. She needs to deal with the trauma. What she has shared is mostly small triggering events, such as getting into trouble with her parents. Something worse happened. Something dark and evil. I can sense it in the way she talks about her family.

  I also cannot help but wonder about her parents’ reaction. Her father will be overjoyed to see her released while her mother seems to vehemently hate her child. Perhaps the source of Clara’s agony is her mother; perhaps she was abusive to the child. Perhaps she injured the child’s head as a baby.

  This is indeed becoming an interesting case.

  I have not yet passed my notes on to Wellbottom. I have managed to stall him by saying I haven’t compiled them yet. I promised to present my treatment plan to him once I am done with my interviews.

  He doesn’t know it, but I already have the perfect plan to rid this fine institution of his diseased presence.

  26 September 1950

  Mundane! Mundane! Mundane! I hoped that once we moved onto discussing the murders of her extended family that Clara will tap into the true reason she is traumatised. However, the reasons for murdering her extended family were, disappointingly, much like those given for killing her immediately family.

  It is starting to frustrate me. I want to begin treating her, but without the true cause of her episode I am not sure which path to take. I considered electroshock therapy, but (as stated before) it is known to cause memory loss and can cause her to forget her trauma. One also has to be aware that she may lose other valuable memories, like how to talk, eat, etc.

  I truly believe that if electroshock therapy is applied while the patient is focused on the problem memory, then that is what the electroshock will treat. It is about where the mind is directed during the treatment that matters most in cases like this.

  While I am still working on a solution for Clara, I do have other news to report. Regarding my conversion therapy treatments, two of my patients are almost cured.

  I allowed these two, the first two to arrive after Tate’s suicide, to have therapy twice a day every day for a longer period than Tate did. They were aware they were sodomising cadavers, but for the purpose of the experiment they thought them male. When made aware of the gender they were actually sodomising, they no longer desired intercourse at all. In fact, when shown a naked rectum, neither was stimulated or aroused in any way. I pushed the experiment a bit further and left them locked in a room together, but there was no sexual contact between them and no talk of intercourse. In fact, they stayed away from each other as much as possible and hardly said a word.

  This is an excellent sign. Yet another feather in my cap, if I do say so myself.

  Three more homosexuals are being transferred to the institution; I am going to test each differently, for different lengths of time, and record the results. Perhaps this way I can figure out the exact amount of treatment each patient requires in order to be properly cured, but still able to lead a relatively normal sex life.

  As for the two young men that have completed their treatment, I am sending them back up to the main hospital to be placed with regular patients. I will ensure the nurses take regular notes of their interactions and medications, so I can see if being in a larger group has any effect on either of them.

  Wellbottom is still on my case. He comes to my office every day demanding updates on Clara. I firmly believe that his sole purpose in life is to cause the patients harm. He cares nothing for them. He just enjoys his position of power. He is an arrogant man, who does little to assist anyone with any sort of illness. He needs to be dealt with.

  Although I took an oath to do no harm, I feel, by not doing anything, I am doing harm to all patients at this institution. It i
s therefore with a heavy heart that I have decided to take action. The man needs to be removed. I have several plans on how to accomplish this, and will need to assess his habits and observe him. When the perfect opportunity presents itself, I will know.

  For now though, I will focus on my patients.

  As frustrating as Clara is, I know I can reach her and I know I can cure her. I gave her parents the hope that she can be treated, and that she will one day see sunlight again. I intend to make good on that promise.

  Chapter Four

  HANS

  8 October 1950

  I feel absolutely horrid. Shortly after I started sessions with Clara I caught a miserable cold from one of the orderlies and have been on bed rest for almost two weeks now. I want to go to Clara. I know she needs me, she needs treatment, but Wellbottom is standing between us. He doesn’t want me to see her until I am healthy.

  However, I am feeling much better than I originally did. I am sure I can soon return to my post. The one good side of having the cold is that Wellbottom has not been badgering me while I have taken leave to recover. It has given me time, between dosing myself with medication and resting, to work on Clara’s case and to go over all my notes.

  The new patients for my conversion therapy arrive today. I need to make time to go down to the boiler room and ensure it is prepped for them to begin their treatment. One man in particular strikes me as fascinating. Aubrey is a burly young man charged and incarcerated for raping several men. He is adamant that he is not homosexual, but since being institutionalised has gone on to sodomise a further fourteen patients, as well as an orderly and a doctor.