The Requiem Red

by Brynn Chapman

“I don’t understand.”

  Why are you encouraging him? You are to reorient the deluded to reality at all times.

  “Go and see,” he says, a long finger pointing to the door

  I reluctantly walk down the hallway, partially to put space between us. I reach the door after a very long moment, and it whines as I grasp the doorknob and push it open.

  Stairs. A very long flight of stairs, the bottom bathed in the yellow glow of a sconce.

  “What is it?”

  “Tunnels. ’Em connects all the buildings. They all have their numbers affixed to the walls. They follow the same course as your map there.”

  I wait, conflicted. “Are we … permitted to use them?” I had never heard Father or Nurse Sally-turtle-bird utter a word about hidden tunnels.

  His face is like stone. “Precious few do. But I won’t tell if you don’t. I am good at keeping secrets.”

  I shudder. I bet he is.

  Footsteps echo in the corridor nearby. “Hurry up now. Make your choice.” He quickly begins to mop once again, his eyes strategically avoiding me so that whoever may be approaching shall not be drawn my way.

  I take a deep breath and descend.

  Jane

  I cannot sleep. Truth be told, I almost never sleep.

  My dreams are a place of torment rather than comfort, oft filled with bizarre images and such sharp sensations, they might well be memories.

  Birds fill my dreams. Bright bluebirds, and black leering ravens. Circling, pecking, and singing. The notes spiraling from their mouths alight with their corresponding colors.

  Always, it ends the same. One bluebird, poised in the corn, humming middle C. It takes flight, disappearing down a darkened, leafy path.

  They might well be memories … but I cannot trust my mind, as I have had my fair share of treatments—shocks, dowsing, isolation.

  My mind is not to be trusted … even by me.

  I lie still, staring at the empty bed beside me.

  I have never had a bunkmate to whom I might talk. As a child, I used to dream, weave myself stories about her. How we would become fast friends, share all our joys and fears. A makeshift family.

  Frost made sure that wish was never realized.

  He ensured my roommates were either profoundly impaired or so entirely melancholy no amount of cajoling, empathy, or pain could pull them back from their despair.

  I roll to stare out at the snow, falling in huge, white flakes, instantly melting as they hit the pane.

  I began speaking to myself when I was five, most likely to fill the silence. I oft find the words slipping out even now, without my permission. Perhaps that is why I hum and compose; it is more socially acceptable to sing than to mumble.

  Wrinkling my brow, I slide out of bed to shut my door. I shove my chair over and wedge it under the doorknob. It will not keep them out, but at least slow their entrance.

  I slide open the window, and the cold snatches my breath.

  A fire escape runs along beneath the windows, but the ladder to the ground is chained with a padlock.

  I stick my head out the window and hum, loud as I can. Nothing. Just the sound of the wind rustling through the trees, the icicle-covered branches clinking together in a natural symphony.

  “Where are you?” I whisper.

  It is much, much too cold for Sebastian to sleep out of doors this eve.

  My eyes steal to the sky, dread weighing down each cautious blink.

  Many somethings come to my window. Ravens. They perch on the wrought-iron scrolls about my window—sometimes only one, sometimes as many as ten. They are quiet when they visit. Unnaturally quiet, as if frightened of capture. Cocking their twitchy heads back and forth, as if posing some unspoken question.

  Indeed, if Frost saw them, he would accuse me of either witchcraft or yet another reason to be “treated” for my affliction. As if tiny little leeches could actually suck out and right any abnormalities swirling through my lifeblood.

  I hear it. A tinny echo as something approaches on the fire escape.

  A big, brown-striped tabby, with eyes quite similar to my own, leaps onto my windowsill, and I quickly whisk him inside and slide the window down with a thud.

  I bury my face in his fur, inhaling the clean scent of snow, and place him onto my coverlets. “Sebastian, I have missed you so.”

  The big cat purrs, winding his body around my legs, till finally collapsing onto my knees. To have him here, to not be alone, has been a relief I cannot put to words.

  I found him five years prior, injured and near death on the escape. I stole for him, sneaking milk from the kitchens, giving him half of my own meals. I even managed to steal the bandages and liniments necessary to heal his paw. From that day on, he has been mine, returning each night to my window. Indeed, he is the first real friend I ever had. I blush. I speak to him as I would a person. I know it to be abnormal, but to have a creature not reject me, to accept me, no matter what … It comforts me.

  I sit up in my cot and tug up the rough covers to my face to muffle the sound of my humming. Middle C. I allow the warm, calming sensations to wash over me and close my eyes. This note in my mind is red, always in red.

  Normally, each note holds a specific color. Except for the special music. The Requiem Red, I call it.

  It is the corn music. When it calls to me, whether by day, or in my dreams, all notes falling from the birds’ beaks blaze in a fiery red.

  As a child, I believed Frost. That is was part of my sickness.

  But now … I know them to be real, not created in my mind.

  The ravens. Their music. It means something—something I am certain will alter my life. It is as if they want something from me. But I cannot discern what.

  I banish the thought as the gooseflesh erupts across my skin like a tactile brushfire.

  Instead, I picture a field filled with flowers and sun. Picture finding it, hiding there—never to return.

  A shriek slices through my reverie as my eyes fly open wide and Sebastian’s claws sink into my flesh. He drops to the floor, slinking to hide under my bed. I shiver hard and cock my head to listen.

  Another wail. Feminine. Close.

  Our ward is directly next to the ablation ward. More aptly termed the torture ward. The place where minds are lost.

  The scream again, this time, long, drawn out, as if the pain lingers. The hairs on my arms rise. The voice sounds familiar. My chest balls with panic, and a gush of fear floods my legs.

  Tears bead, and I blink and press my lips tight, grateful I cannot recall who suffers.

  “No tears. No tears, Jane.” I hastily wipe them away.

  Fear is as much a part of me as my beating heart. I cannot imagine a life without it.

  Of late, a woebegone, familiar shadow threatens to return to my heart. Hovering, longing to adhere itself to my soul, to snuff out my will. Or at the very least, to drag my lips back to that wretched bottle of laudanum.

  The shadow is more loathsome and dangerous than the fear. With fear, one may fight. But melancholy … Its tentacles creep around the soul, crushing and smothering, until all desire is choked out.

  I grow tired of being brave.

  I used to be certain, if I was good, so very good, and followed the rules, helped others in need—one day my life would change.

  There are days I no longer believe such.

  Once in the tenacious grip of laudanum, I spent days in bed. Which was never my custom in childhood. One year in particular seemed to be swathed in muslin. I passed nearly a year in my mind. Mute. Unmoving.

  Catatonia, they called it. Escape, I called it.

  It took another year to regain my body.

  Another scream to curdle my blood.

  “Help. Dear merciful Providence, help her.”

  The shuddering begins, chattering my teeth, shaking my hands. I slide out of bed and, gritting my teeth, trying, fumbling, to dress. I drop to my k
nees to remove the loose chunk of stone behind my bed, to conceal Sebastian should any enter my room. He eyes me from beneath the bed, tail swishing madly.

  The screaming continues as I skulk from my room into the hallway. My door is rarely bolted. I am not deemed an escape risk, which is so very foolish. I am thankful for the thousandth time these doctors cannot read minds.

  The doors between the wards, however, are typically bolted.

  No sounds. Our ward is mercifully quiet.

  Tim, our typical night orderly, is no doubt in a spirits-induced near coma, as is his custom. My ward is filled with quiet young women. Young, sad, demented women. Requiring little attention or muscle.

  I sneak down the hall, ending up at the nurses’ station.

  There’s only Tim, slumped in his chair, his head resting on the nurses’ counter surrounded by a pool of highly flammable, foul-smelling drool.

  I crouch and head to the converted supply room. Once inside, I stand still, leaning against the racks, catching my breath, listening. When no other sound ensues, I jam my shoulder into the small chest of drawers, sliding it across the floor.

  It conceals The Hatch—the name I have given to my gateway to another world. A world of relative freedom.

  I found it many years prior. It is very, very dangerous but enables me to go to the abandoned library—and perhaps one day will be my means of escape.

  The trapdoor creaks, the warped wood popping and cracking like an old man’s bones as I open it and slide carefully in, allowing it to swallow me whole. For a moment I grapple in the dark, clinging to the cold metal.

  I scurry down the ladder and leap the last few rungs, dropping to the tunnel. The screams have given way to moans as I pass beneath the ablation room.

  The shadows whisper, “You have fought long and hard. Time to give in, give way to me.”

  I know if I do, it shall be to Ward Thirteen, with no hope of return.

  There, the lobotomized shuffle in endless circles, with unseeing eyes. I wandered in there once as a girl. I will never, ever forget the glazed eyes, the drooling mouths, the broken bodies, devoid of spirit. Just empty husks of once humans.

  Once someone’s lover, wife … child.

  I place my hand on the tunnel wall, hurrying along as fast as I dare in the gloom. There are few sconces, and one out of every three is lit, leaving very long seas of inky black between. So black, anyone or anything might be inches away without one’s knowledge. Someone or something uses this tunnel.

  I have encountered odd smells, the occasional footprint. But I have thus far avoided running into staff.

  I halt as the moaning increases directly above me.

  Footfalls.

  My heart panics. Think, think. My mind spirals in revolt, picturing solitary confinement—my toes, my only free members, drawing on walls as they have in the past to keep the demons of insanity at bay.

  I cannot lose this meager freedom. The library is my only means of sanity. Without the escape of the books, the shadows will close and win. The footsteps are much too close.

  I bolt back from whence I came.

  Mercifully, a laundry cart has been abandoned, shoved into a nook in the tunnel. I bound behind it, cowering, peeking through the piled linens.

  Humming. A singular note. C. My breath hitches sharply, and I hold it.

  A cascade of warmth. The flashing note of red.

  Bootfalls. Loud. Right here.

  A girl steps into view, bathed in shadow. Long, dark curls bob. Her profile portrays a turned up nose.

  Chills explode down my spine. She halts, listening.

  I grasp the cart as my knees fail. My eyes squint as I struggle to discern her form in the dim sconce light.

  She turns to face the corridor down which I am hiding, head cocked as if sensing my cowering presence.

  The tunnel careens, pitching in time with my mind’s revolt, and my head strikes the corner of the cart in time with a blinding pain to the temple.

  The world shrinks, a circle going smaller and smaller, like a noose cinched around my eyesight. My last thought as my cheek hits the rock is Eyes. Blue with a yellow inner ring. Feline eyes.

  Jules

  I finger the letter in my hands and look over my shoulder for the fifth time. I swear I hear footsteps, scuttling, but so far, no man or beast has revealed themselves.

  My forehead dampens with sweat, and I mutter a curse under my breath, my eyes darting around in the dark tunnel.

  I should’ve ignored the old man and just endured the downpour.

  I pass low-lit sconces, each with a number nearby, reciting the wards and the functioning levels of their residents in my mind. The recitation calms me, drawing my attention from the noises in the shadows and the fleeting sulfur smells that somehow lurk in the darkness. I keep moving, walking swiftly toward my goal.

  Ward One—where the nearly well are given the opportunity to work, to be embedded in community gatherings like the asylum recitals.

  Wards Two and Three are tuberculosis wards. Father has forbidden me to go near them. And for once, I have obeyed.

  Ward Four—the women’s ward. Sad, demented women of every state of confusion meander up and down its yellowed hallways.

  Wards Five and Six—the men-only wards.

  Ward Seven—a special place indeed. Where the foreign-tongued are housed—till it might be determined if they be sane or mad. Nurse Ginny relayed the ward to be a creation of Grayjoy’s after encountering an elegant, elderly gent who was considered demented and housed at Soothing Hills for a year, only to discover he merely spoke French.

  The Frenchman had lost most of his ability to speak, but when spoken to in his native tongue, he suddenly followed every command and showed the appropriate emotions, proving he was not entirely mad, merely lost, unable to communicate his situation, his way back home.

  His distraught family came to collect him within a fortnight.

  I pass the rungs for Wards Three, Four and Five in tight succession. The children’s wards. I’ll admit, I have not been able to muster the courage to step foot inside.

  A scream dances down my nerve endings from the topside hole as I pass by Six. A shuddering cry with chest-rattling gasps of masculine pain. I shudder, wrapping my shawl tighter and nearly run.

  My eyes flick down the tunnel, where Wards Eleven and Twelve house the criminally insane. One for women, one for men. Violent patients—the most highly guarded wards. Where the vast majority of injuries occur.

  And Thirteen. Where patients are taken for experiments. Patients without families to speak for them. Patients who are deemed uncontrollable.

  Father calls them animals.

  But I have heard the rumors among the nurses—by eavesdropping—that if one should cross my father, Ward Thirteen should be their fate. Another shiver wracks my body, rattling my teeth, and I snap them together.

  I know my father to be stern, but is he … capable of such atrocities?

  I halt and stare. The number seven sits before me, waiting for me to scurry up its ladder.

  At last, Dr. Grayjoy’s ward. I reach my hand up and touch the cold rung and freeze, my mouth going dry.

  Several portholes down the corridor, what seems a great, white bird flaps awkwardly down from the topside hole. My heartbeat pounds in my ears, the world slowing as I squint in the gloom. I peer closer and, to my growing horror, realize it is a woman.

  A dead woman. Her body dangling from the porthole above as an orderly below angles her lifeless form toward a gurney. I estimate the distance to guess that is Ward Thirteen.

  Nurse Sally descends from the hole. My father is never far behind. I vaguely wonder if she might be a dalliance. I avert my gaze and scurry up the ladder, intent on not letting the nasty woman catch sight of me.

  My conscience plays devil’s advocate. Of course, patients die. The tunnels would be a sensible way to take the bodies to the morgue. But the hairs on my neck rise in
warning. Warning to stay out of her way, out of her sight.

  Just keep moving. Just keep moving.

  I open the next hole to yet another hallway, the ward number blazing right before me, just as the old man said. I scramble out and dust off my uniform, straighten my cap, and step forward to rap on Dr. Grayjoy’s door.

  I wait for several moments, my heartbeat accelerating. Nurse Sally was quite insistent I deliver it. I stand still for several very long minutes, waiting. Every shuffled stone and scuff of boot of the corridor seems to scream of my presence.

  I sigh impatiently as my pulse escalates; its rhythm of vexation pounding in my ears. I shall miss the night carriage back.

  My face burning, I jiggle the handle. The office is unlocked, and the door swings open, as if inviting me in. I slide inside. Other than the off-putting skeletons in each corner, it is mundane. Precisely the office one would expect of a respectable physick—dark woods, a myriad of reference books and papers towering on a gargantuan mahogany desk with a nameplate that proclaims, Jonathon Grayjoy, M.D.

  The room smells of lingering leather, fire, and tobacco smoke.

  Pinpricks of red embers remain in his hearth. He has not been absent long.

  I slink to his desk, afraid of disturbing the loud silence of this room, and slide the letter onto his desk, in the center of his blotter to assure he will see it. I turn to go, but something in the periphery catches my eye. Something on the top of his desk.

  A sketch. In watercolors, no less.

  I blink. My heart sinks to my knees as a river of fear pumps out, weakening them. I grasp the desk to keep erect.

  Eyes. Just a set of eyes. Decidedly feminine. Nearly feline. Blue with the yellow-hazel ring around the iris.

  “My eyes,” I whisper.

  I trace my finger over the lashes. The lashes are the wrong color. White-blond, not dark brown-black like my own.

  They cannot be mine. Dr. Grayjoy and I have only met in passing at the recital. I lied to Father about him encouraging me to come to volunteer. I merely know him through Father’s ravings and Nurse Sally’s instructions, and his handwriting on charts. And my admiring him from afar.