Asylum

by Madeleine Roux

  Abby sidled up next to him to stare at the picture, both of them trying to make sense of the image.

  “It must be a treatment of some kind,” Dan said finally. “He must have been a patient here.”

  “He’s so young,” Abby said. “He could be our age.”

  He could be me. Dan shook the thought from his mind, peeling off the photo and aiming his cell phone at the next one.

  This picture showed a woman restrained on a table. Fitted over her head was a helmet with wires coming out of it. A wooden bit was wedged between her teeth. Between the helmet and the bit, she looked like she was being tortured, like some kind of martyr.

  The photographs were horrible, but Dan couldn’t stop flipping to the next one, and the next. Each picture showed a patient enduring some kind of treatment, from painful-looking shots to solitary confinement. A photograph depicting hydrotherapy turned Dan’s stomach. Orderlies were aiming hoses of water at a patient, who was huddled and shivering in the corner of the room, completely naked. A doctor stood to the side, arms crossed, indifferent.

  Dan had read about this kind of outdated treatment before—he had a morbid fascination for the subject, really. Growing up in the foster system had given him an interest in social machines, systems that made decisions for people instead of with them. Not that he was comparing his life to the plight of these poor people—if anything, the system had made a good decision for him, all things considered. He wouldn’t trade his family for anything.

  “Wait, you guys, come take a look at this.…” Jordan said, and the catch in his voice got their attention.

  He was standing on the far side of the desk, his flashlight pointed at the wall, where there were even more photos, hanging in frames.

  “How awful,” Dan said.

  “Quiet.” Abby spoke in barely a whisper.

  She moved closer to one of the pictures, gently wiping the dust off the glass frame with her sleeve. It was a photograph of a little girl, no older than nine or ten, with light-colored hair down to her shoulders. She was standing up, her hand resting on what looked like a wooden post, like she was posing for a formal portrait. She had on a patterned dress and was wearing fine jewelry. But a jagged scar slashed across her forehead and there was something wrong with her eyes.

  “She looks so sad,” Abby said.

  Sad was one way to put it. Empty was another.

  Abby stood still, staring so deeply into the photograph that it looked like she was in a trance. Dan didn’t have the heart to tell her that given the scar on the little girl’s forehead and the emptiness in her eyes, it was likely that she’d been given a lobotomy. What kind of monsters would perform a lobotomy on a little girl?

  The picture hanging next to it shocked him from his thoughts. It showed a patient struggling, pinned by two orderlies in white aprons and restrained by a muzzle on his face. One of the orderlies holding him looked positively evil. Dan was mesmerized by the photograph. Who had taken it, or any of these pictures for that matter, and who had hung them up on the wall?

  “It’s hard to remember they were here to get help,” Jordan said.

  “He was ill,” Dan replied automatically.

  “So? Does that look humane to you? Those doctors wouldn’t know the Hippocratic oath if it kneed them in the balls.”

  “You have no idea what was going on,” Dan shot back. Then he stopped himself. Why did he feel the need to defend the very doctors who had probably performed a lobotomy on a child? Or who were getting ready to torture a man? When he looked down at his crossed arms, a bolt of fear shot through his body, and he rushed to fill the awkward silence. “I guess we’re just lucky the field has come a long way since then.”

  “Why leave these here?” Abby cried suddenly, gesturing at the photographs. Her chin was quivering. “They’re … horrible.”

  “Well, at least it’s honest,” Jordan replied, putting an arm around her. Abby shrugged him off. “I hate when people skirt around the truth. And lest we forget, this was locked.”

  “I don’t care if they locked it up.” She wouldn’t stop looking at the photograph of the girl. Dan had an urge to grab Abby away before the hollow girl in the frame could reach out and pull her in. But of course that was ridiculous. “She shouldn’t be here. She should be put somewhere safe.”

  Slowly, Abby raised both her hands and pulled the frame off its hook. A light patch showed on the wall where the picture had been. Abby hugged the photograph to her chest, her arms wrapping protectively around it.

  “What are you doing?” Dan said, unable to stop himself.

  “I’m going to take her back to my room. She’ll be safe there.”

  “You can’t take it, Abby,” said Dan, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. “It’s supposed to be down here. You need to leave it alone.”

  Abby was about to say something else when Jordan spoke up. “Hey, relax, both of you. It’s not like you know her, Abs. You should put it back. Someone might notice it’s missing.”

  “Who?” she demanded with a soft little scoff.

  “Someone,” Jordan replied testily. “I don’t know.… Maybe there’s a catalog of all the crap in here somewhere.”

  Abby didn’t seem to hear what Jordan had said. She stood silently, like a statue, gripping the picture to her chest.

  “Please, Abby, leave her where she is. She belongs with the others,” Dan insisted. “Please.” He couldn’t believe he was arguing with one of the hottest girls he’d ever met.

  Just let her have it, Dan. You want her to like you.

  But the need to speak was more compelling.

  Abby’s eyes seemed almost as vacant as those of the girl in the photograph. Then a shiver came over her and she blinked. Gently, almost affectionately, she put the picture back on the wall. She touched it one last time and said, “Poor little bird. I wonder if she ever escaped her cage.”

  With the picture in place, Dan felt a sense of relief. He couldn’t exactly say why.

  “Come on,” Abby said. “Let’s go back. I’ve had enough.”

  That was all they needed. They scrambled out of the old office like it was a race, and Dan was only too glad to shut the door behind them.

  “Hey, the lock,” Jordan said, just as they reached the vending machines.

  “Don’t worry, I already took care of it,” Dan said, ready to be far, far away.

  “You sure?”

  Without waiting for an answer, Jordan turned back to double-check. The lock was still hanging on the door where he’d left it.

  “My bad,” said Dan, laughing nervously. He really could have sworn he’d locked it. But then, his memory had been known to play tricks on him.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  .....................................................................

  CHAPTER

  No 5

  Dan was dusty and exhausted by the time he got back to his room. Opening the door carefully, so as not to wake Felix, he took a step in and was gripped by cold.

  This isn’t my room. Dan blinked, disoriented. It looked like a cell of some sort, with floors and walls made of heavy gray stone. An operating table covered with a thin, white sheet stood in the middle of the room. In the corner nearest him was a drain—why, Dan could only guess. A small window cut into the top of the far wall was covered by crisscrossing metal bars. But the most unnerving thing about the room was the pair of shackles that were bolted to the wall on the left. At first, Dan had thought they were rusty, but now that he really looked at them, he could see that the dark red stains were far too wet to be rust.

  Why do I know this room?

  Dan quickly closed the door and started rubbing his arms with his hands to get rid of the chill. He tried to rationalize what had just happened. Had he opened the wrong door by mistake? That would explain it. He was extremely tired, and had just taken a wrong turn and ended up at the wrong room. A nightmare room that hadn’t been used
in decades.

  Yeah, right.

  He checked the door number. 3808.

  That was his number. What was going on?

  After rubbing his eyes with trembling hands, Dan opened the door again. And there was his room, two desks, two chairs, and two beds, with the sleeping lump of Felix on the nearer one.

  Dan stepped in and closed the door. Leaning against it, he tried to catch his breath, coughing from the dust still lodged in his nose and throat. His mind had wandered, that was all. It had wandered far, but now he had it back.

  Unsurprisingly, Dan couldn’t sleep. Tossing and turning, he’d banish the photographs from his head only to be overcome by the weird hallucination he’d had. Intermittent snores from Felix didn’t help. Around two thirty, when he finally gave up trying, he grabbed his laptop from the desk and crawled back into bed with it. Maybe he could find out more about Brookline, something that might explain those horrid photographs.

  He typed in “Brookline and History,” and that brought up a list of various towns called Brookline. Adding in “New Hampshire” turned up a vague summary of the sanatorium’s history which contained nothing Dan didn’t already know—that it had housed the mentally ill, both men and women, and had been bought by the college after it closed. He decided to try an image search. Instantly, a results page full of vintage photographs of Brookline’s exterior showed up. In black and white, the building looked even more menacing.

  Narrowing the parameters further, Dan typed in “Brookline AND history AND asylum.” And there, finally, was a link that looked promising. Judging by the garish purple background and abundance of animated gifs on the page, it was a “homemade” website, to put it nicely. The title was what caught his interest, though: “Brookline—Curing the Insane or Creating Them?”

  Pretty sensationalistic, Dan thought. But it only went more over the top from there. The page was long and gave off some serious conspiracy-theory paranoia vibes. Sal Weathers, investigator, hobbyist, and—oh, boy—ghost hunter, had painstakingly compiled what must have been every bit of news Brookline had ever made in local or national papers into one long text block. Statistics about how many patients had been at the asylum at its peak, stories about how when it closed in 1972 patients had been relocated to other hospitals or released … Repeatedly, Dan came across references to the difficulties Brookline had had in keeping a warden. The turnover sounded worse than McDonald’s.

  Finally, about three-fourths of the way through Sal’s winding write-up, Dan found something—a line, a throwaway maybe, but he read it to himself several times:

  It wasn’t until 1960 that Brookline found the man who would redefine and refocus its entire purpose.

  And his name was? And what was the new purpose? But the article didn’t say.

  “It’s called narrative focus, Sal—look it up,” Dan said aloud. Then he remembered he had a roommate. Luckily, Felix seemed to be a deep sleeper.

  Dan scanned down the page. The reason behind Sal’s literary ADD quickly became obvious. Why fixate on garbage like the rate of warden employment when there were serial killers to discuss?

  By far the most controversial of Brookline’s patients was the serial killer Dennis Heimline, known more commonly as the Sculptor. Between 1960 and 1965, he terrorized a small rural community in Vermont. Police estimate that he killed at least a half dozen people, earning his name from the grisly way he left his victims posed like statues. One report described the “cold, terrible beauty” of a young woman found “dancing” in the wilds of the White Mountains, her mutilated arms tied to tree limbs high above. The most horrifying crime he committed occurred at a local pub. The victims were posed in various places throughout the bar—some standing, some sitting, and some engaged in a kind of revelry on the dance floor. All held in place by ropes and wires.

  Perhaps more disturbing than the Sculptor himself was the fact that when Brookline closed, no trace of the Sculptor could be found.…

  Dan was riveted. A serial killer had been a patient here, in this building. Where had they kept him? What kind of treatment had he received? And where had he gone?

  Dan closed his laptop and lay back on his bed. Just as he was drifting off he remembered the photo of the struggling patient and wondered if that could have been Dennis Heimline. Maybe his parents had been right to worry about him coming here. Having a speckled past was one thing, but a serial killer? Treatment photos? Well, he wouldn’t be sharing these discoveries with Paul and Sandy, that was for sure.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  .....................................................................

  CHAPTER

  No 6

  “No offense, Dan, but you look like crap. Did you have trouble sleeping or something?”

  Abby’s voice sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a pool. Realizing he’d begun to nod off, Dan roused himself enough to lift his head and shove a bite of cereal into his mouth. He wondered if the halo of fuzzy light that looked so at home around her head was from the morning sun through the skylight or from his almost total lack of sleep.

  He decided against telling Abby about what he’d found online, because he was worried it would sound too weird—that it would make him sound too weird. He was only just getting to know her; he didn’t want to blow it in the first twenty-four hours.

  “Felix snores. Like he swallowed a frog. Or a lion.”

  “That bad?”

  “Yeah, and then he was up at the crack of dawn to go work out, of all things. Needless to say, I don’t think I’ll be getting much sleep this summer.”

  “You sure you’re not just worn out from our little ordeal last night?” She didn’t beat around the bush. He liked that.

  “I guess it was pretty intense,” he said. She had certainly seemed enamored of that one photo. They’d almost had a fight over it. Dan frowned; he couldn’t even remember now why he’d been so adamant about her leaving it there.

  A stab of pain in his head made his eye twitch. “Damn it. I did not want to feel like this on the first full day.”

  Abby pushed a cup of coffee across the table. “Try that. It’s strong enough to fuel a jet.”

  He turned the cup, careful to avoid the little smudge of pink she’d left on the rim. He took a sip and tasted something between lighter fluid and maple syrup and rushed to swallow before the sweet sludge could make its way back out. “Wow! How do you drink that?”

  “I actually hate the taste of coffee, but the sugar helps cover it up,” she admitted. “And you can’t be an artist and not drink coffee. It’s just … not done. Every installation I’ve ever gone to has either coffee or wine, so you’ve got to suck it up and deal.”

  Dan laughed. Abby didn’t seem like she cared if she fit in or not, but maybe everyone made a few concessions here and there. Just last year he’d broken down and bought a tan corduroy blazer to wear to a community college lecture on Jung’s last years. He’d sat in a sea of tan and navy sports jackets, wondering what his favorite psychoanalyst would say about so many people trying so desperately not to stand out.

  “Hey,” Dan said, forcing a smile as he sat up straighter. He remembered something Abby had said yesterday. “So you took a bus here?” Dan had flown from Pittsburgh, and then taken a taxi from the tiny airport that looked like it had just one runway.

  “A couple buses, actually. Pops couldn’t take the time off, but it’s no trouble. Bus, train, subway … It’s all second nature when you’re from New York.”

  “What about Jordan? Virginia’s not exactly down the block. Why didn’t he fly?”

  “Oh, his parents got him plane tickets all right,” Abby said, “but they were to California, not New Hampshire.”

  Dan raised his eyebrows.

  “Apparently, they think he’s at some pray-the-gay-away camp or something right now. His uncle is paying for this program, and he used the cash from his part-time job to buy the bus ticket.” Abby draine
d the remaining coffee and finished the last of her oatmeal.

  “But what if his parents find out? What happens then?”

  Abby frowned. “Beats me. World War Three?”

  No wonder Jordan was so afraid of getting kicked out.

  Dan felt grateful for his open-minded and easygoing parents, strict as they could be sometimes. He always felt like he’d lucked out with Paul and Sandy, even before they’d officially adopted him. Lots of kids weren’t so fortunate. “It’s nice he has you here to talk to about it,” he said. Abby was so easy to be with. It was no surprise that Jordan confided in her.

  “We just get each other. We’re connected.” Abby gathered her things. The buzz of voices in the cafeteria died down as the students ambled outside, all of them headed to registration. “It was a long bus ride, not much to do but play hangman and chat. I’m sure he would’ve opened up to you, too.”

  “Maybe,” Dan said, although he highly doubted it. “Anyway, he better not miss registration or he’ll be forced to open up to Felix in Advanced Bioethics.”

  “Be nice,” said Abby, but she was smiling.

  They filed out behind the other students, grabbing their backpacks from cubbies placed just outside the cafeteria entrance. Apparently you weren’t allowed to bring your bags inside because college kids had a habit of making off with a whole week’s worth of croissants and fruit cups.

  “Seriously, though,” said Dan. “This morning Felix asked if I wanted to swap schedules, for a buddy system or something. Then when I finally gave in and showed him the classes I wanted, I could tell he was embarrassed for me. Not enough hard science, I guess.”

  Abby laughed.

  “Yeah, thanks. Laugh at my misery.”

  Dan sneezed when they stepped outside.

  “Bless you.”

  “Thanks. Hey, I was actually thinking, though, what if we took a class together or something? You, me, and Jordan, I mean. I know you’re here for art, but maybe I could convince you to take a history class?” he asked. The dormitories spread out on either side of them, forming an almost perfect ring around the grassy quad. Chairs littered the shade under the biggest tree in the quad, and while the benches lining the path were empty now, he imagined they would all be filled later. He’d overheard a few kids in the cafeteria talking about having a lawn bowling tournament after registration.