Asylum

Dust swirled around her feet as the door shut behind her with a heavy click that echoed steadily through out the abandoned facility. The air was stale and felt thick as it traveled down her throat into her lungs, pumping dead air into each red cell as it passed by. Her blood chilled and her skin paled, each hair standing at attention as she adjusted to the temperature change. Despite the hot air hovering beyond the door frame and shattered windows, the cement walls had trapped in chilled air left over from the night that had passed hours before. She took a step forward, the black stiletto heels she wore making a harsh clicking sound beneath her, the sound then bouncing off the walls around her. As her eyes began to adjust, she took in her dark surroundings as regret swept over her like a heavy blanket.

The room was expansive, floored with a filthy and cracking imitation white marble. An old desk sat rotting in front of two large steel doors that had been forced off their hinges. Old documents lay scattered about the floor as though the folders that once encased them all had been thrown wildly around the room. Curtains that may have been cream coloured years ago hung in shreds in front of dirty, cracked windows. Sun beams poured in through holes in the curtains, illuminating the dust that hovered in the air all through out the room. Paint fell from the walls in chips raging in size from pennies to melons, littering the floor and the chairs pushed against the walls. Paintings that had once hung from nails on the walls lay in piles of broken glass, shattered wood, and decaying paper.

Twisting her long chestnut hair and putting it up in a black clip, she glided across the floor towards the broken double doors. The asylum has been closed for over forty years due to the discovery of the practice of psychosurgeries. Still, presences walked every hall, slept in every bed, and hid in every doorway. At the age of thirty-two, she no longer believed in ghosts. Reason told her they were impossible: there is no left over essence when a person dies. Even so, she could not help but look over her shoulder every time she walked into a room. Find the files. Find them, grab them, and then leave. Her assignment could not have been simpler. Working for a company dedicated to shedding light upon the evils of psychiatry, she had been sent to find the original files of Walter Freeman. The man had developed a surgery in the 30s that involved hammering an ice pick behind the eye of a patient to sever brain nerves and he had continued doing so until the early 60s. He performed these so call lobotomies on 40,000 American patients, 22,000 of which had died from the surgery. Psychiatrists had been allowed to perform acts of human cruelty under the guise of medicine and no one had tried to stop them yet. I'll find those files and help reveal the fallacy behind their so called science.

Bitter is an odd term for a human condition. It is doubtful that a human can feel the same way a lemon tastes, but this is the only word used to describe this woman. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, her mother had been thrown into a mental asylum and was never released. By the time word had gotten out about the abuse inside these so called hospitals, her mother was hardly the woman she had once been. Her brain had been completely fried by electroshock therapy and there were so many chemicals flowing through her veins that she was no more than an empty shell lying dormant in a mildew stained bed. Medical doctors tended to all the patients they could but most, including her mother, died before they were able to fix anything. From that moment on, anger became her fuel. Thousands of fake hospitals across the planet were still open and destroying lives and she was determined to find a way to stop them.

So here she was, two years later, feeling her way through an abandoned asylum. Some of the offices looked as though the "doctors" had simply stood up and walked out, as if it were nothing out of the ordinary. Cups left unbothered on desks with coffee rings inside them, patient forms half filled out with cap-less pens resting dusty and untouched on top of them, and some chairs were even pushed neatly into place against the side of the desk; once proud black leather desk chairs now stood rotting and grey. Other rooms had chaos carved into the walls and the floors. Curtains had been pulled down, beds over turned in an attempt to flee, and patient files flung about the room carelessly. Some mattresses lay perfectly in place atop their bed frames, imprints of motionless bodies still faintly pressed into them. Name tags hung on bed posts, a few suitcases still hiding beneath the bed frames.

I don't even know where to start. She knew little to nothing about the design of this asylum. There were many different offices scatters about the building and none of them had names written on the doors, desks, or walls. She headed up a flight of stairs, hoping that maybe the office she was searching for would be near the top. She had no reason to hope for this, simply a hunch that she was following. With every step, her heels clicked loudly through out the stairwell. Suddenly she heard the pattering of small feet running above her. She stopped moving immediately, watching the floor above her. An animal. The building is open, anything could get in. She continued, the stairwell getting darker as windows became smaller and fewer. Using her shoulder, she forced open the door that lead to the fourth floor.

A long empty hallway greeted her, a single tall window with bars over it at the end. This was her only light as the door to the stairs shut behind her loudly. Her breath came unevenly and her heart beat like a drum, sounding loudly inside of her head. Everything inside of her screamed for her to go back, but she was on a mission. She touched a wall ever so gently and retracted her hand quickly; the walls were wet and felt almost as if they were sweating. The ceilings above her were stained brown from moisture. A pipe must have burst from rusting. She wiped her hand off on her pants and walked forward, keeping her eyes off the heavy steel doors on either side of her. Small porthole-like windows carved into numbered doors, peering into windowless rooms. There were at least two dozen of these doors along the hallway. The patter sounded behind her and she spun around, only to face the darker end of the empty hallway. One of the doors was open, something she had failed to notice at first. She watched the door carefully, waiting to see some kind of movement, some sign of a raccoon or weasel, anything. Suddenly she felt the icy grip of a small hand upon her bare arm. She whipped around, lashing her arm out to hit whatever may have been near her, but still she found the hallway empty. She shook her head violently and again walked towards the end of the hallway, faster this time, keeping her eyes forward.

The door at the end of the hall was open, leading into an office with large windows looking over the grounds below. On the desk, written on a dusty gold plate was the name "Walter Freeman." Relief came over her, but briefly. She hurried into the office and began sifting through the drawers, searing for some kind of paper work, anything she could bring back to make the trip at least sort of productive. The patter sounded again in the hallway and she looked up at the door, staring at it with her eyes opened their widest possible. Her hands gripped the drawer so tightly that her knuckles turned white. She heard a single soft step right outside the door, and then dead silence filled the entire level of the building. She stood there shaking for a few minutes, not sure what to believe anymore. She pulled a large file out of the bottom drawer and opened it. Inside were pictures of a young woman no older than fourteen, along with all of her patient documents. She flipped through all the pictures and watched as this woman, starting as a beautiful adolescent with a far away look in her eyes, slowly had her life drained of her. The final few pictures were of the girl in surgery, silver ice picks forced behind her eyes and into her brain. There were no pictures after this; the girl had died on the surgery table. She gathered the papers and pictures as fast as she could and hugged them to her chest, walking around the desk to the door. Before she had a chance to step outside the office however, the door slammed shut. Panic swept over her as she pulled on the door handle, shaking it with all the strength she had. Tears streamed down her face as she fumbled for her cell phone, wanting some contact with the outside world to help level her reasoning skills again. When she opened the device, its screen flickered wildly, and then shut off. Her eyes locked onto the blank screen and she swore she saw the outline of a woman standing behind her, reflected in the black of the cell phone. As she felt a cold hand move through her hair and brush against her neck, she turned around wildly, papers and pictures sliding down her front and all across the floor.