Sanity, Judy Colella [ebook reader below 3000 txt] 📗

“Hell is empty and all the devils are here.”

– William Shakespeare, The Tempest

Sunlight crystalized the sweet blades of grass, making them translucent, backlit, small glowing shafts of photosynthetic art. Even on the neglected lawn of a long-abandoned asylum the sunlight orchestrated its natural magic.

Quite a sight, this field of glowing emerald surrounding what was originally a construct of graceful lines and masterful stonework, but which now crumbled by degrees. Once it was a mansion, the home of a brilliant doctor who believed he could fathom whatever it was that twisted the minds of some into a wrecked and contorted trellis of incomprehensible complexity. In his zeal, he turned the gigantic structure into a hospital dedicated to the service of the insane.

Some good was done here, but when the doctor expended his final breath, those that took over his work proved to be like vile, toxic vines covered with pleasant but deadly blooms. These new masters sounded deeply concerned for their charges, their dedication to carry on the dreams of the too-trusting founder who had hired them unshakable. But within the noble facade, they carried out their true desires, and used the inmates for their own dark purposes. The blackness of their hearts began to permeate the very walls until at last they were exposed and driven out.

But that was long ago, and now the lawns shimmered peacefully, a verdant halo around a decaying and corrupted crown.

And no one saw this beauty or recalled first-hand the ugliness, except one. A remnant. Someone brought there for one reason and kept there for another. One who should never have been there in the first place, but having arrived, never left.

The laughter was what he remembered the longest and best. He recalled two kinds – the mean, smug laughter of the doctors, and the wild, painful laughter of their patients. He’d long since forgotten the sounds of any other, even though he knew they existed. His father had laughed now and again, but its sound had chased itself away. He only knew it had been accompanied by a smile with no hurt behind it.

He thought about the laughter, about how much he hated it, as he stared through a window covered by wire mesh and spider droppings. As far as the view went, it wasn’t much, but it was familiar and therefore comforting. He’d made a safe path to the outside, but rarely followed it. Inside was what he knew best, inside with its ugly, agonized recollections.Its familiar smells of chemicals, blood, excrement, vomit, sex and death had, over time, become a mixed marriage.

The aromas of the outside were so wonderful by comparison as to be nearly unbearable, so he avoided measuring the inner against the outer. He didn’t want to become enraged by the way he’d been forced to live, nor did he wish to believe that anything better actually existed. To do that, he reasoned, would be to admit his choice to remain in this place had been the wrong one. It would also open him to a greater disappointment than he could accept, should the hope that better people lived out there prove to be no more than a whim of his imagination.

He turned from the window and crossed the large room toward double doors that had fallen from their hinges. The floor was a three-dimensional mosaic of debris, none of it recognizable as part of anything that made sense. Just bits and pieces, scraps of lives torn apart years ago, their vacant human shells shoveled into the furnaces to be purified into a form of matter called ash. Everything else was left as small obstacles that discouraged walking barefoot.

Out in the corridor, metal ductwork that had fallen through the acoustic ceiling tiles leaned at lazy angles against tan walls sporting skirts of mold along the lower parts and sweeping upward in the corners. He stepped with practiced ease over, under and around these barriers, heading toward the far end where the generator for this floor was housed.

He knew better than to switch lights on in any of the rooms with windows, but the inner offices where the doctors would hold consultations, or relax with smuggled-in bottles of alcohol kept in locked lower drawers of their desks, or pass the time raping an inmate because he or she would never be able to complain or report it – here there were no windows, and he’d cleaned out a few of them to make living quarters for himself, although how far in his past he’d accomplished this he couldn’t have said. So he’d needed light and the air-conditioning that had eventually replaced fans in the summer, light and heat in the winter, and just light the rest of the time.

When he was very young, one of the janitors had let him watch repairs being made to this same generator that had continued to provide his environment by powering every upgraded bit of technology installed over the years. And thus he’d become proficient at keeping it maintained.

A detached door with a one-way mirror embedded in its upper half was braced against one of the adjacent walls, and as he went by, he glanced at his image. He always did, but never for very long. His reflection disturbed him, mostly because it never changed, but he’d glance over at himself anyway on the off-chance something might be different. And as always, upon seeing that nothing was, he recited that oft-repeated expression, “The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” He had to wonder, though, if it applied in his case, because things had been done to him, things that were supposed to make him change, only it hadn’t happened yet.

The mirrored door behind him, he arrived at the room with the generator and reached for the knob – this was one of the only doors in the entire asylum that was still in place and functional – but before he could touch it, a loud crash came from somewhere downstairs and he froze. He knew every item in this place, knew what was likely to fall over and what was not. He also knew the sounds of the building’s slow death and was ready for the day it would finish its collapse, taking him with it. This sound was unfamiliar, inexplicable, and perversely, more frightening than the inevitability of his being killed by the asylum caving in on top of him.

He made his way as silently as possible toward the stairwell in the hallway running parallel to the one with the generator. The door was gone but he remembered what it had looked like – solid metal with a small window, and the words “Stairwell Two C” stenciled in white on a dark brown, shiny surface. He had no idea what had become of it, nor did he care. The lightless opening gaped at him, daring him to risk navigating what lay beyond. Not much of a dare, really, since he knew these stairs as well as the rest of the place. Once the backstairs area of the house (when it was still a house), it had become one of many ways to travel between floors after the conversion from mansion to asylum. The walls had been reinforced with dull, cold cement, the wooden steps replaced with noisy iron ones.

No sound was detectable at first as he eased downward in the dark, his old sneakers depriving the metal of its voice. When he was almost at the bottom, he distinguished something softer, something familiar yet completely strange. A laugh of some kind…giggling. That’s what it was called. Not like the mad giggles of demented inmates that spoke more of sorrow than of mirth. No, not like that at all. Odd that he’d been thinking about laughter only a short while before. He frowned and came down the rest of the way, curiosity pushing away fear.

There. Again. A girl’s voice, he was certain. He peered around the doorframe, but saw only what he always saw – a corridor decorated by the chaotic hand of neglect, no single object related to another, and none of anything fully intact. Nothing more. Until he heard the whispers. People who were severely demented did a great deal of whispering. But like the giggle, this was different from what he’d come to define as whispering, mainly because more than one voice was involved. Partly because he had no trouble differentiating what he was hearing from the whispers he often had to deal with in his own head. The latter were mere sound-ghosts. The former were real and not very far away. He stepped out into the corridor, drawn to the trespassers by a need he could neither deny nor control. He also couldn’t explain it, but it hadn’t yet occurred to him that he needed to, so he kept moving forward.

The voices became fainter; he increased his pace, determined to at least see who these people were. At the next junction of hallways, he looked to the left one – the right was completely blocked both by part of the ceiling that had lost its battle with decay, and by all the things it had once held up: beds mostly, a table or two, some chairs, cabinets. None of these had survived the crash very well, and in time had simply rusted or rotted into a mish-mash of incomprehensible shapes he never bothered to try and clear away. The left-hand hallway, however, led to the one place he was most reluctant to go. Outside. Whoever had come in was going away, and he felt he should be relieved, but wasn’t. He wanted to see who they were. Had to, in fact. So he followed.

At the next junction was the opening to the kitchens. He had worked hard to make a path through discarded, bent steel tables, filthy cookware, broken china and crockery, and several refrigerators stinking of dead food because their doors neither opened nor shut all the way. This path branched off in two directions; the left one led to what had once upon a time been something called a mud room, but which the hospital staff had converted into the space where trash was stored before being hauled out to the larger bins behind the building. From there, the sanitation workers of a more recent era had removed the dented receptacles and dumped their unsavory contents into trucks backed into the area by way of a narrow driveway between the back door and a grassy courtyard.

Nearing this small, windowless chamber he finally saw what had caused the crash he’d heard. Someone had bumped into a steel sink that had become detached from the wall several years ago, and which was only upright because it had an inverted table against which to lean. It couldn’t have taken much of an impact to knock it over, but its fall would of necessity have been loud.

He sighed, chose to ignore it for the time being, and went to the small door. It was open an inch