In fact, all of the employees of Brookline acted strangely when the warden was in the room. They became quiet, motionless, as precisely still as toy soldiers.
“Wouldn’t you love to look at what they’re scribbling on those clipboards all day long?”
“I’m not convinced I want to know,” Kay said. “You stop noticing it, and the less attention he pays us the better.”
“Day three,” he said in the most stuck-up, nasal voice he could manage, “patients still here and still completely nuts.” Ricky dropped the voice. “Does he really think he can change you?” Or me.
She shrugged, adding a few trees under her sailboat and cloud. “He keeps me here as a favor to my pop. I hope the money is enough to make him happy. If he’s happy, he might just leave me alone.”
Ricky smirked at that, but his smile dimmed quickly. He hated being studied like this. The warden and Nurse Ash weren’t even being subtle about it. They were obviously discussing him, treating him like some kind of specimen under glass. He stared back, daring them to do something about it.
Next to the warden and the nurse, on the wall, hung pictures Ricky had seen several times now as he came and went from the large common area. He tried not to look whenever he passed the pictures. They didn’t seem like the kind of thing that ought to be freely displayed. Images of patients—patients like them—some sitting quietly in their rooms, others strapped to tables in the center of a full lecture hall. Somehow those photos were even more morbid with the warden standing next to them, utterly unaware or bothered by them, as if they were watercolors or family portraits.
“Those pictures . . . ,” he said. They were supposed to be working in their little yellow pads with their sad, stumpy crayons, the only writing implements they were trusted with. Ricky had no interest in suicide, but it was true that at this point he might put a pencil through his eyeball just to get a frantic visit from his mother.
“I hate them,” Kay murmured with a shudder. “I never look at them.”
“Doesn’t it seem odd that they’re out in the open like that?” Ricky asked under his breath. “Creeps me out.”
“I think that’s the point,” she said. “I think they’re supposed to be like a threat. A warning.”
“They are a warning.”
Ricky glanced away from Kay, turning to the young man who had spoken up. Ricky hadn’t really paid him much attention before, since like the other patients he worked in almost total silence. Obedience. He looked to be a little older than Ricky, but it was hard to be sure. He had a handsome, ageless look, with sleepy blue eyes and a friendly mouth.
“You two talk a lot,” the boy added. “I should know, I was—well, I just know that the nurses don’t like chatter. Our whole table could be disciplined. They’re watching.”
“Relax, Tanner,” Kay replied. She wasn’t testy, just gentle. “We’ll keep our voices low, okay?”
That didn’t appease Tanner. He wore a haunted expression, like he had seen some serious, bad things in his time.
“Oh, great, he’s coming over.”
It was too late for lowered voices, apparently. As the warden approached, Ricky didn’t break eye contact. He couldn’t have even if he’d wanted to. Most adults didn’t intimidate him much, but there was something different about this warden guy. He didn’t look mad or even concerned, just blank, like his skin was a mask for another face behind.
“Am I getting us in trouble, Kay?” Ricky whispered.
“I told you,” Tanner muttered, head bowed over his journal.
“Don’t panic, either of you,” Kay said. “He probably just wants to say hello. You’re the new kid, remember?”
“I never forget, thanks to you.”
Kay flipped the pages of both their journals back to the halfhearted paragraphs they had started for their daily entries. The warden crossed the room at a leisurely pace, and Ricky started to see spots in the corner of his eyes. Blindingly intense bulbs lit the all-purpose room. You could never forget in this room that you were in a hospital—a place where surgery was conducted.
The thought made his throat tighten. Kay had told him more about the hospital in California where they sent her aunt. They did all kinds of brutal experiments on the patients there. Because they were “undesirable” and “perverted” the doctors could do whatever they wanted. At least, Ricky reassured himself, Brookline wasn’t that kind of place.
“Hello, Mr. Desmond.”
The warden’s voice was as calm and blank as his demeanor. He raked his eyes over Kay, a flash of memory in his eyes before he fixed his attention back on Ricky.
“Afternoon,” Ricky said. He finally broke eye contact and looked down at his nonsensical journaling. His stomach tightened in a knot. Most adults hated when he stared back at them, defiant, challenging, but the warden hadn’t seemed to mind. He’d seemed to welcome it, smiling that unwavering half smile, a ventriloquist dummy’s smile.
“I’m Warden Crawford, but I’m sure you knew that. Nurse Ash informs me that Keith is just full of information,” he said. Even then he didn’t take his eyes off Ricky.
Kay flinched, the pointier end of her crayon digging into the paper, making a tiny wax divot.
“Here we encourage our patients to write in their journals. Dreams. Thoughts. Your own point of view of your time here, whether it’s successful or otherwise . . . I find it useful to reflect on such things. I trust you’re both embracing the exercise with the full effort it deserves.” His smile flared, but not in a friendly way. Ricky shifted his hand, covering his paragraph of random song lyrics. Half of “Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay” smudged under his wrist.
“Yup. We definitely are,” Ricky mumbled.
“Definitely,” Kay corroborated.
“As our newest patient, did you have any questions for me?” the warden asked, leaning in closer as if to try to get a peek at what Ricky had scribbled.
Just one question sprang to mind.
“Do you know when my parents might visit?” Ricky asked, trying to take the heat off his new friend. That, and he was honestly curious. There had to be some kind of visitation schedule set up eventually. At Hillcrest, parents were supposed to visit every weekend. Just like with the eye contact, asking blunt questions tended to throw off adults, but he was beginning to realize he’d have to get trickier, smarter, to deal with this man.
If you were such a genius, you wouldn’t have ended up here. You would’ve kept your stupid temper.
“Soon, I’m sure,” the warden replied gently. “Nurse Ash assures me you’re settling in nicely, which tells me it’s high time we began your treatment in earnest, mm?”
“My treatment?” His eyes flew to Kay, but she was trying to disappear into the table. “And what will that be like?”
The warden chuckled, craning back and tucking his hands into his coat pockets. He pulled out a tiny metal tin and opened it, popping a mint into his mouth. “I’ll be seeing to you myself, Mr. Desmond, so don’t worry. Your curiosity will be satisfied soon enough.”
“Friday work hour is different for everyone,” Nurse Ash explained. Her red hair bounced under her hat as she led him through the main lobby. A new family was being welcomed by the front door, though Ricky couldn’t tell from looking at them which one was the patient. He almost called out to them—caused a scene—but then a rank of nurses appeared from the far corridor where Nurse Ash was leading him, clipboards in hand, deployed to check on patients in their individual rooms. They nodded each in turn to Nurse Ash, then stared at Ricky like they knew what he’d been thinking. He shivered.
Continuing through the hall, Nurse Ash and Ricky passed a rickety old elevator—the kind with the metal gate in front of the doors. It was coming to a stop as they walked by, but it was coming from below. So there was a basement, just like in his dream.
Nurse Ash led Ricky through a heavy door to a kind of reception area. This must be the administration wing. At Victorwood, he would often hear the nurses laughing and
chatting at the drug dispensary stations, the sounds of their excited gossip drifting through the halls. Here it was utterly silent.
Across the expansive room, Ricky saw a glass-paned door labeled “Warden Crawford.” For a heart-fluttering moment, he thought Nurse Ash was taking him in there, but she moved instead to unlock a nondescript wooden door to the side, and he breathed a sigh of relief.
“What’s in here?” he asked.
“Brookline has operated for decades,” she explained. “And, frankly, we can’t always keep up with the amount of paperwork there is when you’re dealing with as many patients and families as we have. We try to stay on top of it now, but things weren’t always so smoothly run here.”
“Filing,” Ricky muttered. “Wonderful.”
“Was that a complaint?” She stopped, the door halfway open, and gave him a cold look.
He had forgotten that she was one of them. That there was always the threat of “discipline,” even if he didn’t know what that looked like yet. He wasn’t spoiling to find out.
“I just prefer the outdoors, that’s all,” he amended.
Her expression softened. “Of course. I think we all do. Here, let me show you what you’ll be doing today.”
Beyond the door was a small, cramped room, lined with shelves. It wasn’t like the halls and rooms and cells of Brookline, not perfectly scrubbed and tidied, but much more haphazard. Dusty. Accordingly, Nurse Ash handed him a small rag from the pocket of her coat.
“Clean as best you can,” she said. “Start here, with the old patient intake and outtake cards. Just remove the files, alphabetize them, and replace them in the storage box. Get as many done as you can, please. I know it’s a bit tedious, but maybe it will give you a chance to think about your reasons for being here.”
Ricky nodded, but he wasn’t fully listening. A box on the shelf directly across from the door was spilling open, old black-and-white photographs and tintypes visible above the bulging edges. He drifted toward the box, tugging out one of the photos and studying it. A young girl stared at the photographer, her expression lifeless, her small face overshadowed by the giant doctors crowded around her. The only impulse he felt was to help her, save her . . .
“These photos,” he said softly. “They’re like the ones in the hall. In the cafeteria.”
“Yes,” Nurse Ash replied. She joined him at the shelf and gently took the photo out of his hands, sliding it back into the box and out of view. “I find them troubling, to be honest. But the warden thinks it’s important to be upfront about the work we do here. To be proud of it.”
“Proud of hurting little girls,” Ricky spat.
“We’ve come a long way,” Nurse Ash said, maybe a little defensive. “We can’t help what happened in the past, we can only try to do better.” She paused. “We have to do better.”
She sounded sad. Resigned.
“I’d still really like to talk to my mother,” Ricky reminded her, sensing a moment of weakness, of vulnerability.
But Nurse Ash straightened up, correcting the sad slant to her lips as she brushed off her hands and swept to the door. “I can’t help you, Ricky. Not like that. You know, it’s a privilege to get this assignment, not every patient is allowed in here. I can only suggest you be on your best behavior. Order and discipline, remember? That’s what we reward here.”
“Yeah,” he said. “I remember. And hey, I promise I’m one of the good ones. I’m gonna get that phone call out of you eventually.” He winked.
“You’ll have to do better than that.”
And she was gone. He heard the key turn in the lock. There wasn’t all that much light to see by in here, and for a moment he was overcome by the claustrophobia of it all. Dust choked his lungs. He heard the pipes creaking and settling in the walls, and it reminded him of that strange, dark heartbeat he had followed in his dream. A dream . . . a vision . . . As the week had gone on, and his sleep had been interrupted again and again by that terrible screaming, he’d been increasingly less sure what had really happened that first night.
“What a privilege,” he said to himself.
He was drawn back to the box of photographs, and he decided to start his sorting there. A small act of defiance. He found the little girl again. She looked so terrified. Maybe terrified enough to be the one he heard screaming. But this was an old image, and he didn’t recognize any of the orderlies huddled around her. There were images of equipment, surgical equipment, and doctors conferring over what must have been the latest and greatest. Saws. Drills. Syringes that looked big enough to be for elephants.
He recoiled and shoved the pictures away. If he were anywhere else, it might be fascinating, if morbid, but he was in a sanitarium now. These pictures were from Brookline, he reminded himself. Those tools had been used on patients just like him.
It was too real.
Chilled, he forced himself to sit down with the box of files Nurse Ash had pointed out. The whole thing was a mess. Half of the brown folders had spilled open, the cards and notes piling at the bottom of the musty box. The rag didn’t seem like nearly enough to clean a square foot of the room, so instead he tied it around his nose and mouth to keep out the irritating dust. Some of the papers were water damaged, others simply blank.
He dumped out the box and began organizing. Nurse Ash was right about it being a tedious job, although really that didn’t begin to describe it. Hunting down the stray scraps of paper all belonging to a single patient proved almost impossible, since the names were frequently smudged or altogether absent. After a while he decided to hunt and match by symptom or treatment.
Instantly the task became a lot less boring.
“God,” he whispered. Some of the treatments made his week of gardening and writing in his journal feel like a vacation by comparison. Just like he was using guesswork to gather the files back together, these doctors had been using guesswork on people. New cocktails of drugs. Isolation therapy. Shock treatment.
Someone called Maurice Abeline had undergone such intense, prolonged shock treatment that he became unresponsive. There were no more notes about him after that.
“They killed him,” Ricky murmured, slamming his fist into a filing cabinet. It didn’t seem right for him, a patient, to see these things. It was like the pictures, so blatant, so unashamed. He dug back into Maurice’s folder and pulled out the last description of treatment. He set aside that notecard and hunted through the next file and the next, collecting the latest note he could find on each patient as he went.
When that box was more or less organized, he sat cross-legged on the cold, cement floor and flipped through the final cards.
Unresponsive. Deceased. Complications from F.L. Unknown. Deceased. Unknown. Unknown.
The unknowns alarmed him the most. Was it unknown what their ultimate fate was or unknown what had killed them? He looked through the cards again, trying to find patterns or some kind of explanation for so many sad endings. Most, he discovered, were males, and the frequency of deceased or unknown declarations accelerated after the year 1964. None of the cards were more recent than 1966.
Ricky had no idea what he was looking at. A slew of male patients died at Brookline in a two-year period. Why the short time frame? And why were the female patients more fortunate?
He shoved the papers into the back of the box, still grouped together. They were out of sight, but if he ever came back here he would be able to find them quickly. Standing, he adjusted the rag around his face. It didn’t do much to keep out the damp paper smell of the room and it only made him feel more claustrophobic. There was still so much left to do. Sure, he had tackled one box, but there were dozens upon dozens in here.
So many . . . There might be just as many dead patients waiting to be found in the other containers. He sighed and hefted the organized box of files back onto the shelf, then gave himself a little pep talk to start on the next. Bending to grab it, he stopped, frozen, feeling a sudden gust of air on the back of his neck. It was a groan, a sigh
, but chilled like no human breath could be.
His spine went rigid and he stood, turning, tracking the sensation. There was no one behind him and no vents that he could see, either. It was his imagination then. Paranoia. Like the screaming girl, the heartbeat. He whirled back around to face the box and almost let out a scream of his own. His throat closed up around the sound. A man, or perhaps a boy, stood right there in front of him.
Ghostly. Pale. A thin stream of dark blood trickled from his eye. He was wearing the same hospital pajamas as Ricky. And it—the thing, it couldn’t be human—reached for him. Ricky jerked back, instinctively, no longer able to breathe in the tiny, dirty closet with its cold, ghostly breaths. With its actual ghosts.
He overbalanced, stumbling backward into the shelving unit to the right of the door. The figure was already gone, just a flash, there just long enough to reach for him and then vanish. Ricky tried to steady himself on the shelves but the unit was already teetering. Gritting his teeth, he pushed back against it, barely managing to keep the whole thing from toppling down on him. One of the boxes shook loose, too close to the edge, and it and all of its contents crashed onto the floor, dozens of pictures scattering across the cement.
Footsteps approached from the hall. Someone had heard the racket. On hands and knees, he frantically scooped the pictures back into the box. Knuckles rapped quietly on the door.
“Mr. Desmond? Ricky? Is everything all right in there?”
Nurse Ash. Had she been standing out there the whole time?
“Fine,” he called through the rag, moving it aside to unmuffle his voice. “Just bumped a box, nothing to worry about.”
Her footsteps didn’t retreat. He worked faster, righting the box and reaching for the last few stray photos. There was something strange about the last picture on the ground . . . It looked familiar. Eerily familiar. Painfully familiar.