Shades of Grey

MURIAS ASYLUM— APRIL 1844

“Excellent!” I smiled.

“What is the message?” Ophelia asked.

I looked around the room, observing how many people were mentally lost causes and how many could be of service in my plan. There were a disturbingly high number of potential assets…

“Tell them that Robin Hood and his merry men have come to rob the sheriff of Nottingham.”

There was a pause as they all tried to understand my analogy.

“What exactly does that mean?” Ophelia inquired.

“We’ve got to act soon: the tattoos are moving from the doctors to the patients.”

“The tattoos are on the patients now?!” Kam cried, looking to the catatonic Marius. “My God, that woman is unstoppable!”

“It’s not just her we are after,” I said, keeping my voice low. “It’s primarily the Board. Kingsmith is just a pawn.”

They all nodded and I took a confident drink of my water. I was well on my way to freeing Forma from the wolfish Bastille to which I had sent her.

I sat at a table near a window during recreation time the next day, staring at the two orderlies by the doors and slowly working up the nerve to implement my plan to investigate and search for weak spots in the Asylum’s defences. While I was doing this, several other sane patients would begin constructing simple but effective bombs: all part of the plan I had told the others to circulate the day before. Everything was going well so far…

Isabella and Ophelia sat next to me after they had received their rations for the day, also waiting for me to gather my nerve.

“What are you waiting for?” asked Isabella as she began to eat.

“The right moment,” I replied with dark resolve, tapping my fingers nervously on the table.

“How exactly are you planning to do this?” Ophelia inquired. “When the right moment comes, of course?”

“Get an orderly to lead me to the bathroom, then crawl through the ventilation shafts to the supply closet next to it where I’ll disguise myself and begin my search,” I replied, appalled at how poorly thought out a plan it was.

Ophelia and Isabella shared my dismay.

“Are you sure the orderlies are that dim-witted?” Isabella queried.

“I’m counting on it,” I said, standing as courage slowly came to me.

“What about one of the sisters? They’d be glad to help!” she countered, nodding towards the trio as they milled casually about the room, tending to patients in various states of madness. I shook my head, not wanting to pull anyone else into the line of fire with me.

“No, it would be too obvious. I’ve been talking to them for weeks. Kingsmith could figure it out.”

They both nodded in understanding.

“Well, don’t get caught,” Ophelia warned. “Please.”

“I don’t plan to,” I replied, walking over to the orderlies at the front entrance of the room.

“I need to use the loo,” I stated confidently.

“Very well,” the one on the left replied, motioning for another orderly to come take me. “Galvin will escort you.”

I looked at the small but muscular orderly that approached and surmised that I had enough strength to take him out if he was not as dim-witted as I needed him to be. This shouldn’t be a problem.

“Let’s go then,” Galvin said in a bored voice. Good, he wouldn’t pay too much attention to me.

I nodded and followed Galvin out of the recreation room and over to the lavatories about twenty metres to the right. Galvin positioned himself just outside of the door, opening it for me.

“I’ll be right here: if you try anything, I’ll know,” he cautioned.

I nodded curtly and entered the green and black tiled lavatory.

Now to implement my plan… I thought with a swift, decisive exhale.

Plugging the drain of one of the sinks, I turned the faucet on, recreating the sounds one would expect to hear in a latrine. Satisfied with my auditory deception, I leapt atop the dividers between the stalls and carefully moved the air vent cover over just far enough to crawl through, praying Galvin would be stupid enough to wait a few more minutes before entering to retrieve me.

I gently replaced the ventilation cover and crawled forward until I was directly over the opening to the supply closet which was, thank God, completely empty.

Exercising extreme caution, I carefully removed the ventilation cover and easily slipped through, landing silently on the closet floor.

I stood swiftly and grabbed a nurse’s uniform, quickly putting it on and styling my long hair around the large cap so that no one would see my face clearly. I eagerly smeared some eyepaint I found in the breast pocket onto my eyelids and looked in a lighted mirror along the wall. I then began to manipulate my face, looking for an expression that would make for a suitable disguise. To my surprise, I actually did look entirely different.

Who needs a Pallitus when you’ve got an old uniform and some eyepaint? I thought to myself in triumph.

I walked carefully in the heels that had come with the uniform over to the door, listening for signs that Galvin had unearthed the truth.

“Oy! What you doin’ in there? Nobody goes for that long!” He called as he pounded on the door. When there was no answer, he frustratedly threw the door open and not seconds later I had to quell laughter as an aggravated roar echoed from the bathroom when he discovered my deception. I then saw him fly out of the lavatory and quickly down the hall to the recreation room for assistance.

I took this chance and cautiously quitted the supply closet, continuing down the hallway in the opposite direction on my way to the Asylum entrance. As I passed through the third wing of patient rooms, I tried very hard to ignore the knowing looks in the eyes of the sane patients that easily deduced my identity and the horrified stares of the maddened ones as they shrank away from my nurse’s badge in terror.

“No! NO PUNISHMENT! GIRA HAS BEEN GOOD!” shouted an older woman in a room to my right as I passed. An orderly at the end looked up at me and for a moment, I thought he saw through my Britomartian guise, but his next statement confirmed the opposite.

“First day?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said with a nervous exhale. “Just got transferred from Bedlam.”

He smiled at me.

“Well, here we don’t uphold that Moral Management rubbish. If any of ’em gives you trouble again, go ahead and kick the door. Don’t be afraid to yell a bit, either.”

“Really? It seems like such a nice place!” I replied, feigning innocence as I gestured to the bright, friendly blue walls.

“Nah, that’s just what Kingsmith wants you to think. You should pay a visit to the treatment wing sometime today. Hell of a show down there, I tell you.”

He gave me a genuine smile and I nodded in thanks, proceeding to kick the door of Gira’s room.

“Er, back off!” I shouted with hesitancy. The orderly laughed.

“Not a bad start...”

I smiled as I passed him and crossed the hall, entering a large door that led to a stair landing. A series of sickening screams suddenly flew up from below and echoed off the hard walls of the stone shaft in a cacophonic screed of crippling sound.

I immediately followed the screams down the stairs and arrived at a very large wooden door with a thick padlock around the handle and a large plaque above it that read TREATMENT WING: STAFF ONLY.

Without a second thought, I kicked open the door and raced down the hallway that lay behind it: a dark, gruesome brick shaft lit by torches that hung portentously inbetween stone columns that made up the foundations of the monstrous building. This was the deepest level of the Asylum and I had a sinking feeling I would find its deepest, darkest secrets here as well.

It was a good twenty minutes before I found the door that housed the source of the screaming. I slowed my breathing and looked through a small opening in the door, observing the ‘treatment’ in progress.

I recognised Dr. Kingsmith’s back as she stood in front of a male patient who was strapped to what I thought to be a large device called a gyrator.

“Christopher, how many times do we need to do this before you admit to me that you are indeed sick?” she asked in her falsely solicitous voice.

The man called Christopher just laughed and spat at her shoes.

“You know, doctor, the definition of crazy is doing the same thing repeatedly and expecting a different result and we have been doing this for about five or so years. Who sounds more ‘sick’ now?” he shot back. I commended him mentally.

Dr. Kingsmith sighed and nodded to the two attending orderlies. They nodded in obedience and ascended the wooden platform above the gyrator, proceeding to turn the large lever. The compartment in which the male patient was strapped began to swing around the room, increasing in speed as the orderlies turned the lever faster, until the compartment became nothing more than a great blur.

“AGH! STOP! STOP! ALRIGHT! I’M SICK! I ADMIT IT! PLEASE STOP!” pleaded the male patient in agony.

Dr. Kingsmith nodded to the orderlies and they slowed their rotations. Soon the compartment slowed to a stop and I observed the male patient, aghast. He was green with nausea and unsteady with disorientation. Dr. Kingsmith knelt to his level and forcibly turned his head toward her with curt abruptness.

“What was that?” she asked softly.

“I’m sick!” he cried. “I admit it! I’m sick!”

There was a silent moment of defeat as I thought he had given up, but not a beat passed before he vomited all over Dr. Kingsmith. I mentally commended him again.

To her credit, she remained still and calm. After a moment, she stood and calmly removed her jacket. I withheld a chuckle until she picked up a knife from the table and turned back to the patient.

“Very good, Christopher. Now, we shall unearth your greatest fear…” she said deviously.

Christopher’s eyes grew wide with understandable unease as she gently brought the flat of the blade down the side of his face, stopping just under his chin.

“Is it the sight of bad blood being drawn?”

The doctor then brought the knife quickly down vertically along his chest, cutting into his Asylum uniform and leaving a long gash in his skin. Not a second passed before she cut a large horizontal line across the first laceration, cutting deeper and drawing more blood this time. Christopher only glared at the doctor.

“Alright, how about the sight of leeches drinking your bad blood?” taunted the doctor.

I stifled a gasp as she began to place leeches onto the patient’s gash, almost delighting as he cried out and squirmed uncomfortably.

“Ah…I think that might be it…”

Dr. Kingsmith stood back and revelled in his misery as he continued to squirm, twitching and convulsing with increasing violence as he fell slowly into a disturbed state of madness.

I then heard multiple screams from other patients echo through the damp hallway, mixing easily with the harsh voices of other wardens, nurses and orderlies.

I ran towards the next door, watching as a female patient was branded in multiple places at once. I winced as her screams became nearly ultrasonic and when the branding iron was removed, she whimpered with insanity. Isabella’s words then came back to me.

“They make us insane.”

With horror, I realised what was happening.

Through another window, I saw another male who was forced to grip a rope suspended over an enormous cavern and judging from his panicked state, Dr. Kingsmith had uncovered the fact that he was an acrophobe.

“Do not fall, Mr Wells,” said a doctor with as much malice as Kingsmith. “Just admit that you are sick, accept the fact that we are here to help you…”

The man said nothing. He merely hyperventilated and continued to keep his eyes closed.

I looked away and continued to observe the goings on in each door along the damp, ominous hallway. The more doors I looked through, the more I witnessed the torturous practices that Dr. Kingsmith employed, the sicker I became. This was much more serious than I thought.

I turned and continued down the hall, trying to maintain an air of nonchalance while also trying to ignore the screams of the tortured patients. It took every ounce of strength in my body to hold in my horror until I reached a private file room at the end of the corridor. I eagerly threw open the door and locked it behind me.

In the privacy of the dark room, I took advantage of the opportunity to gasp aloud and truly absorb exactly what sort of woman I was up against: a nationalistic, psychotic doctor with the power and temper greater than any Creature I had yet to face.

No problem, I thought in bitter sarcasm to myself.

After a moment, I looked up and saw two rows of patient files lining the walls: patient files that could have useful information…

I turned on the light and opened the first file, detailing the case of a young girl who had been in the Asylum for almost seven months. She had been sent here after trying to escape over the city wall and it was later revealed that she was deathly afraid of spiders. My stomach lurched as I tried to imagine how Kingsmith would exploit such a simple fear, until I read her notes on the bottom of the page.

“Complete submersion…” I whispered in horror.

The other files contained similar stories, each growing in severity until there burned in me such a fire of purpose that I felt a growing desire to destroy Kingsmith at that exact moment, which is why I failed to hear the key twist in the lock to the file room door.

The door swung open loudly and I dropped the files, stumbling over my stolen heels in shock as I stared at the surprised faces of Dr. Kingsmith and two faithful orderlies. No one moved for several moments, until Kingsmith gave a condescending chuckle.

“And what are we doing here? Playing dress up in a file room?”

Without missing a beat, the two orderlies raced into the room and worked to restrain me as Kingsmith strode forward, but I was faster. In spite of the heels, I managed to leap towards the orderlies and kick each in the face, knocking them into the walls and allowing me a clear path to Kingsmith. With elated pleasure, I kicked her in the chest and knocked her against the wall where I managed to clamp my hands around her throat. However, before I could do any more damage, the brutish orderlies had recovered and they easily grabbed me, breaking my hold.

“I know what you’re doing, you psychopathic harridan!” I shouted, fighting under their grips. “I know what you’re doing to these people!”

Without warning, her hand flew to my throat, clenching with an iron grip.

“There is no need for name calling,” she said, licking her other thumb and wiping away the eye paint from my eyelid. I shrank away in disgust, but the doctor did not relinquish her grip.

“I think its time for another treatment, wouldn’t you agree, Miss Echo?” she sneered as she pulled off my disguise and fastened my wrist cuffs to my belt.

When she finished, she nodded to the orderlies. Looking to their hands, I noticed a simultaneous lumination of their flame tattoos with a particularly bright lumination from Dr. Kingsmith’s tattoo. How glaringly suspicious…

I frowned in thought, forgetting to fight as they dragged me back down the stairs to the damp hallway from which I had just escaped. The doctor turned to the right and strode confidently down the darkness to a door at the very end of the hall, lit by only a single torch and secured with a strong padlock.

“I have not used this room in a very long time, but I think it may get me one step closer to unearthing your greatest fear.”

The doctor pulled out a key and unlocked the door. The orderlies pushed me forward and I saw that we were in a very old, very dusty theatre. I laughed aloud as the orderlies tied me to a seat in the front row.

“You’ve done it doctor,” I laughed acrimoniously. “You’ve unearthed my greatest fear: poorly maintained theatres. You wouldn’t dare put on a poorly produced theatre production, would you? That might send me into a tizzy.”

“Put away your sarcasm, Miss Echo,” Dr. Kingsmith replied as she pulled out a very terrifying looking instrument, which she situated on my head. “I trust you won’t have much left when we leave here today.”

I grew worried as she placed two long metal clips into my eyes, holding them open and preventing me from blinking. When she finished, she gently tapped my face and gave me a leery smile.

“Let the show begin,” she called as she turned and sat in the seat next to me.

The house lights then dimmed and the lights on stage went up. A long line of orderlies then led ten very confused and frightened patients onto the stage, each bound to a long chain of metal shackles. They looked dirty, malnourished and gravely insane.

“What is this?” I asked the doctor as she dropped a solution into my eyes to keep them moisturised.

“Just watch…” she said quietly.

Each of the patients had a tick of some sort that further exaggerated their state of insanity: a shaking hand, a twitch of the head or a greatly irritating moan — except for the one patient I recognised.

“Cyrus!” I said, recognising him on the end. He saw me sitting next to Dr. Kingsmith and his face fell in horror. He knew what was coming.

“What are you doing?!” I cried in horror to the doctor.

She did not answer me, instead she just watched the action on the stage as a line of orderlies holding very large rifles marched on from stage left and turned to face the patients. I gasped, sensing what she had planned.

“You’re sick!” I shouted.

“Just watch, Miss Echo…” she said, keeping her gaze on the stage.

“Unleash hell!” called one of the orderlies.

At this a thick round of bullets began to rain down upon the patients, echoing horrifically through the theatre…and all I could do was scream.

When it was over, the orderlies calmly walked off stage and roughly dragged the prisoners behind them.

I sat in quiet shock as Dr. Kingsmith mercifully removed the instrument from my eyes.

“What the hell was that?” I asked, trying to slow my horrified breathing as the stage lights darkened and the house lights came up.

“Extermination of the incurable patients,” replied the doctor as she undid the chair restraints and locked my wrists into leather cuffs behind my back.

“Extermination?!” I cried, aghast as she led me out of the theatre and into the hallway.

“Yes, of those few patients for whom our fine work here can produce no benefit.”

“How can you be sure?!”

“They were making no progress.”

“But why kill them?!”

“Incurables tarnish the name of the Board. Under their decree, any patient who has not made progress within five years time is to be exterminated.”

In a sudden flurry of anger, I brought my right foot behind me and attempted to swing it up to pin the doctor to the ground, but my restrained hands threw off my balance and she was able to move faster. In a second, she forced me against the wall.

“You had better be careful, Miss Echo, or I just might label your case file as ‘incurable.’”

I said nothing more as she escorted me back to my room; I merely daydreamed about all the bodily harm I wished to do to her.