Sanctuary Bay

by Laura Burns

  “Never heard of it,” Dr. Diaz answered. “But I can look into it.”

  “So what do we do now?” Sarah asked. “If Karina’s alive, then where is she? If that treatment is supposed to help Izzy, then why does it seem like she’s suddenly lost her mind? And why is the entire Wolfpack acting insane? They repeated a meeting last night word for word and they didn’t even realize it.”

  “What the hell is this?” Ethan’s voice was quiet, but something about his tone made Sarah nervous.

  “Did you find Philip’s file?” she asked.

  “No,” he said. “But I found my father’s.” He held up a thick brown file folder. “Gregory Steere. And there’s another one right next to it. Elizabeth Lanning. Except somebody wrote in another last name after that, so it would be filed in the right place, I guess. Elizabeth Lanning Steere. My mother.”

  Sarah’s eyes widened. “I didn’t know your parents went to Sanctuary Bay,” she said.

  “That’s the thing,” Ethan replied. “They didn’t.”

  15

  “Let me see those,” Dr. Diaz said, reaching for the files in Ethan’s hand. “Maybe they’re just medical histories for enrollment purposes. We don’t do that currently, but it’s entirely possible there used to be a family history taken.”

  “Yeah, especially if it has your mom’s married name,” Sarah said.

  “See for yourself.” Ethan handed the files over and turned away. From the look on Dr. Diaz’s face, he wasn’t looking at a simple medical history. His eyes moved back and forth, scanning the records, his forehead creased with concern.

  “Ethan…” Sarah wasn’t sure how to approach him.

  “They met at Harvard,” he said without turning around. “Sophomore year. They have this whole story about it. She sat next to him in philosophy class and he immediately started annoying her by asking to borrow a pen. Every time she’d tell the story, she’d say the same thing: Who comes to a philosophy class without a pen? But that was all it took. Love at first sight and all that. At least that’s what they always said.”

  “Maybe they just meant that they started dating then, but they knew each other in high school,” Sarah suggested.

  “They’re my parents. I know when they met,” he snapped, looking at her.

  “Okay, sorry,” Sarah said. She started back toward Dr. Diaz, but Ethan grabbed her hand.

  “No, I shouldn’t yell at you. Obviously I don’t really know.” His expression was so sad that every fiber of her being wanted to draw him in for a hug. “I don’t know anything about my family at all.”

  “These records indicate that your parents spent all four years of high school here at the Academy,” Dr. Diaz said.

  “That would explain why it seemed normal to them to send Philip here, if it was their high school,” Sarah said.

  “There’s nothing normal about any of this,” Ethan muttered.

  “When did the school first open?” Sarah asked, looking around the big room. “There’s a lot of stuff in here, and the classes aren’t that big.”

  “In the early fifties,” Dr. Diaz replied. “But you’re right, there does seem to be a lot. I wonder if there’s more than just medical records—it could be old student academic files, I suppose. I’ve actually never made it to the back of the room.”

  “I’m going to look.” Sarah climbed over a carton and inched her way toward the old filing cabinets along the far wall.

  “Why?” Ethan called after her.

  “I don’t know. There’s just something bothering me.” Sarah pulled open a drawer and blew the dust off some ancient, yellowing file folders. She glanced at the date on one or two of them. “These are from the sixties,” she said. She shut the drawer and moved on to the next huge old cabinet.

  “What’s bugging you?” Ethan asked, coming over to her.

  Sarah hesitated.

  “Is this a memory issue?” Dr. Diaz guessed.

  “Kind of. Maybe.” She shrugged. “The table Izzy was strapped down to, it had these metal bars across it to hold her legs down. Is that normal?”

  “Not really. Typically if you were going to restrain a patient, you’d use something made of padded foam and mesh,” Dr. Diaz replied.

  “Guess metal bars are the more cutting-edge Sanctuary Bay way to go,” Ethan said sarcastically.

  “The operating table in the old asylum was the same,” Sarah said. “It had the same kind of metal straps. Only rustier.”

  Both of them stared at her, baffled.

  “And there was a filing cabinet like this one in that same room,” Sarah went on. “It had a drawer missing, and there was water damage to the wood. But it was the same kind. I saw a few of them at the asylum. So I guess I want to see if they brought over any of the stuff from the asylum when they started the school. I thought maybe there’d be a mention of Bromcyan.”

  Dr. Diaz frowned. “That asylum was closed decades before the school was founded. The POW camp was here in between.”

  “But Bromcyan was carved in the POW cell too, remember? I saw it,” Sarah told him. “I was down there for my Wolfpack initiation.”

  “Fine. Let’s look.” Ethan went over to the farthest cabinet, tucked into the corner of the room, and yanked open the top drawer.

  “What year?” Sarah asked.

  He raised his eyes to hers, shocked. “1924.”

  “Sanctuary Bay didn’t exist then,” Dr. Diaz said.

  Ethan pulled out a handful of folders and handed one to Sarah. She opened it up and scanned the fading words. “It’s still a medical record, though.”

  “This one too. And this one.” Ethan kept flipping through the files. “They’re patient files.”

  “From the old asylum?” Dr. Diaz took a few folders and began looking through them. “I never looked at anything but the names when I jammed new files in, but I assumed they were all from the school. There’d be no reason for us to keep files for the asylum patients.”

  “Who owns the island? Maybe when the school bought it, they became responsible for everything,” Sarah guessed. “So they technically own everything at the old asylum and the POW camp.”

  “That could be. They would have had an obligation to maintain the patient files, so maybe they just moved them all here. This is deep storage,” Dr. Diaz said.

  Sarah couldn’t take her eyes off the file in her hand. “This is for a girl who was only fourteen, and it says she had hysteria. Doesn’t that mean she just had really bad PMS?”

  “It could mean a lot of things. Mental illness wasn’t well understood back then,” Dr. Diaz replied.

  “But still, to be sent away to an insane asylum…” Sarah could hardly imagine it.

  “This guy thought he was Rudolph Valentino,” Ethan said. “Oh, and sometimes he thought he was a two-year-old.”

  “You’re making that up,” Sarah frowned. “Stop being insensitive about this.”

  “I’m not! He suffered from dementia, and the two most common delusions were of Valentino and infancy.” Ethan held up the file as proof.

  “Schizophrenia,” Dr. Diaz put in, his voice quiet as he scanned the file in his hand. “This poor boy suffered terribly. There wasn’t any real treatment.” He sighed. “Sad as it is, I have to admit a certain professional curiosity in reading these files. I can’t believe I never knew they were here.”

  Sarah opened another one, her gaze skimming over the long list of drugs and treatments, looking for anything that would let her see what this man’s life had been like. Did his parents come visit him in that awful asylum with its dark rooms and its grand hall? Were the doctors and nurses kind to him, or were they the kind of horrific figures that always showed up in insane asylum movies?

  “‘Mania,’” she read aloud. “So maybe he was actually bipolar. But they had him so hopped up on drugs that the medicine itself may have caused the symptoms!” She ran her finger down the list of meds. “Opium, paraldehyde, Bromcyan.” She looked over at Ethan. “Bromcyan,” she repeated. �
�It’s listed here as one of the meds they gave this man for his mania. Sedatives and Bromcyan.” Her hand that held the paper was shaking.

  “The file is from the early twenties?” Dr. Diaz asked. “Maybe it was an experimental treatment that fell out of vogue quickly. They were flying blind back then. Bromcyan. Huh.” Dr. Diaz suddenly sat down on a nearby file box. His face had gone pale, and the files he’d been holding fell from his hands without him seeming to notice. He was lost in thought.

  “Dr. D? Are you all right?” Sarah asked.

  Dr. Diaz stared straight ahead, his eyes unblinking.

  “Dr. D?” Sarah bit her lip. “You’re freaking me out.”

  “I’m okay. I didn’t recognize the name of the drug at first, but it’s starting to feel familiar,” Dr. Diaz answered in a strange, low voice. “I can’t quite place it though.”

  “Well, we know it was being used to treat mania in the nineteen twenties,” Ethan said. “And we know it’s being put into Izzy’s blood. And somebody at the POW camp knew about it.”

  “I wonder if that’s the experimental part of the treatment that Dean Farrell was talking about,” Sarah mused.

  “How experimental can it be if they were using it almost a century ago?” Ethan took the file from Sarah and flipped through it, reading. Sarah sank down onto another box. It was disorienting when memories changed. The details about Bromcyan hadn’t shifted, but things she hadn’t consciously cared about had suddenly become important. The prisoner who’d gone mad wasn’t what mattered; the word he’d scratched into the rock was what mattered. The strange tube attached to Izzy wasn’t what mattered; the drug inside it was.

  “Cheer up, Sarah. This one has a happy ending,” Ethan said. “Listen: ‘Patient response better than expected. Episodes of dementia nil.’”

  “Really?” Sarah asked. “But it said he was a pretty bad case.”

  “Apparently the Bromcyan worked.” Ethan grabbed another handful of files from the drawer and held them out to Sarah. “Let’s see if it worked for anyone else.”

  “There’s a mention here,” Dr. Diaz put in. Sarah was surprised to see him studying another file, back to his usual self. He’d seemed so out of it just moments ago. “This one is also schizophrenic, or that’s what I would think, reading between the lines. They describe it here as delusions, mania, and dementia—the girl told them that angels were talking to her. Anyway, they treated her with Bromcyan and it seems like it was a miracle for her. Oh!” he exclaimed suddenly, grimacing.

  “What?” Sarah asked.

  “Uh … it worked to calm and order her mind for a short period. Then she jumped off the bluffs after saying she wanted to fly like the angels.”

  “Oh, god,” Sarah cried, covering her mouth. The story about a patient hurling herself off Suicide Cliff was true.

  “The doctor notes that he’d decreased dosage of the Bromcyan and he suspects it may have allowed her dementia to return.”

  “When’s that dated?” Ethan asked.

  “October 1924,” Dr. Diaz replied.

  “This one’s from 1926. They changed their mind about the Bromcyan, I think. It says they’ve been using a low dosage with great success when combined with a sort of suggestive therapy. It says that the Bromcyan ‘renders the patient calm and suggestible,’ so they drug up the patients and suggest they do healthy things. And it works.”

  “Maybe the angels suggested that poor girl should fly,” Sarah said.

  “But this doctor thinks it’s only useful with low doses. High doses cause more of an unpredictable effect,” Ethan said.

  “What’s the doctor’s name?” Dr. Diaz asked.

  “Herman Wissen,” Ethan replied. “The man had impeccable handwriting, by the way. I’ve never met a doctor who could even form a single intelligible letter. No offense.”

  “None taken. There’s a reason I use the Smart Board instead of writing,” Dr. Diaz said with a smile. “It’s the same doctor for this file.”

  “So this Dr. Wissen was treating mentally ill people with something called Bromcyan ninety-something years ago, and it worked like a charm,” Sarah said. “Why haven’t any of us heard of it? I know about lithium and penicillin and Prozac and all the other old-school drugs that were revolutionary. Why not Bromcyan?”

  “Maybe it has a different brand name we all know,” Ethan suggested.

  Sarah jumped as her cell buzzed in her pocket. She glanced at it. “Emergency. Suicide Cliff.” What now? She could almost feel the adrenaline rushing through her body. “I have to go. Something’s wrong. The pack.”

  “What happened?” Ethan’s voice was sharp. “Something with Karina?”

  “I don’t know. I’ll call you when I find out.”

  Sarah left them both sitting among the old files. As soon as she got out into the hall, she started to run.

  * * *

  Sarah saw a crowd already gathered at Suicide Cliff when she rounded the west wing of the main building. But she couldn’t see what they were looking at. She put on more speed, even though her lungs and the muscles in her calves were already on fire.

  “Oh, thank god you’re here! Maybe you can talk to him. He won’t listen to us,” Hazel whispered to Sarah when she skidded to a stop next to the group. She moved aside to let Sarah get closer.

  And that’s when Sarah saw him. Nate. Pacing about two feet from the edge of the cliff, the robe he wore as the Jager billowing around him. Her heart lurched into her throat. He would never come outside in the middle of the day in that robe. He would never endanger the Wolfpack that way. What was wrong?

  Izzy pushed her way up next to Sarah, and Sarah almost fell over from the shock.

  “Iz! Are you okay? What are you doing here?” she cried.

  “The text said it was an emergency,” Izzy replied.

  “But…” Sarah couldn’t deal with Izzy now. All her attention had to stay on Nate.

  “A storm approaches,” he called in his strong, clear Jager voice as he continued to pace confidently along the edge.

  “Nate, you have to come away from there,” Sarah told him firmly, fighting to keep the panic out of her voice.

  It was as if he didn’t hear her, or even see her. He stopped suddenly and stared at the ocean.

  “There’s a storm coming,” he said, this time in a small, thin voice Sarah had never heard before. He sounded young. And scared. “Do you see it?”

  Sarah moved a little closer. She didn’t like the height, but as long as she looked at the ocean and not the spiky rocks she was fine. The water was a deep greenish-gray, and the swells were high. The sky above them was a bright, cheerful blue, but out toward the horizon darkness spread, the gray clouds matching the gray water. Sarah blinked, trying to fight her sense that the darkness was growing.

  “Yes, Nate, I see the clouds,” she told him. “Maybe … maybe we should get inside.”

  A gust of wind blew the hood away from Nate’s face, and Sarah finally saw his eyes. They were fever bright, darting around the crowd. “We’re not all here,” he said. “Our number is wrong.”

  “Nate, you’re way too close to the edge.” Sarah wanted to grab his arm, but the vision of them both tumbling down to those rocks stopped her. “Come back. Come over here to me.”

  “Where’s … where…” Nate’s voice had lost all its Jager authority. He didn’t even sound like his usual self anymore. The cocky self-assurance was gone.

  “We can’t be out here like this. People will see us,” Grayson told him, voice trembling. “Let’s go back to the den. Where it’s safe.”

  He didn’t respond. “Where is the blood?” Nate asked. “Where … where is the girl?”

  No one answered. Sarah heard Izzy give a little laugh under her breath. But it wasn’t funny. Nate began to work at the belt around his waist, picking at the teeth tangled in the seaweed, agitated.

  “Are you talking about Karina?” she asked.

  Nate’s face blanched, and he spun toward her immediately. Sarah
winced. She was relieved he had responded, but that was the wrong thing to say. Nate shook his head … and didn’t stop. Faster and faster, flinging his head from side to side.

  “Okay, this is getting stupid,” Izzy said.

  Pushing away her fear of tumbling over the edge, Sarah stepped forward and took Nate’s face in her hands, forcing him to stop shaking his head. “Nate. What’s going on?” she asked softly.

  “Where is the bone?” Nate replied. “Blood and bone.” Suddenly his self-possession, that laser focus of his, returned. He gave Sarah The Grin, but it looked like the frozen grimace of a skull.

  Repulsed, Sarah let go of his face, and he stepped backward—right toward the edge. Sarah grabbed him by his elbow.

  “He’s lost it,” Izzy said.

  “Yeah, let’s get out of here,” Logan put in.

  Sarah heard the others moving behind her, murmuring to one another, trying to decide if they should stay or go. But she couldn’t take her eyes off Nate. His eyes were wild now, a ring of white showing all the way around his irises.

  “Nate?” she said. “I think you should— Maybe you should just sit down for a minute.”

  “Don’t bond us won’t be blood,” he told her. “Wax poetic. Not poetic, pathetic, peripatetic.” He pushed his hand into his short dark hair, and managed to grab a chunk of it. “Stop!” He yanked his hand away, hair and skin and blood coming with it.

  “Holy fuck,” David burst out.

  Kayla screamed.

  Nate threw back his head, knocking his hood completely off, and howled, the chilling sound turning into a hysterical, coughing laugh halfway through. He twisted his fingers into his hair again, ready to pull.

  “Oh my god. Nate—” Sarah rushed toward him, but he danced away from her, screaming. No words, just blood-curdling shrieks. The others were screaming now too, or crying. Kayla shook with sobs.

  “Stopstopstopstop,” Nate began to chant. It was quieter than the shrieking, but freakier.

  “Nate?”

  He looked at her, his eyes fixed on hers. There was no sign of gorgeous, intense Nate in those eyes. They were the eyes of a panicked animal.