by B L Teschner
“I don’t want to split up,” Millie said nervously. “Not this time.”
“We don’t have to; we’ll stick together.”
With a nod, she followed me over to the door. I lifted my hand and pulled my sleeve down over my palm, using it to wipe away the layer of filth that was covering the small window.
“What do you see?” she asked.
“It looks like a big empty room. This is a basement; there aren’t any windows on the walls to let in any outside light, so it’s hard to see.”
“Should we open the door so we can let the hall light go in?”
“It’s worth a try.” I placed my hand on the cold metal handle and turned it carefully, taking care to open it slowly and not make any noise. The flickering light from the hallway worked hard to illuminate the room. Inside, the walls were peeling in the same way as the hall with pieces littering the concrete floor. Random furniture was stacked in one corner.
“You were right; it’s empty.”
“Onto the next one?” I asked.
She looked up the hall and then down the other way. “Which way do you think we should go?”
I nodded over her head. “Let’s just go that way. The other way looks like it dead-ends.”
The next couple of rooms were unremarkable. One had countless stacks of old chairs, and another had metal beds with moth-eaten mattresses stacked together that looked eerily similar to ours in our bunk rooms.
“I’m so cold,” Millie shivered beside me as we went up to the next door that was right before a corner we would be turning.
I put my arm around her shoulder and rubbed it up and down. “I know. Let’s get through this quick and we can get back up to where it’s warmer.” I smeared away the dirt on the little window of the door. Looking inside, I saw what appeared to be stacked boxes. “Just some more junk.”
“What kind of junk?”
“I’m not sure; boxes, it looks like.”
“Let’s go in just to be safe.”
I opened the door and we stood outside of the doorway, peering in through the darkness. There were stacks and stacks of boxes that filled the room. No sign of Dwayne or anyone else. “Let’s move on.”
“Hold on a second.” Millie moved anxiously into the room and went to one of the boxes. “Look at this,” she said, lifting out what looked like an old newspaper.
I came up and stood beside her while she examined the browned, weathered article. “What is it?”
“It’s a newspaper article from 1920.”
“What does it say?”
“‘MENDUKIAH LUNATIC ASYLUM SCHEDULED TO CLOSE IMMEDIATELY.’” She scanned over the article a second before reading it aloud: “‘The Mendukiah Lunatic Asylum, founded by Richard Baxten in 1891, was a quiet yet menacingly large hospital nestled in the golden hills of Mendukiah. At one time offering refuge for the insane, it has quickly turned into a modern nightmare. Overcrowding lead to insufficient funds and shortages in staffing, which in turn curdled into abuse. Mentally ill children and adults who were sent there to be cared for were all too often forgotten.
‘The Mendukiah Police Department was tipped off by a visiting relative who noticed that their loved one was in poor condition. Upon investigating, it was discovered that the patients were not only being neglected, but were being used as lab rats in unorthodox medical experiments. Existing patients are to be shipped to mental asylums in neighboring cities.’” She lowered the paper away from her face. “I can’t believe it.”
“So this place did experiments on people?”
“Does experiments,” she corrected with a quiver in her voice. “And I think we’ve finally found the floor they do them on.”
“At orientation Martha told a group of us that this place closed down because her great-grandfather died. What a load of bull.” I dug around in the box of newspaper clippings and pulled out another. “Look at this one: ‘SCANDAL AT MENDUKIAH LUNATIC ASYLUM.’ ”
“What does it say?”
“‘Recent investigations into Mendukiah Lunatic Asylum have revealed ungodly treatment of its patients. The usual experiments such as ice water baths, restrained isolation, and even trephination—opening a hole in the scull—were carried out on adults and children alike. But it was the eccentric experiments that caught the eye of investigators. These so-called treatments were pure torture, and ranged from chaining them to basement walls and throwing scalding-hot water on them, to mutilating patients by removing their teeth while still conscious with no pain relief whatsoever. Other patients had been found chained to their beds; one young patient had been strapped down for so long that her skin had begun to grow over her restraints. Many of the patients died, succumbing to the treatments they endured.
‘Often admitted on dubious grounds, families abandoned their relatives to the facility, subjecting them to an empty and repetitive life. Hysteria, panic attacks, menstrual deranged, superstition, and agoraphobia were only a few of the impairments that plagued the patients. Thankfully, they have now escaped the abhorrent medical treatments they were being subjected to. But that cannot be said for all of them. Countless unmarked graves reside behind the hospital, leaving behind not even a name for relatives to find their deceased love one.’”
Millie was already digging around in a different box. “That’s terrible.”
“Yeah it is. Martha told us that the people in that cemetery mostly died of old age.”
“We can’t believe a word that woman says.”
“I agree.” I tossed the paper down on the floor. “And we should go.”
“Hold on a second.” She took out a worn leather-bound book. “It’s a diary.” Her eyes widened as she opened to a random page in the middle and angled it toward the light that was drifting in from the hall. “It says, ‘Today the nurse smacked me across the face because I didn’t get out of bed fast enough. She hit me so hard that it knocked me back onto my mattress. I didn’t say a word; I didn’t want to receive more punishment for talking back to her. The new man with the speech problem was wrapped in a sheet from head to toe, completely covering his face so it was hard for him to breathe. He tried to move but he was wrapped too tightly. A nurse then threw ice water all over him, and even poured it like a waterfall over his face. I was sure he had drowned.’” She turned the page. “‘Sarah was put in a wooden coffin last night after supper. They said she was delusional and she needed to be exposed to fright so she would be cured. It didn’t cure her at all. Instead, she wet herself and was subjected to punishment by lashing. And the woman in the bed next to me succumbed to her treatment; they had tried to remove blood from her head that they thought was making her mad.’” Another turn of the page. “‘I hate this place. I’m not even sick; I know I’m not. How is grief a reason for mental lunacy? I’ve lost my mother, not my mind. I really miss my father, though I hate him for leaving me here. The doctors are insane; they need the treatments. They removed Sean’s tongue after he spoke back harshly to a mentally handicapped woman who was trying to scrape the flesh away from his arm. And I can’t even sleep in my room because of the other patients in here with me. Some of them are very ill from their treatments. And when they die, no one seems to care. It takes days for them to remove their decaying bodies and bury them outside. Speaking of, the woman who died beside me is still beside me. She’s beginning to smell.’” When Millie looked up at me, her eyes were glassy. “Grief? She was put in a mental asylum because of grief?”
“It’s terrible, but, that’s just how it was back in those days. I remember learning about it in history class. You got put in places like this because of the weirdest reasons, like egotism and, I don’t know, greediness and stuff.” I picked another article out of the box. “This one’s newer; it’s from 1925. It’s talking about this place re-opening after years of it being closed. It says, ‘After the horrible downfall of Richard Baxten and the closure of Mendukiah Lunatic Asylum, it is finally turning a new leaf. Leonard Baxten, the brother of above-mentioned Richard Baxten,
will be reopening the hospital to focus on the proper treatment of the insane. One large change will be the number of patients allowed to reside at the hospital, dropping from its once overcrowded fifteen hundred, to the now more sensible five hundred.’”
“Help me,” a voice moaned from somewhere close.
Our eyes snapped to each other’s. “Where’s that coming from?” Millie asked.
I carefully stepped to the doorway and peeked down the hall before looking back at her. “I’m not sure, but we should turn the corner here and see if it came from that way.”
Millie sat the book down in the box and we slowly inched our way back into the hall. I looked around the corner and found another long, low-lit corridor with doors on both sides.
“What do you see?” she asked behind me.
“I don’t see anyone, just another hall.” I stepped around the corner and stayed along the wall while making it to the closest door. After wiping the glass with my sleeve, I peeked inside. “I think it’s another room full of old beds.”
I felt a tug on the bottom of my shirt. “Look across the way,” she whispered. “There’s a light on in that room.”
She was right. I took her hand in mine and we tiptoed across the hall to the other side. I didn’t need to clean it with my sleeve; the window wasn’t as grimy as the others. Being careful not to be seen, I peeked in from the side of the square, using only one eye to see. I could make out the form of a body sitting on the concrete floor in the corner of the room, huddled next to a primitive, stained toilet.
“Crap!” I whispered loudly. “There’s someone in there!”
“What?” Millie gasped. “Who?”
“I can’t tell. Possibly a girl; her knees are to her chest and her head is down in her arms.”
“Let me see.” I moved aside so Millie could peek into the small square window. “I can’t tell who it is. Should we knock?”
I hesitated and lifted my finger to the glass. “I just hope we don’t get caught.” My fingertip tapped the dirty surface; the girl’s head shot up instantly, as if waiting for contact.
“Help me!” she screamed, the sound slightly muffled from the glass. She hurried up from the ground and ran up to the door, her open hands beating on both sides of the window as she pressed her face against it. “Please! Get me out of here!”
“Quiet!” we warned her in unison.
“Get me out of here! You have to get me out of here!”
“Get the keys!” Millie ordered in a panic. “We have to let her out!”
My fingers jumbled the keys as I retrieved them from my pocket with shaking hands. “Don’t worry,” I assured her, “we’ll get you out of here!”
“They’re gonna come back!” she sobbed. She stood away from the door and ran her hands over her brown curly hair; it was then that I noticed the slash marks on her arms. It was the girl Connor had seen the guard take into Martha’s office. The blood on her arms had never been washed off; it was crusted in long brownish-red streams down her skin.
I focused back on the keys and stuck one in the lock, with no avail. “This one isn’t it. These locks are different from these styles of keys.”
“Keep trying,” Millie urged me.
I took another one and stuck it in, then another and another. It was no use; none of the keys were working. I looked up and locked eyes with the young girl on the other side of the dingy glass. “I, I’m sorry; I don’t have the right key.”
Her eyes oozed with fear and she ran up to the door and started banging again. “Please don’t leave me! You can’t leave me!”
“We promise we’ll come back and get you,” Millie told her. “We’ll find a way!”
“Martha has a key around her neck,” she cried. “The doctor has one too. They are the only two people I’ve seen open the doors down here. The guards need one of them with them to get into these rooms because I don’t think they have keys to them.”
Millie and I looked at each other in defeat. “How the hell are we supposed to get Martha’s key?” I asked.
Millie shook her head. “I have no clue.”
“Don’t forget about me,” the girl cried. “Please, I just wanna go home. I promise I won’t be mean to people anymore; I’ve learned my lesson.”
Putting her hand to the glass, Millie brought her face closer, locking eyes with the girl. “I promise I won’t forget about you.”
The girl’s cries quieted as she put her hand on her side of the glass against Millie’s. With a single nod, she stepped away and went back to the dimly-lit corner, sitting back down with her knees to her chest and her head in her arms as she was before.
I turned to Millie in a panic. “We need to get to the police. I don’t know how we’re gonna do it, but we need help.”
She looked further up the hall. “More doors. Maybe there’s another way out?”
I shook my head. “I doubt it. We’ve been all around the outside of this building; the only doors to the outside are the front ones.”
“Well let’s keep looking. There’s another light on in the one next to this one.”
I focused on the door she was speaking of. “I’m not looking forward to seeing what’s inside.”
“Me either. But Dwayne’s probably here; we need to keep searching.”
“I know.” Taking her hand, we stepped ahead to the next door and I cautiously peeked through the window. This time it was someone I knew, a kid from my room. He was secured in a straightjacket and passed out on the floor, his blood-streaked face smashed against the dirty ground. My eyebrows furrowed. “That’s Ben from my room.”
She moved her face next to mine so she could see into the frame of the window. “Oh my gosh, is he dead?”
“I don’t think so; a dead patient wouldn’t help their one-hundred percent success rate.”
“That’s true. But look what they did to his face. How terrible!”
“I don’t think they did that; I think he did it to himself, which is why they probably put him in the straightjacket.”
“Why would he do that to himself?”
“I don’t know, but, I saw him slap himself a few times before. He must have gotten worse when they brought him down here and they had to restrain him.”
“That’s so sad.” She paused. “Should we try the keys on this door?”
“I don’t think they’ll work. That girl’s probably been watching them a lot; she says it’s only Martha and the doctor who have the right key.”
“Okay.” She nodded ahead. “Next one then?”
“Yeah.”
We quietly made our way down the hall. It smelled of must and dirt, and the ground was still littered with peeling paint and a film of dust like the other hall had been. There were a few more rooms with lights on; one was across the other side. We crossed quickly and stayed against the wall like we were some sort of spies. Technically we were.
This time Millie was the first to wipe the window and look in. When she did, she gasped. “Blue!” she called out, knocking sporadically on the glass.
“Blue’s in there?”
Sure enough, the girl who wore nothing but blue came to the window. She looked terrible: Her hair was greasy and unwashed, and her eyes were puffy and set above dark circles that I had the feeling weren’t there when she first arrived at the program.
“How did you find me?” she cried.
“We snuck down here,” Millie confessed, her voice stretched thin with despair. “I went back for you, that night when we met in the bathroom, and you weren’t there.”
“That’s when they brought me down here!”
“You’ve been down here that long?”
“Yes! They forced me down the ladder with a taser gun!” She hugged herself and closed her eyes. “They said they’re keeping me down here to detox. It’s been terrible! They’ve given me a small dose of Percocet every now and then to wean me off of it gradually, but it’s been nothing but hell! I’ve been sick nonstop; I can barely sleep. The guards
bring me food, but I don’t have an appetite.” Her eyes opened once again. “I’ve begged Martha to let me out, but she refuses. She says she detests kids who use drugs. She told me I was a waste in society and that I was going to make the world a bad place by being in it. I told her I would stop but she didn’t believe me! All she said was that she was keeping me down here to teach me a lesson, even though I wouldn’t remember it, whatever that means.” Millie and I exchanged glances. “They’re abusing us!” she went on. “I’ve watched them bring kids into these rooms over and over again. Then when they take them out the guards take them up the hall.” Her head nodded to the side, motioning toward the part of the old corridor we had yet to explore. “The kids are out of it when they bring them back out. I think they’re going to kill us!”
“They’re not killing us,” Millie assured her. “But they are doing something, we just haven’t been able to figure out what yet. And apparently Martha and Dr. Sigtile are the only ones with the keys to these doors, so we can’t get you out.”
She nodded fervently. “The guards can’t get in without one of them.”
“You’ve seen a lot of kids,” I repeated. “Have you seen a black kid?”
“He’s our friend,” Millie put in. “He was taken away and we haven’t seen him since.”
“I’ve seen a couple of black kids brought in, yeah, but I’m not sure if they’re still here. Try further up the hall.” She moved closer to the window. “Be careful.”
Millie exhaled a tense breath of air. “We’ll come back for you Blue, okay? We promise.”
Blue nodded unsurely and backed away from the door, turning around and retreating to the cot-like bed in the corner of the filthy room.
“Let’s go,” I said, nodding my head up the hall. “We still have a few doors left.”
The next room housed a young girl, thirteen or so, who was on her bed in the fetal position, crying uncontrollably. When we got her attention she just ignored us and buried her head deeper into her arms.
“She’s inconsolable,” Millie pointed out. “She’s probably so scared.”
“I’m scared,” I agreed. “And I’m not even locked up in one of these rooms. Yet.”