UNITED STATES OF AMERICA 1862
THROUGH THE SMALL, HIGH window on the asylum wall, Vermont was a single square.
It was an insult, the beauty of it – the bonfire of autumn leaves in red and orange and brown, the yellow-bellied goldfinches bright against the clean blue sky. A postage stamp of exaggerated colour against the peeling wallpaper, once a calming pale green but long since faded to grey. The pipes snaking along the bottom rusted raw, dripping a metallic grunge on to the tiled floor.
And still the birds sang.
As with so many such institutions, Allum had started off admirably enough. A place to heal, to repose, to make new. Burgeoning philosophies and morally sound treatments. Reading, painting, writing, walking, prayer. A grand turreted building surrounded by landscaped gardens and sprawling woods, with a close central core and long annexed wings, giving patients privacy and comfort, sunlight and fresh air.
Like house plants in straitjackets. Insanity, domesticated.
Things had taken a sharp downturn when the pharmaceutical company had opened its lab in the northern wing. They trotted out experimental drugs like a baker tossing half-proved buns in the oven, as though failure would mean nothing more than wasted flour. Patients’ lives were worth even less than that.
Once Allum’s founders realized the money that could be made on their cattle, the asylum quickly became an abattoir. It hired less and less qualified staff, who employed brute force in lieu of true medical expertise. It fell victim to chronic overcrowding – naked, unwashed patients stuffed into every corner of every room, the corridors lined with cages when the wards could take no more frantic bodies.
It was in two of these cages that Arden and I lay, side by side yet separated by bars, in the hallway with a single postage-stamp window.
Here we were both girls of seventeen – she Augusta and I Harriet – pale and bony from malnourishment and various other maladies.
I’d been admitted for mania a year prior, after an off-duty ‘physician’ had heard me confronting Augusta on the street. Apparently, wailing about a supernatural curse and immortal murders and the semi-conviction that you are a ghost does not a sane person make. Augusta, realizing that I was shut away out of her reach, had had herself committed a month later for melancholia – a common affliction of poets.
Mania and Melancholia fast became our morbid pet names for each other.
Yet it did not take long for Augusta to regret her choice to follow me here.
At first it wasn’t so bad. We were in cages, yes, but in our own clothes, no matter how crusted with filth. A small retention of our personhood. Our fingers could lace together through the bars, and we could talk freely into the night, for everyone already thought us insane. We were fed twice a day, offered counselling from a young, wiry-haired doctor who was vastly out of his depth.
But then the alternative therapies began.
The ice baths from which you never truly warmed up. The rotational therapy, in which you were strapped to a chair suspended from the ceiling and spun around over a hundred times in a single minute. The starvation, not necessarily through barbarism but through negligence and disorganization. A cold hunger that burrowed into the bones of you.
No reading, painting, writing, walking. No privacy or comfort. A reality that felt beyond even prayer.
It was no wonder Augusta decided to put us out of our misery early.
She’d been led away for her ice bath one day when, several minutes later, her nude figure came sprinting back down the corridor towards my cage. Dark hair in a knotted braid that bounced against her hollow chest, ribs visible between the smallest of peaks. A thick snare of pubic hair, her legs bowed and angular. Eyes lupine, feral.
A sharp medical instrument in her outstretched hand.
When the orderlies caught up with her, she was only inches away from plunging it into my throat.
I was sorry she had failed.
She was packed into a starched white straitjacket, then chained upright to one of the cage’s vertical bars so that her spine was flush against it. She slammed her head back against the steel until she lost consciousness – just so that she wouldn’t have to look me in the eye.
A few days later, the researcher from the pharmaceutical lab called her name. I watched an orderly take her away, thrashing like she was being led to the gallows, all the way to the northern wing.
She came back a few hours later, but she never truly came back.
I didn’t know what was worse: watching her struggle, or the moment she stopped. Her ferocious eyes glazed and vacant from whatever experimental drug they’d pumped into her.
Was she still in there? If so, for how much longer?
As gut-wrenchingly terrible as it was to see her like that, the hopeful heart of me began to see the situation for what it was.
If I could escape, I would not just be free of Allum. I would be free of Arden.
The thought was a yellow-bellied goldfinch against a clean blue sky.
And so I studied every single doctor, nurse and orderly for weeks, drawing spirographs in my mind of their movements. Who does what, when and where and why? How might I slip through the blank spaces of that pattern?
Stealing the key to my cage was not too difficult. Pickpocketing on the streets of Shanghai had been only two lives ago, and my fingers remembered the deft sleight of hand, the feather touch, the art of distraction. The fact that seduction was the most powerful weapon in my arsenal.
One of the orderlies had a reputation for romancing the patients – something about the power dynamic was innately appealing to him. He was a slippery man, with too-light footsteps and a sharp gaze, a high forehead and a narrow chin. But he also had keys, and he patrolled the corridors around midnight every night. The first curve of the spirograph.
‘Howard,’ I whispered through the bars as he passed my cage one night, when half the asylum was asleep and the other half howled like a pack of werewolves.
His pale eyes snapped towards me. ‘Yes?’
‘I heard what you did with Minnie.’ I smiled coyly, so dripping with syrup I thought he was bound to see through it. ‘Made me jealous.’
Something lit up on his face, but it only made him look more sinister, somehow. Like a candle held to a chin, casting strange shadows on the peaks and valleys of his features.
His polished black heels swivelled on the tiles, and he slipped softly over to my cage. I was sitting on the floor with my legs tucked to my chest, looking up at him through my eyelashes. He stooped to one knee, his joints clicking as he did so, and murmured, ‘And why is that?’
I ran my tongue around the inside of my cheek. There was a hole in my upper right gum, where the doctors had recently pulled a rotten tooth – without morphine, without any numbing at all. I’d tried to climb up from the chair halfway through, and one of the orderlies had given me a black eye.
‘I think you know why.’ My voice was a purr, thick and feline, intoxicating as incense smoke. I tried to ignore the sour reek of my own breath.
I crawled on hands and knees towards the place where he knelt, playing up the helpless prisoner angle. Sure enough, the very tip of his tongue brushed the corner of his lips, and I knew I had him.
My stomach turned as I reached out a filthy hand and stroked his cheek, tracing a fingertip down the dull ridge of his jaw. He’d been trying to grow a beard, but there were large patches with no hair at all. There was a brownish hotpot stain on his chin.
At the same time as the sickening caress, my other hand was at his waist, working free the loop of keys from his belt. He did not notice the latter.
‘Do you want me?’ he asked, reaching a hand through the cage and cupping my breast. At his touch, my insides lurched with disgust, and I forced myself to imagine how it would feel to run gaily through those burnished bonfire woods.
The loop finally slipped from his waistband, tucking itself silently into my palm.
An oozing pipe dripped rusted orange on to the floor behind me.
‘Tomorrow,’ I whispered, grabbing at his crotch just hard enough to hurt. He recoiled, but only slightly. The rest of his body pressed right up against the bars. ‘After my bath. Come and find me then. I want to be clean for you.’
‘What if I like you dirty?’
God, I hoped Arden was too comatose to witness this.
‘Tomorrow,’ I said again, and then I pulled myself back to the corner of my cage.
After a long, lecherous stare, Howard got to his feet, adjusted the rigid bulge in his pants, and resumed his patrol.
The keys were warm in my palm.
The danger of assuming someone is insane is that you also assume they cannot outsmart you.
The next spirograph curve bent at around six in the morning, when Howard was doing the shift changeover with Bessie, who was sufficiently hard of hearing not to hear the rattling of a key in a locked cage. She was a lumbering woman, not too bright, but with a casual cruelty that cracked like a whip whenever she was in a bad mood – which was often.
I hoped she and Howard would be punished for allowing me to escape.
As the patients’ werewolf howls dimmed at dawn, I made my move. It took a few tries to find the right key on the densely packed loop, but when the padlock finally sighed open, a sharp thrill bolted through me. I slipped out of the cage barefoot, scarcely able to believe my fortune.
Clarence watched me blankly from the cage on my other side. He’d been dosed with a different drug to Augusta, but the effect was largely the same. Less drool, but nothing behind the eyes. Guilt cramped in me.
Was I a monster for leaving them here?
I would make it right, I vowed to myself. If I lived the full life I’d always dreamed of, I would dedicate it to eradicating these vile places altogether. I didn’t have Arden’s gift for the written word, but I would bang down the door of every journalist who would listen until one agreed to expose this horror for what it was.
In a last-minute fit of shame, I tossed the loop of keys to Clarence’s feet. He eyed them with vague interest, but didn’t move to pick them up. Despair mounted in my chest, but what could I do? I couldn’t force the will to escape into someone.
Footsteps clacked near the end of the hallway. I had to move.
I could not look back at Augusta’s limp frame. The patch of drool on her redundant straitjacket. The vomit tangled in the dark mass of her hair.
With a final apologetic glance at Clarence, I turned in the opposite direction and tiptoed as silently as I could past the ward, past the nurse’s office, past some of the optimistic private bedrooms that had been first built into Allum’s sunny outlook.
The northern wing was almost deserted. The laboratory technicians went home every night, to warm beds and home-cooked dinners and families who loved them despite their cruel experiments. I tucked myself into a small alcove between doorways and waited.
The final spirograph curve: the groundskeeper’s predictable movements.
From being led to and from my ‘treatments’, I knew there was a door leading to the landscaped gardens in the seam between the northern and western wings. Every morning the groundskeeper would unlock it, prop it open with two plant pots to breathe fresh air through the staleness, then head to the staffroom to make a cup of coffee before beginning his duties. Once he started work, the gap in the pattern disappeared. Medical staff, gardeners, pharmaceutical bigwigs and cleaners roamed the wings – and thus blocked off the open door. But as the kettle boiled, there was the smallest of windows in which escape was possible.
Sure enough, the groundskeeper arrived around seven, whistling in his grubby overalls. He was a jolly-faced man, ruddy and bright-eyed, with grassy hair on his forearms like molasses. He never met anyone’s stare when he was inside the building, as though avoiding a gaze meant avoiding complicity. If I can ’ t see the atrocity, the atrocity can ’ t see me, and I don ’ t have to do anything about it.
The door was propped open. The kettle began to whistle on a distant stove.
And I ran.
The dewy grass was a gasping shock on the filthy soles of my feet.
The air was almost too pure, too rich, and my lungs choked on it.
As I sprinted on weak, wobbly legs, I expected a chorus of yells from behind me, a slew of orderlies ready to tackle me to the ground.
None came.
I reached the woods, panting, and sank to my knees. Exhaustion, disbelief.
I grabbed big fistfuls of crimson leaves, traced fingertips over their ridged veins, held them up to my face and breathed in the earthy tang of them, as though they would cleanse me of Howard’s touch. I looked up to the canopy, to the abstract curls of sky between the towering branches, hoping to spot a yellow-bellied goldfinch.
I was free.
Not just from the asylum, but from Arden. From our twisted fate.
I had lost track of time in recent months, maybe years, but I was certain our eighteenth birthdays would soon be upon us. Yet there was no way Augusta would be able to escape that straitjacket, that cage, that medicated stupor, that grotesque abattoir.
Her ferocious eyes, glazed and vacant.
Freedom sprawled out in front of me like a prairie, and I kept waiting for the euphoria to sink in, for the crisp air and the sharp light to breathe life into me, yet everything about it felt wrong.
I have to go back for her.
The thought came to me diamond-bright, but I shook it away.
No. I had waited countless lives for an opportunity like this. I would go back for Arden, but after I turned eighteen, after the curse had been broken. I would go back with police and journalists and politicians, kicking down the gates of this cruel world.
But what if Augusta didn’t survive that long?
What if we were too late to save her?
Worse, what if she survived, but was forever changed? Empty? What if she was reduced to a patch of drool on a sad shirt collar, to soiled underwear and empty stares?
Would I ever find another love like Arden’s again? Or would I spend the rest of my days with a gaping hole in my chest?
How would the rest of my days even look ? I had no family in this life save for the grim-faced uncle who’d taken me in when my parents died of influenza. My vague smattering of friends had disowned me when I was admitted to Allum. I had no money, no education, no prospects. And without Arden, the promise of life felt hollow.
It wasn’t just that I wanted a future. It was that I wanted a future with them . I wanted –
A vision came to me, so stark and raw that it hit me high in the stomach.
A world of white bone and falling ash, of pleading and begging so animalistic I couldn’t tell where it came from. Pain so large it took on a form of its own. Pain so absolute it was like the darkest pitch of night, like a black hole in the universe.
Arden, weeping – only, they were not Arden; they were a spectral smudge, a vague outline.
‘I told you,’ they whispered, voice hollow and ringing like the inside of a church bell. ‘I told you it would ruin us.’
Understanding briefly arranged itself in my chest, dust motes gathering into an approximate shape, but as a bird sang in the trees above me, the vision dissipated, leaving only a directionless dread in its shadow.
Come back, come back , I begged the vision, because, as horrifying as it was, it was the first real insight I’d had for decades, centuries. A crucial puzzle piece in the why of my existence had sputtered out, leaving only the lingering scent of smoke in its stead. I dug my hands into the forest floor, feeling the cold, wet dirt wedge itself under the ragged crescents of my nails.
What does it mean, what does it mean, what –
Sunlight dappled through the canopy, and my heart scudded and flipped.
As soon as the bone-white world had evaporated, that sense of almost-understanding had vanished too. But some part of me knew that even if I left Arden in Allum, there would be no future. There would only …
Ruination. That’s how the vision had felt. Like utter ruination.
Arden was doing this for a reason. And that reason was to protect us.
My bones knew it. My blood, my guts, my soul. It was written in the very fabric of myself.
With a final shuddering breath, I turned and ran back in the direction of the asylum.