When I sleep my neurons play odd games XXII...
I’d been taken to a huge building that looked like Founders in Royal Holloway, a medieval monastery and the Imperial War Museum all in one. It was an asylum, and I’d just been admitted.
I was relieved to find Spacedmonkey in one of the wards; she was looking after some of the younger inmates, even though she was a patient and not a nurse apparently this was no excuse not to carry on care-work. I was to share a room with her and Captain Lawrence ‘Titus’ Oates who claimed wryly he was there because of PTSD. (It took me a while to work out, but Titus was a ghost only the two of us could see or talk to, which rather explained why he was sleeping in our room.)
Breakfast was cereal in the shape of roses that changed colour the longer they sat in the milk. I was mildly horrified; Spacedmonkey reassured me the cereal really did do that, I wasn’t just hallucinating. There was one other girl in our ‘set’, very thin with dark lank hair, but I don’t recall her name.
Doctors came at breakfast to assess medication and the way they seemed to do this was by being evil until you threw a flid and then saying ‘we need to up your dose, the meds obviously aren’t working’. It was at that point I realised the staff were all evil bastards and although they certainly had a goal, us being sane wasn’t it. The thin girl was taken away to solitary, the rest of us were sent outside into a field to get some exercise. Titus was dressed for Polo, but the only thing we managed to find was an old-fashioned golf club and some decrepit leather balls to play with. So we wandered about, talking, and occasionally hitting things randomly with a golf club. I told Titus he ought to be a giant fenris-wolf as he’d be much happier and would never have to worry about the cold. (It made sense at the time.)
Back in the hospital, walking through some of the rooms and wards, and they started to whisper to me. I had odd disjointed black-outs. Finally got back to our room where a nurse was changing the bedsheets to reveal that the mattress was covered in blood. One by one everyone was quizzed, but I had a horrible sinking feeling in my stomach and instinctively knew the blood was mine.
“Lift your hair away from your neck.” I did so, my neck smiled red and I fell over.
I woke up: my neck had been bandaged, I was in a straight jacket in solitary with the walls screaming at me. I started to have some sort of fit; when it stopped I was slumped in a heap at the end of a random corridor, with the tattered useless remains of a straight jacket on, and blood from a nose bleed all down the front of my shift. I got up, feeling like hell, wondering how I could find Spacedmonkey or Titus or at least hide somewhere until I stopped feeling so peculiar.
Instead I found a shrewd looking old lady in early Victorian dress. She told me that the so-called ‘doctors’ were trying to steal what was mine: put the sovereign to sleep, make them forget and they’ll disown the kingdom all on their own! I had no idea what she was talking about, but at the same time it sounded very ‘Bedlam’. “They managed to lock the place down, but even so, there are one or two of us they missed.” She grinned, and a strange grey-gold light shone around her for a moment. “We’ll help you. All you need is the smallest connection and the crown will return to you. But first you must remember - you must!” Then she disappeared.
I managed to locate Spacedmonkey who told me I had to leave: all the doctors were looking for me and if they didn’t find me they were going to start torturing her, Titus and the thin girl until I gave myself up. I explained that I couldn’t leave as this place was mine and all the people within it my responsibility (and I knew as I said it it was perfectly true.) She looked skeptical and slightly weary, shrugged and said, “Let’s find Titus then.”
The walls started whispering and I felt ill, the longer we searched the louder the walls screamed and I had black-outs again. We finally saw Titus in the dinning room; Spacedmonkey shouted something at him, he stood up and looked aghast at the state I was in. Doctors were shouting. My nose started to bleed and I collapsed; Titus made a grab for me, and we both disappeared.
We’d sidestepped a second out of time or space into a ghost-land made of grey and gold. “You’d best hurry up,” Titus advised. “I don’t have the strength to keep you here and they’re giving the old girl quite the ragging.” He nodded his chin to where the doctors were yelling at Spacedmonkey and she was glaring at them.
I had no idea what to do: the power was all around me but I couldn’t grasp it. I heard the old Victorian lady whisper something about a purge, and suddenly I was on my knees coughing up an entire pharmacy-worth of meds. That done I found I could somehow grab hold of the gold-grey power that flowed through everything.
Titus looked pained and muttered, “Hurry up...” We started to fade back into the dinning room. The doctors advanced like white-coated jackals, looking triumphant.
I dug my nails into the fabric of that place, threw my head back and screamed. My neck opened again, my eyes bled and burned gold. Golden light pulsed out of me with the force of a split atom, searing all trespassers and enemies to ash, realigning the building with its ghost self: making Bedlam whole again.
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Soooo, apparently last night someone tried to steal Bedlam.
Didn’t work. Heehee!
Apologies to Spacedmonkey for apparently stealing her, and thank you for dragging Titus along, he was very helpful too.