Excerpt: Untitled

Prologue –

It was one of the chillier nights in the hospital that night…the nurse could see her breath even in the patient’s room fluttering in and out of visibility. ‘It really is dreadful that the heater was broken in this ward,’ she thought as she made her way down the hall, the small padded sound of her nurse’s shoes and the unsettling flickering of the lights over head were the only things to break the odd silence. It usually wasn’t this quiet…there was always some sort of disturbance in the building: an upset patient calling for a long dead loved one, the staff talking amongst themselves, going over charts and medicine dosages…but tonight she seemed to be the only one in the whole building.
That was when the silence was disrupted by the muffled sound of glass shattering inside of Room 667. ‘What in the world,’ she thought to herself as she hurried toward source of the sound. Things like this had happened before…a patient falling and knocking over a vase, but not in this particular ward…not this late at night when all the more troubled patients were strapped down and kept sedated. This particular part of the hospital was different from the rest. It held the more disturbed patients…the ones that gave the most trouble.
The nurse slowed as the room came into a clearer view…the door was opened ever so slightly. Taking a deep breath, she pushed it open wider and stepped hesitantly into the patient’s dark room, glass crunching under her feet.
“Hello? Are you alright,” she asked nervously as she searched blindly for the light switch, bumping into what felt like an overturned chair in the dark. Remembering that the older rooms in the hospital had hanging lamps instead of a switch by the door, she moved cautiously into the middle of the room, feeling above her for the cord that should be hanging down to turn on the light…but instead, her fingers brushed against something solid…soft…and oddly familiar. As she moved her hand upward, the lights in the hall began to flicker wildly, brightening and dimming the room randomly.
And then she froze as the room was illuminated just enough for a split second to casting just enough light on the figure before her, swaying back and forth.
It was the body of the patient that occupied the room.

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Chapter 1 –

Moss and lichen covered trees stretched on for what seemed like forever along the winding road. Or, they would have stretched on for that long, if the fog would let up. Sara narrowed her eyes and leaned over the steering wheel, as if that position would help her to see through the rain and the mist. The road she was looking for was supposed to be up ahead…but for all she knew she might have passed it by now.
Being raised in the city, she was nowhere used to back roads like this…there were no street lights…no other cars…no sign anything that might suggest civilization. She kept expecting a deer or a bear to pop out of the woods at either side of her vehicle…but she sighed and laughed to herself in her head. Stuff like that only happened in corny movies where the city girl heads out into the country for whatever reason and gets chased by the wildlife. The only thing missing from that story was a boyfriend and a parked car.
A flash of metal pierced through the fog as the headlights hit a sign in the distance. Slowing to a crawl, she could make out the words on the sign as she drove past: Lincoln County Psychiatric Hospital – 1 mile.

‘Thank you,’ she thought graciously as she loosened her grip on the steering wheel, taking each hand in turn and wiping the sweat off of them onto the side of the driver’s seat. It wasn’t hot at all, in fact, it was very cold…but driving at night had always made her nervous, especially in a strange, backwoods place such as this.
Jutting out from the side of the road was a gravel driveway. Beside it, a sign that read ‘Welcome to Lincoln County Psychiatric Hospital’. A canopy of magnolia trees shielded the drive from most of the rain, allowing for better vision. After nearly five minutes of driving at about 40 MPH, the tight concentration of lined trees branched out on both sides of the drive. An odd smell pierced her nose as the driveway turned into a wooden bridge over a dark colored lake.
“Must be drainage…they never mentioned it in the job description…go figure,” Sara muttered to herself as she attempted to hold her breath as she crossed over the foul smelling water but failed, having eventually to take air in gasps because of the length of the bridge. But the odd, foreign smell burned her eyes and nose until the tires of her car finally touched gravel again.
In the distance, a large, iron barred gate surrounding the hospital finally came into view through the fog. Sara stared across the well-kept asylum grounds at the large, multi-leveled plaster and stone building. Ivy ran up the side of the building in a perfect pattern like something out of a fairytale. Flowers were planted neatly in beds in small, yet abundant little gardens trimmed out with small hedges around the premises while grey-stone statues of cherubs watched on.
It would have been almost welcoming, but it was still odd, she noted as she pulled up into the small parking lot where a handful of cars sat. Most of the building seemed fairly new…but left hand side of the hospital looked considerably older than the rest…and all of the rooms had iron bars on the windows.
Sara shuddered at the thought of what kind of patients might be residing in those rooms as she opened her umbrella after slamming the car door behind her. Whoever they were, maybe she would be able to help them, in some way or another.

The large, ornate, wooden door to the institute opened after a moment’s wait in the rain after ringing the doorbell, revealing a woman in her mid-forties. She bright smile flooded through her care-worn face when she saw Sara on her doorstep.

“Are you Miss Chapel,” she asked inquisitively, but almost like a child. Her voice was like a peal of bells and made Sara smile instantly.

“Yes, I’m Sara,” she said and shook the woman’s hand. “Are you Mrs. Evans?”

She nodded happily, “Yes, child. Now, come in…you’re going to catch cold out there. We’ve so thrilled that someone has decided to take the job so quickly…”

Nodding, Sara stepped into the warmth of the building and let out a deep breath that she didn’t notice she had been holding in. The lobby had a very soothing atmosphere, most likely decorated specifically for that purpose, to calm and pacify even the most troubled of minds.

“You didn’t have any trouble finding us,” Mrs. Evans asked kindly as she closed the door courteously behind Sara. “The fog was absolutely dreadful tonight.”

“No, Mrs. Evans, I found it alright. Although,” she said, looking around the lobby, “why was the hospital built out here, in the middle of nowhere?”

“Oh, this hospital has been here for ages, dear. It was originally built to keep some of societies most…’dangerous’ people. Although, with the proper treatment that today’s world offers, most of the patients from that era had only minor cases that could have been cured,” she said as she pulled out a ring of keys from her jacket pocket and began locking the front door back. “But since they thought that they posed such a threat to society, they made sure that they had an isolated enough location so that they couldn’t bother anyone ever again. It really is tragic, but times have changed. We can connect with law enforcement, the fire department, and any other facility that we could possibly need as well has have there here in about thirty minutes if the need ever arose.

“Now Miss Chapel, you will be staying at the Asylum while you are working here, as agreed. Do you have any luggage?”

Sara raised a hand to her forehead and closed her eyes. Her voice was flooded with embarrassment, “Oh…they’re out in my trunk…I’ll go get them…”

“Oh, Charles will get them…he’s oversees the maintenance of the facility as well as does odd-jobs. Is that okay if he takes them in for you?”

“That’s fine…thank you so much,” Sara muttered gratefully as she fumbled with her keychain to hand to the woman, her face flushed pink, but Mrs. Evans nodded understandingly, taking the keys in hand and walked briskly over to the young, female receptionist who was busily signing off papers. Setting down her pen briefly, she accepted the keys from her superior, hung them on a rack to her right and then picked up the pen again without skipping a beat.

“Tanya will get those to Charles,” Mrs. Evans said turning around to face Sara, gesturing to the hall before them. “Now, would you like a tour of the facility, Miss Chapel?”
Without really getting a chance to give a direct answer, the woman pulled the ring of keys from her pocket and moved past her to the short hall before them to unlock another set of double doors, but these were far more hospital-looking than the century old mahogany entrance.
As Mrs. Evans unlocked the door, a muffled heart-wrenching cry from a woman sounded from upstairs, barely audible, but it was still loud enough to hear…Sara shot a panicked look at the woman before her to seemed to remain perfectly calm.

“Some of the guests here are of a different variety than you may be used to, my dear, but this is their home and will be yours as well while you work here,” she said as she pocketed the keys and stepped back for Sara to walk through the double doors down a long, white hall, filled with numbered rooms on either side. “Welcome to Lincoln County Psychiatric Hospital, Miss Chapel.”