“For your own safety, Liv,” he said, leaning over and peering into her face. “I want to tell you about this place,” he continued. “This asylum is magnificent. When I started here, I longed to share the story with you. You were the only person in the world who would understand.”
Liv bit her tongue against the cruel things she wanted to say. Her words were wasted on the man before her.
“I started my rounds at the Northern Michigan Asylum on a dreary day in September. It was a terribly, soggy day, and I remember how my shoes squished in the wet grass. By the time I stood at the desk of my adviser, Dr. Strickland, my socks and the hem of my pants were sodden.”
Liv imagined him, dripping wet and likely looking like a lost boy as he stared up at the immense buildings. He did not look like a lost boy anymore. He stood above her, his eyes gleaming with excitement as he told his story.
“The day’s activities did not surprise me,” he continued. “I completed my psychiatric residency in New York at one of the most depraved and violent mental institutions in the country. They didn’t appreciate me there, Liv. They loved lobotomies. Schizophrenia or hysteria, their favorite treatment was an ice pick to the frontal lobe.”
He offered a derisive laugh, but Liv shuddered at the description. It terrified her that men like Stephen wielded such power over those least able to defend themselves.
“I saw the usual patients. Herbert was a paranoid schizophrenic. He gave me the evil eye when I passed. In the women’s ward, I saw a young woman pulling her long red hairs out one by one. Another patient plucked them from the table and quickly braided them into her own thin, gray hair. Dr. Strickland watched me as if I might be shocked at these things, but they barely registered. Crazy was something I’d grown accustomed to by that time. I was looking for something more, and I knew I’d find it here.” Stephen paced away, abruptly turning on his heel and striding back.
Liv thought back to her own intervening years. While Stephen played God with the mentally ill, she’d raised and nursed the future of the world. The little boys and girls who were bright-eyed and filled with hope, despite the dire circumstances that had brought them to the orphanage.
There were attendants who liked to control the children, even hurt them, but Liv drove them out. One by one, she revealed their dark nature, and they ran from the truth of their own corrupt hearts.
“They gave me a plain little apartment in the staff building,” Stephen went on, “which suited me fine. In those days, I wanted nothing more than to live within these walls, to root out the secrets of this place.” He paused for effect. “And then one afternoon, the mysteries revealed themselves. I overheard Dr. Green and Dr. Palmer speaking about a priestess who could raise the dead. She was coming to the asylum as a patient, to some sort of meeting. I knew I’d found it — my destiny, Liv.”
“A priestess,” Liv murmured, the word strangled in her throat. In her mind, she envisioned a wild woman with a headdress of feathers and bones. And then she imagined the woman’s strong arms pinned against her body, the stiff confines of a straightjacket wrapped around her, flattening her bosom, hiding her heart, stifling her voice.
“I jimmied the lock on Palmer’s door,” Stephen lifted his hand and squinted his eyes as if reliving that long-ago break-in. “His apartment was identical to mine, with the bonus of the most hideous display of fruit bowl paintings you’ve ever seen. The man is plainer than the oatmeal I’ve been feeding you. Sorry, by the way. Truly, I’ve watched manic patients fall asleep in his office.” Kaiser laughed and slapped the brass bed frame causing a jolt of surprise to invade Liv’s thickened senses. “I found a letter imprinted with an odd wax seal. The letter spoke about a meeting of a brotherhood. More importantly, it described the priestess. I was floored. It was more than I envisioned when I first felt the power in this place.”
Liv let her head fall to the side. She did not want to look on his face flushed and impassioned. She hated the way he gazed at her. Did he consider them old friends? She locked in an asylum attic, and he chattering away and practically bouncing out of his shoes?
“The letter wasn’t enough. I had to know more. So, I broke in again, and you can imagine my surprise when I was greeted by Dr. Strickland, Dr. Green, and Dr. Palmer. They were sitting in the darkness waiting for me.” Stephen’s voice dropped low. “My heart plummeted right through the floor beneath me and splattered somewhere in the basement. I told Strickland, the mastermind of their group, that I wanted in. Palmer and Green looked like daft cows staring at me with their big dumb eyes, but not Strickland. My theory, Liv? He knew when he hired me that I would join the brotherhood. I was meant for the brotherhood.”
Stephen sat with a sigh on the edge of Liv’s bed and she cringed as he reached over and pushed her hair away from her eyes.
“Strickland sent those other two morons out and gave me a hard time for breaking into Palmer’s apartment, but all the while I saw the intrigue in his eyes. He recognized something in me. He saw potential, something Green and Palmer didn’t have an ounce of in their big toes. I made it clear that he’d be a fool to keep me on the outside.”
“So, they let you in?” Liv asked, wishing the story would end and she could close her eyes and blot out the sound of his voice.
He laughed again, and now he was on his feet, pacing.
“Those bastards broke into my apartment in the middle of the night. I woke up to a rough canvas sack yanked over my head. Hands, six at least, maybe more, grabbed my arms and legs and lifted me from the bed. Had I gone too far? Were they carrying me to the furnace room to toss me into the fire and dispose of me for good? I panicked. I bit a man through the fabric. The man shrieked and jerked his arm away. I heard Palmer swear and relished the knowledge it was him I had bit. Before his fist hit me, I sensed it. The impact slammed into my nose and I saw a grotesque array of black stars. Blood was pouring out of my wrecked nose, and then I felt them haul me out of the building, into the cool night.”
Liv imagined Stephen, blood seeping into a canvas sack pulled over his face. Why hadn’t the men taken him to the forest and thrown him into a shallow grave?
Because they were like him.
The realization made her head pound.
Liv missed the children then. She missed their earnest faces and their warm, searching hands. She missed sitting in the rocking chair on the big front porch and rocking the babies while a breeze rippled in the mulberry tree that hung over the porch.
Children were not filled with secrets and dark desires. They wore their emotions plain on their lineless faces. George had always loved children. He sometimes told Liv ‘their innocence balances the scales of good and evil in our world.’
“We walked for ages, and then…” Stephen paused. “And then I heard it and felt it. The chamber, the eye. It seemed to call out to me. Come in, Stephen. Come inside.” His voice changed as he whispered the calls, as if he were singing an eerie, seductive song. “When they pulled the canvas sack from my head, I saw Dr. Strickland in a chair opposite me. I looked around at the chamber and I felt it watching us, holding us.”
A tremor ran along Liv’s spine and her arms and legs broke out in goosebumps. She too remembered the whispers from the chamber, the chilling call of something evil luring its prey.
Stephen moved around the bed, positioning himself in front of Liv’s face once more. He squatted down and looked into her eyes.
“Strickland lifted a glass bottle of Sodium Pentothal. We used it often at the sanitarium in New York as a sleep-cure. But I knew why he’d brought it. It’s a truth serum, a way of getting people to talk, though I soon learned he didn’t need a truth serum for that,” Stephen snorted.