Page 20 of No Asylum Here

Her glassy eyes stared vacantly at the ceiling, devoid of life.

I remembered this woman. There was no forgetting her. She’d been sweet and docile. The perfect victim for Malcolm Rook and his evil thirst to butcher, abuse and violate, all in the name of science.

The woman’s bruised and bloody flesh stretching her swollen belly began to writhe. An ugly screech came from the corpse a moment later, and I reached into her with my gloved hands and pulled out her baby.

It wasn’t human. Its flesh was gray, its veins filled with a glowing green liquid. The umbilical cord still attaching the child to its mother was bloated with the same substance.

A voice that made my insides curdle cut through the fog swaddling my mind, and I lifted my glare to find the devil himself standing on the opposite end of the table. Wearing the same scrubs, covered in the same blood.

Malcolm Rook glared at me from across the table with his throat slit, the gash still spewing liquid.

I clenched the scalpel now, setting the baby down in the crook of his dead mother’s arm and lunged at the man who’d destroyed so many lives. The woman, this baby, countless others. To say nothing of my own.

Before I could slice his throat again, as I had that day, the dream changed.

Next, I was lying on a steel table in his laboratory, surrounded by the collection of his past victims. Countless needles were shoved into my body, hundreds, so many that the glass syringes clinked together with the slightest twitch, the Treatment each one held sloshing with the movement. There were so many, the room was bathed in that caustic viridescence.

The grotesque face of Saint Bart’s pharmacist appeared in my field of vision, two syringes in his hands. “Shall I do his eyeballs, doctor?”

“Not yet.” Rook shoved Fredrick aside, his face appearing next in front of mine. “I’m so disappointed in you,” he said to me with a sigh. “You were once the best physician here. Now look at you. You’re a disgrace. To me. To your grandfather. To all of St. Bartholomew’s.”

I tried to close my eyes only for cruel fingers to pry them open.

“The injections, Fredrick. Now.”

I resisted the urge to scream as two needles were pushed into the sclera of my eyes and I felt the Treatment filling them. The pain obliterated every nerve, overloading my system like a fried circuit board.

“This is your last chance.” Rook raised his voice to be heard over my agonized cries. “Surrender to the Treatment. Let it flow through you. If you don’t, you’ll be removed from my staff. Permanently.”

Even if I possessed the ability to care, I wouldn’t. “I’d rather rot in a cell with the rest of the poor souls condemned to this fucking purgatory than work for you a second longer you evil son of a bitch.”

I couldn’t see his reaction, but the venom coming off him in waves was palpable. “Have it your way. Fredrick, Saint Bartholomew’s has a new patient. Get a fresh intake file, and make it black.”

Chapter Ten

Patient Seventeen

The nightmare morphed into something different several dozen more times. One moment, I was strapped face down to my bed while orderlies took turns violating my backside, and the next I was in Saint Bart's morgue, being slowly dissected and forced to watch them toss me into the cremator, one piece at a time.

The painful thing wasn’t even the torture. That shit got old after a while. It was that she wasn’t there.

Pitch darkness folded around me as the nightmare took on a different shape. I shouted into the void, “Is that all you’ve got, you fucking cocksuckers? If you end up breaking me, it will be from sheer goddamn boredom, not your pathetic mind game⁠—”

The taunt hadn’t fully left my tongue when the darkness melted. A new setting materialized, leaving me standing in a strange room.

This wasn’t Saint Bart’s.

Grateful Dead posters hung from the walls. The Rolling Stones were playing on the record stereo cabinet at the foot of the bed. My attention centered on the vinyl disk going round and round.

It tickled a distant memory in my brain…

Back when I was still human.

My father had gifted it to me after I’d graduated from Brown. Christ. It felt like a lifetime away.

I barely remembered the person I was before Saint Bart’s.

Standing in my old room was a bigger mind fuck than any other torture method they’d thrown my way. Especially when I realized I wasn’t alone.