Page 16 of The Mare Rider of Cornwall Cove
“Don’t worry, babe, they will,” Phil interjected, cutting me off.
I snickered. “True. Our followers are factual folks. So, groundbreaking for the hospital was in 1810 with completion of the facility for the insane—their words not mine, viewers—in the spring of 1813.” I started a slow walk around the game room, motioning toward busted chairs, tables, and then to a filthy chess piece, a king, lying in the corner covered with mouse droppings. “The hospital was state-of-the-art for its time, with three floors, over a hundred rooms for patients, and the top asylum doctors in the state. Patients from all over Massachusetts came here, many arriving in fancy carriages with rich relatives, but many more were the dregs of society. They treated the rich patients better than the poor, obviously because nothing really changes, but all were subjected to terrible procedures. Many passed away here. Some given nice markers that their grateful families paid for. Remember, back in the 1800s and well into the 1900s, people suffering from mental health issues were shunned and called lunatics, imbeciles, idiots, madmen or madwomen. Many people were locked up here, or in other asylums, simply for being autistic or being a person with Down syndrome.”
We made our way to the door, stopping to let me wet my lips as Phil opened it and stepped out into the hallway, framing me in the open portal as I stepped through. I felt my phone buzzing in my front right pocket. The vibrations traveled through the coinin my gris-gris bag, which amplified the hum a bit. It felt like a slew of texts came rolling in all at once.
“Many women were institutionalized for a variety of reasons, such as hysteria or mental inferiority. Some merely for being assertive, as back in the day an independent woman was considered mentally ill. The patriarchy ruled with an iron fist and gleefully sent many women into horrific conditions to silence them. During my research for this stream, I read about a doctor who visited a girls’ school in the mid-1800s and said that they were training the girls for the lunatic asylum. Seems women who read or studied were demonstrating an eccentricity of conduct, which meant they were morally insane and locked away until they conformed to a more demure, natural, feminine way of behaving.”
“Damn,” Phil said from behind the camera. I sadly nodded as the light now moved from me to the long, empty hallway. Empty save for a wheelchair sitting about forty feet away. I glanced back at Phil.
“Was that out there when we came down the hall?”
“No, no, they were all in the cafeteria.” He shined the light on me as I swallowed softly. “I swear it.”
He was right. The hall was empty. I recalled clearly thinking how glad I was about no gruesome gurneys.Groovy, as Kevin the chem house ghost would say.
“Okay, well, it looks like we might have a prankster spirit on the grounds,” I flippantly said, knowing the viewers would love something dark and occult to take place.
I opened myself up just a bit and picked up some weak auras moving around the reception area. Perhaps one of the phantoms shifting about had moved that wheelchair.
I felt nothing overtly malevolent nearby, but a strange sort of vibration pulsed through the wall to our left. Something I wasn’t familiar with. So, being the person who was supposed to makethis stream exciting, I did what was expected of me. I took a few steps to the left and opened the door to what seemed to be another office of some sort. No placard on this one to tell who might have occupied it, so I stepped inside, with Phil coming after me. The room reeked of mold and mouse urine. Nothing sat in this area but one old raggedy upholstered chair, the arms and back gutted years ago of its stuffing by rodents or birds in search of nesting. Draped over the skeletal back of the once grand seat was a moth-eaten sweater, gray with age, the buttons coated with tarnish. I nudged Phil and jerked my chin at the chair. He moved around me with care to film the chair.
“There were many administrative offices in a large facility such as Cornwall Cove,” I said from the side. “This one may very well have been the head nurse’s office, as each facility had many nurses to care for patients. I found some interesting information about asylum nurses at the turn of the century. Many were looked down upon, as working with the insane was considered less valuable than other forms of nursing. The majority of asylum nurses in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century were unskilled and turnover was high. Even male employees, such as ex-military, stayed less than three years at the job, which I’m sure we can understand. The work was hard, the hours crushingly long for miserly pay, and it had to be unpleasant to say the least.”
“Seems shitty to run down nurses and doctors who were just trying to help. I mean, not all of them were being cruel,” Phil softly interjected, his camera now pointed at me.
I nodded. “Yeah, for sure. There were many kind and caring health professionals working in these kinds of places. Sadly, some were also real monsters. And while we now look back at some of the procedures that were used on those suffering with mental illness, back in the late 1800s those barbaric practices were considered the height of medical knowledge.”
“Man, I amreallyglad I live when I do,” Phil mumbled. I nodded vigorously.
“Yeah, if we’d been dating back in ye olden days, we’d have been subjected to all sorts of wild shit in order to cure our homosexuality. Wild and scary like transplanting testicles to change sexual orientation wild.”
“Shit,” Phil gasped as his eyes flared. “What was that even supposed to do?”
“Cure the deviance? I don’t really know. There was some vague mention of some doctors thinking testosterone had something to do with sexual orientation, so they tried to change it via transplants. How they even got their hands on queer men to hack up like that I don’t know. Maybe they found men in prison who had been arrested for sodomy and given over to the asylum for study as part of their sentence. If I were facing a death sentence or life in prison with hard labor, I might be tempted to sign on for the asylum instead of the noose.”
Phil shuddered visibly. “This place is the pits.”
“Yeah, babe, it really is. Let’s move on to the cafeteria, then we can show the viewers the lobby and perhaps the grounds if we don’t run out of time.” I tugged my phone out to check the time and the texts from Roxie. Time was ten after nine, so we had plenty of time before we had to be back in the game room to pop the cork on the bubbly and then pretend to go to bed. I felt kind of bad deceiving the subscribers. Roxie was sending me messages steadily, all with lots of exclamation marks and explosive emojis as our sub rates climbed nicely. Each text ended with KEEP THE CAMERA FEED OPEN AT ALL TIMES. I hoped the people were enjoying the stream and didn’t find it too boring. I’d have to ask Phil on a wee break if I sounded too much like a stodgy professor.
We moved out of the nurse’s office and stepped back into the cafeteria. “Now this is an interesting room. Many of the patientshere were able to eat in the common rooms like this dining hall, which had seen lots of transformations over the years in terms of quality of food. They fed the rich patients better than the indigents, who were mostly given bread and butter and some sort of tea or coffee for breakfast with a stew or soup for dinner. The wealthy paid for their loved ones to be treated better, so the food would have been high-end institution fare with perhaps even a chef to prepare the meals for the well-to-do. There would have been fresh fruit and maybe even chocolate for the upper-class patients while—”
I skidded to a cold stop. My moose of a boyfriend literally rear-ended me, and not in that fun way I kept asking him to, which nudged me forward, as I gaped at the wheelchairs now sitting in a tight circle in the middle of the dining room.
Unsure of what to say, I snuck a peek at Phil behind me as his camera finally captured the sight before us. His jaw dropped. “Oh fuck,” he whispered, his deep voice shaky, as he stared at the wheelchair roundup. “What’s that on the floor in the middle of the chairs?”
I’d not seen anything in the center. Although he was several inches taller. I rose to my toes, my snow boots creaking slightly. My heart thudded twice the normal rate when I saw that opossum we’d flushed out not an hour ago lying dead on the floor, its mouth and eyes open wide, a trickle of blood pooling under its horribly twisted head.
“Fuck!” I shouted, stepping back into Phil, who slid his free arm around me. “Shit, fuck, okay this is not okay!” I bellowed, my sight locked on the poor marsupial, as Phil backed us out of the cafeteria with haste. I broke free of his hold, stalked down the hall, and stormed into the lobby. Several smaller entities darted through the walls. A few lingered, meager forms that were barely holding their corporeal forms together. “Who is responsible for what happened to that animal in the dininghall?” I demanded at the top of my lungs. I generally didn’t yell at spirits, then again, I generally didn’t have phantoms engaging in this kind of carnage. Even the Tewberry twins weren’t known to harm animals. Shave heads, yes, but slaughter an innocent animal?
“Arch, we should go back to the game room,” Phil said, coming up beside me, the light on his camera quaking slightly. I stared at the forms moving to and fro, their essences catching on the wind blowing down the stairs from what I assumed were holes in the ceilings on the upper floors. I felt myself shaking with a combination of shock and rage. “There could be other people here. We need to take a break.”
I glanced back to see that the tiny green light was still green. Roxie’s prime directive of “Never turn off the camera” rattled around inside my head. The stream was still live. Oh shit. My phone was vibrating like mad in my pocket as it rested by the gris-gris bag.
“Okay, yeah, we need a moment,” I finally agreed. I wet my cold lips and turned to bury my face into his chest. He was as solid as ever. His arm came around me tightly and kept me there as I battled to draw in calming breaths. “That was terrible.”
“Yeah, it was pretty bad. Come on, let’s just go back to base. Get our bearings.”
I drew in a deep breath of his scent, let it work its magic, as my fingers clutched at the back of the glow party tee covering his coat. Breaking apart, I turned my back on the specters watching us warily as I made my way down to the rec room. There were no signs of other people here at the moment, so I felt deep down in my seeing-eye center that the opossum was not left there by human hands. Call it a hunch. The memory of that black, shadowy form I’d glimpsed just for a millisecond came to mind. Perhaps there was a UFI perpetually shackled to this dreadful place.
