Happy Holidays!
A/N: There's a quote from Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury. Clearly I don't own that one.
-It's midnight. The screams won't shut up. Somebody save me from this place.-
That was all the little piece of paper said.
My eyes followed those words over and over again. To memorize them, to suck the magical power out of them, to get me out of this place.
Briarcliff Manor. This obnoxious place. It was the place I found myself living in after the failed attempt to find the cell of Bloody Face. It smelled piss and shit, and humans' rotting flesh. The melody of Dominique was played repeatedly, solely in order to drive the patients to further madness.
When the Sister Jude had admitted me against my will about two weeks ago, there was still hope. Hope that I was going to escape this hell and expose the inhumane reality of the asylum to the eyes of the world.—Something had happened to the optimism and bravery since then. Jude's various forms of cruelty had shattered them in complete pieces. My life in this place was misery and misery was my life. The faith in myself, my ex-lover, and life itself, might be floating in someone's filth bucket by now.
So, when Sister Jude had commanded I organize the anarchic library as punishment—for something I didn't care to know,—my motivation was as low as hell's ground level.
Until I found that note, that is.
The tattered paper must have been sitting there for quite a long time—it wasn't an everyday occurrence that this place had a visitor. It was quite possible that the last time someone'd come here was more than years ago. Most of the inmates, and even some of the employees, didn't seem to know its existence. It was not a surprise, though, as the life at Briarcliff might as well be just their own rooms, the common room, the bakery, and—if Jude liked them enough—the solitary confinement.
The words on the note were written pretty neatly. My own handwriting wasn't exactly the finest thing.—I'd been actually surprised when Jude was able to decipher my notes at all. Wendy used to say my handwriting mirrored my personality—messy, strong, persistent, and sometimes incomprehensible.
The owner of those written words—whoever it was—must be gentle and fragile, I decided.
"The screams won't shut up." The paper swayed in my hand as my breaths hit it. "Somebody save me from this place . . ."
Even though the mysterious person didn't have a tangible shape in my mind, I felt a sense of familiarity. A sense of comradery, someone might describe.—Patients screamed, cried, and howled throughout the night, until they fell asleep from exhaustion. Somebody's screams were another person's lullaby. Eventually you won't be able to tell if those voices are simply the echoes of others' suffering, or something coming from inside your own head. That was the way of their lives—ours. This was how it always had been at Briarcliff.
I didn't know what came over me, nobody could ever explain. But when I realized, I'd ripped a small piece of paper out of a nearby magazine, and was scribbling words on it. There was no harm in writing a reply to the long-forgotten note. Nobody was going to read it.
Perhaps, this was my way of seeking a shelter for my despaired heart. Perhaps, this was my heart searching for a company—however invisible and imaginable this other person might be—in this hell.
My grip around the short pencil gradually gained its strength, until there was a faint sound in the distance. I looked up. It must be the dinner time already, because I could hear the whistle. Oh, how I hated that ear-splitting sound—I loathed it. It was like they were screwing a nail directly into the flesh of my brain, especially after an electric-shock therapy.
Outside the small window, the sky was turning orange, urging me to go back to the common room for pre-dinner assembly. The library was in a better condition. Jude wouldn't say anything to this, I decided. I placed my note in the hole, before leaving there.
As I walked down the hallway, I struggled to keep a straight face. My fingers played with the old note in my pocket, and a tiny smile pulled the corners of my mouth upwards. The surface was crusty, like the type of paper I loved. I found myself biting my lip like a child.
In my mind, I re-played what I'd decided to write. I imagined how the white piece of paper might shine in the newly discovered hole. I imagined how it sat there, waiting to be read by somebody someday. I imagined how that someone would smile, and how they might even laugh at my handwriting.
-I'll hold on to the world tight someday. I've got one finger on it now; that's a beginning.-
###
Cigarette smoke swam in the air of the common room, wrapping our bodies, slowly dying our clothes and skin ash-yellow. The grimy wall near the piano had another blood spot added to its collection. With the constant rhythm of Mrs. Tyler's head-banging, even Dominique had slight funkiness to its beat.
"Where have you been?" Kit Walker furrowed his brows at me as I sat next to him.
I sighed. The couch was old, but after moving around the library for hours, it felt like a queen's bed. "In the library," I said.
"There's a library?" he said, as he held a pack of cigarettes in front of me. I gave him a nod. "Why?"
"Jude wants me to organize that place." I took one out of the pack, and struck a match.—As I held it near the tip of the cigarette, I realized my fingertips were smudged with something black. Ink—I was playing with the letter in my pocket all day. I wiped it off on my sweater.
"But why?" His eyes narrowed. "What did you do?"
I shrugged. "Nothing. It's bullshit and Jude knows it." Cigarette ash floated as I flicked it above the ashtray. "She doesn't need the fucking place organized. There are literally only piles of Hollywood magazines. Nobody is interested to know what kind of food a German Hollywood star was obsessed with in the 70's. She's just doing this to me out of spite."
"How long do you have to do it?"
I shrugged again, and my greasy hair fell into my face. "Until the place is perfectly organized."
"How long do you think it'd take?" He creased his forehead.
"Depends on Jude's definition of 'perfectly organized.'"
###
It was probably my fifth or sixth visit to the library, that I began to suspect there was something cursed about that rat hole of a place. Even after hours of (imitation of) hard work, the place was somehow able to get dirtier and messier every time I came. The books I'd put alphabetically in shelves were disorderly. The mountains of books I'd sorted out by titles were lying on the greasy floor in shambles.
Someone might be out there to get in my way, someone like Jude. She must be involved in one way or another. But for what purpose? It was no other than the old crow of a nun who'd sent me on the mission. Or what if—the paranoid voice inside my head said—what if it was another attempt to drive me to deeper insanity? In fact, the deeper I got my feet in the swamp of madness, the better for her.
"You are not gonna get me that easily, you tramp," I said, suddenly feeling my competitive soul blaze.
Little by little, I began to repeat the monotonous work, which I'd been doing for weeks now. It was such a mind-numbing task. Organizing stuff was never my favorite thing to do, nor was I good at it.
My mother was just like this.—She was the kind of woman who found comfort in messiness. And never in my childhood had I seen her so enthusiastic about keeping the house clean. She only did it, so I wouldn't get food poisoning or lice.
To say my mother was an unconventional woman would be an understatement. She was always, without remorse or shame, ahead of her time. Creative, enthusiastic, and fierce. "Before I realized I was pregnant with ya, I wanted ta be a painter," she once told me in her distinctive Appalachian accent. "I still do. If ya're really passionate 'bout somethin', Lana, nothin' is an obstacle." She was a person of her own before she was my mother. I remember the smell of oil paints better than the smell of homemade food; the coarse texture of canvases better than the softness of fresh laundry; the dry sound of paintbrushes better than sweet lullabies. With my little world surrounded by such things, it'd never occurred to me, at that time, that this way of life was strange.
But it was, and in some narrow-minded people's eyes, it was something to be frowned upon, too. My father, like everybody else, found this shameful. He'd often yell at her, sometimes even throw things at her. One time he got so furious he threw her creations out of the house, and set them on fire. "Look at your daughter, not your stupid paintings," he said. "What ya're doin' is a disgrace, a huge taint on the name o' Winters. Why can't ya just be like every other woman and be normal?" And because of this incident, among many other things, I had come to despise him and despise the idea of 'normal'.
I had never looked back at my childhood and wished for a different life. My mother was always my greatest inspiration. She'd taught me the power of mind, and the power of defiance. She'd taught me that a single drop of paint on a canvas was enough to make change.—It was enough to enrage men, so it must be powerful, right?
There was one thing, though, that I regret about my life. And it was that she, the most artistic person on earth, failed to teach me the art of cleaning. She would use and create. She excelled at that. But I couldn't, for the life of me, remember my mother cleaning her pallet or washing her paint-covered overall. For that, throughout my childhood, and even in my adulthood, cleaning to me was a mere concept. Good thing I found Wendy, who found holiness in the very act of cleaning.
But I had to remind myself, Wendy was no longer, or perhaps was never, a goddess that I'd made her out to be.
Somewhere outside the library, there was a whistle. It knocked the stack of magazines out of my hands as I flinched, and they—goodbye to the minutes dedicated to sort them in order—scattered across the floor. I decided I was fed up with everything that was my life then, so much that no sound of irritation could go past my throat. Instead of picking them up, I glared at the books like they were the rebellious kids in Wendy's class.—I'd once met some of them, and as briefly as the encounter was, their smug, ignorant faces got under my skin.
Shit, Wendy. Not again. It was not going to be so easy to get rid of the part of my life that was once my world.
Crouching down, I collected the rebellious magazines. "August '58 . . . October '58 . . . November . . ." I ran my fingers through the stack. "Where the fuck is June '59?" I searched for the missing volume, which, for mysterious reasons, had managed to fly across the place and rested against the wall near the door.
"Great." I walked towards it, cursing whoever decided to subscribe to it in the first place.
I bent forward to grab it, but before straightening up, I flicked my eyes to the wall. There was a hole, that small crack I'd discovered a while ago. How long ago was it, though? Even with my persevering hope for freedom, I didn't keep track of the date any longer. It easily could've been a month since Jude had held me against my will, or it might be only a week from that day.—Nobody knew, nobody bothered to know what day it was. In Briarcliff, where the inmates' lives were built on the base of monotonous routines, such information was merely another thing to worsen their depression.
I abandoned the magazines and Jude's nonsensical command, and knelt down before the hole. There was something inexplicable about it, like it was pulling me by the sleeve. It could be the exhilaration of having a secret, the feeling that resembled a sense of superiority. I was the chosen one.—I was Alice, and it was the rabbit hole I was looking in.
As my eyes narrowed to adjust to the darkness in there, I saw a piece of paper. I took it by its rim.
Since I was the library's only regular visitor, I hadn't really expected to see anything new. But, when the sunlight fell upon the crumpled, stained note, I could not help but strain my eyes. It wasn't the one I'd left the other day.
-You must be an angel, whoever you are. I hope you don't mind me taking your letter with me. I know it'll help me through the darkest days.-
My heart drummed against my ribcage, and in my eardrums. I traced each letter with my fingertip, feeling the indentation. I scratched the inked surface, and it smudged the graphite lines. Yeah, this is real. Then I knew this wasn't a product of my hallucination.
But then, so what? The journalist part of me refused to just end this less-than-humble note exchange. There remained so many questions to be answered. Who is this person? How long have they been here? Do they know who I am? And most importantly, what have they done to be trapped in this hell?
Yet, another part of me, the part Jude's whip and fangs had touched in the slightest way, feared to sniff around for the sole purpose of finding the secret friend. I was not a tamed dog. But try as I might, I could not deny I'd learned to be cautious with my bottomless curiosity. All thanks to the old fiend in a habit. Don't trust anyone but yourself, and that included the mysterious person until proven otherwise. If I needed to start a personal project, nobody could know what I was up to.
So there was irony, a great contradiction in my ambitious scheme.—If my plan should remain unknown to everyone around, there was no way for the secret comrade to know someone was looking for them. The only way that could protect my identify, while continuing the exploration, was to keep the exchange going in hopes of some clues. Unlike outside the asylum, there was no inside source, no documents to give me a clue, no nothing. All I got in my hands was a 3-inch pencil.
"At least that's a start." I shrugged and took a pen out of my worn-out shoe.
-I am no angel, with no wings to fly out of this place. But I do have the eyes to see the light of hope. On your darkest nights, look at the moon. Remember I'll be looking at the same light as you.-
The pencil ran across the paper like a fish in the water. The rush that ran down my spine reminded me of my true calling. That feeling of thrill and proud mixed together in a savory cocktail.—it was why I became a journalist. Chasing the truth was always my home, the fuel that drove me, something the torturous life had made me almost forget. And the memory of my home returned to my hazed mind at last. I wanted to go home.