Dunham Mental Hospital was a dismal place: all grey stone and metal, built into the remains of an old fort or castle, with only a few greasy oil lamps to provide light inside. It wasn't drafty, and the thick walls kept out the most of the cold even in winter, but the narrow windows and still air weighed heavily on the soul, whispering fear and imprisonment into the hollow corridors.
Cornelius Sturmhalten—a name he'd never cared for, and avoided using if at all possible—tipped his hat back to get a better look at the gate, an imposing iron structure, thick-barred and without ornamentation. Its ominous air was somewhat deflated by the chattering townsfolk who came to see the madmen gibber, a depressingly popular pastime, but nonetheless it was almost threatening in its solidity. Once you enter, it seemed to say, you will never leave.
Only to lunatics and the more superstitious townsfolk, though. His new status as a doctor meant that he could come and go as he pleased, but despite that, he felt an uncomfortable sense of foreboding as the gate swung shut behind him.
He was greeted by an older doctor, roughly a decade his senior, with an early sprinkling of grey in his short-cropped hair and a pensive expression made more so by the narrow rectangular spectacles perched on his nose.
"Sturmhalten?" asked the man; the young doctor nodded curtly. "Good. I assume you've found lodgings in the town?" Another nod; "I'll show you around, then. Be careful—the building's large, and you wouldn't want to get lost. You'll be working in the fifth ward. My name is Bridgeworth, by the way," he added, extending a hand. Cornelius shook it tentatively; the man's grasp was firm and dry.
"It will be a pleasure to work with you, Doctor Bridgeworth," he said, and the doctor's solemn face broke into a wide smile.
"Excellent! Follow me, then, I'll show you to the ward."
He had plenty of opportunity to talk to Bridgeworth as the senior doctor led him through the labyrinthine tangle of corridors and staircases that composed the hospital. The doctor was friendly enough, and an intelligent conversationalist. Cornelius made it a point to ask about individual patients, particularly once they reached the ward where he would be working—about their illnesses, symptoms, current treatments, odd individual quirks. Bridgeworth seemed surprised that he was so interested in the individual patients, but it was a pleasant sort of surprise, and he answered the younger doctor's questions willingly.
The conditions were standard fare; most patients occupied stone-and-concrete cells, with varying degrees of restraint, depending on how much of a danger they were to themselves and others. Some had straw-stuffed pallets; others merely had piles of straw. Whoever was in charge of cleaning was clearly not very enthusiastic about their job, because the place reeked of blood and vomit and other, less savory fluids; some of the madmen were smeared with their own excretions. It took a great deal of willpower for Cornelius to refrain from covering his mouth and nose; he tried breathing through his mouth, but he could taste the stench in the air, and that was perhaps worse than the smell.
The patients themselves were typical of asylums; one would not stop gibbering about strange colors and stones from the sky, and another seemed oddly fixated on fish. One had somehow gotten hold of an inkpot and drawn strange swirling hieroglyphs, half picture and half text, over the walls of her cell. The drawings were disconcertingly alien, and looking at them made his head buzz uncomfortably. Bridgeworth shook his head as they passed her cell. "Pity about her. An intelligent enough girl, or so she was, but she won't speak a word—just write, or paint, those squiggles. Puts up an awful fuss if we try to take her ink away, and it's a harmless enough hobby."
A flash of color at the edge of his vision caught his attention; red was an uncomfortably common color in the asylum, but it was a dirty red-brown clay color, not brilliant red-orange like a robin redbreast.
He was struck by the aptness of the simile as he turned his head. The boy had an undeniably birdlike air about him, thin and angular, making small sharp movements as he appeared to listen to something beyond the range of sane men's hearing. If he were a bird, his feathers would have been slicked back as far as possible, and not just because he was dripping wet—probably just returned from a round of immersion therapy. Whatever he was hearing, it was clearly nothing he liked; occasionally he would whimper and fold himself even more tightly into a ball.
Bridgeworth followed the young doctor's gaze, shaking his head sadly when he saw the object of Cornelius' attention. "Terrible story. From this town, in fact. I don't know all the details, but he did for two people and tried for himself, too, and he's been raving mad ever since."
"What was his name?" asked the young doctor, unable to tear his eyes away from the boy. Something about him was unbearably pitiful; the heavy iron manacles around his wrists and waist that fastened him to the wall, the way he shut his eyes and trembled and shook his head in response to voices only he could hear, that splash of color that didn't belong in this world of stone and concrete and iron.
Bridgeworth frowned. "We generally refer to patients by number here. But," he winked conspiratorially, "I never really agreed with the practice, so just between you and me, he was Hanna Cross."
"Han—?" Cornelius began to ask, but he was cut off when the boy jerked his head up as if in response to his name, staring through the young doctor with eyes wide with abject terror, and began to scream, high and wild and terrified, with a few intelligible words scattered throughout—"no, no, no please, please, stop, I didn't mean it, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, stop, stop, stop, please no, please—!"
The older doctor fumbled in his coat pockets briefly before coming up with a syringe and a small bottle of liquid in one hand and a key ring in the other. "This is why we don't use their names—some of them react badly. But in the end, I think, it's better—we want them to rejoin society, and they can't do that without names." He continued talking as he uncapped the bottle and filled the needle; unlocking the door to the cell, he grabbed hold of one of the boy's thin wrists, trying to wrestle the uncooperative lunatic into a position where he could make the injection. The contact seemed to snap the boy out of his hallucination; he stopped screaming and started struggling, thrashing wildly as much as the chains would let him, continuing with a much quieter, panicked babble of "No, no, no I'm sorry I'm sorry don't don't don't need medicine no medicine please no medicine—" His pleading was unsuccessful; after a brief struggle, Bridgeworth managed to get the needle into a vein and inject the chemical. The older doctor backed away quickly, shutting and locking the door; the boy's struggles grew weaker as the morphine began to take effect
"Was that really necessary?" asked the young doctor.
"He won't calm down on his own. We've tried—he only screams until his voice gives out. We've tried everything… nothing works for very long, and we can't keep him sedated all the time." Bridgeworth shook his head sadly. "I don't know what to do. He won't even talk; he's terrified of the doctors."
Not unreasonable, Cornelius thought, if they really had been using immersion therapy, and probably shock therapies as well. "Perhaps a kinder approach would be more fruitful?" He wasn't certain how Bridgeworth felt about the idea of 'moral treatment', but if conventional methods weren't working, perhaps the older doctor would be willing try.
Why was he so concerned about this boy? There were cases like him in asylums across England, across the world, people so broken they couldn't be put back together. Cornelius had dealt with some—the violent ones, who would attack anyone within reach; the silent ones, who had retreated into a world of their own imagining; the frightened ones, trapped and tormented in a private hell of delusion. There was no reason that this boy should affect him the way he did, but nonetheless, something about the boy's situation tugged at his sympathies, urging him to do anything he could to help.
"He had kindness before he came here; he went insane." Bridgeworth didn't seem to have noticed the young doctor's drifting attention. "But—if you think you can help him, be my guest. He doesn't know you, maybe he won't be as frightened of you as he is of the rest of us."
A small victory—not even a difficult one, but Cornelius felt his spirits lift despite the oppressive atmosphere. Maybe Bridgeworth was right, and the boy was beyond help—but he would try anyway, because he had to.