Prologue
It was a dark night. The trees swayed roughly in the strong easterly wind surrounding the old Victorian building making the branches scrape like wiry fingers along the glass panes of the barred windows.
The doors leading to the facility are heavy and locked with bolts and electrical key codes, the building having been updated some years ago.
The corridors are magnolia in colour on the walls and ceilings, the wooden floor a deep mahogany brown, almost black. Laminated signs regarding hand hygiene, carer support and group activities adorn the halls where nurses who no longer wear uniforms aside from an identification badge busied themselves between their patients and the seemingly endless paperwork which now is data-based on computers instead of handwritten in notes. They are no longer allowed to call their residents 'patients'; they are referred to as 'service users' now.
Occasionally the newly installed halogen lights flickered on and off along with the rest of the power, infuriating members of staff who tried to input progress notes.
"Shitty thing," the charge nurse exclaimed as he hit the screen as if that would stop it from playing up.
"What's up with the lights? I thought they'd all been replaced to stop this," another nurse asked him.
"Along with every other piece of electrical equipment, plus new wiring throughout the building. Nothing wants to work here." The charge nurse answered, picking up a selection of handwritten notes on a 'service user', "Perhaps she's right, that one in bedroom 11, maybe 'he' does take out the lights so he can get her," he remarked sarcastically. Both of them started laughing at the absurdity.
Further into the hospital, the nursing numbers start to dwindle. Past more coded doors to prevent patients from entering areas they shouldn't, along corridors illuminated by the flickering of strip lights which hum in time with the darkness. The further back into the old building you get, the clearer the older characteristics become. Heavy metal doors enclose on what used to be padded cells but are no more, they are simply rooms like the others here but these ones are sparser and kept locked to prevent self harm and suicide. The nurse to patient ratio is higher at this end of the building for security reasons, but the halls are eerily silent for the nurses feel uneasy here and don't wish to travel the long distances.
Many of the bedrooms are empty save for a few which keep some of the more violent of the patients in them; most are sleeping soundly having been administered their medication and sedatives. In one cell however, bedroom 11, at the furthest part of the hospital, one patient squirms against her restraints restlessly.
It is no longer the practise of mental health hospitals to use such methods on patients but in this case they have no choice. The young girl inside has been bound to one of the old beds which came with leather straps and binds, these attach well to the old fashioned strait jacket they have placed her in. She is watched by a security camera but this too is unreliable, losing its electrical feed for long periods of time. She stares up to the ceiling, her eyes stung red with tears as she watches the light flashing on and off, jumping every time the room turns pitch black.
Her case is complex, she suffers from post-traumatic stress disorder as a result of an incident occurring six months ago which she has not recovered from and is unlikely ever to.
"Where are my meds?" She asks herself, "Why haven't they come to give me my meds?" She is already heavily sedated, but without a last injection for the evening she knows that she won't sleep tonight and 'he' will be here soon.
The light flickers again and she screams in the momentary darkness, the branches on the trees outside tease her with their tapping, they sound like her pursuer, as if he is biding his time.
Her door has her name written on it, but does she not respond to her name anymore, she insists that this is not her name; the doctors suspect this to be a reaction to her ordeal, a way of disassociating herself from it.
She is known for self harming but the nurses and doctors cannot find a method; no blade has even been found and the wounds which adorn her flesh are too deep and clean to be the result of her fingernails. Hence why they put her in the strait jacket and bound her to this old bed; but still she manages somehow to cut herself and there are not enough nurses to watch her constantly.
The girl cannot bring herself to close her eyes. Instead she starts to sing quietly as the light in her room continues to taunt her, hot tears streaming down her face once again. "A cross upon… Her bedroom wall… From grace, she will fall…" she swallows, trying to relieve her dry mouth as she remembers how she came to be here, "An image burning… In her mind… And between her thighs…"