I'm standing in line again, waiting for my little white paper cup to be filled with six different pills. The others who had already taken theirs had begun their zombielike trance. It wouldn't be long before I joined them. Missy, the girl in front of me was nervously tugging at her mousy brown hair. She already had several bald spots from her nervous tick. Nurse Covington stood at the counter dispersing the medications. I was glad; she was the nicest one here. She didn't treat us like we were insane. Sometimes, she actually talked to us. She had short blond curls that were mostly tucked under her nurse's cap. She looked to be in her late thirties and was just a little bit plump.
I nervously fidgeted with the ties on my hospital gown. I wanted to savor these few moments of temporary sanity. I was sure that I was sane all those years ago when I was brought here in the first place but now it seemed that the longer I lived here, the more I lost my grip on reality. The cycle amused me. Insane asylums were not necessarily for crazy people, but for normal people who are tortured into insanity.
The line moved up and it was Missy's turn. I heard her begin to argue with the nurse.
"I don't want to take them, please don't make me! They don't make me feel good. Please, I'm not crazy, please. I'll be a good girl." Missy rambled on.
"If you want to be a good girl then you need to take your medication." Nurse Covington said firmly. She held the white paper cup with the pills out for Missy to take.
"I DON'T WANT TO TAKE 'EM!" Missy screamed as she slapped the nurse's hand and made the pills fly into the air and scatter on the ground.
I held my hands up to my face. I knew what was coming and I didn't want to see it.
Two of the orderly's grabby Missy as she screamed frantically. "NOOOO! NOOO! I'll be a good girl! Please don't make me!" She was screaming so hard that saliva dripped from her chin with hot tears pouring down her face. "NOOO! God, Please NO!"
The orderly's dragged her away kicking and screaming. Her cries for help echoed down the halls. I knew where they were taking her but not because I had a premonition of it. I remembered when I had made the same mistake.
I was fairly new to the Biloxi Mississippi Psychopathic Ward. Doctor Gersham had just given me an evaluation and declared me insane. I had told him about my premonitions. All my life I was taught to tell the truth. I didn't understand why I was being punished for that truth. He repeatedly tried to get me to confess that I was lying but I wouldn't. I would not back down.
Then they started giving me the pills. They've played with my prescriptions since then, experimenting on me, trying to see what combination works best. They made me feel so sick and out of it. My mind was so unclear and I hated feeling that way. I tried to talk to Doctor Gersham about it but he ignored my requests. Finally I refused to take them.
The worst thing about what was coming next was that I had to experience it twice, once through my visions, and then again in real life. Nothing is more terrifying than knowing what is coming for you and not being able to do anything about it.
Just like with Missy, two orderlies took me away into another room. They strapped me down to a bed and tied my hands and legs so that I couldn't move. One of the nurses put a rubber bit in my mouth. She told me to bite down on it. I was so frightened. I didn't understand why this was happening to me. Why was everyone standing around watching this? Why wouldn't anyone help me? I prayed for God to intervene, but God didn't come.
Tears rolled from the corners of my eyes, down to my ears, then into my hair. I was already trembling in anticipation of what was to come. I tried to speak but the rubber bit prevented me. I want to tell Doctor Gersham that I had made everything up. I wanted to tell him that I was a liar, anything to stop him from hurting me this way.
The doctor fastened a device to the top of my head and pulled straps down to lock under my chin. The tears came harder now and my body shook with sobs as I moaned my stifled cries. If only someone would recue me. He walked over to a machine and turned a dial all the way up. I felt an electric pulse run through my body, making every nerve tense up and flare in pain. My veins and arteries felt as if they might burst. My heart beat unrhythmically. Even though it was only moments long, I felt like an eternity had passed.
When the doctor turned off the machine, I continued to lay there helpless, even after they removed the straps from me. I was a corpse, foaming at the mouth. I wanted nothing more than to die.
"Good morning Mary." Nurse Covington said to me.
"Good morning ma'am." I forced a smile at her and pushed the wretched memories to the back of my mind.
She handed me the white paper cup and I dumped the pills into my mouth. I chased them down with a drink of water and then reopened my mouth and moved my tongue around so that she could see that they had been ingested. She gave me a nod of approval and I moved out of the way for the next person to get their dose.
I sat down at one of the tables in the recreation room and looked out the barred window. I could feel the drugs taking effect. My heart rate slowed, my senses dulled, my muscles relaxed. I was just about to settle into my trance when a premonition came.
Suddenly, I saw him coming for me. My body felt sick at the thought of him. He was going to take me away from this room to a place where he could be alone with me. A wave of nausea washed over me.
"Hello princess." A deep man's voice spoke with insincere kindness. "I bet you'd like to go for a stroll today wouldn't you?"
His name was Richard. He had slicked back, jet black hair and pale skin. He picked up my limp body and settled me into a wheelchair. He lifted my wrist and let it drop to be sure that the drugs had taken their effect. Then he started whistling a tune as he pushed me down the halls. It was the same tune he always whistled around me. It was "All the Boys Love Mary" by Van and Schenck. I used to love that song before Richard came along.
I remembered a time when my little sister Cynthia and I laid on the carpet listening to the radio while Ma and Pa sat on the sofa. Ma was crocheting and Pa was smoking his pipe. The radio was a new thing to our household. Pa had just gotten a raise from work he thought it was about time that we could afford such a luxury.
When "All the Boys Love Mary" came on for the first time I remember jumping up and down saying "Listen Pa! They wrote that song about me!"
He thought it was very funny but Ma always wished I would stop jumping and behave more ladylike.
I remember when I started to scare them with my premonitions. They've never been anything I could control. They just came to me when something terrible was coming.
Ma was hurrying trying to get dinner ready. The knife she held was quickly chopping carrots across the cutting board. I kept begging her to stop but she was getting so frustrated with me.
"Mary Alice Brandon, if you want me to be able to stop then why don't you help me?"
Then she screamed out in pain as the knife nearly sliced her entire index finger off. She looked at me with accusing eyes, as if I had something to do with it. She wrapped it in white cloth that turned to red far too quickly. After she got home from the hospital, nothing was ever the same between us.
More instances like this repeated themselves. My father tried to ignore them and begged me not to talk about them, but if I could protect my family from bad things then why wouldn't I? It was a dark day when they brought me to the asylum. I didn't understand how my own family could do this to me. My mother refused to look at me. I think she would have rather had a dead daughter than one like me. I never saw them again.
My head hung limply to my side as I listened to Richard's set of keys jangle at his hip with each step on the white linoleum. He wheeled my chair around and backed us into a dark, empty room.
"Oh Mary, I've missed you. Did you miss me?" He whispered into my ear.
I wanted to scream for help but I couldn't make my mouth move. I felt like I was trapped in one of those nightmares where someone is chasing you and for some reason you just can't seem to run fast enough.
He lifted my body out of the wheel chair and laid me onto a white cot. Everything here was white. The walls, ceiling, floors, the clothes of the staff- all white. He climbed on top of me but didn't let the full amount of his weight settle onto me.
He pressed his face against my dark hair and inhaled deeply. "Oh Mary, you smell so good."
He tilted my head to the side and let his wet icy tongue slide up from my shoulder to my ear. His touch made me sick. A single tear rolled down the side of my face. If there ever was a hell, this would be it.
He moved his hand low and ran his fingers up my leg, pushing up my hospital gown. I wanted to scream out so badly! I wanted him to stop!
"Richard?" A muffled voice came through the door. It was Nurse Covington. "Richard, are you in there?" The handle turned back and forth but Richard had locked it from the inside.
We both listened intently as Nurse Covington began to use her own set of keys to open the door. Richard jumped off of me and in an instant he had me back in the wheel chair and flipped on the lights.
The door opened the rest of the way and Nurse Covington gasped when she saw us. "Oh!" She put her hand to her chest. "I didn't think anyone was in here." Then she eyed Richard suspiciously. "What are you doing in here with Mary?"
Richard grabbed a small box off the shelf and flashed the nurse a bright smile. "I wanted to grab a deck of cards to show Mary a card trick."
Nurse Covington nodded warily. "Well get on with it."
He smiled that slick smile again and rolled me out of the room back into the recreation room. He wheeled me up to a table and knelt down in front of me to put the brakes on the chair. While he was down there he let his icy fingers slide up my leg once more.
"It's such a shame that we were interrupted." He whispered. "But don't worry princess; I work the graveyard tonight so I'll be paying you a visit."
Suddenly he was peering over my shoulder at someone else. His cool expression changed in an instant to one of anger and frustration. I desperately wanted to see what he was seeing but I had no control over my premonitions. They never showed me what I wanted to see.
I looked at the barred glass window behind Richard and caught the pale reflection of the man who had incited such a reaction in Richard. He was just as pale as Richard but had cropped blond hair. His face was full of surprise as he stared at Richard and I. His clothes were not white, so I assumed that he was here to visit someone.
A low growl escaped Richard's throat. That seemed to make the blond stranger smile. He looked around as if scoping out the area, weighing his options and then left. As soon as he was gone Richard seemed to calm down. He leaned up and gave me a messy kiss on the cheek.
"See you tonight princess."
It was night and the drugs had mostly worn off by now. I was locked in my room, staring at the ceiling. There were exactly 144 white square tiles on my ceiling. I had counted them many times over. I was considering starting to count all the little tiny pin prick holes in them as well when I heard the jangle of keys at the door. I knew it was him.
The door swung open and I could see his silhouette from the light in the hall. "Hey princess," He said is his cool voice.
I held perfectly still and pretended to be asleep. I gave myself false hope and told myself that maybe he would go away. Maybe tonight he would leave me alone.
"Princeeeeessss?" He teased. He closed the door behind him and walked over to my bed. "Come on princess. You know what I want." He reached down and pulled the white sheet off of me and then started to tug on my hospital gown.
"No!" I screamed and suddenly began to fight back. "Go away!" I started to kick him and scratch at him but he just stood there and laughed at me. No matter what I did, I couldn't hurt him. "HELP! SOMEBODY PLEASE, HELP ME!"
Then he slapped his hand over my mouth. "Nobody's gonna help you princess. Now listen close. There was a man today who noticed you. Do you remember him?"
I nodded with his hand still clasped over my mouth.
"Good. Now princess, I hate to be the one to tell you this but there are worse men out there than me. If he ever got his hands on you, he would not be as kind to you as I have been. So you need to understand that I have to do something to you, to protect you." Richard's face went grim.
Suddenly a premonition hit me. I saw him biting me in the throat. I saw him drinking my blood and then forcing himself to stop. I saw my own body writhing in agony, feeling a burn more painful than any electrotherapy shock. A burn that would last for three days. Then I saw myself, changed, forever.
As I pulled back out of the premonition I gasped for a breath of air, filling my lungs, and then letting it out in a shrill scream. "Get away from me! Don't touch me!"
Another set of keys jangled at the door and two more orderly's stepped in, one tall and one short.
"Please! Help me!" I begged. "He's a vampire! He's going to bite me!" It was the wrong thing to say. I had momentarily forgotten who I was and who I was talking to. As I kicked and screamed, the other two orderly's helped hold me down to the bed as Richard went and got a needle, a straitjacket, and a wheelchair. He came back and inserted the needle into my vein, immediately making me relax and lose the ability to fight back.
"I don't know what's wrong with this one! I just came in here to check on her and she went crazy!" Richard said.
"That's what they do." The tall orderly joked back.
Then Richard picked up the straitjacket and the other two helped to get me into it. I was so powerless. I hated feeling this way. I couldn't even defend myself.
"I think some time in solitary confinement would be good for this one, don't you?" Richard asked the others.
"You'll have to run that by Dr. Gersham." The shorter one said.
"Well I'll just put her in there for tonight and run it by him in the morning." Richard decided.
"Sounds good to me." The tall one responded.
Richard lifted me up and placed me in the wheelchair. He pushed me down the hall and then down a slanted walkway until we reached the basement level. It was darker down here with awful florescent lighting. Finally, he used his keys to open a padded room and he pushed me inside.
"That was a very foolish thing for you to do Mary. You know that our secrets are supposed to stay between just the two of us." Richard said sternly. Then he lifted me out of the chair and placed me onto another white cot. "Actually, it's better this way. With you down here no one will know what's happening to you." He pushed the hair out of my face and kissed me hard against the lips.
Again, silent tears began to fill my eyes and spill over. I felt his mouth move down to the side of my neck. I knew what was coming. The harrowing sadness began to swallow me whole. It seemed like everything in my life had been decided for me. I never had a choice in anything. I never wanted these premonitions but they were mine. I never wanted to come to this place but my family forced me. I never wanted to be drugged, shocked, or bound, but no one ever asked me what I wanted. I didn't want to become a monster like Richard, but again, I had no choice.
Richards's sharp teeth dug into my flesh, searing it. Even with all the muscle relaxant the syringe inserted into me, I cried out at the pain of it. The burning was so intense, I felt like I was on fire from the inside out.
Richard kept drinking, sucking the blood out of me, the life out of me. He pushed his body harder against me as his instincts took over. I waited for another premonition, the one of me dying but it never came. Finally, Richard forced himself to pull back. He looked at me with hateful red eyes, like I was the one torturing him.
Then he let himself out of the room and locked it behind him, leaving me alone in my agony. I felt the burning spread from my neck down into the rest of my body. I now knew that I had been wrong about my previous assumptions. The assumption that Richard having his way with me was hell. No. This was hell.
In my agony I looked back on my life and hated it. I hated myself. This was not the person that I wanted to be, this victim. I used to be happy once. I used to be carefree and childlike. How I longed for those days where my innocence had not yet been corrupted by the cruelty of the world. I truly did hate myself; the empty shell of what had once been, the broken promise, the damaged goods.
As the pain raged on I vowed that I would be different. I focused every ounce of energy left in me trying to bury Mary Brandon. I hated her; I never wanted that weak victim to reside in me again. I wanted to be someone else. I wanted to be childlike and innocent once again.
I felt myself pushing through my own mind, erasing every trace of her that I could find. Destroying any evidence of anyone who had ever hurt me. I broke the images, the memories into smaller fragments and made them dissolve into nothing. I could feel myself forgetting everything. Finally it came down to my own name. The name Mary carried with it the memories of that song. The song was tied to memories of my family and the radio, even worse, it was tied to Richard. I used my last semblance of mental strength and destroyed my own name as well. I wasn't sure who I would be when I came out of this burning hell, but I knew that I would no longer be me and nothing brought me more comfort.
My eyes flew open as I took in the new surroundings. I was in a white padded room lying on a white cot. I wasn't sure how I got here but it was different from the pitch black darkness of my mind that I had been trapped in.
The fluorescent buzzing was loud to me and the light that it sent out reflected every dust particle in the air. I could smell a moldy dankness that suggested I was underground. I pulled myself up into a sitting position on the bed. I was in a straitjacket. I started to try to wriggle free but the fabric ripped as easily as paper. The jacket fell down on to the cot around me. I stood up and went to the door.
My hand reached down to see if it was open but the handle bent and broke under the pressure of my grip. The door slid open. I stepped into the hall and looked down both ways but it was completely empty. I noticed a hospital chart on the outside of the room I was just in. I flipped it open. It had a name typed at the top:
Brandon, Mary Alice
"Ugh." I cringed at the name Mary. I must go by Alice then, I thought to myself. I threw the chart down, not caring to read the rest. I sniffed the air and could taste something sweet. Suddenly I was very thirsty. A burn seared my throat and I wanted to satisfy the craving. I turned left to follow the scent and began skipping down the hall. I felt good, I felt powerful.
I went up a sloped pathway that led me to the upper level of what I guessed to be a hospital. Suddenly the aroma became much more powerful. My mouth began to water and I followed my instincts down the darkened hall. No light came through the windows so I knew that it was night. I came to a door with the name "Dr. Gersham" written on it. I pressed against it. My desires told me that I wanted what was on the other side of that door. I pushed it open.
A balding man with glasses looked at me with startled surprise. "Mary! Who let you out-"
I hissed at him. "I think you have me confused with someone else. My name is Alice." I was surprised at the musical sound of my own voice; it reminded me of wind chimes. "Pleased to meet you." I smiled. I walked closer to him, drawing nearer to the delicious scent. I could hear his heart pounding hard in his chest. Just as I could feel my self control slipping away I reined it back in. I understood that it was his blood that was calling out to me but my desire to be in control fought against my instincts to kill him.
I clenched my teeth together tightly and made the decision to walk away. He still sat there staring after me, somehow glamoured by our short exchange. It was right then that I saw a vision in my mind. It was powerful. A man who was strong like me was coming for me. He had black slicked back hair and wore all white. I could hear him whistling a song that made my hair stand on end. Then the image was gone.
The smells in the hospital were driving me mad so I ran towards the exit and burst through the doors. There stood the man I had seen in my vision.
"Princess! My sleeping beauty finally woke up." He smiled at me but the sound of his voice made me feel on edge. I did not know who this man was but I knew that I did not like him.
"Stay away from me." I growled as I shifted down into a crouched position.
"Now, now. Is that any way to treat your prince charming?" He chuckled.
I leapt through the air and smashed into him, forcing his body to break the pavement beneath him. I bared my teeth at him and hissed. He tried to escape me but I would only knock him down again. I was stronger than him. I felt powerful. I enjoyed feeling powerful.
As I had him pinned to the ground another powerful vision entered my mind. I saw another one of our kind with blond cropped hair. His eyes were glowing red. I saw him coming here to the hospital because he was searching for me. I saw him kill the dark haired man before me. His name was James.
I smashed the orderly's head into the pavement once more and said, "This is your last warning. Stay away from me."
He looked at me with angry red eyes but did not attempt to follow me as I walked away. I could sense the blond one coming closer so I began running as fast as I possibly could. I did not want to be anywhere near the hospital when he showed up.
I saw signs that said that I was in Biloxi, Mississippi. As I walked past the window shops in the night I caught a glimpse of my own reflection. I was beautiful, pixie-like. The only problem was that I was dressed in a hospital gown. It made me cringe. I walked up to a dress shop and gripped the door handle until it broke under my pressure. I let myself in. There were so many beautiful clothes to choose from and I wanted to try them all on. Since I was able to move so quickly, I ended up trying out a majority of them. Finally, I settled on a cute black little number that complemented the shape of my body. I walked out of the shop feeling like a new woman.
I looked at the streets and had no idea where to go. For the first time, I closed my eyes and searched the future. It was not something that just happened to me, it was something I sought after. The fact that I had control over it brought me immense pleasure. Finally, I saw a family of vampires like myself. They had golden eyes and lived on a diet of only animal blood. I saw myself going there with a handsome blond gentleman. I saw us happy.
When that vision played out, I searched for the blond gentleman. I saw us meeting in a diner. I saw us falling in love and getting married. I saw us as two halves making each other whole. I knew that he was meant for me.
Suddenly I had purpose and knew exactly what I had to do and where I had to go. I would go to the diner and meet him. I would be there waiting for him, and I would find my happily ever after. I skipped down the streets and followed the direction that my heart told me to.