With no time to waste, Oliver unlocked the top drawer of his desk hastily. The sounds of the riot and firefight outside was terrifying. His questing hands found Constance's face first and, despite the nearby danger, he lingered on the flesh mask, nostalgic. He had so hoped their relationship would last but, like so many, she had disappointed him. He caressed her flat, smooth cheek, then pushed her aside. He needed the keys that were deeper in the drawer.

Finding the ring, he shut and locked the drawer He also grabbed a couple of the sedative-filled hypodermic needles he kept in the next drawer down and pocketed them before locking that drawer as well. Then he hurried to the side room. Letting himself in, he found Violet and Tate sitting on the floor near the bed.

There was a bone saw on the floor near them, a tool rendered useless by the short length of the cord compared to the distance to the room's only electrical outlet — the same distance that kept Tate safely away from the television. Unsure what to do when her plan failed, Violet had simply left the medical device on the floor and huddled with Tate to wait for her father.

Thredson took in the situation disapprovingly. "If the two of you want to survive, do as I say."

The pair shared a glance then looked back to the psychiatrist.

"What's happening, Doctor Thredson?" Tate asked.

Oliver moved to unlock the young man's restraints. "The police have gone insane," he said. "They're shooting people indiscriminately. We're going to shelter in Doctor Heath's ward down in the tunnels until this ends. They won't be able to get in there."

A loud explosion from somewhere below shook the floor beneath them. Thredson got the cuffs off Tate. Violet helped him to his feet as he was still pretty drugged. The three of them left the doctor's office. Oliver locked it behind him in the hope that it would deter anyone who might come after they left, but he wasn't counting on it.

Downstairs, the front doors were smoking but still holding. There were a handful of people sprawled on the floor, mostly patients. One was lying in a wide pool of blood. The trio didn't stop to investigate. Violet and Tate were in the lead, with Thredson deliberately positioned behind them. He wasn't intentionally using them as a human shield. He wanted to be sure they didn't do anything to him.

They ducked into the main corridor. The hall was full of people who were in various states of confusion, panic, and hostility. When one patient tried to grab her, Violet lashed out with the scalpel she had held onto through everything. The man screamed and retreated, bleeding badly from the gash in his arm. Thredson noticed the weapon but didn't say anything about it. They needed to keep moving at all costs.

It was harrowing trip down to the tunnels. So much screaming, crying, laughter, and gunfire. It was utter madness. Tate, sheltered for so long in the bubble Dr. Thredson had created for him, was overwhelmed by the chaos. It felt like he was just having a vivid nightmare. He retreated into the comfort of that delusion. He became a tourist, allowing the other two to steer him while he watched the carnival parade of distorted faces and terrible sights flow by him.

Then they were in the cool darkness of the tunnels. The shooting and screaming could barely be heard once the heavy steel door was shut. Oliver took the additional precaution of dropping the security bar into place. It was a safeguard that had been installed to prevent a patient riot from intruding, but it would work against the police just as well. The metal door was six-inches thick, and the bar added another four inches of defense to it.

Once the bar was in place, the three went further down the dimly lit tunnel to where it intersected with another, creating a four-way passageway. Oliver glanced down the left hall, then the right. Everything was still and quiet.

"This way," he said.

He ushered them down the left-hand corridor. Several doors lined the walls, most of them closed. Tate thought he vaguely recognized the place, but the memory was intangible and indistinct. He couldn't tie it to anything more than that feeling of having been there before.

"Heath," Thredson called.

A figure emerged from one of the side rooms, stopping them all in their tracks. The form was distinctly female: She was dressed in a short white viewing gown that had fresh blood splashed across the front. Incongruous with the patient's smock, she wore white patent leather shoes, also spattered with blood. She held a bloody surgical knife. Her head was completely covered in gauze bandaging, as were her arms and upper thighs. Despite being unable to see, she lunged in their direction, knife at the ready.

"Lisa!" Dr. Heath's stern voice echoed down the hall. He came out of the room two doors down from where the armed woman had come from. "Stop."

Lisa halted and turned toward the sound of his voice. She lowered the knife.

"Go back to your room," the doctor commanded her. "I'll be in soon to see you."

The bandaged woman hesitated, then turned abruptly and lurched back to the room she'd come out of.

"Nice security system," Oliver remarked drily to hide the fact that he found the whole display unsettling. Then, to Violet: "Give me that."

She, like the other woman, had her scalpel at the ready. He carefully but quickly plucked the instrument out of her hand before she could react.

Dr. Heath smiled sardonically. "Great minds..." He waved them toward him. "Come along. The patients can take Harold's old room. Oliver, you'll have to share one with my other guest."

"I'm not a patient anymore," Violet objected. Tate slipped his hand into hers and she gave it a squeeze.

"What other guest?" Oliver wanted to know.

Heath, like him, ignored Violet. "Mr. Mott."

Thredson looked put-upon. "What is he doing down here? This mess is his creation."

Despite his objections, Oliver herded Violet and Tate toward the other doctor.

"He was injured and came to me," said Heath as though he were a paragon of mercy, here to serve. "He could still be useful. He's sedated and resting. He won't bother you."

"His very presence bothers me," groused Thredson. "Is he restrained?"

"I don't believe that's necessary," Heath remarked. He paused beside an open doorway and motioned into it with a glance toward Violet and Tate.

Violet hesitated, looked at Tate, who looked at her. Then she peeked into the room. It was an intimidating room with two gurney-like beds and a curtain to separate them. Little else was in the room aside from some sturdy cabinets that were surely locked.

"Go on," Oliver said to them.

"This is your room until this nonsense blows over," Heath added.

Hesitantly, Violet entered, gently tugging Tate along by the hand. Once they were inside, the doctors moved along, continuing their conversation about Dandy and the siege as though this were a routine inconvenience.

Violet turned to Tate. "This is nuts," she said quietly.

He quirked a small smile. "Through the looking glass."

The response threw her for a moment, then she got what he meant. "No shit. I think this rabbit hole just hit rock bottom."

He reached for her then and she collapsed into his embrace. The whole world was insane, but his arms made her feel more secure. The feeling of safety dwindled as quickly as it came.

"I hope my dad's okay."

"Your dad's strong and smart," Tate supplied. "I'm sure he'll be fine. He'll come get us. Eventually."

He was wrong, but his assurances helped for the time being.

—

Above, the incident raged on, with officers in bullet-proof vests scaling interior fences in an attempt to make it into the main portion of the building. Under fire from the armed asylum guards and several inmates, it was literal war. It took nearly ten hours for law enforcement to breach the main structure. That's when the rout began.

Anyone they encountered inside the building was ordered to lie face-down on the floor and submit to being cuffed. Those who were restrained were left where they were, bound and helpless, while the officers moved to the next group. Anyone who did not comply immediately was shot.

It was well into night when they finally had the top side under control. Unaware of the secret tunnels beneath the asylum, law enforcement hauled cuffed people away to various jails and hospitals. Many of the inmates who had not participated in the fire fight were simply flushed out onto the streets with no money or clothing appropriate for the frigid weather. They were expected to figure out for themselves where they would go and how they would survive, despite being mentally unstable, deficient, or so old and sick that they relied on Briarcliff for meals and medicine.

The dead were left behind unless it was an officer. Officials were supposed to come back and retrieve the other bodies, but two days later, the place was left untouched. Police barricades were still up, but they had no one watching the facility. With nowhere else to go, many of the released inmates crept back into the abandoned asylum to raid the kitchens and make use of the rooms as shelter from the elements.

On the third day, Heath and Thredson unbarred the door and ventured out into the halls to appraise the situation and restock their dwindling supplies. Several of the returned inmates had moved the corpses out to the common yard where they left them piled in the corner near the mortuary. The stench out there was ghastly, but only trace odors made it into the building.

While Thredson and Heath were deciding what to do, a skinny man in his late 50s approached them. He still wore the Briarcliff uniform he'd been wearing since the siege. There was dried blood and other substances crusted on his shirt and pants. Filthy and lost, he gave them a gap-toothed smile of hope.

"Doctors?" he said in a raspy voice. "When's supper?"

...

A week later, Dr. Haddonfield returned to the asylum to help Thredson and Heath with the transformation of Briarcliff. Legally, none of them were supposed to be there. But many of the patients had returned and wanted to settle back into their known normal.

Dandy had been severely injured but was recovered enough to make decisions about how to help the facility with his mother's money. Supplies were no trouble, though it meant having to send people out to pick things up. Those trips were done covertly in the early hours on an irregular schedule to avoid being detected. Larger shipments were picked up directly from the warehouses and brought back under the cover of night.

Many of the patients made their homes in the trashed wards, though some settled into the sections of the tunnels that were no longer being used. Thredson claimed a portion of the rooms down there for himself. Haddonfield and Heath stayed put where they had always been. Some of Haddonfield's 'experiments' had perished during the turmoil, but he found other individuals to take their places.

The whole situation was illegal and dubious, but the patients weren't being held against their will, most of them. Either they had nowhere else to go, or else they were too institutionalized to understand how to get on in life without the assistance. Some who were more stable than others were promoted to positions of "aide" to assist the doctors with menial tasks. Those that could took turns with chores. Roy was brought in and made head of the kitchen, a role he loved.

They even had a couple of security guards return, prisoners who had escaped during the riot who also had no way of melding into society. They were paid in meals and power to control the occasional patient outburst. One orderly returned out of compassion when he happened to find out about the underground facility. He genuinely cared about what happened to the patients and understood the crux of the problem. He couldn't fix the politics involved in turning a bunch of mental patients loose on a city, but he could help care for them. So, he did.

Violet had her reasons for staying, both because of Tate and Dandy needing her and because leaving would mean stepping into a reality she wasn't ready to accept. As long as she remained, she didn't have to accept her father's death or anything that came with it. Pharmaceutical grade drugs helped with that state of denial and were readily dispensed by the doctors who wanted to keep her there to assist them.

A strange sort of normalcy returned to the asylum. Some within would even say the place had improved.

—

Six months later...

Late afternoon sunlight poured through the broken window at the far end of the hall. A lone figure wandered toward the main intersection of halls, dressed in a Briarcliff uniform. A brightly painted papier-mâché mask covered his face. He paused outside the day room and looked in. There were a few old people in there listening to Bobby Darin on the battered old record player. In one corner, Mort was singing a completely different song to himself as he organized bobby pins and pencil nubs into piles on the floor.

"Tate!"

Violet's voice down the hall caught the young man's attention and he looked away from the day room, in the direction of where she'd called from. She hurried up to him. She was wearing a stained but laundered nurse's dress. Even though she'd never had formal training, she had been promoted to the status by the underground doctors over the months that followed Briarcliff's collapse and rebirth.

"It's time," she said. She caught his hand and smiled. "Are you ready?"

Behind the mask, his eyes smiled back.

—

The darkness of the room was split by the knife of light that suddenly poured in when the double doors were unlocked and pushed open. The air that came out was stale and smelled of paper. Violet let Tate go in first then followed him in. She turned on the flashlight she always had with her. Though the asylum technically had power, no one was allowed to turn on the lights so as not to draw attention to the place.

"Oh, Violet," Tate said. His words were muffled by the mask. "It's...amazing."

"I can't believe it took them so long to find the key," said Violet. "But you've definitely earned this."

She shined the flashlight around the room. The light hit the nearest shelves, throwing long black shadows that melded with the darkness in the deeper recesses of the room.

"So many books," Tate breathed. He went to the nearest shelf and ran his free hand over the spines of the books housed there. "Can I really read them all?"

Violet giggled. "I don't know if you'd want to. Like, do you really want to read..." She picked up a random book and read from its cover: "An Introduction to the Analysis of the Infinite?"

He shrugged. "Maybe. Infinity's a big concept I don't really understand."

She wasn't sure if he was serious. The mask made it hard to tell. But wearing it made him happy. It calmed him, which made him easier to talk to now that Dr. Thredson had scaled back the drugs he'd been on. It had been rocky for a bit. If the mask helped, she could live with it.

"Why don't we look for something about animals," she suggested, reshelving the boring book.

"I like animals," agreed Tate.

Together they moved deeper into the library.

Author's Note:

This chapter draws inspiration from the ATF sieges of Ruby Ridge and the Branch Davidian compound, as well as the legend of Cropsey. We've got one more chapter to tie things up. Hopefully it will answer a few last lingering questions. I can't guarantee it, though.