Of the many offices assigned to the various staff employed by Briarcliff Manor, Dr. Oliver Thredson's was one of the smallest. He was the newest member on board and therefore the lowest ranked, entitled to the most meager of allotments-and trust. He fully intended to change both of those things, but he found acclimatizing to the strict structure of the place stifling. Many of the longer-tenured doctors refused to even look at the possibility of treating the personality of a patient, preferring to cling to more traditional methods of addressing the body rather than the mind.
Looking at the case file spread across the scarred old desk under the wan light of the hanging lamp overhead, he knew that the Tate Langdon case was unique and needed to be dealt with as such. Dr. Thredson pulled a slow drag from his cigarette and peeled back pages of photographic evidence from the scene of the staggering crime: 42 people shot; 13 of them died.
The door opened and a tall, muscular orderly led Tate into the room, a hand on one of the young man's arms. He steered Tate over to one of the two wooden chairs in front of the doctor's desk and started to cuff him to it.
"That won't be necessary," Oliver said with a tolerant smile.
The orderly paused and gave him a funny look.
"Please," the doctor insisted. "If there's any trouble I'll call. You'll be right outside, yes?"
"Yes," the man in white agreed but he didn't sound like he thought it was a good idea to leave the patient unfettered.
"Patrick, isn't it?" asked Dr. Thredson. When the tall man nodded, Oliver gave him another tolerant smile. "I appreciate your devotion to duty, Patrick, but I'm sure we can manage just fine here. Isn't that right, Mr. Langdon?"
Tate glanced up at the orderly towering over him then across the desk at the doctor. "Yeah. I won't bite. I promise." A hint of a smile twitched at the corners of his lips.
The orderly gave a little shrug then left the room, leaving the door ajar.
Dr. Thredson watched him go then shifted his attention to the blond youth seated across from him. "Is it all right if I call you Tate?"
"It's my name."
"I like to ask," the doctor said. He snubbed his cigarette out and noticed the teen's intense scrutiny of the gesture. "Would you like one?" He shook another cigarette out of the pack on his desk and offered it to him.
Tate hesitated then took it. "Thanks." Though he hadn't smoked much before coming to Briarcliff, he found the easy access appealing.
Dr. Thredson smiled and lit his Zippo lighter. He didn't get up though. In order to light his cigarette Tate had to rise and bring the white papered stick to the flame. Once it was lit, Tate sank back into the chair, visibly more relaxed than when he'd first been brought in.
"So, Tate," said Oliver, folding his hands on the desk once he'd put his lighter away. "Do you understand why you're here at Briarcliff?"
Tate sucked on his cigarette for a silent moment, dark eyes unreadable. Finally: "Yeah."
"Do you remember what you did?" prompted Dr. Thredson.
Again, there was a protracted pause while Tate nursed his cigarette. "Sort of."
Oliver expected resistance, so the brief answers didn't faze him. He simply shifted tactics. "You left a letter behind at your mother's house before you went to the college." He rifled through the various papers and pulled out a photo copy of the letter in question. "Was this intended to be a suicide note?"
Tate frowned. When he'd written that letter, he hadn't expected to ever see someone other than his mother to read it. He certainly hadn't anticipated ever being confronted with it.
When he didn't answer, Oliver looked from the letter to the young man.
"It says here that you were 'thinking strange thoughts' before the shooting," said the doctor. "You wrote that you'd been having severe headaches for several days." He lowered the letter then and looked at his patient. "What sort of strange thoughts were you having?"
Tate didn't want to talk about his inner thoughts with a stranger. So, he went sarcastic instead. "I don't know, doc. Maybe I was thinking about shooting some people."
"Why?"
"That's a stupid question."
"On the contrary, it's a very valid one," said Dr. Thredson, unruffled. "You were making good grades. Your family wasn't impoverished. Individuals who know your family say you had a good relationship with them. Why did you want to shoot people?"
"I don't know," Tate flared, suddenly irritated. He leaned forward and smashed the cigarette out in the ashtray hard enough to make the round container bounce.
"Why are you angry, Tate?" Dr. Thredson pressed.
"Because you're asking me bullshit questions," snapped the blond teen. "I'm crazy, right? That's why I'm here, isn't it? Because I'm a crazy fuck who did something crazy."
Oliver settled back in his chair and considered the young man. "No. You're here for me to determine whether you're insane or a simply a cold-blooded killer." He paused significantly. When Tate didn't respond he arched his thick brows above the dark horned rims of his glasses. "About your headaches... How often would you say you have them?"
Tate turned his attention to his bitten-down fingernails and picked at some dead skin. "A lot. More over the past couple weeks. Pretty much constantly."
"Is that why you took the Dexedrine?"
"Yeah," Tate said, annoyed that the doctor knew so much about him. He sat up a little more to try to see what all the guy had on his desk. There were a lot of papers there. It was impossible to know at a glance what all he had on Tate. "I thought maybe it would help."
"Did it?"
"I don't know. No. I guess not."
Oliver shuffled through his papers again. "You were raised Catholic, weren't you?"
"Yeah," Tate said, caught off guard. "Why?"
"You were... an altar boy and a Boy Scout -one of the youngest in your troop to achieve Eagle Scout rank, in fact."
"Yeah. So?"
Dr. Thredson continued to study the papers before him. "The leader of your troop... Michael . He was involved with your church. Studying to be a priest at the time, wasn't he?"
Tate didn't like the way the doctor was asking so many questions and answering none. He decided not to answer any more. Two could play that game.
Dr. Thredson didn't need an answer; he already knew it, thanks to the papers he held. "Was he a close friend?"
"He wasn't touching me, if that's what you mean," Tate smirked, forgetting his plan to stay silent.
Oliver looked across the desk at him steadily. "Why would you think I meant that?"
Tate stared him down, then said abruptly: "Can I have another cigarette?"
"Certainly," Dr. Thredson smiled. He pulled out another cigarette and again lit the Zippo. "I was asking because I understand you took the name 'Michael' as your Confirmation name."
Tate kept a close eye on the man as he leaned in to light the cancer stick. He exhaled smoke as he sat back down, smoothing the hospital gown before doing so.
After a few silent moments, when it was plain Tate wasn't going to say anything, the doctor said, "Can you tell me why you shot those people?" He lit another cigarette for himself.
"I don't know," said Tate with a sharp shrug of one shoulder. He shifted in his seat. Then he revised his answer. "You wouldn't understand."
"Try me."
Tate sat forward then, his expression intense. "You ever... Have you ever looked out at the world and realized there just aren't that many people out there? I mean real people. Not these... fucking. Meat puppets. Blank-eyed soulless bastards just going through the motions. Shallow... easy-listening cogs of the world. Hollow people. Selfish, self-serving do-nothings that give nothing. That are nothing. All they do is take and then they have the balls to think they're better than you. Even though they're not."
He looked for some sign of understanding from the man seated on the other side of the desk or, failing that, confusion or revulsion. But Dr. Thredson just looked the same as he had before: Tolerant and open.
Irritated again, Tate sank back into his chair. "Lots of assholes go through life on autopilot, not using their brains and still they get ahead in life because other losers just like them are paving the way for them. Making laws and rules so those jerkoffs can get ahead while real people get held down. Forced to play by those rules even though they're a hundred times better than the jerks that made them."
"You believe you're smarter than most people," the doctor said. It wasn't really a question but a gentle statement instead.
"I don't believe it," corrected Tate. "I know it. In fact, I don't know why they say 'average' when it's pretty obvious most people really aren't as smart as that."
"I'd like to hear more about the 'strange thoughts' you were having," the doctor prompted as he tapped his ash. "Before the shooting. What sorts of thoughts?"
"I don't know," Tate hedged, leery of the subject. "Just strange shit. Like maybe... maybe most people would be better off dead. I thought about killing my mother."
"Were you angry with her?"
Tate tipped his head thoughtfully. "Nah. Not so much. I mean, sometimes I am. But not like... I hate you, I want you to die. I just didn't want her to be embarrassed by the fallout of all this."
"So, you thought you would be doing her a favor?" Oliver was fascinated by the glimpses he was getting of Tate's inner psyche. "Why didn't you kill her then?"
"I decided she deserved a little discomfort," Tate grinned. Dimples showed in his cheeks, making the smile a charming one despite his words. "For being such a shitty mother."
Oliver looked down at the papers scattered over his desk. While he could tell there was a lot more to that subject with the young man, he decided to leave it for the time being. "Tell me, Tate. Do you hear voices in your head?"
"Doesn't everybody?" Tate's smile grew. "I mean... isn't that what your conscience is? A voice in your head telling you what's right and what you should feel bad about?"
The doctor smiled though this time it was to mask his need for a moment to think. He knew going into this meeting that the young man was smart on paper: He'd made good grades and scored exceptionally high on an IQ test as well. But Thredson was beginning to see a manipulative side to that intelligence in how Tate kept successfully blocking him from probing into the most important areas of his psychological foundation.
"Did your... conscience tell you to shoot those people?"
Tate's smile withered. The fact was he had several internal voices, but he didn't consider them to be in line with the classic shrink idea of 'hearing voices'. Likewise, he knew the inner dialogues that led him to the shooting weren't from some outward source but stemmed from within. But he didn't trust Dr. Thredson enough to explain himself.
"What happens if I say I do hear voices?" he asked in a casual way, probing the doctor's reaction.
Oliver pulled a last drag off his cigarette and crushed it in the ashtray. "There are one of two things that will happen after this meeting when I file my report. If I decide you're of sound mind, you will go to trial for injuring and killing the people you shot. If I decide you're not, you will be kept here at Briarcliff for continued assessment and treatment."
Tate also snubbed his cigarette out; it had burnt down so low it was melting the filter and putting off a noxious stink. He sat back in his chair and ran both hands through his hair, suddenly feeling claustrophobic. Prison, the asylum; it made no difference at the moment. They were one and the same to him. The only thing that stood out was that the doctor was the first and only person he'd met so far that actually seemed interested in what Tate thought of the world he was stuck in.
"It's not like... Hearing voices," he said, weighing what he wanted to say before saying it. "I don't hear it with my ears like a sound. It's all in here." He touched his temple. "Like... There's a me-voice that sort of talks about everything I see and hear. It's what tells me to do things like watch TV or change my clothes. A lot of times I have music in my head. Songs I hear. Once I had one stuck in there that played over and over for a week. I'd go to sleep with it in my head and I'd wake up and it would still be playing. God. That was the worst."
He decided he'd said enough and gave a soft laugh. "But everybody has inner thoughts like that, right? I mean. How could we function without thinking about what we're doing?"
"To a degree," the doctor allowed. "But there's a difference between thinking about getting ready for work and having an internal voice that tells you to go kill people."
Tate's jaw set and he folded his arms. "I'm tired of talking about that."
He expected the doctor to debate the matter or to try to force the issue, but the man just nodded. "That's all right, Tate. I think we've had a good, productive chat." He raised his voice then to call: "Patrick. Please come back in."
The door opened all the way and the orderly stepped back inside.
"Please escort Tate back to his room," Dr. Thredson said in a mild tone. Then he said to Tate, "It was nice meeting you. We will be seeing each other again soon."
Patrick took hold of Tate's arm again and urged him up out of the chair. At the doorway the teen dug in his heels, twisting to look back at the therapist.
"What're you gonna tell them, doc?"
Oliver smiled gently. "When I've made my complete diagnosis, I'll let you know. Don't worry. You won't be kept out of the loop."
Patrick tugged the blond youth out of the office then, leaving Oliver to survey the spread of papers again. He lit another cigarette and slipped a sheet of paper into the old typewriter on his desk. Setting his diagnosis into print was incredibly easy; he hadn't even needed to take notes. The signs were perfectly clear, and after a lengthy description of his evaluation, he summarized it neatly at the bottom of the page.
Diagnosis: Paranoid schizophrenia.
...
After his meeting with the doctor, the orderly took Tate back to the ward where he locked him in his room. The man returned shortly bearing a tray with food on it and two cups - one metal and one clear plastic. The plastic one had something clear in it that Tate took to be water.
The orderly, Patrick, set the tray down on the little cabinet and took the clear cup, which he held out to Tate. "Drink this."
The teen took it and sniffed it. It had a funny smell. "What is it?"
"Just drink it."
"And what if I don't?"
The tall man's brows went up. "If you want to keep that hospital gown, you'll drink it."
Tate gave him a flat look. "You're a real jerk, you know that?"
"That's what they pay me for," said the orderly. "Now drink it."
Holding his breath, the blond youth gulped the stuff. It tasted awful but he got it down. He grabbed some bread off the tray and hastily ate it, hoping it would wipe away the aftertaste. It only helped a little.
The orderly chuckled and left, taking the plastic cup with him. Tate glared after him then turned his attention to the rest of the meal. It was a macaroni and mystery meat in tomato paste concoction. He sniffed the contents of the other cup and discovered it to be plain old water. He drank that down in a couple of big swallows. The macaroni stuff was mushy and bland but by the time he finished it, the bitter aftertaste from the medicine was mostly gone from his mouth.
He was trembling by then. He felt funny on the inside, jittery and smothered. He went over to the bed where he promptly collapsed. The world spun around him. He thought he could hear voices out in the hall, but they were hollow and distant and indistinct. He tried to sit up and found he was too shaky to even prop himself up against the headboard.
The weird shaky effect lasted a long time despite his attempt to sleep it off. He had no idea how long it had been before another orderly came to herd him out of bed and into the hall. Disoriented and wobbly-kneed, Tate made it out into the hall where he was mercifully allowed to sit down. He kept his back to the wall outside his cell and watched while the man locked the door. There were other inmates out in the hall already. The man went to each cell and flushed everyone out, the same as he had done to Tate, locking the doors behind him.
Everyone in the hall was male; there were no female inmates in the ward Tate was in. Distantly he reasoned that it made sense, but he couldn't fathom why. His brain wasn't cooperating with finer points of thinking. He drew his knees up and folded his arms over them, then braced his forehead against them. The only thing he took comfort in was the fact that his head was so jittery, it didn't have time to hurt.
...
A little over an hour later the orderly came back to unlock the rooms again. Tate was feeling less strange, but everything still had a hollow, hazy feeling to it. He didn't understand the purpose behind locking and unlocking the doors. He knew some people had come and gone while he had his head down but he didn't know who or why.
Unnerved by the whole ordeal, he went back to his room and flopped on the bed once more. The room wasn't spinning any longer. The light outside was growing wan, reddish in the late afternoon. He heard whispering outside the doorway of his room but when he lifted his head to look, there was no one there. So, he put his head back down.
He must have slept because the next thing he knew, he was waking up. Someone was in his room. Opening his eyes, he saw it was Patrick again. He had another tray of food and two more cups, one of them clear plastic.
Tate groaned when he saw it and pulled the blanket up over his head.
"Yeah, it's that time," the man said, sounding amused. "Come on out and let's get this over with."
"No," Tate said. It was more of a whine than anything.
"I don't want to have to make you drink it," said the orderly.
"Then don't," Tate reasoned. He pulled the blanket down so he could peek out at the man in white. "You don't have to."
"Actually, I do," said Patrick. He was right beside the bed. He'd set the tray down. He had the clear cup in his hand. "It's part of the job description: Medicate patients. You're a patient here and this is your medicine."
"It's not medicine," said Tate grumpily. "It's poison. It made me sick earlier."
"It isn't poison," the man reassured.
"How would you know? Have you taken it?"
"No," Patrick said. "I'm not a patient here and I'm not one of the staff who samples the drugs."
Curiosity overcame Tate's reluctance to cooperate. "Are there people who work here who do?"
"Maybe," said the orderly. "But that doesn't matter right now. What matters is that you take it."
Tate had hoped to hear something interesting. Disappointed, he sat up and looked at the cup. Then he looked up at the man holding it. "Come on, man," he pleaded, and tears shone in his dark eyes. "Please don't make me take that shit. It really messed me up. I felt like I was dying."
The orderly wavered, not entirely immune to the pleas of a desperate young man. He glanced over his shoulder then looked back at Tate and sighed.
"All right," he said in gruff tone despite his permissiveness. "I'll let you slide this once but tell anyone and you'll be sorry."
"I won't tell a soul," Tate promised, vastly relieved. "Thanks, man. I owe you."
"Yeah," said the orderly. "You do. Now eat up. Someone else will be around in about a half hour to collect your tray."
"Why not you?" Tate was suddenly reluctant to deal with another person now that he knew this one could be managed, if only a little.
"I'm off after this," Patrick said. "Night shift takes over then. Enjoy your dinner."
With that he took the still-full cup and left. Tate dug into the uninspired supper with enthusiasm brought on by his narrow escape from further drugging.
...
Lights out in the men's ward was a study in contrasts: It was dark but from the small, barred window in the door and the heavily reinforced window above the bed slices of light cut through the blackness. There was just enough illumination to wash everything in a bluish tint, making the shadows hazy around the edges and prone to shifting if one didn't keep a sharp eye on them.
Beyond his locked door Tate could hear the sounds of other inmates coughing or talking to themselves. One was singing; Tate suspected it was the same guy from the common room who'd been standing on his head.
The teen wasn't tired but there was nothing else to do so he stretched out on the bed and pulled the thin blanket up. The singing was bothering him. He tried pressing the pillow over his ears. It helped but only a little.
There was nothing he could do about the noise or in general. So, he did the only thing he could. The hospital gown provided easy access - the only bright side he'd found in the ill-fitting item of clothing. He tried to think of something erotic while he masturbated, to pull himself further away from the confines of the cell but the cot squeaked when he got a good rhythm going, distracting him. He didn't need fantasy though. It was simply a convenience.
He was just starting to detach and lose himself in the pleasure of the moment when a bright light shone through the little window of his cell, right on his face. He brought his free hand up to shield his eyes and squinted in irritation at the intrusion.
"Hands above the sheets, Tate," Sister Jude's voice came from behind the glare of the flashlight. "We don't allow that sort of behavior here."
"Eat me, you old bat!" Tate snapped, annoyed at both being caught and being told what to do.
The light blinked away and for a moment he thought she'd left. Then he heard keys jingling in the lock of the metal door. He pushed himself up, half-sitting.
"Out of the bed," the nun commanded. She had a thin cane in her hand and a dark-haired orderly with her who held the flashlight that had so recently spotlighted the patient. "On your knees. Face on the bed."
"What?" Tate blinked.
"Carl?" Sister Jude flicked her free hand, and the white-clad orderly snatched the thin blanket away.
Tate curled up reactively, his irritation and outrage shifting to uncertainty with a touch of fear. He didn't understand what was happening.
"Out of bed!" the nun barked and brought the cane down on the mattress next to his leg so sharply it made a cracking sound as wood met cloth.
Tate's heart raced. He could see the orderly tensing up, his ham-hands flexing. He could tell the guy would pull him out of the bed if he didn't do as he was told. Not wanting to be manhandled, the teenager got up. Sister Jude put a skinny hand on his shoulder and shoved him down hard. He resisted a little but then dropped to a knee.
"You'd best bend over that cot," she said in a voice that was pure ice. "Unless you want to be cuffed to it."
It was a nightmare, Tate told himself. It had to be. Nothing real could be this bizarre. He knelt and bent over the bed, hands propping him till she shoved him down all the way so that his face was against the musty-smelling mattress.
"This is a place of the Lord," the nun said sharply. "Acts of perversion are forbidden and will not be tolerated."
With that final remark she brought the cane down. The viewing gown offered no protection as it had succumbed to gravity's pull when he'd bent over. The thin wood cut into his skin, causing him to bite his tongue to keep from yelping in pain.
Tate had been spanked before; his mother believed in a strict upbringing. But those moments of discipline were nothing compared to being caned. The black-robed woman didn't give the matter her full strength, but the pain was still a shock to his system. He managed to keep silent as the first few lashes struck his ass and the tops of his thighs but when the cane started to hit areas that had already been covered, he couldn't help crying out in pain. After fifteen strokes with the wooden instrument of torture, he felt her hand leave his back.
"Get back in bed," she said harshly, her tone one of irritated disgust. "And pray for forgiveness."
He pulled himself back up onto the cot, wincing when his striped skin brushed the thin mattress. He was forced to lay on his side where he quickly tugged the shapeless hospital gown down to hide the wounded area. He didn't have to worry about anyone seeing his boner; the whipping had effectively taken care of that problem. The orderly scooped up the discarded blanket and tossed it at him. Tate quickly spread it over himself.
The nun and orderly headed for the door, with Sister Jude pausing on her way out to look back at him. "I have little tolerance for disobedient boys," she said archly. "You will obey me, or you will suffer the consequences."
She left and he heard keys in the lock again. Tate tried to shift his position to a more comfortable one but there was no getting comfortable. His backside hurt too much. It felt lacerated, on fire. Gingerly he ran his fingers over one area and felt hot, angry welts. Even that light touch brought more pain.
He shoved his hand under his thin pillow to provide better support for his cheek and tried to process what he'd just been through. The orderly hadn't seemed at all shocked or disapproving of the treatment. In fact, he'd seemed rather... blank. Like it was all part of the routine. Embarrassment trickled in over Tate's confusion and misery. He wished he'd managed to stay silent during the harsh treatment; to take it 'like a man'. But even under his mother's hand he had never managed to be stoic. He sniffled and discovered with annoyance that his eyes were trying to leak.
Down the hall Tate heard Sister Jude's sharp voice raised to say something to another inmate and then the ward was silent. The singing had stopped. Tate was sure the other patients had heard what had happened in his cell. No one was anxious to be the next person under her cane.
Sleep was a trial that night. Every time Tate tried to roll over, fresh pain would wake him. In between fits of wakefulness his dreams were bizarre and hard to comprehend, filled with fear and dark places and people who wanted to hurt him.
At one point he dreamed a young girl was trying to lead him out of the asylum but before they could reach the front door, Sister Jude caught them. She had three large dogs with her that she set upon the girl and while they were tearing her to pieces the nun put a rope around his neck and led him to an empty cell deep in an abandoned portion of the Kirkbride-style sanitarium. There she tied him to the wall and left him. Even though his hands were free, he was too intimidated to even try to untie the rope.
When he woke from that dream, he was frustrated and angry with himself but underlying that was a sense of fear he'd never known before.
...
Author's Note:
As mentioned before, I've changed things up with this AU. Thredson isn't contracted here; he's a full-time employee. Also, you'll notice there are a few more orderlies in my fic than in the show. I'm planning to keep the cast of characters small but I had to have more muscle. The way that the inmates will be treated is based on what actually happened in some of the worst sanitariums in America. With as violent and crazy as some of the patients are, there'd be no way they'd put up with the treatment if it was just one-on-one all the time. Someone would beat Jude to death if she didn't have someone there to stop them.
Oh. I guess that might be considered a spoiler. Sorry. But I wanted to explain that now, so you wouldn't be wondering later.
I listened to the "Directions to See a Ghost" album by The Black Angels while writing this chapter. Next: Tate finds out what the doctor's verdict is and Ben wants at the new patient.