“But what plan could include Mama in a mental institution. Daddy would never-”
Jude nodded. “I know. He would have taken us and run before he let that happen. He would have done something crazy like…”
“Fake her death,” Hattie finished.
Chapter 19
The Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane
September 1965
Sophia
Blindfolded, her arms stuck to her sides by a tightly wound sheet, Sophia walked through the forest. Twigs snapped under her feet and the freshly fallen leaves of early autumn crunched and swished around her bare ankles.
Alice had covered her face, but the gap beneath her right eye showed a sliver of their path. They moved in and out of trees, onto a grassy hill matted from Kaiser who stomped ahead. Night had come, and the half-moon offered snatches of light when the clouds parted.
Despite the wool coat she wore over her nightdress, Sophia shivered - as much from the crisp air as the fear that began with a trembling deep in her belly and radiated out to her fingers and toes.
Was Dr. Kaiser going to killer her? Or had he discovered some new experiment that he must perform in the darkness of the forest?
“This part is steep, Alice,” Kaiser said quietly. “Guide her.”
Alice’s strong hands grasped Sophia on either side, pinching her arms into her ribs.
“Sophia…”
She heard her name whispered across the forest, and she bucked forward, eyes widening.
“Ouch!” Alice bellowed as Sophia stepped on her foot.
Sophia strained to hear the voice, but Kaiser grabbed her roughly and dragged her down a steep embankment.
Alice huffed behind them as she hurried to keep up.
“What is this place?” Alice murmured, a tremor in her voice. The hardened nurse was not one to show fear, or ask questions, and Kaiser only shushed her.
Sophia gazed at a nest of huge trees twisting together. They seemed to grow across the ground rather than into the sky.
She thought of her mother. When Sophia had nightmares as a girl her mother told her the fear lived in her mind, it would only get bigger if she let it. For years Sophia had clung to those words, to the power within her to dispel the monsters lurking, but now the fear gripped her and held her with an untouchable force. She shook violently in Kaiser’s hands.
The trees no longer looked like trees, but huge bone-white skeletons clawing at the ground. They were patients who had died in the asylum, painful violent, unjust deaths. They were eternally trapped there raking at the earth for escape.
“Alice, help me here,” Kaiser growled practically dragging Sophia as she dug her feet into the dirt floor.
Sophia’s heart thudded in her chest and cold sweat poured down her face. The blindfold had mostly slipped away, but Sophia saw only black shadows darting in and out of the skeletal trees. They slithered and groaned, pain and rage bubbling up and out of their long dead mouths.
“No… no… no,” Sophia muttered shaking her head, trying to close her eyes but unable to jerk her gaze from the gathering phantoms.
“In here,” Kaiser barked, shoving Sophia hard from behind.
She stumbled forward, suddenly out of the forest, into a damp tunnel lit with kerosene torches. The firelight flickered and Sophia closed her eyes against the shadows cast by the flame.
”What on earth was that about?” Alice grumbled, again placing her hands on Sophia and urging her forward. Sophia felt the trembling in Alice’s hands and knew she too had sensed something amiss in that odd hollow of trees.
They followed Kaiser down a winding tunnel similar to the transport tunnels beneath the asylum. Instead of arriving at a door, the tunnel opened into a large circular room with rows of stone benches surrounding a raised wooden platform. On the platform stood a hospital bed made up with a clean white sheet. The objects next to the bed were unfamiliar to Sophia - a leather mask that looked like a dog muzzle and a metal tray of sharp instruments.
“No one is here?” Alice asked. Her hands had stopped shaking, but her eyes darted suspiciously around the room.
“I am presenting this evening,” Kaiser told her curtly. He stepped close to Sophia, and she felt a prick in her neck. He slipped the syringe into the pocket of his coat. “Unwrap the patient and place her on the bed. There are straps to secure her.”
Kaiser opened a leather satchel and walked along the wooden benches placing a sheet of paper every few feet.
Sophia wanted to resist Alice or beg for answers, but her eyelids drooped and her legs collapsed beneath her as the nurse guided her onto the platform. She slumped onto the bed unable to roll sideways as Alice unwound the sheet from her torso. Her arms burned with a thousand pinpricks when they were freed, and Sophia used the last of her energy to wiggle her fingers welcoming blood flow back to the tingling tips.
She stared at the slimy bricks lining the ceiling. The chilled room grew ice cold, and she shivered. Her lips lay heavy on her face and her tongue rested like an anchor on the floor of her mouth.
“Sophia…” again that whisper, but different this time. It sounded like a hundred voices, hurt, angry, vengeful.
A face flashed close to her own - pale and gaunt in the firelight. The woman had died young. Stringy black hair clung to the mottled skin of her scalp, and tiny red spiderwebs filled the whites of her eyes. A single spot of blood seeped from the corner of her lips, and her mouth seemed to fold in as if someone had removed her teeth. The woman reached for her, grabbed Sophia’s neck and Sophia perceived an instant of the woman’s terror, years before when she had died in that same room. The vision vanished, and Sophia’s eyelids grew heavier, impossibly heavy.
She welcomed the darkness.
When Sophia woke, voices filled the room. She blinked through gritty eyes into blinding lights. They had assembled more lamps around the bed. Dr. Kaiser stood near her head. Sophia turned and looked for the men she heard speaking, but they had moved the kerosene lamps to the platform. They lay in shadow and she in light.
Her thoughts swam in a pond of sludge. They traveled slowly, lethargically and barely made it to consciousness before slipping back beneath the surface. She tried to remember where she was, how she’d gotten there, but could not reach deep enough into that dank water to retrieve the memory.
Dr. Kaiser held up a hand and the group of men fell silent.
“This evening I am presenting Patient Number seven-twenty-two, Sophia Gray. I’ve had her in my care for nine years and eight months.”
Sophia listened to murmurs among the men. The word medium drifted to her.
“Many of you have requested that I bring her to our meetings over the years and I admit, I’ve been reluctant. Her mind is strong and has often been resistant to my efforts to wipe her memories after our more creative experiments. However, last month, Dr. Fritz wrote me about his experiments with LSD.”
The group of men whispered amongst themselves at this declaration.
“Since we are always in service to studying that which regular society refuses to look upon, I felt it was my duty to succumb at last and bring Ms. Gray so our collective minds might determine with whom she is communicating.”
Another man stepped onto the platform. He was short and thin with beady green eyes and a speckling of hair over his upper lip. He floated in his over-sized doctor’s coat - the head of a man stuffed onto the body of a small boy. She turned her head and noticed Alice hovering just beyond the platform - her mouth set in a grim line.