The bastard child of a popular political candidate, Wilma was dumped at the asylum with a demand to either make her presentable or keep her out of the public’s sight. She had grown a little too old to easily dismiss her habit of wandering, mild kleptomania, homosexual tendencies, and social eccentricities. Still, she was docile, and the asylum staff opted to focus on simply hiding her from the outside world, much more concerned with treating their more “extreme” cases - as well as working on the unethical experiments lurking behind closed doors.
Initially, her father came for frequent visits, but as his career began an upward climb, he severed any non-professional associations. As his presence in the asylum tapered off to an occasional and distant donation, the doctors became less and less concerned about keeping up appearances.
Though her susceptibility to praise won some of them her fondness, Wilma never fully trusted the doctors or the nurses. She was not offended by their careless neglect - instead, she considered it a loosened restraint that allowed her to accumulate a better trove of shiny stolen things and stories from her fellow wards and secrets from down staircases she wasn’t supposed to descend. Nevertheless, she spoke in a lulling tone that suggested her head was more often up in the clouds than down in the winding, labyrinthine facility, so it was easier to chide her for waltzing into labs or offices at random than to risk aggressively correcting a girl from such an influential family.
This tactic foundered when Wilma opened the wrong door, one with hinges freshly bleeding oil, one that opened so cleanly and so quietly that she saw and understood everything she was not supposed to long before the sawbones saw her coming.
They would command her, belittle her, pry gaps in her psyche in an attempt to convince her, and tell her a thousand times that what she saw was a trick of the dark, a misunderstanding, a convincing production performed by her misaligned relationship with reality. The reports said they were securing a patient for transport home, but she knew the truth. It could not be broken out of her, the view of her friend and fellow inmate, begging for protection, as his body unlocked, swung open and let the air rush in, in a way that no living flesh should.
Nor could she ever forget the view of the doctor’s wide, pained eyes as she sank her teeth into his flesh, deep enough to wrench a chunk free and swallow it. Wilma’s frequent habit of chewing on ribbons and fingernails turned into a much bloodier biting habit after that.
The treatments never took well enough to scrub the truth from her brain, but they did have other effects. The lies they fed her were so frequent it became difficult to tell when they were lies at all, and slowly she began to see things solely because they promised there was nothing to see. Every door became a mouth, a ribcage, a fist, and every speck of light became an eye. Her hair tangled in her face became matted fur, and it was an easy mistake to make when they had muzzled her jaw so tight and commanded her to stay.
It was easy, then, when the shadow from the basement had fully eclipsed her. It was simple, after black trails started seeping from the bruises around her wrists, from the beds of her fingernails, from the empty socket where her sharpest tooth used to be. It was natural to stand guard, pacing back and forth behind the only door she had never crept through, waiting with ragged, bated breath for warm bodies to stumble close enough to reach on her chain.
