All Mad Here? Maybe Not...
@ofconfettiandgallows
Why couldn’t they have come back earlier?
It’s a question Victor’s asked himself a lot over the past -- however long it’s been. It’s hard to track the passage of time when all you see of the outside world is a tiny patch of half-dead lawn and cloudy sky through a high, heavily-barred window. A few months, he reckons. Not quite a year -- it hasn’t gotten cold enough again for that -- but they’re past the worst of summer. So at least six months.
Half a year of supervised hospitalization.
He still remembers his first day here -- his parents wheedling him into the carriage, all false smiles and promises that they just wanted him to talk to someone. . .and then passing through the gates, being met by the orderlies, and realizing with cold horror that he wasn’t just talking. . .he’d almost escaped, bolting for the street beyond, certain that if he could just make it back to the cobbles he could be free. . .and then the third orderly had appeared out of nowhere, and with the whack of a blackjack, everything had gone dark. . .
And he’d woken up here. In this shapeless grey uniform, head already shaved, nurses already gossiping about his condition. Says he saw the afterlife. Says he married a dead woman. Says the whole village graveyard rose to attend his wedding. Poor thing -- this is what mysticism gets you.
He’d tried to argue at first. Tried to prove it was all real, that it wasn’t an overactive imagination, that it wasn’t him -- desiring the dead. But they’d shut him up quickly, with ice-water baths and straitjackets, electrocution and hungry leeches. He’d tried to lie then, tried to say that okay, yes, he’d been seeing things, but he knew now that they weren’t real, so could he go home please? But the superintendent had seen right through him, clucking his tongue and saying Victor’s parents were well-prepared to pay as much as it took to make him well. And they were prepared to accept that money, as long as it kept coming.
It was then Victor realized he was probably going to die here.
And now. . .he wraps his arms around his legs, pressing his face into his knees, listening to the screeches and howls of the truly mad -- or the trapped sane. Now he’s more or less given up. Part of him still yearns for freedom -- still whispers that he could make a break for it. But mostly, Victor just lets the doctors do as they will, and waits for his inevitable demise.
At least he knows that what’s waiting for him Below is better that what’s Above.