Marshsong Page 8

  The Wellington Manor Department of Psychological Services emerged just where she had imagined it. It was right where days past she had spied a large vacant tract of mud and the brick shard rubble of buildings around. The bulldozers had made mincemeat of the old row houses that once cradled together on the corner. Just weeks ago she had remarked at the hints of home belongings, a football t-shirt, a golden trophy for basketball, and the faint remnants of a teddy bear, all crammed with earthquake determination under the cracked wood of the bulldozer’s might.

  Now standing in that empty lot stood the correctional facility in its modernist glass and cheap construction—a bureaucratic erasure of any past on this corner. The teddy bear now lost in some landfill to be buried away from time. Memory is a spatial issue, she thought.

  She didn’t have much of a plan when she got there. It was night, but she knew the building itself did not slumber. Locked up inside she was sure were more of the newly defined lunatics of Barrenwood. Newly defined because even the term itself was rather new, let alone the buildings to support the definition. She had heard hints of it only in the language of those she met—utterances by those sophisticated enough to believe in the new stupidities of the age; strange ideas about sicknesses in the mind and healings of the heart; strange corollaries between broken limbs and thoughts with rashes; therapies and shock treatments to cure the mismanaged dreams of people off the reservation.

  Somewhere in that building of reflective new glass control was the jailer, the warden who had to protect those inside by keeping them caged like beasts. They weren’t all that unlike her, she thought. Marty was her jailer, keeping her at bay from the knowledge that he was wrong and so, too, was the jailer in this insipid prison.

  Isabella decided to enter the front door, but of course it was locked. She pulled on the handle only to have it clearly refuse her. Next to the door was a white intercom that she pressed with her finger.

  “Visitor,” she said with as little enthusiasm as she could muster. No one replied. She tried again but to no response.

  She had to pick the lock, which required very little effort on her part. She wasn’t Isabella for nothing. The lock went click and she opened the large door to find herself in the caged welcome area that was the waiting room. The lights were out and she could only make out the distracted flickering of the fluorescents somewhere further into the building. Like all recent developments obsessed with security, the front room was a cage in and of itself. The room acted as a sort of purgatory—for keeping in and for keeping out. As much as the inmates of the mad weren’t allowed into the soiled streets of Barrenwood, neither were the mentally intact allowed access to the inner workings of this brain prison.

  The waiting room had to be about the saddest place in the world—a cracked, brown vinyl couch with a tear in it, some magazines on a side table from years' past (the entire building was new and already everything was out of date), and the overall mood was one of endless submission; a cruel world of forces too complicated to ever push against. Isabella unlocked the next massive caged door to gain access to the main hall of the asylum. It opened with a large creak that rang out against the vastly overly fortified metal interior.

  She saw a shadow move with great rapacity and then a flashlight coming quite rapidly toward her down the hall.

  “Stop, stop!” the voice said. “This place is off limits and you are trespassing. Stop at once!”

  Isabella had no intention of running anywhere. She stood in the black pool of herself and greeted the lights with the same somber childlike look that worked everywhere she went. The guard came running up. He was overweight with keys jingling. a Santa Claus of security. His eyes were tired and who knew what kind of dream Isabella had woke him from.

  “Little girl, how did you get in here?” he asked, coming out of a daze. Sweat built up on his brow. A man ever in a state of heavy breathing and sweat.

  Isabella stared at him without a word. She wanted to understand the world. Why did this man do this? He wasn’t cruel. He was a boring dullard sympathetic as the rest. Just doing his job. A guy caught up in forces he had no interest in understanding. He wasn’t a sadistic man, but this job might make him that way over time—a lump of clay to be shaped by the steel, glass and cracked vinyl couches of the world around him.

  “I’m from your dreams, dear William,” she said, finally staring into his already greying eyes.

  The man screwed up his eyes to get a better look. He even rubbed them. “Little miss, ya can’t be in here. How did you get in here?” he asked, vacillating between a threatening tone and a paternalistic tone.

  “William,” Isabella said with as much kindness as she could muster. “I am here to rescue you. You have to leave this job. It is going to ruin your life. No one should be in charge of guarding another person. It destroys their soul. It will most surely destroy your soul.”

  William was as dumb as a doornail. He hadn’t thought about his soul in a long time and Isabella’s words bounced off him like hail. He grunted at her words and made a move to wrap his arms around her. She evaded him quite easily and gave a little karate chop to the back of his head. He landed on the floor with a bounce, his head knocking straight into the linoleum-checkered floor.

  Isabella reached down and rubbed his head. “I tried, William. You’re a lost little sheep, my sad boy.” She stood back up. The world was endlessly painful. She made her way down the hall skipping at the thought of no more guards; just she and the newly produced loons.

  The place was at no vacancy, each room occupied, and Isabella moved with the quiet qualities of a cat. Fortunately, her dialogue with William hadn’t awakened the inhabitants and through the small glass windows in the grey-green doors, she could see huddled figures on mattresses quivering in the shakes of their tortured slumber.

  First stop, the office. She really enjoyed being a sleuth. With one guard and easily picked locks, Wellington Manor turned out to be a candy store for her taking. She had full access and she had a specific plan in mind. The office door opened with a pop and she found herself in no time at all with full access to the office. Pencils, sticky notes, sad calendars with sunsets, photographs of children smiling in piles stuck with pins to corkboard, decaying yellow daffodils; the entire room had the weight of a place resisting its own nature. A downward drag of doldrums that was the tedium of the workday being fought off with snapshots and pollen. Across the far wall, Isabella saw what she had come for—a wall chock-full of files.

  She opened up a file at random to find rows upon rows of paper loaded into manila folders—names scrawled across the top with analysis and reports under each: hysteria, schizophrenic episodes, chilling of the ear, Chelzmere’s nodal, confine syndrome, bipolar disorder, aching heart, the list of maladies went on and on. Each person had become a list of observations to be recorded. It truly was an amazing industry. With a malady, one now gained a reason to observe and record, something to focus on and to describe and pontificate about. Forget lightning or gravity, now they could study the shift in moods and laughter. Isabella marveled at just how much writing had been produced in Wellington Manor’s relatively short lifespan. She scanned the files alphabetically making her way to R—R for Revan. Ta da, there it was: Chelsea Revan. Room 21A.

  “Now that that work is done, let's move to the next phase of this mid-eve jaunt.”

  Before she left the room, she took a peek back at a photograph taped to the side of a cubicle wall. It was of a large woman in a red holiday sweater standing by a Christmas tree with her tiny blonde child. The mother was beaming and the child was looking dazed. Isabella felt the odd nostalgia combined with the madness of childhood, the look on the daughter's face terrifying Isabella in that special way that children did. A dangerous combination this thing called parenting. Isabella licked her finger and smeared the girl's face. The nitrate smudging made the girl’s face a blob of brownish yellow.

  “There, that’s more fitting.” Isabella licked her finger again and tasted the che
mical residue: salt, motor oil, and sesame seed. Not bad. She headed out toward 21A.

  Chelsea Revan clearly had special treatment. Room 21A was in the far back corner of Wellington, tucked down its own special hallway. It appeared that this area had been constructed for the very real necessity of housing what might be considered celebrity cases. She was most definitely one of those. As the daughter of Blount and Cudress Revan, she was in the inner circle of the most powerful family in Barrenwood. She had five siblings each of whom was more terrifying than the last. She nevertheless suffered at the bottom of the ladder, as the youngest at the tender age of sixteen. Her family was a startling blend of loathsome boredom and sadistic mendacity. They gossiped constantly and possessed a philosophy that centered on cuisine, fashion, soirees and society. Chelsea often stared in wild dismay at their gardener because he at least possessed a reason to wake up every morning. As young as she was, she already felt as though she had lived a hundred years. Her heart gained weight with every day, dragging her further and further into a sinking pool of nothing. Sleep and exhaustion were her constant bedfellows. She had stopped washing her long stringy black hair.

  By the time she had been interned, she had moved from a participator of gossip to its sole subject. Everyone in all the families, and most particularly her very own, were eager to have placed outside the spotlight. Now that her embarrassing mutterings and odd odor were no longer ruining dinners, Chelsea had become a delightful source of chatter. Having her fixed had become a cause celebre, with her mother now spending much of her time telling her friends what wonders the scientific community were working on these days. Any subject at all gained fascination in her tiny rich world and the thought of it made Chelsea all the sicker.

  Not only was Chelsea of the royal line, but she also happened to be of the oldest one. The Revan’s were Barrenwood’s most esteemed family and her Uncle Gerald, the Duke of Revan, was considered by all to be the king. Gerald's sister, Chelsea’s aunt, was her true hero, however. The witch of the family, Minasha Darkglass, was a brooding, terrifying figure with bone necklaces and black lipstick. Renowned for her fealty to the occult, Minasha existed as a tolerated novelty. Chelsea’s tangled hair might have scared the bored sacks of meat that were her siblings, but they all could tell that it was a sign of her allegiance to her black sheep aunt.

  The royal families lived a life outside of the rabble's drab existence, which consisted of 98% of the population. The 2% were nevertheless a large part of civic life as they meddled in everything from city governance to the announcing of festivals. Barrenwood still held fast to an era where royalty acted as the patron saints of their hamlet. The town had the day off and a parade for the King’s birthday and the fashion houses still took their cues from the gowns of the ladies.

  As intriguing as the royal houses were, they had never been a source of interest for Isabella. Sure, she still spent time with the Persembes, but that was about the extent of it. The rich tended to lose the water rather quickly and thus they never called to her. Isabella and Fennel were drawn toward vast tragedy and not ones thin with little imagination. She did have a vague memory of some fine dining moment a long time ago when Marty had brought the twins, like little pets, to some event in a big room. They had played in a corner while Marty talked with what must have been a king. The memory was vague, shrouded in cobwebs, as those days were long since passed. In the present era, not only did the twins not rub shoulders with House Revan but, in fact, were strictly forbidden to interact with them. The sickness welled up inside them when they even remotely got near the gates at the bottom of the Elegiac Hills.

  Isabella stared inside the small plexiglass window where she could see a small black bundle that must be Chelsea Revan. She lay fast asleep in the corner of the cot in the corner of the room covered by a small lily pad green blanket with pink polka-dot flowers. Isabella slipped the lock and creaked open the whiny door. The sound rang out in the cells and before Isabella could even close the door behind her, Chelsea Revan’s eyes had become very open. She sat up on the bed with her knees folded under her arms. It was as though this small girl with wiry black hair had become the smallest creature possible. Her eyes appeared to bulge out of her head and she just stared at Isabella, rocking back and forth. She looked extremely scared.

  Isabella sat on the far edge of her bed and spoke in her flat unemotional style. “I don’t work here. I am sure you could guess that, but I thought I would tell you so.”

  Chelsea just rocked back and forth, the slight awareness fading as Isabella spoke. She was slipping again into another realm in her mind. Isabella reached out to touch her and Chelsea inched away.

  “Don’t touch me,” the small girl hissed. Her face contorted into a revolting sneer and Isabella wondered if this visit had been at all advisable.

  “I don’t need to touch you, but I do need your attention. Will you answer some questions for me, Chelsea?” Isabella asked, standing up and beginning to pace the room. She really didn’t feel the need to play therapist. She just wanted to know if the Revans did, in fact, know something about her kind. Looking the traumatized girl over, she wondered if anything of any value was clunking around in that snarled head. Chelsea continued to rock back and forth.

  “Have you heard anything about mythical creatures walking around Barrenwood? A pair of twins that haunt the city? Anything like that?” Isabella felt a little pathetic as the grand inquisitor of a sixteen-year-old. She really had to step up her game.

  Chelsea suddenly looked at Isabella with fierce eyes. She stared and stared. Isabella enjoyed it. Go ahead, I could never lose a staring contest. Time went by, but Isabella did not care. She had the patience of a fat stone.

  Chelsea stared into those black pools of oblivion and found herself swimming around in there. It was dark. Brooding. Wild. Uncaring. Frantic. It was many things, none of which gelled with her orderly world. She found herself dazed by Isabella’s intensity. She felt something that she couldn’t distinguish, whether it was kindness or ferocity. Whatever it was, it made Chelsea all the more vulnerable. She blinked.

  “I knew you would blink,” said Isabella in bland fashion. “So now answer the question.”

  “You snuck in here? That’s funny. Billy will hate that,” said Chelsea with a strange smile on her lips. She wrapped the blanket around her body and wiggled in it nervously. “This place is easy to get in, though. It is just hard to get out. I don’t want out, though. I’m crazy.” Chelsea stuck her tongue out at Isabella and made the face of a lunatic. Isabella recoiled. She didn’t like this girl’s energy.

  “There is no crazy.” Isabella responded flatly. “You can’t be crazy, you silly girl. There is only fear and hunger. Which are you?”

  Chelsea turned away and looked at the wall. She then spun back around. “I hate eating.”

  “I didn’t exactly ask that,” responded Isabella.

  “You don’t like eating either. We’re the same size,” said the not-crazy girl, sizing up Isabella.

  “I try to graze. It is a better way of supplementing a diet.”

  “I’m royalty. You should have curtsied when you came in.”

  “I don’t really do that.”

  “Yes, you do! Bow before me!” said the girl, standing up on the bed and pointing over at Isabella. Chelsea then fell back on the bed laughing. “I’m kidding. I mean, I am royalty but you don’t need to curtsy. You can continue being boring! Ha-ha, who cares?” she laughed to herself and put the blanket over her head. She looked like a mossy ghost.

  Isabella pulled the blanket off. “I just am trying to find out a simple thing. I figured it would be of interest to you. I’m sure your life outside these walls can be rather boring, but I know the stories. I know how you shut yourself off. How you are determined to make yourself different. Surely there are parts of the family, the parts that speak to the old world, that must capture your attention.”

  “I hate history. It is dull. Every book is another chance to talk about how amazing
we were. I don’t believe it because they say that about us now and I know we’re not. I can see it. Just a bunch of maroons.”

  “The world is like that in general. It isn’t just your family. It takes time to appreciate them if that is your goal.” Isabella felt like a parent and she didn’t like that feeling. She looked around the room in all its somber qualities. The entire prison atmosphere offered a truly down and out mood. “This is no place to have a conversation. If you ever want to have a real chat, you should visit me at my nightclub. It’s called Le Chateau de Crawler and it's just on the east end of the Calliope across from the Herring Blue. You might enjoy it. It is—different.”

  “Oh, how very nice of you, little miss,” smiled Chelsea, twisting up her lips and performing for someone not in the room. “A night out on the town. Come to think of it, I’m going to pass. I think, yes, I will pass. I find it, what is the word, boring. Yes, boring. You are boring and a plebian. I don’t hang out with people like you. Didn’t you know? You’re worthless! Poor thing. She doesn’t know she is worthless. Hahahaha!” Chelsea seemed to be talking to the room. She pranced about laughing.

  Isabella was losing patience with the patient. She grabbed Chelsea’s arm in an iron grip. Chelsea squealed and tried to pull away.