Asylum Read Online Free Page A

around a gurney. Lying on the bed, oddly placid, was a young man in a hospital gown. One of the doctors was cradling his head in his hands, while another was buckling a heavy leather strap across his forehead. Nearby, a nurse was holding a syringe.
    Abby sidled up next to him to stare at the picture, both of them trying to make sense of the image.
    “It must be a treatment of some kind,” Dan said finally. “He must have been a patient here.”
    “He’s so young,” Abby said. “He could be our age.”
    He could be me. Dan shook the thought from his mind, peeling off the photo and aiming his cell phone at the next one.
    This picture showed a woman restrained on a table. Fitted over her head was a helmet with wires coming out of it. A wooden bit was wedged between her teeth. Between the helmet and the bit, she looked like she was being tortured, like some kind of martyr.
    The photographs were horrible, but Dan couldn’t stop flipping to the next one, and the next. Each picture showed a patient enduring some kind of treatment, from painful-looking shots to solitary confinement. A photograph depicting hydrotherapy turned Dan’s stomach. Orderlies were aiming hoses of water at a patient, who was huddled and shivering in the corner of the room, completely naked. A doctor stood to the side, arms crossed, indifferent.
    Dan had read about this kind of outdated treatment before—he had a morbid fascination for the subject, really. Growing up in the foster system had given him an interest in social machines, systems that made decisions for people instead of with them. Not that he was comparing his life to the plight of these poor people—if anything, the system had made a good decision for him, all things considered. He wouldn’t trade his family for anything.
    “Wait, you guys, come take a look at this.…” Jordan said, and the catch in his voice got their attention.
    He was standing on the far side of the desk, his flashlight pointed at the wall, where there were even more photos, hanging in frames.
    “How awful,” Dan said.
    “Quiet.” Abby spoke in barely a whisper.
    She moved closer to one of the pictures, gently wiping the dust off the glass frame with her sleeve. It was a photograph of a little girl, no older than nine or ten, with light-colored hair down to her shoulders. She was standing up, her hand resting on what looked like a wooden post, like she was posing for a formal portrait. She had on a patterned dress and was wearing fine jewelry. But a jagged scar slashed across her forehead and there was something wrong with her eyes.
    “She looks so sad,” Abby said.
    Sad was one way to put it. Empty was another.
    Abby stood still, staring so deeply into the photograph that it looked like she was in a trance. Dan didn’t have the heart to tell her that given the scar on the little girl’s forehead and the emptiness in her eyes, it was likely that she’d been given a lobotomy. What kind of monsters would perform a lobotomy on a little girl?
    The picture hanging next to it shocked him from his thoughts. It showed a patient struggling, pinned by two orderlies in white aprons and restrained by a muzzle on his face. One of the orderlies holding him looked positively evil. Dan was mesmerized by the photograph. Who had taken it, or any of these pictures for that matter, and who had hung them up on the wall?
    “It’s hard to remember they were here to get help,” Jordan said.
    “He was ill,” Dan replied automatically.
    “So? Does that look humane to you? Those doctors wouldn’t know the Hippocratic oath if it kneed them in the balls.”
    “You have no idea what was going on,” Dan shot back. Then he stopped himself. Why did he feel the need to defend the very doctors who had probably performed a lobotomy on a child? Or who were getting ready to torture a man? When he looked down at his crossed arms, a bolt of fear shot through his body, and he rushed to fill the awkward silence. “I guess we’re just