My Probation Consists of Guarding an Abandoned Asylum | Part 15
After having to let go Dr. Weiss, I spent a couple of nights looking for him, expecting to find him debilitated or something.
The last place I attempted to look was on the destroyed,
ceiling-less Wing D. All the building was half-rotten, but the floor on this Wing,
thanks to nature, was soggy and every step felt like ice melting below you. I
avoided it as much as I could, but I had no other place to search.
I encountered an office I had never noticed before. Also,
I never looked for it. On its door I could read, on almost-gone letters: Dr.
Young.
As soon as I entered this space, a sensation of
sleepiness flooded my body. My limbs and head felt heavier with every step I
took inside. The longest yawn I can recall exited my mouth without even asking
me for permission. Through my barely open eyelids, heavy as lead, I discerned
what looked like a humanoid figure sitting behind the desk in the center of the
room.
“Sleep!” A dark, far away voice commanded me.
***
I was a seven-year-old kid playing on the playground
of the park in front of my infancy house. I tried looking back, couldn’t. I tried
stopping my running body from chasing other kids yelling and laughing, I
failed. I knew that feeling. I wasn’t in control. I was a passenger inside my
body. I flew with it.
The noise around me muffled as my small body climbed
the ladder to get to the top of the slide. I felt my cheeks numbing below the
cramping of so much laughing. The time became slower, allowing me to feel and
experience everything with so much nuance. The rests of sand under my nails
tickled me, the warmth of the sun-heated metal steps perforated my rubber
soles, and the light dimed as a cloud got over the playground.
When I reached the top of the slide, it felt like it
was a skyscraper high. A child screamed something I couldn’t decipher before
throwing herself on the plastic, uncovered slide. My short legs ran towards the
disappearing girl, gaining more speed with every thump on the metal below me,
but the sensation of time becoming slower increased in an inverse correlation.
Headfirst, my body jumped to the slide. As my belly
entered in contact with the slide, a burning sensation spread from my torso all
the way through my limbs. My mouth opened instinctively to let a pain shriek
out, but nothing came out. My body, that should have been tummy sliding down,
was stuck in place. Time had stood still completely.
My head turned back, my eyes peeked behind, and I’m
just waiting for my body’s movements to reach back enough to discern what was
happening. My left leg grabbed, with extreme unyielding force, by a boney and
old hand. My sight slowly turned up to discover the mysterious person who is grasping
my extremity.
A wrinkled, almost melting skin covered body is attaching
itself to the top of the slide. A yellow grin that reflects light in a
disturbing way blinded my vision as my eyeballs kept rising. A long peak-like
nose with skin marks points directly at me like a judging finger. Two deep in
their sockets, red and tearing eyes pierced directly at mine.
I gasped.
The witch pulled me out of the slide.
I fell.
The throbbing pain of my shinbone breaking conquered
my entire nervous system.
***
I woke up on the floor of Wing D’s office. I was back
in the moldy Bachman Asylum.
Quickly, accustoming myself to real time, I stood up.
A middle-aged guy dressed in old pants and sweater,
fingers interlocked, stares at me. Studying me.
“What the hell was that?!” I confronted the bastard.
“Relax, it was just hypnosis,” he answered me with a
calmed voice that failed to get me into that same state.
“What you mean with…?”
“Since you were a kid,” the motherfucker interrupted
me, “you were touched by the supernatural.”
“What? I don’t remember…”
“Of course you don’t,” he kept getting in my way. “Do
you think that a witch would have allowed you to remember?”
“Fuck that.”
“Sorry, I don’t make the rules.”
I stood in silence. He left his creaking chair.
“But,” he continues, “she left you something. I’m sure
you’ve felt it before. Maybe a weird tingling when you are close to something obscure?”
As if activated by command, that exact sensation started
on my healed shinbone, spreading through my muscles.
He grinned.
“Oh, what I could do with that. Perhaps you could give
it…”
“No way. You can’t have it,” now I interrupted the motherfucker.
“Then, maybe I’ll have to rip it out of your dead body,”
he concluded.
The bastard jumped over his desk.
I backed a little.
He approached walking in fours like a starving insect.
I ran away.
A ringing hit my eardrums. It came from the second
floor.
Dizziness engulfed my body. Every step was difficult
to take. Nausea. The broken stairs to the second floor retreated from me. I
puked a little. Held myself with a wall. The stomps of the crazy supernatural
sucker became louder. Crawled the last yards until I reached the stairway.
The moment I climbed to the top, the lightheadedness
disappeared. That shit was awful.
Ring!
It was a phone on the last dorm.
I crossed the blood “X” one on the door without paying
attention.
***
“You can’t give that power away,” Luke’s voice came
out of the device as soon as I picked up the call.
“Why not?”
I wasn’t planning to. But who the hell does he think
he is to tell me what to do and what not?
“That is what allows you to talk to me and the rest of
the Asylum folk.”
“You mean to dead people?” I questioned him.
From outside the room, Dr. Young’s hoarse and
distanced voice rumbled directly at my eardrums.
“Let me make you a deal. If you willingly renounce
that power, I will make you forget or remember any memory you want.”
“That sounds tempting,” I told Luke.
“Don’t do it…”
I hung up the phone on him.
It continued ringing while I left the dorm and went
down to the first story.
***
Back in Dr. Young’s Office, he indicated me to lay
down on a falling-apart couch. I did.
“Okay,” I explained him, “you can have it, as much as
you first take away with it what happened exactly four months ago.”
“Sure,” he replied. “Just need to let you know that I
will need to replace that void in your memory with something from your
unconsciousness.”
Before I could agree or not, we started.
“Sleep!”
***
I was back in my body from almost eight years ago. I
was in the office building of the stock market company I used to work for. Wasn’t
my office though. It was bigger, the chair was comfier, the view was amazing,
and Dr. Young grinned maliciously to remind me of his presence and evil
intentions. I was in my boss’s office.
It hit me what that cheater was doing.
I paid attention to what my non-responding body was
doing. The light from the double-screen computer in front of me fried my eyes.
Cold sweat rolled down my face, down each inch of skin in my whole being. An
excel sheet is open in front of me.
This was the day I deleted from my job records the
information of every client I scammed.
My eyes ran through each one of the names written with
LED lights. The amounts and dates flew as The Matrix code in front of my eyeballs.
All the information about everyone I selflessly harmed appeared in front of me.
I didn’t want that anymore, but my hand didn’t listen
to what I told it. It followed the memory.
The mouse positioned over the deleting button.
Young’s grin expanded.
I clicked.
***
I was thrown back at the Bachman Asylum. Not last
night, to the night of exactly four months ago.
I was running down a corridor heading to my night
guard office.
Increasing volume thumps followed me.
Pang. Pang! PANG!
When I reached my office, I encountered the phone
ringing.
It was exactly as I remember, but now Dr. Young was
standing there.
“Why you want to forget this?” He questioned me
confused.
“Oh, you’ll see,” I responded.
Ring!
Shit. I can affect this memory.
PANG!
I answered the phone. It was Luke.
“What the fuck are you doing?” (That’s not what he
said that night).
PANG!
“Have a little faith in me,” I answered (also not my
response).
PANG!
Jack stood on the threshold of my office. Axe in both
hands ready to attack. He inspected the room, but the presence of Dr. Young
highjacked his attention.
“Oh, shit,” whispered the hypnotist.
The axe fell on him.
***
I woke up on the same couch I had fallen asleep in Dr.
Young’s office. His ghost was nowhere on sight, the dizziness and sleepy
sensation caused by his presence was also gone. I was alone in the dark, humid
and health-threating room of Wing D.
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