A history student is tasked with sorting through an abandoned asylum's archives. The asylum is rumored to be haunted, but Lena dismisses this as merely town folklore. When her research brings her to venture inside the asylum's walls, however, the fr...
It's Thursday and I'm back to digitizing the old photos again. The computer is unbearably clunky, and I certainly spend at least half of my time looking up at the ceiling and waiting for it to load or, if I'm honest, flickering through the old directories and peering as inconspicuously as I can up to the shelves searching under S or A.
It only takes a couple of weeks for my boss, an old-fashioned professor type in tweed who always has his mind pinned up somewhere other than where he is, to notice. "So, Lena," he clears his throat and offers a ruddy smile my way. He's spilled his coffee on his jacket and is dotting it with a napkin. "I might be wrong, but there's something else you're interested in, isn't there?"
"Oh," I bite my lip and move to gather the binder of photos into my hands, as if this movement will profess my love for them.
"It's okay," he waves his hand through the air and shifts to lean over the desk. "I just gave you that as a starting project. It's mundane work, really. Anyone could do it. Now if you have passion," he makes the word rather onomatopoeic, the way he says it, "you have to follow it. Everyone can scan photos, but not everyone has passion. So tell me."
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I smile nervously, looking at my thumbs as I twist them. "Well if I'm honest... I've been fascinated by the asylum."
He raises his eyebrows, and strokes his chin in thought. "Now in what way?"
"What do you mean?"
"Well," another shift, a sip of coffee, "let's see. We have medically, socially, architecturally..."
"Oh, I see. No, I think I'm most interested in their stories. In what it was like to be a patient there."
"Playing with fire, that one," he lets out a chuckle and moves his hands around his mug. I stay silent, waiting for him to say more. "There's nothing the hospital wants more than for those stories to remain very much un-researched."
"I figured," I bite my lip sadly.
"But hey," he lifts his tone, trying to lighten the mood. "Let me put in a word with Donna from the hospital archives. They're in that office building across from the asylum - you know the one? Who knows, maybe our archives and theirs can do some kind of joint project..."
"Really?" my eyes beam.
"Can't see why it would hurt to try. This whole damn city is getting mapped out and digitized," he gestures to my binder of photos. "Would look real bad if there was nothing written up about the asylum, no? Donna might even be looking for someone to make a little blurb and digitize a few photos. She'll hand-select them of course, PR and all that," he rolls his eyes, "but it's something. Sound good?"
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