Secrets Revealed

My thoughts were a jumbled mess as I crossed the cracked and vacant parking lot. It had been months of extensive research, but I finally found it. And what I found would hopefully, help ease the grief I felt whenever I thought about my mother, whom I never had. I reached what I had been heading towards- an old run down asylum, to be exact The Ridges. The building was colored a very musty yellow, reeking of old. Vines snaked their way up the crumbling walls, windows were broken out or cracked around the metal bars which once held their... interesting patients. The whole place screamed to me to get away, but I, Erick McCoy, hadn't come this far to give up.

Through my research these past months, I discovered my mother had been a patient here. The records said she had Multiple Personality Disorder and that one of them had caused her to cut herself in a fit of rage. The personalities were so great that when one caused her pain, the other would instantly be there telling the other to stop and that it hurt. Often times my mother was never herself and more the personalities.

I shuddered to think about it and about the treatments she probably had endured. One account told of how she had been so into the rage personality she beat a nurse to death by crushing her into the wall over and over. The doctors and nurses underestimated her strength and that personality, so she had escaped... for a short while. When they captured her again, they had tied her down and gave her a heavy dose of shock treatments and water boarding all at the same time. From then on she stayed tied down, as long as she appeared angry. How I was conceived I do not know, but I'm hoping this asylum would help me find the answers.

I stepped up the stairs, which were as old and decrepit as the rest of the building. I had come prepared for the boarded up doors with a crowbar. I stuck the hook behind a wooden slat and pulled. It came loose fairly easy from all the weather abuse and since it had been closed since 1990. Three more slats and the door was bare, I stuck the hook into the door and pulled; my muscles straining with the effort until finally, I just decided to kick in the door. The door cracked and popped inward with the stress of my kicks, leaving it open enough for me to enter. I peered through the doorway at the dusty walls, finding nothing unusual - I stepped into the building.

Everything seemed to be a huge black mass of nothing; I reached into my back pocket grabbing the hand-sized flashlight I'd remembered to bring. Pictures hung on the walls, so filled with dust I didn't even know what they were. I reached out with the sleeve of my jacket and wiped away the dust on the first pictures in the hallway. A lady sat posed and looking rather grim. She had wrinkles and wore an old dress complete with white hair. Her eyes bored into me with what appeared to be hatred. I wiped the bottom of the picture to see what it said or if there was a title; it read: Lucie Baldwin. Founder of The Ridges Asylum. 1840. I shuddered at the women who appeared to look witch like in appearance and traveled to the next picture, wiping it off it revealed a man, who was large and had a gray beard and mustache. Underneath it said: Charles Hale. Dean Physiologist. 1882. As I continued down, wiping off the pictures, they all were deans after the founder passed away. I got to the very last one, wiping away the dust and there stood a young looking man. He had blonde hair and jet blue eyes. Something about him had me staring at the picture for longer than I had expected. I wiped at the bottom, holding my breath. James Luke Anderson. Dean Physician. 1925. I realized with a jolt that he and the man named Charles had been something other than the Dean as well. Charles had been a physiologist and now this man named James had been a physician... odd...

I turned away from the pictures looking farther down the hallway, noticing many doors. I slowly made my way past doors that seemed to mock and taunt me hanging from their hinges. I debated on checking every door... but as I traveled on I started to feel pulls toward only certain doors. I didn't understand where the pull was coming from, but decided it might just be intuition.