Redemption

Prologue: Troubled Beginnings

Prologue: Troubled Beginnings      

    Westbrook Asylum, a psychiatric breeding ground for those that are mentally unstable, lies in exile just on the outskirts of the Danville city limits. Constructed in the early 1900s when Danville was little more than a small pioneering town, the family asylum of both Thomas and Gregory Westbrook couldn't have come at a more opportune time.

    The small town had become afflicted with random citizens falling ill to schizophrenic episodes and sociopathic tendencies that had begun to take a toll on the livability of the town itself. While the first constructed model of Westbrook Asylum was only to be able to hold up to fifteen patients at a time, more than thirty Danville citizens called the institution their home away from home. Both psychiatrists, being the only staff the two could manage to afford, were worked to their breaking point as the days and weeks began to jumble themselves together. 

    What little time they had to spend with their families and friends was completely consumed in their work; their wives divorcing the pair due to this fact. While the job offered good pay, the mental stress it put on the two men was a toll too great for them to bear.

        Gregory was the first to fall into a fit of irreconcilable insanity. One which left him catatonic and quietly muttering to himself in his own private makeshift cell in the attic of the asylum, while his brother assumed full responsibility of the hospital and all the duties that came with it.

         Thomas, stronger in mind than his younger brother, continued on in his work building up the asylum from a piss poor hovel to an actual building that was pleasing to the eye. For a time, it seemed as though the dark days were behind him, but that quickly changed when he too fell ill and was left on his deathbed with subtle hints of his own deteriorating mind being brought to light; his constant twitching and bouts of forgetfulness suggesting early stages of Alzheimer's disease.

    All too late did the town find that its water supply had been tainted and carried with it small strains of LSD that contributed to half the recorded populace being committed to Westbrook Asylum and the drastic rise in the town's overall suicide rate. With Thomas Westbrook no longer fit to run his own asylum, the property was turned over to the local government whom decided to board up its doors and windows and set the mad house ablaze. The entire mental health facility's inmate population  left trapped within the fiery inferno.

     The overall problem of the town's insanity seemed to be solved, yet the asylum itself couldn't seem to let go of its horrific past. Many years later, a man named Phillip Burns rebuilt the asylum after acquiring the property from Danville for a rather cheap price in pursuit of a location for him and his team of eager, young doctors to practice their psychiatric prowess on an astonished public. By this time, the small rural town of Danville had blossomed into its own metropolitan area, one that no longer saw the need for an asylum.

    The haunting tales of the blaze resulting in the deaths of over fifty of the institution's patients had long been forgotten, yet that area of the city remained completely untouched.  And whether the city needed it or not, the asylum was rebuilt on the old foundations of its predecessor and opened that very same year with Phillip Burns, stepping in as active warden.

      Almost like a siren beckoning sailors to their death, the asylum slowly began to receive cases of mentally unstable patients, some worse than others, but all treatable.  As time went on however, the same patients seemed to show up on their door step, all seemingly relapsing back into their old ways. Some patients going as far as to becoming worse than they were before their first admittance to the psychiatric clinic.

   Despite the hospitals valiant efforts, Westbrook Asylum slowly became little more than a prison for the madness and destruction it contained. While the institution wasn't seeking redemption due to its failure to contain and cure the simplest of mental afflictions, redemption patiently watched and waited in the shadows with cold, judgmental eyes and when the time was right, it struck with the swiftness of a thief in the night.