All The Little Things

Asylum

The room was almost silent. The tapping of the receptionist on her typewriter was the only thing that pierced the perfect stillness of the small, brightly lit room. The light came from commercial lighting which reflected off the blank, lifeless walls. There was no colour, save for the dark, muddy brown chairs that were filed against the walls like sullen children. The floor was white linoleum, and as the receptionist shifted in her chair, her stately black shoes squeaked softly against its surface.

The room smelled of strong, undiluted bleach. It was clean, too clean. Its stillness, its quietness, felt instinctively wrong to all those who had ever crossed its threshold. Through a window, one pinprick of light caught the woman's eye. She glanced up, and watched as the raised lantern drew closer towards the front door of the small reception room. In the moment before it was darkened, it flickered, winking at the woman as once again the outside fell into the darkness of the night.

The woman turned her gaze back to the typewriter as a wailing scream came from outside. The door banged open, and two large burly men with the closely shaved hair of ex-army mercenaries entered, carrying what appeared to be a body in a burlap sack. The sack writhed, struggling against the strong grip of the men.

"Max, Carlos," the woman greeted coolly, barely glancing up from her typewriter as her fingers continued to push against the keys.

"We got another one. This one had been done in by her family. They don't want to see the lunatic again. She mutters things all the time. Spells, they say. Covered in bruises too. She's Matthew Dawson's widowed daughter..." The mercenary, Max, told her in a deep, gruff voice. His voice trailed off into silence, his face showing that he had more to say.

"She's pregnant. A devil child... That's what I heard. The town's been whispering about her. She has the devil's mark upon her skin. Three scars, like claws on her left shoulder. She kept muttering about demons... Screaming all the way here. The townsfolk are worried," Max muttered, trailing off. He knew what he was saying was not too much out of the ordinary at this place, but still, he couldn't shake the feeling that something bad was entwined with the fate of the woman.

The receptionist nodded, dismissive. The men continued on past her, with the body carried between them, disappearing through a door at the back of the room.

Sighing, the receptionist pushed her chair backwards, its feet scraping loudly against the floor as she opened one of the desk drawers. She pulled out a brown, leather ledger, and opened it to a marked page. With her forefinger running down the page, filled with a list of names and dates she had been entering for the past ten years, she stopped at the next blank space. The receptionist paused for a moment before she wrote in her practiced scrawl, "Isabel Dawson, admitted 1963."

***

As the full moon reached its apex in the night sky, a southerly gust picked up. The great mass of greenery rustled as the wind blew, the trees whispering softly to each other the secrets that only they knew. A damp, musky smell wafted through the air, the forest floor still saturated with early evening rain. Fog drifted through the air slow, enveloping its surroundings in its gentle caress. The night was still and quiet, the only noise the soft sniffs of nocturnal animals and the muted sound of a gushing waterfall.

​The night was broken by the sound of heavy and harsh breathing, and the violent snapping of twigs. A woman with filthy blonde hair and odd, sea coloured eyes broke through the undergrowth. She was clutching a small bundle to her chest as she ran through the forest. The brambles scratched at her skin, tearing her once clean and beautiful white dress.

    In the moonlight that was filtering down through the canopy of leaves above, her skin was like ivory. It was marred by three long silver scars which started at her left shoulder and moved diagonally downwards until they disappeared from view under her dress. Thin trails of blood ran over her face, and down her dress from deep wounds on her face and arms. She was muttering under her breathe, looking around her wildly as she ran, stumbled on. There were patches of hair missing from her head, where she had pulled out her hair in desperation.