The Touch

Chapter 6 - Blind Bird, her story

I have never known my real name, I have only known myself as Blind Bird. I wasn't given this name by choice, it was given to me by a cruel, vindictive man who hates those with The Touch. His name is Dr Marshall.

Having very little recollection of my parents or my life before I came to Westridge Institute, which is very strange considering I came here when I was eight years old. Sometimes at night I would have visions in my dreams of what may have been memories of my mother. I could see a woman kissing me good morning and people in suits with big black cars coming to the house and talking to my parents, although I cannot remember what was said.

In the dark I have dreams where I can hear voices raised and then hushed and I remember being taken by a strange woman with a stern looking face. But the most recurrent vision was lying in a room being surrounded by people in medical masks and being told to keep still then liquid pouring in my eyes and screaming. That is the last time I recalled seeing anything visually and the doctor called me Blind bird after that. 'A bird that can not see trapped for all eternity' was how he put it.

This facility is what most people would see as a hospital, but to me it was a prison for children. In this prison you were isolated day after day and although I did hear other children occasionally, I was never allowed to talk or interact with them. I remembered before I went blind that the halls were long and seemed to go on forever. You could turn a corner and another long thin hallway would be in front of you. Coming off these hallways were rooms with black doors and keypads where the men and women dressed in uniform pressed their thumbs on to open them.

The testing rooms were filled with experimental medical devises and drugs so that they could try and discover if there was a genetic link behind the Touch. I learnt that most of these tests were futile and they ended up killing more children than finding out why they were born with The Touch and others were not.

They started performing tests on me after I was there for two weeks. The tests were at first were very basic. I was wired up to machines and they would bring in people and I was to touch their wrist or their arm. I would see a type of picture in my mind of the person who I was touching, usually showing them as babies and then growing up to the age they were now. At first they would always stop me when I had seen only a small amount and take notes on what I had seen. But as the months progressed they would try pushing me to see if I could see future events in these people's lives.

Some visions were quite funny and I would laugh out loud at the scene, just like a child watching a funny movie because in the beginning that is all I thought it was. But as the people changed, so did the visions. One man in particular gave me a terrible feeling in the pit of my stomach and the visions I received were horrible. I screamed as I saw what he had done in his past. He had tormented animals and I saw him murder a woman. She had begged for her life and this man had showed no remorse when he strangled her to death. I screamed aloud and tried to take my hand away but they held my hand down and the visions kept on coming. He was a monster who was full of hatred towards women and I wanted to get away from him and his visions. For two weeks they subjected me to seeing his past and over that time my dreams were filled with nightmares about him. One day I was pushed further to see what his future would be like. It showed a vision of a truck coming down a busy road and this man arguing with a woman. He was trying to grab for her and she pushed him away. I saw him stumble and fall backwards, right into the path of the truck. The vision stopped and I realised that I had just seen his death. That is when I laughed and told him that he was going to die soon. Sure enough a few weeks later I heard one of the staff discuss it to another that he had been hit by a truck after trying to grab a woman.

 I was ten when the tests started changing again. I felt they had pushed the boundaries as much as they could with my visions and now they wanted much more.

The doctor in charge of the hospital and the testing was Dr Fredrick Marshall. Before I went blind I had met him and I remembered that he was a tall lanky man with a comb over grey hair style and thick round black rimmed glasses. I had taken an instant dislike to him on the very first day that I met him as he seemed almost alien to me with his long legs and very long arms. He also had very small eyes which were almost pitch black in colour. He was in charge of the department for testing on people with The Touch using experimental technology and it was clear to me that he didn't like anyone with the Touch.

He stood in front of me the first day that I was brought into his department and informed me that I was never to talk back to him and I was to do exactly what I was told at all times. I was also told never to touch him.

"Why can't I touch you?" I asked

He looked at me with his small eyes and his thin lips flattened together in a grimace. "You are a plague on this earth, a stain on God's name as a creation and I do not want your stain to touch me".

I had laughed at that as I knew I couldn't stain anyone. Did he think I was made of ink?

He looked at me again and then told the nurses to take me to my room.

I soon found out that he was disliked by most of the staff, especially the nurses. He would spout out orders to the nurses and lab people in the testing room and he never showed any kindness towards anyone.

The only person who showed me kindness was a bubbly young nurse called Samantha who was very motherly towards me. She gave me the warmest hugs when Doctor Marshall was out of the room and often brought small treats to my room. Over the years that followed she became my only friend and had given me warmth when I had been treated so cold by others.

When I turned twelve they moved me to a new room further in the institute. It was a lot darker and colder than my last room and the walls were painted a dull grey colour. I didn't like my new room and asked why I couldn't just stay where I was.

"There are some new tests that they want to start on you and they need you closer to the new lab" Samantha explained. She seemed very sad on that day and little was I to know that it was the last day she would be with me for many years. She was told that her mothering was not making my abilities progress any further so she had been transferred to another department. She hugged me tightly to her as she told me that she couldn't see me any longer and I sat there hoping that this was just some lie that Dr Martins had invented to make me conform more to his standards.

I cried for Samantha at night for months. I felt all the light literally falling away from my life and the coldness of Dr Marshall invading my thoughts and feelings.

The new nurse that was in charge of me was called Mrs Bramfort. I was not to call her by her first name like I did with Samantha and I was told she was tall and big like a mountain. There was something nasty about her and she seemed to enjoy tormenting me. It was as if she could take my misery and loneliness and make it expand so that I felt like I was suffocating in it. I didn't know how to get away from the darkness that surrounded me as it was in every waking moment of my day.

I felt that there was only one thing that could possibly save me from this place and that was to escape this institution any way I possibly could.

At night I kept my mind busy by plotting out my escape. The doors to our rooms were unlocked at only one time during the day and that was every morning after breakfast when we were allowed to go and change our sheets on our bed and place them down the laundry chute and then 15 minutes after that to have a shower and brush our teeth. There was about a half hour where you weren't being monitored and I also remembered from when I had had my sight that the cameras did not cover the area of the laundry chute. My plan was to take my sheets down when the others were heading into the bathroom and while they were cleaning their teeth I would climb down the chute. The laundry staff would be having their breakfast at that time and I managed to touch one of the laundry staffs arm briefly and saw that there was a doorway from the basement that led into the underground car park where the trucks would come in to drop off supplies. If I could hide there until a truck came down then I could either wait by the front of the security gates and hide behind a car and escape when the truck went through the roller doors, or I could wait for the truck driver to start taking the supplies out of the truck and when he was inside the laundry room then I could get into the back of the truck and hide there. Whatever I decided I knew I had to get out of this institute and to get as far away as possible.