The only time I ever feared for Charlie occurred on a cold night in mid-August.
We walked under a radiant midnight sky, alive with starlight and a glistening full moon. For hours, we walked down the deserted streets of Burnington, talking senselessly to one another, with Charlie's arm around me and a bold, glistening hopefulness in his eye.
Charlie had a grand vision of the future, one that never faltered or trembled under the weight of the world. He told me all about it – his dreams to change society, to be accepted for what he was. Nobody thinks like Charlie – nobody dares, I should say. He was like an excited, energetic child, running ramped through those empty streets, dragging me along behind him. I smiled and laughed with him, letting myself consider the possibility, and it was magical.
And then at one point, Charlie turned to me and his lively red cheeks were drained of their colour, leaving a pale shell of a man. I asked him the matter but his frightened eyes stared straight through me, as if I were as transparent as glass.
A loud voice called to us from the darkness. It had a mocking quality to it, a sinister quality, and never in my life has a sound gripped me so. If I'm honest, I must tell you that I don't know what the voice said, but it was followed by a deep belly roar, and out from the darkness stepped four strong young men. One of them, the leader I assume, smiled at us with black, rotten teeth, and in his right hand, he gripped an iron rod.
By daylight, Charlie and I were marked with almost identical lacerations, which consequently healed into an almost identical arrangement of scars. And as we laid there in the crisp morning air, I watched the blood trickle down his weary face and I heard their twisted laughter fade away into the morning sun.
© A.G. Travers 2016
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Burnington Asylum
Horror"The asylum was not a place where madmen went to become sane; it was a place where sane men went to become mad." The year is 1952, and Thomas Wright has been committed to Burnington Asylum. The reason? He fell in love with a man. Determined to escap...
