Shilan

Five

If the majority of attendants at Lurnie’s Insane Asylum excelled at anything, it was concealment.

They donned masks that were effortlessly inscrutable, kept their movements carefully measured, could school their voices into a monotone that never altered, despite what they came to feel (with the exception of our beloved Pauline).

After that evening in the staff room, when I’d come across that single, peculiar file under my name, I’d decided I could use a bit, or rather a great deal, of this concealment myself. Not a single one of my inmates could be aware of what I'd recently . . . come to discover, especially not at a time this fragile.

Even Adam couldn't know.

The mere mention of my file would occupy everyone’s thoughts, have them doubting and questioning when all we needed right now were strong, determined minds. A single focus: Adam's scheme.

I’d have plenty of time to ponder over everything I’d read and share my news with those closest to me when we were free and not hauled up here like neglected animals. I would not allow myself to jeopardise this plan for anything.

With pensive fingers raised to his black eye, which had been bloodied in the common room during my search for the basement key three days ago, Adam traced his dark bruise, the skin wrinkling beneath his touch as he was deep in thought. With noticing my tight expression and poorly smothered flinches through the holes in our walls, however, he let his hand fall to his side.

“Just a shiner, Shilan,” he assured, voice hoarse from disuse. A corner of his lips twitched upward. “Compared to what these psychos are capable of, this was a mercy.”

“Mercy?” I echoed, astonished. “You talk like you weren't strapped in a straitjacket for two full nights.” Pauline's choice of punishment, of course. She’d only let the nurses check on Adam’s eye yesterday. “I couldn’t last more than three hours last time I was in those tiny straitjackets.”

His countenance was almost lost in the dim light, but his dull voice was lost in something else. “The straitjacket treated me well, actually. The only pain I experienced those nights came from knowing our escape was being delayed because”--a scoff--“because of me.” He ran a hand down his craned neck, shaking his head a little. “Only God knows how the attendants haven't gone looking for that key yet.”

Or noticed this hole here, I almost added. But instead, I waited till he met my gaze again, gave him an earnest look. “If it weren't for you, there'd be no escape to begin with. And this plan will still work tomorrow the same way it would have three days ago. Everything's still in check.”

A voice in me laughed mirthlessly at that last line, but I decidedly ignored it, channeling my features into what I hoped was indifference.

The same way I'd hidden my apparent schizophrenia from the others, I'd forbidden myself from acknowledging it as well. I disallowed it to ever become the subject of my thoughts, even strived to erase it from my mind completely. I treated everyone in the asylum the same way I'd always had, and sternly refrained from asking myself whether this person I was seeing and hearing and could almost touch was real and not just a mere delusion.

If the file I'd seen in that staff room was mine at all. 

Shutting out these thoughts and persistent questions had proven to be near impossible, but I knew I could last until the escape was over. I had to.

As the interminable night concluded with sleep never there to greet me, I walked over to the rusted door of my room and waited for noon to come with a jittering heart. This was it. We were going to do it. I scanned the old place I’d spent three years cooped up in for what I prayed was the very last time: my yellow-brown bedsheets, the industrial grey of the cracked walls, the always accumulating dead company of pests.