The Demon Lives Inside Me

Chapter 3

Maybe three days have passed? I'm not sure. I wasn't given a clock or anything. I was bored. I didn't even have a book to read. No company besides the mice in the corner. This was more like a prison than an asylum.

On around the fifth day since I got here, I was allowed out of my room. Other patients were too. Some hugged each other. People here seemed normal. I didn't understand why they were here in the first place.

"Hello." a voice said. I turned around and found a guy around my age. "You must be the new patient. Hi I'm Caesar." he stuck out his hand. I shook it.

"I'm Reid." I said. "I have a question,"

"Fire away," Caesar responded.

"People here look normal, why are they even here?" I asked.

Caesar's expression turned solemn, "No, no one here is normal. We're all either mentally disturbed," he pointed to his head, "or we've seen things that cannot be unseen."

I pondered this, "Why are you here?"

"I uh I may have accidentally set an entire block on fire and my lawyer used the insanity plea." Caesar responded. 

I stepped back a little, "If you're insane then shouldn't you be like locked up in your room at all times?"

"Yeah I guess, Oasis Hills doesn't really care about their insane people though." he answered. Some hospital this is. I thought. "This is the only time any patient gets any daylight, an hour every five days."

"Um wouldn't that go against the eighth amendment?" I asked.

"I guess but in this asylum," Caesar's voice turned into a whisper, "the federal laws don't exist. This asylum now owns you." he stepped away.

"Wait what do you mean 'it owns me?' " I asked. I was starting to get really confused. If this asylum 'owned me' then how would I finish college? No hospital can own me, that is against the law. I need to call my parents or someone, I need to get out. Then a thought appeared in my head. Vicky. 

"- so that is how it legally-" Caesar explained. I wasn't listening to him.

"Yeah, yeah, great, I need a phone call." I said. I walked away from him. Caesar kept following me.

"Well, here's the thing-" he began.

"Yeah okay, that's great." I said not listening. I went over to a guard. "Um sir, I need to make a phone call to my family."  

The guard laughed, "You think that you're allowed to connect to people?"

"Um yeah, is that not allowed?" I asked. I was going to get out.

"No idiot! Now go back to whatever you were doing or else we'll lock you up early." he responded. Caesar and I backed away.

"Where are all of the really 'insane' people anyway?" I asked. Caesar was now playing with his fingers, tapping them together. He looked up from his fingers, "Oh uh well they keep them downstairs, like in the basement." he shuddered. "Yeah, they're basically locked up at all times. They get to get out of their cells once every year but never out of the basement."

I cocked my head to the side. "Okay, I really need to get out of here." I said. I started to walk toward the exit. Caesar ran after me.

"No no no no no." he said. He motioned his hands like how a conductor would to silence an orchestra. 

"W-" I began to say when he again motioned his hands like that.

"Have you learned nothing? You don't get out of here. Once you're in here, you're in here for life."