Lazarus Rising

1.3 The Sanatorium

The Sanatorium was built on an island in Grafton Lake. Connected by a thin spit of land to the industrialised city the island had been inhabited since prehistoric times. A cold dank place crowded with ivy covered trees and a tangle of impenetrable holly and laurel bushes. In winter, fat migrating geese flew in from the North, waddled out onto the grey ice to peck despondently at its frozen surface and then seemingly spooked by their own shadows flew on again. Rising out of the deep chilled waters of the lake, a monument to the city's beneficial past, the once pure white stone blocks of the great gothic building had long since faded to a ragged green patchwork of wet mosses and bent creepers that held the old hospital in an eerie clutch of shrouded silence broken only by the steady ticking sound of wet dripping leaves.

Cheyenne skimmed in over the flat waters of the lake and landed her aero in the small plaza by the crumbing timber boathouse on the far side of the island amidst a flurry of limpid foliage. Climbing from the vehicle she stood and watched, coat pressed hard against her body by the sharp wind as a silvered arm grew out of ground, grabbed the vehicle and drew it into the facility's underground storage facility like a mechanical kraken dragging a ship down beneath the rippling waves of a turgid green sea.

She turned and walked, head down across the square, past the corroded signage and pushed her way through the bent plastic swing doors by the old shower block entrance. Instantly the pungent reek of Powerzone rushed up and raced into her lungs. She made her way quickly along the long corridor edging around the scattered piles of rusted bedsteads, broken wheelchairs and rotting water hoses hitched up over a series of iron manacles hanging off the wall. At the end of the passageway she stopped at a rusting steel door while a red laser ran up and down her body. With a clang the door unlocked, admitting her into the warmth of the main building.

Once home to the cities criminally insane the Nietzsche Sanatorium was a sprawling three block building designed in reverence to the Victorian penal system. It was a building crammed with a baffling multitude of passages, stairways and basements. Each main block contained a vast vaulted central hall from which rose five floors of cells facing onto balcony's serviced by narrow cast iron walkways strung out with a decaying web of rotting suicide nets.

Ninety percent of Sector19 staff were Lylacs, and in deference to them the Service had blocked up the rows of shattered glass windows and fitted out the building with soft sodium lighting. Bathing the interior in a ghostly wash of yellow light it filled the space like a cloying fugue from a recent gas attack. It was a place of oppressive silence, broken only by the occasional shout, the clanging of heavy steel doors and the scurrying of footsteps of a host of unseen Investigators.

Cheyenne walked over the cracked lino floor of the obsolete restaurant and ran up the spiral staircase to the third floor, along the walkway to cell 3952 and pushed open the solid metal door.

Moah Raye looked up from the little drinks machine he was attending to, "Hygge. Drink?"

"Hygge." Cheyenne threw her coat over the back of her chair. "Thanks Moah, I'd love one."

Moah fiddled with two small china beakers and waited while the machine choked and gurgled to itself. "Seen there was an explosion over at the Foundation building?"

"Hmmm," she said absently as she pulled the spheres out of her pockets and set them into the recesses on her desk.

"The Indian drums have it that some Old Worlders were having a popper party over there and a few got splattered around the walls."

"Really." She tried not to sound interested. She flicked her desk on and waved her hand over the table. The globes simmered with an inner light, like candles glowing in pumpkin heads.