Hall of Infinite Doors
Everard the orderly leads you back to your sparse cell, his large hand placed possessively over your shoulder the entire time. As you pass the nurse's station on your own floor (floor 8, you discover) you tell the time as just after five-o'clock. Late afternoon. You can still see people outside, green-clothed orderlies and docile patients peppered across the delicately-manicured front lawn. Compared to the green outdoors, your own room is bare, pale and unstimulating. The door shuts and locks fiercely, the loudest sound around.
With nothing to do, you upend your backpack and start sorting through and organizing your belongings. You have few clothes - two old t-shirts and one disintegrating pair of silk pants - but discover by accident a folded pile of hospital-green scrubs underneath the sink. You also find some reading material - two books in your backpack, one a notebook smeared with unreadable ballpoint blue, the other a cracking, water-damaged collection of poems and short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. The stories you save for later, but the smeared notebook interests you. Sort of - it makes you feel something tight and curious inside, an emotion you're unfamiliar with, unpleasant but needing to be explored.
The notebook is difficult to try and decipher. The writing is completely smeared, leaving only bare ghosts of letters and words, nothing to form identifiable sentences with. Some pages are filled with writing, others with the ruins of pictures, sprawling portraits and diagrams nothing more than blind smears of blue now. the last few pages are blank and brittle. The entire thing smells of the sea, and salt crackles off the pages as you turn them.
You can't get much from it, though you spend a time reading it. It's organized in chapters, organized numerically and called Journeys - or at least, that's what the headers are. As to the writing itself, you aren't sure it's even English. The characters seem remarkably different, shaped differently, though as you stare at their smeared, crippled remains you feel a mounting physical pressure in the back of your brain - the increasingly familiar feeling of knowing you SHOULD know something, but you don't.
The evening trickles by. You hear motion outside your room - footsteps in the halls, lots of them, people moving steadily in one direction from the rooms around her. Shortly after that, your own door opens, letting in a young male orderly carrying a tray. Unlike Everard, this one is skinny and red-headed, with a round boyish face and demure oval glasses and a friendly personality that exerts itself immediately. "Hi there!" he says, "My name's Shawn. I work on this floor, and since you're new here I assume I'll be seeing a lot of you for a while. What's your name?" You explain your predicament as he unloads a tray full of spaghetti, salad and canned pop onto your desk, along with a small paper cup full of large dirt-colored pills. He nod and listens. "Sad to hear of your condition. At least with most other forms of insanity you get the dignity of having no idea anything's wrong with you. Though at least you still have control of your bowels."
Something beeps on his belt and he fumbles around for a pager, grimacing as he reads the face. "Speaking of bowel control, I have a little... waste management situation to take care of." He winces. "See you around," he says, shutting the door and leaving you with your food.
The food is hospital-grade, though you haven't had anything to eat all day and are fairly hungry. The pills in the little cup are red-brown, roughly the size of M&Ms and unstamped; there are about six of them there, a decent handful of medication.
With nothing to do, you upend your backpack and start sorting through and organizing your belongings. You have few clothes - two old t-shirts and one disintegrating pair of silk pants - but discover by accident a folded pile of hospital-green scrubs underneath the sink. You also find some reading material - two books in your backpack, one a notebook smeared with unreadable ballpoint blue, the other a cracking, water-damaged collection of poems and short stories by Edgar Allan Poe. The stories you save for later, but the smeared notebook interests you. Sort of - it makes you feel something tight and curious inside, an emotion you're unfamiliar with, unpleasant but needing to be explored.
The notebook is difficult to try and decipher. The writing is completely smeared, leaving only bare ghosts of letters and words, nothing to form identifiable sentences with. Some pages are filled with writing, others with the ruins of pictures, sprawling portraits and diagrams nothing more than blind smears of blue now. the last few pages are blank and brittle. The entire thing smells of the sea, and salt crackles off the pages as you turn them.
You can't get much from it, though you spend a time reading it. It's organized in chapters, organized numerically and called Journeys - or at least, that's what the headers are. As to the writing itself, you aren't sure it's even English. The characters seem remarkably different, shaped differently, though as you stare at their smeared, crippled remains you feel a mounting physical pressure in the back of your brain - the increasingly familiar feeling of knowing you SHOULD know something, but you don't.
The evening trickles by. You hear motion outside your room - footsteps in the halls, lots of them, people moving steadily in one direction from the rooms around her. Shortly after that, your own door opens, letting in a young male orderly carrying a tray. Unlike Everard, this one is skinny and red-headed, with a round boyish face and demure oval glasses and a friendly personality that exerts itself immediately. "Hi there!" he says, "My name's Shawn. I work on this floor, and since you're new here I assume I'll be seeing a lot of you for a while. What's your name?" You explain your predicament as he unloads a tray full of spaghetti, salad and canned pop onto your desk, along with a small paper cup full of large dirt-colored pills. He nod and listens. "Sad to hear of your condition. At least with most other forms of insanity you get the dignity of having no idea anything's wrong with you. Though at least you still have control of your bowels."
Something beeps on his belt and he fumbles around for a pager, grimacing as he reads the face. "Speaking of bowel control, I have a little... waste management situation to take care of." He winces. "See you around," he says, shutting the door and leaving you with your food.
The food is hospital-grade, though you haven't had anything to eat all day and are fairly hungry. The pills in the little cup are red-brown, roughly the size of M&Ms and unstamped; there are about six of them there, a decent handful of medication.