Rosenhurst Asylum

Rosenhurst Asylum

I awoke, suffocating. My lungs were paralyzed. Or I’d forgotten how to breathe. I sat bolt upright. Shoved my hands hard into my diaphragm. Five seconds. Nothing... Ten. I kept pushing, and gasped an airless prayer for life. When at last my chest heaved upward. I sucked in a lungful of cold, damp air. Then I smelled the stale, acidic breath of my three cell mates. And thanked God I was alive.

Emily lay closest to me, snoring in the bed beside mine. She was given to wild mood shifts, alternating between bouts of fevered mania and deep, suicidal depressions. That’s why our nurses bound her arms to the bed frame each night.

At the moment, Emily twitched fitfully as she slept. “No,” she whimpered several times, as her wrists chafed against the leather straps.

My nightmare last night, it was terrible. I dare not tell the staff, especially Dr. Graves. Any hint of emotional distress would doom me to his treatments – ice cold water plunges, solitary confinement in the padded cell, or, worst of all – the syringe – one sharp prick that would leave me floating numbly in limbo, halfway between life and death.

My nightmare was always the same – a demon welled up from deep beneath the monastery’s crypt. It was a shapeless horror, a black fog that absorbed all light, all life. It poured beneath every door, flowed down every corridor, killed everyone in its path.

In the dream, I was always one short step ahead of it, while my friends, my sisters behind me choked and convulsed. Their eyes rolled back, pure white. Blood oozed from their noses, ears, and mouths. Until they fell lifeless, gray-skinned to the floor. And with each death, the demon gained new power over us.

Why had this night terror come? Two years ago, I’d arrived here sane, after a rough two-day journey in a windowless carriage. And despite my exile, my lack of freedom, and the burning anger and resentment in my heart, I had remained so. Until ten days prior, when this nightmare first assailed my sleep.

Two miscarriages and acute melancholy had brought me here. That was my husband’s explanation, anyway. In truth, it was my unwillingness to live convivially among his mistresses, as he cavorted with one after another in his frenzy to sire an heir. At his age, time was running out.

If my arranged, ill-suited marriage had one saving grace, however, it was this – my husband’s cruelty had its limits. He hadn’t abandon me to Bedlam, but had secreted me away, financed my “convalescence” here at Rosenhurst, a sanitorium that, despite its many shortcomings, had picturesque grounds and a library.

From childhood, I’d always broken the mold of society's expectations – well-educated in Latin and Greek, so I could understand many of the texts moldering on the library's shelves.

These volumes weren’t my first choice of reading - arcane holdovers from the monastic days, when this hulking, medieval pile was the Abbey of Portae Inferi. All fifty monks perished one fateful night in 1780 – chalked up, from what I've heard here, to consuming death angel mushrooms in their stew. After that, the abbey stood abandoned for more than a century. Then a group of wealthy philanthropic widows restored the place, established a haven for troubled women. A place, they hoped, where female patients could heal, find peace.

After breakfast, I ventured to the library – a cavernous, dimly lit chamber – its limestone walls and arched ceiling admitting light through tall, narrow slit windows. The shelves were twelve feet tall, so I used the ladder any time I had to reach the uppermost volumes.

What a bitterly cold winter morning it was. A fierce wind howled in off the moor. I strode past the wind-whistled windows, my lantern flame shivering in the drafts. I paused at one slit and peered through. Beneath a clouded, gray sky, sleet had sheathed everything in ice.

In the farthest corner, I found what I was looking for – books on mysticism, across several faiths, including medieval Christianity, dark age Paganism, and Judaic Kabbalistic texts. Dreams factor strongly in most forms of mysticism, so any hope of deciphering the meaning of my recurring nightmare lay here.

As I perused the lower shelf, I felt warm air on the back of my neck. I spun ‘round, then jumped to see Emily standing six inches away.

“God, Emily, you frightened me!” I said.

“Sorry,” she replied. “You’re the only person I ever see in here, and I wondered what you were looking for. Figured I’d watch and learn.” She smiled demurely, then added, “I wish I knew Latin like you.”

I wondered how many times she’d been hovering behind me. She was a secretive, observant soul, moving soundlessly from room to room. And somehow, to my consternation, the floors never creaked beneath her. Smart people like her do their best to remain invisible in places like this. We were friends, Emily and I. And here at Rosenhurst, that meant something.

“I’ve been having nightmares,” I said, then felt better for telling her. “Ten nights in a row, the same terrifying thing.”

“Welcome to my world,” she said. “Though I usually don’t have the same dreams over and over again. Maybe it’s because of the date. Getting close.”

“Close to what?” I said.

“January 20th. The night when everyone here died.”

“How do you know the day it happened?”

“You forget – I grew up a few miles from here. Oh, the dark tales my parents told me about this place. Strange lights in the sky at night, over the abbey.”

“You mean, fire?” I said, thinking I’d talked some sense into her.

“Blue fire? And strange shapes that rose and took the form of skulls that shimmered in the sky, then died? When that happened, the abbot came to our village the next morning, asking for help in burying five or six monks at once.”

It was January 18th. Damn Emily’s scary stories. I shoved all thoughts of a “death anniversary” out of my head. Or tried to. I looked up and down the wall of leather tomes and shook my head.

“Were those recent deaths from mushroom poisoning, like the event when every monk perished?” I said.

Her face went slack. She stared at me with brown eyes that, in the dim light, looked black.

“That’s what the nurses will tell you. So you’re not terrified of living here. But no, there were never any poison mushrooms. I’ve never seen a single mushroom growing anywhere near my village. No, whatever killed them wasn’t natural. Wasn’t of this world.”

Emily loved to tell tales and spin yarns, but, given my terror over the past ten nights, I gave her words some credence.

“I wish there were more mythology books here,” I said.

She looked suspiciously about the room before whispering, “I’ve been meaning to tell you all week. I found a new chamber. It’s full of books. With the same, strange glyph drawn on every cover.”

My heart jumped, a thrill rushing through me.

“What are you talking about? Where?”

“Follow me,” she whispered. And I did.

In the opposite corner of the library, she pointed to a line of ancient bibles on a shelf. I doubted I could lift more than one of them at a time.

“All I see are Bibles.”

“Stand still, and tell me what you feel, what you smell.”

We both calmed, went still. All I heard was the whistle of wind through the slits. Then I felt it – a gentle, chilling draft moving out from the lowest shelf of these enormous Bibles. And a damp, moldy smell. Sharp in my nostrils. I felt a wave of nausea, but it passed.

“Something, behind these?” I said.

She nodded, and together we removed the huge tomes, one at a time. We set each on the floor, until we’d cleared a gap about three feet wide. I could see a black hole in the wall behind it. Emily plunged through while I held the lantern to provide light as best I could. The thought of venturing inside frightened me. But I had to know. So I followed.

We passed through a brick-lined hole in the wall, then emerged into a stone-walled chamber with a single set of shelves against the far wall. The lantern was our only light. A small rug, colored like the stone floor, lay before the shelves. Emily pointed at it emphatically.

“There’s a hole in the floor. Under the rug. Don’t know where it goes. Meant for the curious, I suppose. Like us.” She grinned, then added, “You know Latin, right? You ever heard of a church, convent, or monastery named The Gate of Hell before?”

I’d taken note of the abbey’s name when I first arrived. But then, for some reason, I’d buried it beneath my anger and hurt, from being brought and confined here.

“This place is my own gate to Hell,” I said, and fought back tears.

“Think beyond yourself.”

All the bindings in here were black. Except for one – that swirl of oxblood leather, with gold symbols engraved on its spine. Despite its age, the gold still glinted in the lantern light. The volume stood on the shelf directly behind the rug. I reached across and gradually wriggled it off the shelf. Emily placed her hand on the volume, too, from the other side, to prevent it from falling down through the rug, and the hole beneath.

“Let’s take it with us,” she said.

“Are you crazy? What if they find out?”

“The monks are gone, remember? Dead. The doctors and nurses won’t care. Besides, we’ll hide it. Easier for you to read out there. Better light.”

Ten minutes later, we were back in the main library, the Bibles back on the shelf. We sat together on the floor and examined gold glyphs on the spine. An equal-sided triangle, its point facing down, with a large eye at the center. Not just any eye. Goosebumps broke out as I stared. The eye seemed to gain dimensionality. Depth. Did I see subtle movements in the gleaming folds of skin above and below? It was pure evil. I felt it in my bones.

“Something’s not right about this,” I said. “That eye. Do you feel it?”

Emily nodded.

Thin gold rays extended from the eye in all directions, then seemed to reflect off the inner edges of the triangle. As though that three-sided shape, typically symbolic of the Holy Trinity, confined the eye and its evil powers.

I opened the cover. Illuminated Latin text – beautifully done, with gold, silver, and bronze gilding, along with colorful inks.

While the wind whistled and Emily sat beside me, I began to read.

---

The weather had grown sharply warmer. All the ice had melted away, and a warm gale now blew over and through Rosenhurst. For the first time in over a month, we were allowed to venture outside, to walk the grounds and breathe clean, fresh air. It soothed me, that wind. Helped to calm my mind for what I knew was coming. And our only way to survive it.

Now, as the sky darkened toward dusk, I listened for anyone in the corridor. Emily was sharpening a thin wooden stick she had found in the grass. It was slow going, with only the dull-textured stone of Rosenhurst’s walls to help grind away and form a point. With a knife, it would have taken seconds, but there were no knives available patients in a sanitorium. Emily had worn blisters into her fingertip, from all the scraping. At last she deemed it sharp enough, so I lifted my hospital gown, exposed a section of thigh for her to experiment with. She dug the tip across my tender skin there. Blood trailed from the one inch cut. I told her to suck it off with her lips, to prevent any blood from dripping to the floor, or showing on my clothing. If they caught sight of it, we'd pay the price.

Once the bleeding stopped, she inspected the wound.

“It left a groove. I think this will work!”

She stood up, and I dropped the hem of my gown.

We had only a few hours, and doing this would certainly earn us the vilest punishments possible. But only an inverted triangle, carved into our foreheads, would cause the evil to pass over us.

Every hundred ten years, on January the 20th, the demon that cursed this land would emerge from underground. It would slay all who were unprotected. Neither cross nor crucifix would stop the deathly force the demon wielded. It was time to implement our plan. Save ourselves first, and then try to convince everyone else.

Our other cell mates were helping in the kitchen this evening, so we got to work in peace. First, Emily carved a deeply grooved cut on my forehead. I had to close my eyes, so the blood wouldn’t flow down into my eyes and blind me. The pain was severe, but in two minutes, her work was done. She pressed the hem of her own gown against the three cuts, and, after about ten minutes, the flow subsided.

I had carved two sides of the triangle into Emily’s forehead when a nurse rapped loudly on our door.

“Supper! Open the door and head downstairs!”

“My God – hurry!” Emily pleaded.

It was nurse Agnes, just outside. When she heard Emily’s shout, she pushed the door, but I was sitting with my back propped against it. I worked feverishly, cutting the final, upper side of the triangle, before Agnes bowled herself against the door and shoved me aside.

She entered, anger turning to horror as she saw the blood pouring down my friend’s forehead. Her screams rang out, and soon more nurses, and one of the several men who guarded the grounds, came rushing in. They bound my wrists behind my back, while Agnes staunched the flow of brood from Emily’s forehead.

“We have to flee Rosenhurst now!” I shouted. “Get as far away as we can in the next few hours! Those monks who died a century ago. They weren’t poisoned. They were slain by the demon. A demon from Hell! Rosenhurst, and the monks’ abbey, was built over a portal to the underworld. And tonight is the one night each century when the demon rises and slays everyone who isn’t marked!”

“She’s gone mad!” Agnes shouted, while two other nurses handled me roughly.

“Mark yourselves with the triangle! On your foreheads! It’s the only way!” But I knew my words were in vain.

Missy and Victoria, our other two cellmates, appeared in the doorway. Their eyes went wide, and they covered their mouths in horror when they saw our disfigured faces.

Then someone shoved them both harshly aside, knocking them to the floor, and Doctor Graves stepped in, his eyes bulging with shock. Despite my struggles, he quickly plunged a needle into my arm. The pain was nothing compared to the cuts on my face, but the flesh around the puncture began to burn. Then the room around me swam, shifted, turned. Soon I couldn’t see anything. But I heard screaming, shouting. Then, silence…