THE HALL

The Hall

by

Angela Ewing

The odors of humanity gone wrong hung like cobwebs in the corners of the narrow corridor. Flakes of old green paint; stained ceilings; cracked walls; fear. Elise remembers it now. Memories of anything come rarely, but sitting in her rocking chair on the veranda, her memory wakes up. The thought springs from nowhere, and suddenly she is in that place, the old empty building, the place they shouldn’t have been.

The Hall, once an elegant manor house set in the English countryside, opened as a hospital in 1869. The asylum, built in the Jacobean Revival style, was built to house the town’s pauper lunatics and accommodated 300 patients, separated into male and female wards. Renamed The Hall Hospital in 1912, it began using ECT (electroconvulsive therapy) as a new treatment for patients during the war in 1939. After 1960, the National Health Service provided inpatient psychiatric treatment.

Now, it was left dilapidated, empty, and isolated. Hidden within dense woods in the English countryside. “No Trespassing " signs were posted around the building.

      “Why did you bring me here, Jen?” Elise was trying to keep up with her sister in the narrow, dark corridor. “It’s creepy...”

“I know, I know, but I just wanted to see the place, the place where Mother disappeared to for all those years.”

Elise moved closer to her sister. The green corridor was filled with unseen anger and loneliness; she could feel it pressing down on her. Doors on either side remained closed and silent. She said, “She was ill, Jen. Mother was ill. We didn’t understand why she was here because we were too young and it was wartime.”

“You were young, Elise, only ten; I was fifteen, and I know this is the place. I came with Auntie Joan to see Mother when she’d been here a few months.

Elise raised her voice, “But you didn’t find Mother that day, Jen. That day. I’ve tried to forget it all these years, but sometimes I dream it. I know why she did it. She was sick because Jason died; that’s why she did it. Maybe she couldn't stand the grief and a life of wondering if she was going to be around tomorrow.”

“Yes, but other mothers lost sons and husbands. We all missed Jason; of course we did. But we kept going; others kept going. Our beautiful mother, the drama queen, crumbled. She wanted to leave us. And Dad as well. If you hadn’t left your school earlier than usual, we wouldn’t be here now. She was a coward.”

       No, I think she just missed the fame. Everyone knew and loved Letitia Jane Osborne in 1920. She was a flapper. Without the crowds and the applause, she felt totally alone. The war did that to people, leaving them alone.”

The door at the end of the corridor stood ajar. “I think this is it.” Jennifer stared at the door, hanging by its one hinge. The window within shed a meager slant of light into the doorway.  She hesitated, staring into the dull space. “I’m going in.” She gripped Elise’s hand. “It was this room, and I’m going in.”

“There’s nothing in there, Jen.”

“I want to see if there’s anything that could be where Mother was, maybe a chair, a table, I don’t know, something. I remember she had a bed by the wall, a narrow bed.”

  “She wouldn’t have had her treatment, whatever that was, in this room, though, would she?”  

“No, probably not.”

Jen stepped into the room where slanting light from a narrow vertical window cast a sliver of silver onto the floor. Iron bars, set vertically against the window outside, obliterated most of the view. Silence was heavy, and the smell of oldness drifted like marijuana around the room. Elise stood at the door, her heart racing; fear ran up her spine. This was wrong. The window beckoned. She hesitated and then moved toward it. Only high grass and weeds, nothing, except for a beautiful cedar tree and, behind it, radiating in a spotlight of pink, an old arch. Solid. Centuries old, part of a church.

As she turned away, dust motes rose and swirled around the room. Silence, yet from outside, a sigh from the high grass. Then, movement somewhere in the room and a small voice, breathless. Afraid.

They froze.

Jennifer whispered, “Oh God, did you hear that?”

Elise headed for the door. “I felt it! That’s it, I’m outa here.”

“But there’s someone here.”

“There’s no one. Stop it! We’re leaving.”

Letitia Jane Osborne died in 1969. Jennifer, her oldest daughter, was executor of her mother’s will and decided she wanted to know more about the ECT her mother had undergone in the hospital in 1942, in ‘The Hall.’ She and her sister Elise broke into the grounds and found the door to the hall open. They shouldn’t have been there.

***

Elise adjusted her robe; sitting outside was pleasant enough, though the robe felt like a rule she hadn’t agreed to. She wished she could shed it, wear something pretty, something of her own choosing, and certainly not the slippers they insisted on. She stared out at the manicured grounds, too neat, too curated, as if someone had trimmed away anything unpredictable. Verandas wrapped the old building like watchful arms, perfect for residents to be outdoors where they could be seen.

The memories came in their strange, drifting way, sometimes sharp, sometimes warped by time and Alzheimer’s. She remembered the siren, a long, wailing, intrusive warning never to be ignored; then in the shelter, the hope that the bomb didn’t explode right above them, just a heavy silence afterward. Only a thud that shook the ground. The unexploded bomb lay in the schoolyard like a sleeping animal. She had run home, breathless, only to find her mother with her head in the oven. Panic. The smell of gas. The stillness. Elise turned off the knob with shaking fingers, then ran to the neighbor, who revived her mother and called the ambulance. Nothing unusual, they said, during the war. Children whispered anyway, cruel little voices carrying the news that Jennifer and Elise’s mother, Letitia Jane Osborne, was in the loony bin.

“Time to go inside,” the nurse said.

Elise took one last look around before she was led in. The old cedar tree stood strong, its branches unmoving in the evening air. The archway beyond it glowed pink in the dying sun, a soft, deceptive color that made the shadows underneath look deeper than they should. She felt the faintest shiver as she turned away, unsure whether it came from the breeze or from something older, a memory of the corridor that spoke of human suffering. It had followed her all the way from that day they shouldn’t have been there.