SL Huang - Up and Coming - Stories by the 2016 Campbell-Eligible Authors

Edward had never been able to bring himself to visit and dreaded doing so now. The judge had ruled her suicide attempt a moral insanity. He hadn’t believed she was mad then, but she surely would be now—locked for months in this wretched place with the echoes of lunatics all around her.

The front door was open, but just beyond the forecourt stood a metal gate. The smell wafting through the bars was a potent mix of unwashed bodies and human waste, feathered over the odor of dirt and mold that clung to the walls of the old building. Edward stood at the gate, watching the lunatics in the long gallery cavort and cry. There were only men that he could see, but he could hear women’s voices off to his right. Peering that way, he made out a set of bars dividing the inmates by gender into east and west wings.

The echoes drove into his brain like iron spikes. Anger . Fear . Despair . Hate . They pounded on his body like hammers. The inmates were obsessed with their private hells, and the echoes of their emotions filled the long gallery, reverberating again and again off the thick walls. The urge to run from the asylum nearly overwhelmed him. Instead, he rang a small bell hanging at the upper corner of the gate.

The man who approached wore a dirty linen shirt with no coat. His long trousers of faded blue had the look of old sailor’s clothing. Even Edward’s worn black coat and wash-water grey stockings were in better repair.

“Visitors come ‘round Tuesdays and Sundays, mate,” the guard said. “You can watch the lunatics anytime for a penny, though, if that’s what you’re after.”

If he left now, Edward wasn’t sure he would ever return.

“I’m of a need to see someone today. Etta Ferris.” He reached into his coat pocket and pulled out a shilling. “This for your trouble of letting me in on an off day.” He pushed the silver coin through the bars, glad he had thought to bring it.

The guard grinned a wolfish smile. He lifted a hand that was truncated to a thumb and the first two fingers, angling from the second knuckle to the wrist in a long, puckered scar. Grabbing the small coin awkwardly, he slipped it into a pocket and pulled a key from under his shirt to open the barred gate.

At the squeal of the hinges, an inmate in the center of the room stopped pacing and stared. He was silver-haired but sturdy. Suddenly he was moving, grunting wordlessly, legs pumping as he rushed for the gate. Edward stepped back, alarmed. A burly man, another guard judging by the keys he carried, hit the lunatic in the chin with his elbow and the old man crumpled.

“Is she curable or incurable?” Edward’s guard asked, turning back to him from the commotion.

Edward stared at the old man on the floor. Waves of frustration radiated from the inmate as he rolled into a ball and sobbed. “Incurable,” Edward said faintly. That had been the doctor’s diagnosis on her admission.

“Right, then, I think I know her.”

The guard led Edward across the room and unlocked a door just in front of the bars to the women’s side. Edward followed him up a set of stairs, through another locked door to the right, and into the incurable women’s ward.

The smell hit him like a fist, sour and far stronger than below. Some women were chained to the walls or the floor, others were loose. Sores were untreated, feces was smeared about, and Edward’s shoes peeled from the sticky floor with a crackling sound. The echoes beat on his mind and his nerves until he thought he would begin raving as well. He wondered if even ten sovereigns could be worth this hell.

The guard walked ahead, oblivious to Edward’s torment. “Here y’are, mate.” He stopped and pointed. The woman was not chained but lay on her side on the filthy floor, unmoving, eyes wide. She was skeletal. “‘Fraid she won’t last much longer, she won’t eat no more.”

Tears stung Edward’s eyes as he took in the familiar pattern on the torn and faded dress that had once been her best, the brownish-blonde hair unwashed and matted with dirt, the narrow back that had cringed at echoes, but had been straight and strong when protecting him from his father’s drunken outbursts. He crouched down next to her, wondering if Bedlam would be his fate as well someday. He smothered the thought before it turned to Samuel and what his future might hold.

“Mum?” He said it quietly, as if not to disturb her. There was no response, no sign she recognized him.

“She ain’t spoke a word since she come here,” the guard said.

Edward didn’t need to wonder why. He could feel despair tolling from her like a great bell, ringing in his bones and chiming the sadness of her life. At least she wouldn’t suffer much longer. The will to die pulsed within her, stronger than blood. The echoes of it buffeted at him like a sad wind.

He wondered if he was strong enough to handle the intensity of her despair. Taking an echo of yearning or lust into his body was enough to muddle his brains and fill his heart with desire until he could exhale it into a phial; the prospect of taking in a sadness so deep that death was preferable terrified him. He felt for the phial in his pocket, reassuring himself he would only have to carry the emotion in his body until he was out the front door.

Edward kissed his mother gently on the forehead and said a silent prayer for her soul. Anxious to be gone from here, he tipped his head back and unlocked that strange place deep in his chest that he had discovered. The place that allowed him to harvest and hold the echoes.

He took a cautious breath, terrified that the emotions of two hundred lunatics would flood into him like a river finding an open weir gate. He knew his mother’s emotions well, though, and narrowed his focus on them. Her despair sifted into his lungs, sinking naturally to the spot beneath his breastbone. No other echoes followed. He breathed deeper, harvesting her sad bounty. When he had taken all he could hold, he locked the echoes in his chest.

Relief at his success lasted only a second before the echoes took effect. The terrible desolation of spirit was stronger than he could have imagined. It threatened to crush him to the floor. Despair and hopelessness overwhelmed him, suckling on his energy and will. He knew if he didn’t leave quickly, he might not leave at all. Edward pushed himself up from his knees, standing unsteadily.

“I’ll go now.” His voice was a whisper. The guard had seen nothing of his struggle; he nodded and led him back down the stairs.

The distance to the front door seemed twice what it had been before. Edward was despondent beyond tears, beyond words—beyond life. He held fast to the reason he had undertaken this awful task, the money that would help Samuel. He wondered if experiencing this despair was his penance for selling the echoes, inflicting them on the criminal, even if it was the man’s just due. When he finally reached the barred gate, the guard fumbled with the key.

Without warning, Edward was struck from behind. His body crashed into the bars and there was a sickening crunch from his coat pocket where he had placed the small phial. A sharp pain needled into his hip as a sliver of glass pierced the skin. His guard turned and swung at the old man who had run for the door when Edward arrived. The lunatic fell backward and the second guard wrestled the man to the floor.

When the two-fingered guard finally opened the gate, Edward threw himself out into the cool, fall air and stood on the front lawn, shaking. The fright of the incident was nothing to the horror of the broken phial. He slipped his hand gingerly into his pocket and pulled out the shards of glass, dropping them onto the lawn.

The journey home was torture. His mother’s hopelessness and misery dragged at him like a weight, trying to pull him to the ground. It whispered at him to give up, to give in, to lie down and die. It mercilessly nurtured every sorrow he had ever felt and revived them as if they were new. Near home he tripped and stumbled, falling to the gutter. Unwilling to get up again, he lay with his face against the horse piss and offal of the streets, and wished the sludge deep enough to drown him.