I stood outside the nurse’s office, a few inches away from the closed door.

“Okay,” I whispered. “You’ve got this, Emerra. So he’s a little creepy! Everything about this is creepy. Your whole life after death has been creepy, and the fact you have a life after death is pretty creepy too. You could be buddies! Right? Good.”

I lifted my hand but lowered it again without knocking.

Conrad was leaning on the wall a few feet to my side. “Do you want me to go in?”

“I said I’ve got this!” I insisted. “You just stand there and…be fluffy.”

“Can do.”

I didn’t want to confirm Conrad’s (accurate) suspicion that I was a coward, so I knocked before I could think better of it, opened the door before I could stop myself, and walked inside.

Norris was sitting in a chair by the window, reading a book. When he saw me, he closed it.

“Miss Cole, good morning. Do you need my assistance? Perhaps you’re feeling faint again.”

I blurted out, “No!” Then I smiled and tried to sound more like a normal person. “I’m fine. Thank you.”

“No complications from your…anemia?” He raised one of his long, pasty fingers and motioned to my face. “If you’ll forgive me for saying so, it looks like you haven’t been sleeping well.”

“I’m actually here to ask you something. It’s a…a personal question.”

Way to go, Emerra, I thought. That was definitely something a normal person would say. He’ll never suspect you’re a weirdo—though he might think you’re trying to ask him out.

His pale blue eyes stayed fixed on me, without blinking, for one or two lifetimes. Then he put his book down on the window sill beside him.

“You may ask,” he said.

“Why do you work here?”

He gazed at me some more.

I’m never one to leave an uncomfortable silence alone when I could, instead, be filling it with awkward conversation.

“You said you worked here because you collected the bizarre, but you’ve been working here since the school was founded. Right?”

“Yes.”

“The psychics only started appearing a year ago, which means you couldn’t have been here because of them. I thought maybe there was something else weird about this place.”

His strange smile ticked up the edges of his mouth.

“That’s quite astute of you, Miss Cole. I wonder if you’ve already guessed what it is.”

“Does it have anything to do with the fact you call this place ‘Bedlam?’”

He unfolded himself from his chair and walked toward me, stopping only when he was an inch too close.

I forced myself not to step back, but nothing could stop me from leaning away.

“Very good, Miss Cole.”

He abruptly turned toward the middle of the room and motioned for me to follow him.

I followed at a distance.

Instead of going to the door that led to the rest of the school, he turned toward the door on the opposite wall. He opened it wide and walked in without waiting for me.

I hesitated on the threshold.

“My personal rooms,” he said. “I have to be available at all hours, so I live beside my office.” He paused. “You may come in.”

After a slight hesitation, I did.

He hadn’t turned on the lights, but the faint sunlight from the cloudy day filtered in through the tall window, highlighting the deep shadows, making all the shapes stand out. While Turner’s room had the easy clutter of a lived-in home, Norris’s room was barren in the center, while the edges were crowded with stuff.

There were framed newspaper clippings hung on the wall. He had numerous shelves, covered with items. There was a (hopefully) fake taxidermy of a foot-long, mummified mermaid, neatly arranged bones, some kind of hood, a plague doctor’s mask that looked old enough to be real, and a snake skin, carefully coiled for display. A worn doll with seven fingers on each tiny ceramic hand sat beside a marionette puppet with a cracked face. They were leaning against each other, as if they were in love. In the window were several potted plants. As I got closer, I saw they were labeled: hemlock, nightshade, snakeroot, foxglove. Everything in the room was spaced so that, no matter where you stood, you could see as many of the objects as possible. The man lived in a horror museum.

Norris was going through his bookshelf. The long, chipped nail of his index finger tapped on each spine as he worked his way down the row.

“Ah,” he murmured. “Here we are.”

He pulled out a binder that was designed to look like a leather-bound book. He walked over to the small desk by the window, put it down, and opened it.

As he talked, I crept closer.

“In 1919, the Lurendells sold Setlan on Lee to another private owner, one Mr. Efans. He defaulted on his loans only seven years later, so it was sold, at cost, to the Allards, who, after a few changes, turned it into what would become one of the most infamous insane asylums of all time.”

I had moved close enough to see what was in the binder. They were photocopies of newspaper articles, all meticulously cut out and mounted behind protective covers.

This story has been taken without authorization. Report any sightings.

HORRORS AT ALLARDS ASYLUM

EVERYDAY ATROCITIES FOR THE FEEBLE MINDED

I flipped through the stiff pages, taking in the images and the headlines, as Norris went on.

“Dr. Allard, himself, was only modestly more guilty than most doctors. His methods would be considered barbaric by today’s standards, but at the time, they were either the tried-and-true treatments or cutting-edge research.”

My voice was barely above a whisper: “What kind of treatments?”

“It varied. Allard was more of a pragmatist than a theorist. He had his pet ideas, but he’d try anything so long as there was a chance it would work. His tamer techniques included restraints, tranquilizing chairs, mercury pills—”

“Mercury pills?”

“They were thought to be a safe and useful remedy. But Dr. Allard preferred barbital, and he used it often.”

“Barbital?”

“A barbiturate. A sedative. He often drugged his patients—for their own good.”

“Those were his tamer treatments?”

“Certainly.” Norris tilted his head; it rotated around his fixed eyes. “Do you know what malarial treatment is, Miss Cole?”

I shook my head.

“Allard would inject his patients with the malarial parasite to induce a fever. For insulin shock treatment, he injected large amounts of insulin in them to put them in a coma. Before succumbing to the coma, they were often wracked by seizures. In 1934 Meduna found an alternative way to induce these seizures—he injected them with a cardiac stimulant.”

“Why?”

“They believed that it helped. When electro-convulsive treatment was introduced, Dr. Allard was among the first to begin experimenting with it. He also ascribed to Dr. Cotton’s belief that infection in the body led to mental illness, so he performed hundreds of surgeries, everything from removing teeth to taking out appendixes, gallbladders, and parts of the intestines where he thought infection could linger.”

The page of the album sat heavy in my dull, numb hand. How could every new detail be more disturbing than the last? I knew I needed to learn everything I could, but searching for another question felt like slowly reaching my arm into a dark closet coated in spider webs.

“Did he do autopsies?” I asked.

“It was standard. After all, he was trying to find evidence that madness had its roots in physical pathology. Allard did other surgeries as well. Castration. Removal of ovaries. It’s hard to say if it was to prevent unwanted pregnancies among the patients or because he believed that the mentally ill shouldn’t be allowed to reproduce.”

“He was a monster,” I said.

“He was a doctor. Too quick to use the barbital, but otherwise, a perfect example of a man of his times.”

I looked back down at the binder and flipped a few more pages. After the articles there was a series of photocopied pictures. Some of the copies were defective; subtle gray shadows became black shapes with grainy edges and glaring white highlights. I could make out a padded room. A stained straight jacket. A small cell with bars set in the window. Chains. A pharmacy. A group of men, all dressed in the same collarless shirt, dark pants, and suspenders, working in the garden beside a stone wall. A large rectangular room lined with a row of tubs. Each tub was covered by a heavy, sagging cloth.

My hands started shaking.

“What’s this?” I asked.

Norris glanced down. “Hydrotherapy. Mostly harmless.”

My trembling grew worse. “How is it mostly harmless?”

“For most patients, it was a form of relaxation. Better than a drug-induced stupor, wouldn’t you agree?”

My voice rose. “That water was freezing! They were put in bound. I couldn’t move my arms!”

My heart lurched. I had said that. I had actually said that out loud.

Norris didn’t seem to notice.

“Manic-depressive psychoses were often treated with cold water therapy, and binding a patient was common practice if they tried to resist their treatment.”

“You mean if they resisted anything.”

The nurse’s head drifted down in a slow nod, then he raised it to gaze out the window.

“At the time it was almost impossible to get a license to open a new asylum,” he said. “No matter how well meaning the director was, most of them had to deal with severe overcrowding. I wonder how long it took for good intentions to become everyday atrocities. Women were locked inside for years because it was the men that tended the yards. The well-behaved had to participate in work therapy that became something very close to slave labor, while the resistive were restrained because it was easier than fighting them. You’d look the other way when there was a complaint about one of the wardens because at least they were willing to work there, and you were always short-staffed.”

He turned, and his eyes locked on mine.

“It’s almost like a school, isn’t it?” he said.

He let out one of his three-huff laughs.

I didn’t think it was funny.

“They had problems with their wardens,” I prompted.

“Oh, yes.” Norris reached down and flipped through the binder. “Most of their problems were with the wardens. The scandal was terrible. Practically every accusation possible was brought up. Abuse. Rape. Neglect. Harassments. Cruel punishments for arbitrary rules. It was rumored to be more like a prison camp than an asylum.”

He stopped at a page full of portraits. There were five men and one woman. Each one had a side-view and front-view shot. Their names were scrawled across the bottom in white.

He pointed. “These three were eventually convicted of manslaughter, although two of them had their charges dropped after serving for ten years.” He pointed to the woman. “She got away with everything because no one believed that a woman could ever do what she was accused of.”

“Was she guilty?”

“I don’t think we’ll ever know the truth. I tried to compare the testimonies of the patients to the few reports that made it into the hospital’s files, but as you can imagine, most of the incidents were kept off the record.”

“Why were the men found guilty of manslaughter? Did they kill someone?”

“They probably killed lots of people, Miss Cole—in their own small ways. When you drive someone to suicide by using therapy as a punishment, or kill them by neglecting necessary care, it’s less dramatic than beating them to death, but the person’s still dead.”

“They beat someone to death?”

“They tied five of the most violent patients together with rope. The wardens said that it was to corral and control them, but it was also strictly against Allard’s practice. He had solitary confinement rooms set aside for the most resistive patients. I wonder if they did it for entertainment purposes. While the patients were alone together, a fight broke out. Two of them were killed. The first was throttled, the other had been stomped to death. When the wardens returned, they beat the remaining three, supposedly to subdue them. One of those three died from his injuries. Unfortunately for the wardens, he was the son of a rather prominent man—thus, the investigation.”

“What happened after that?”

“The asylum was closed down. After the trial, Allard and his wife retired to South America. They could escape their reputation. The building could not. Allard’s lawyer was unable to find a buyer until five years later. By then the manor was in terrible condition. An investor bought it in 1947 and did his best to turn it into a profitable apartment building, but it failed less than five years later. Ever since then, it’s passed from owner to owner, none of them staying for longer than ten years. Between owners it rots away, abandoned and empty.” His lips quirked up in a smile. “Bizarre, isn’t it?”

A second later, I managed to break away from the staring contest. I reached down and closed the binder. “I don’t think it’s bizarre for people to want to avoid a building with that kind of history.”

“Then you know nothing about people, Miss Cole. We’re drawn to the macabre. Can’t you see all the early gawkers, men in suits or working clothes, women in their dresses, standing outside the gate, high on their toes, trying to get a glimpse of the building where it all happened?”

I could almost see them. The crowd, gazing in, some with their eyes half turned away, whispering to each other because it only felt right to whisper. The wall that had been built to keep the patients in became all that kept the public out.

Norris leaned in, much too close. I didn’t back away.

He said, “You can’t imagine how thrilled I was when I heard that there was an opening for a nurse here. At last I would be able to see the place for myself, match all the rooms to the photos—maybe learn why no one seems to be able to live here.”

“And the psychics?”

He shrugged. “A happy accident. Very amusing and, perhaps…a bit creepy. Don’t you think?”