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Old 03-17-2017, 06:39 AM   #107
Icelander
 
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Join Date: Mar 2006
Location: Iceland*
Default A Candy-colored Clown They Call the Sandman

The crackle of the radio one floor up is not loud enough to be audible to Cherry Bell or Dr. Anderson. A dull whoosh that might be a muted explosion at least one building away is, though, and they both look questioningly at Taylor. He grabs Bell by the arm and nods at Dr. Anderson while leading her up the stairs.

Taylor: “Gots one o’ them cell phones, doc? Call O’Toole. Ask him if’n he be in C Wing an’ if he done burnt hisself. If’n he kin walk, tell him to meet in the D Wing stairwell real soon. If’n he cain’t walk or ainīt in C Wing, try an’ figure another way to meet up. We’s gonna be back directly. An’, uh, mebbe try them Coast Guard boys if’n ya kin get through?”

Dr. Anderson gives Taylor a doubtful look while he’s talking, but immediately takes out his cell phone and looks up the phone number he saved for Special Agent O’Toole. To his surprise, he gets a ring tone when he presses it. It takes quite a few rings for anyone to answer, however, and Bell and Taylor have disappeared from Anderson’s sight onto the ground floor by the time his phone call starts.

Agent O’Toole: “…----ing ----etty ---- ----! Yeah?”
Dr. Anderson: “This is Dr. Michael Anderson. Perhaps you recall me from earlier. I am calling to ask you to meet me in the D Wing stairwell as soon as possible. Are you quite all right, O’Toole?”
O’Toole: “----ing magic. I think I set off some kind of incendiary -----ing trap, but at least I’m not on fire. The ----ing room is, which is some crazy ----ing ----, but I stayed out. Pissah, ain’t it?”
Anderson: “Can you make it to the stairwell down to the D Wing cellar in two minutes? Not the dining hall one, the lobby, the one closest to the central building?”
O’Toole: “Hell, that’s only like three hundred feet. If I can’t, you can trade my spaz ass to the ----ing Yankees!”

Danny O’Toole is standing in a corridor on the ground floor of the abandoned C Wing. The door he had been trying to open evidently triggered an incendiary device inside the room, which O’Toole considers pretty nuts. Manhanock Asylum for the Criminally Insane was already like something out of a Batman movie or a Japanese horror game and that was before the entire guard force went full rehtahd, obsessing over psycho bitch Bell like a bunch of unhinged John Cusacks in the 80s. Chick was mad hot, had that sexy kind of easily corrupted innocence shtick going on, but going Apocalypse Now fighting over who’d stick their dick in crazy seemed excessive, even for Maine-iacs.

----, that Green Beret ---hole, Taylor, had rigged some kind of explosive trap in G Wing for the guards earlier. Maybe he was still with Dr. Anderson and had been through this wing too, leaving ----ing Rambo-style traps like the goddamn PTSD Fairy. Though ---- knows if that’s better or worse than some of the guards having developed a bad case of incendiary IRA-envy to go along with their Fatal Attraction to Little Miss Bunny-Boiler.

O’Toole has another happy thought, maybe the guards having gone ape---- means that the criminally insane inmates are running free in the world’s looniest riot, some of them having sought shelter in the abandoned wings. Maybe the incendiary device was some pyro-spaz’s latest arts & crafts project.

O’Toole figures that anyone in C Wing might have heard the fireball in the room and it won’t take long for the flames in there to start making plenty of noise. He therefore draws his M9 pistol and runs northeast down the hall heading for D Wing. It’s maybe a hundred feet to the C Wing lobby and the stairwell there and O’Toole slows down to cross it, passing over to D Wing through a connecting corridor between the Kirkbride Plan wings.

Emerging into the dining hall of D Wing, O’Toole moves only slightly over a walking speed, being unsure whether there might be guards walking in the halls of D Wing. It’s abandoned, yes, but the guards also saw him running toward it earlier and they might still be looking for him. O’Toole wishes he hadn’t cut off the phone call before he asked whether that Green Beret nutcase was with Doc Anderson. Yeah, sure, Taylor probably was ax-crazy behind that butter-wouldn’t-melt aw-shucks Forrest Gump thing of his, but at least he didn’t seem to have any immediate homicidal plans for O’Toole, whereas the guards probably did.

---

After O'Toole ended the phone call, Dr. Anderson closed his eyes and concentrated. He felt Mrs. York sleeping close to him, but ignored her for now, scanning for other dream signatures. On the floor above him, maybe twenty feet up and 40-50’ north, there were four sleeping men. Three were mildly sedated and might be suffering from minor aches. The fourth had been heavily drugged, but his mind was still overwhelmed by a constant barrage of awful pain from what appeared to be life-threatening injury suffered recently. His condition can barely pass for sleep and he is unable to reach a dream state.

Dr. Anderson can tell that all four men are confused, frightened and psychologically troubled. Without taking the time to examine each one, he cannot tell why or how, but he figures that all of them have been living under great stress for a long time and suffered a series of psychological shocks and repeated trauma. If they are mental patients, they are hopefully recently arrived patients, as otherwise, Manhanock Asylum for the Criminally Insane has become a truly terrible place.

There do not appear to be any sleepers on the second floor of either the rear central building or the main building in the centre of Manhanock Asylum. On the third floor, however, Dr. Anderson can detect a man moving in and out of fitful sleep, somewhere on the cusp between drug-induced unconsciousness and real sleep. In the same room, there is another individual who is not asleep, but almost seems to be in a wakeful dreaming state, which he maintains by repetitive low chanting. There is also a third man, sleeping, despite obviously having been drugged.

That third man has events running through his mind which will form the substance of his dreams when he enters an REM state. Dr. Anderson notes that there is an image of Agent O’Toole there, along with anger, resentment and contempt. Dream-O’Toole is given a pair of rat ears and a long ratty tail, running around the sleeper with mocking cheeps.

After determining that there are no other sleepers within range, Dr. Anderson focuses on his patient, Mrs. York. She is dreaming, apparently being chased through dark tunnels by a figure not unlike Terry Amiti, except larger and more fearsome. She is trying to reach an even larger figure holding out arms protectively. That figure has the face of Agent O’Toole and is backlit by lights from several flashlights. The tunnels Mrs. York is running through are identical to the ones close to where she was found and it is remarkable how soon identical stretches of them repeat.

As far as Dr. Anderson can determine, every aspect of the dream is modelled on sensory images that must result from direct experience over the the last fews days and there is little evidence of older, subconscious imagery providing emotional subtext. The sensory images are fairly vivid and detailed, but limited to a very personal viewpoint, without any sense of a larger world. Dr. Anderson takes a deep breath and sits down on the stairs before apparently falling asleep as he enters Mrs. York’s dream to investigate more closely.

Dr. Anderson takes care to stay an invisible observer, but he gets the sense that even if he didn’t, Mrs. York might have trouble noticing him. Her brain seems to be functioning adequately and her memory over the last few days might be much more reliable than should be the case for a patient who has had Alzheimer’s Disease for more than a decade, but she seems to be sorely lacking the buttress of personal memories reaching back a lifetime that makes a person who she is. Her world is limited to the tunnels beneath Manhanock Asylum, with only a few fleeting snatches of memories seeming older than a few weeks.

The massive trauma to her head from the blunt force injury that had broken her skull and many facial bones seems to have caused major damage to her brain and whatever had partially fixed it had not been able to prevent some loss of memory. New nerve and brain cells might be successfully integrated into the central nervous system by whatever process had been used with Mrs. York, but that didn’t mean that they could be grown identical to cells shaped by events, complete with her memories. Average mental capacity or not, without any life experience or many memories to provide a sense of self, Mrs. York seemed to be extremely naïve, impressionable and lacking in initiative.

Mrs. York’s tiresome dream seemed to involve nothing but endless sequences of a giant-sized Danny O’Toole saving her from various threats in the darkness and carrying her into the light. Sometimes he didn’t arrive and she found herself swallowed by the darkness itself, falling, falling, into silence and emptiness. Romantic emotions toward her imaginary rescuer are childishly free of physical desire, though Terry Amiti had connotations of terrors of violation. Mrs. York didn’t even dream about food or drink in her rescue fantasy, probably because she had forgotten every positive association they could have.

Dr. Anderson knows he should gather more data before treating Mrs. York in any way. On the other hand, he really doesn’t want her to wake up with a demoniac lust for his human flesh. If she isn’t a cannibal, instilling an aversion toward eating people will presumably change little. So Dr. Anderson starts weaving a dream, one where Mrs. York is all the diners as well as the main course. She ought to be easy to terrify enough for her to never want to eat anything even resembling human flesh. It's a kindness, really. And he really wants to know if it will work.
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Last edited by Icelander; 03-23-2017 at 08:26 PM.
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