Samuel Crane

Chapter 3

            I can hear the guard calling my name it’s time to go back in our torture chambers for another night. Time to hear the screams of people losing their minds, the sounds of drills in the far corridor where they take people to drill in their skulls thinking it will make them normal again. The screams of the people in pain from the sharp metal spike going into their brain through their nose, Dr. Davis performing another lobotomy. What he calls “the cure to mental illness”.

            Hahaha, yeah, that’s why he gets the big bucks from the state government for this lunatic asylum. Let me explain.

            This place is so over-crowded that people aren’t cared for. They don’t even know where to put them. The people who have been here the longest, with no family coming for over five years, are dumped in the basement, where they roam around. Nobody goes down there. Rumors are that they survive off eating the bodies of the old and the weak. And the ones who are sick with tuberculosis? They’re sent there as soon as they’re admitted. They don’t let families visit. They tell the families at the front door when they are dropped off.

“Think of them as dead and never look back.”

And they weren’t kidding. The families never do come back to check on the people with tuberculosis or the ones the f*****g judges call mentally insane. This has been going on since they first opened mental institutions.

            Sad the way people can write off others because they have an illness. That’s one reason I’m in here. The court found me insane for the acts I committed over the past years. Acts some call me a hero for and others a murderer. Some love me, some hate me, and some want to see me hang or burned. They say I am evil; but the acts I committed weren’t toward good people but to the ones who did bad things to others. Still doesn’t justify what I’ve done, but I think of myself more as a vigilante than a killer.

            Probably one of the reasons nobody bothers me inside this place. I haven’t spoken to a doctor in almost four years, since I was committed. Maybe it is the way I could see into their souls and get in their minds. I had the pleasure of meeting the last doctor in a dark room one night. I went without a fuss; I knew what they were going to try to do. Once the door closed with just me and the doctor, I turned and looked down into his eyes with a smile on my face. I absorbed into his body and let him feel the pain of every person he’d tortured. The nurse who walked in to escort me back to my room asked the doctor if he was all right. He replied,

            “Never let anyone experiment on this man ever, do you understand me?” The nurse, frightened, answered and did what the doctor ordered. She removed my file from the cabinet and put it away somewhere in the old files in the storage building.

            Unfortunately, the nurse contracted tuberculosis and never left this place; she went missing for some time until a custodian found what was left of her body on the floor of an old abandoned room in one of the other buildings on the property. The doctor leapt off the roof that night and died.

            I don’t make friends here, I don’t talk to anyone. Most of the people don’t talk, they just laugh abruptly for no reason, or walk around lost; some pick at the walls as if they are looking for something. The mind is strange in these humans, but the medication they give them makes them a lot worse than they really are. This is how they keep them in here; nobody gets out, not even some of the nurses.

            The guard is still calling my name. If I don’t walk over to him he will use force to make me move, so I’d better get up and go.

            “Crane, let’s go before I come over there and make you.”

            “Yes, master,” I say to myself as I raise my hand. We walk through the gates, down the corridor to the next, pushing and shoving me the whole time. I don't let it bother me much. I realize the guards in here have severe control issues.

   The sound of his keys triggers a memory as he unlocks the door to my room. I hesitate to go in for a second.

            “I said don’t f**k with me, Crane.”

            He slams his club into the backs of my leg dropping me to my knees. I fall into the room on my back.

            “I told you I don’t care what anyone says about you. I will make you do what I want you to do, when I want you to do it.”

            Lying on my back, I stare at this sorry soul of a man. He has no clue, no clue at all about me.

            The memories[VA1] [VA2]  of New Mexico still runs like a film in my head. I remember I stopped at a gas station-s***h-truck stop on an old highway. I walked up to the bathroom out in the back of the place and I heard a man talking to a woman, so I stopped just before the corner and listened. She was looking for a trick to turn for money and the trucker kept shaking his keys in his hand. They argued over the price then words were exchanged in moans. I knew what they were doing so I waited like anyone else would. But then I heard a choking sound and walked around the corner of the building. The trucker saw me and yelled,

“Mind your own business! I’m busy here.”

I kept walking towards the sound of the keys as he choked the life from the woman. I watched him for a few seconds, and my body started burning just like the night in the barn when I was young. I remember grabbing the man by the throat with my teeth, ripping it out. I ran off into the woods behind the station for a while. I must have fallen asleep, because I woke up in a patch of long grass. I got up and walked back to my truck. It was still dark out; I don’t remember what time it was. But as I walked to my truck I heard that woman’s voice. I glanced over and she was telling the cops that a half-man/half-coyote creature came out of the dark and grabbed the trucker by the throat, tearing it out. If wasn’t for that creature she’d be dead.

I was puzzled. I didn’t remember a coyote, and what the hell was she talking about? I looked down at myself. I was human like everyone else. I got into my truck and sped away to the next town, where I bought a bottle to drown in so I could get rid of the crazy images and strange feelings I had.

That’s when I ended up in the desert at the four corners at night. That’s when I found out what I was and what I could do.