The Briar Archive

1. 1982

1982

“I don’t want to remember what we almost had, what we couldn’t save.”

Sel

I first found magic in the charred ruins of a madhouse, or rather that’s where magic, real magic, first found me. I remember the steps of the spiral staircase were blackened and warped from the fire. Yet somehow, the stairs still wound up to the second floor in a single, unbroken structure. The burned railing snaked along the warped metal supports, winding upward in a sickened, misshapen helix.

A shaft of cold morning light shone down the center of the staircase, illuminating the plaster, ash, and scorched paper cluttered on the floor of the five-story rotunda. It felt like I was looking up from the bottom of a well.

I wasn’t eager to test the stairs. The fire that gutted the New York City Lunatic Asylum had happened after decades of neglect and only served to make them more dangerous. But I was going to have to risk it. I needed to get to the second floor.

Only I wasn’t exactly sure why.

I wasn’t even supposed to be there. No one was. The old building on Roosevelt Island, known as the Octagon because of its shape, had been condemned since not long after it closed in 1956. And even though the place was named a Heritage Site in ’76, it was still a maze of post-fire broken glass and tetanus when I found myself there in 1982.

I was offered an assignment for the Times about companies wanting to turn the sliver of island into a paradise of condominiums. I would never have entertained the idea for the story if it hadn’t been for an unseasonably warm day where I’d been forced to open the only openable window in my apartment. I’d been pacing, pouring sweat, waiting for a call back from the paper about an edit I was bristling over, when the wind picked up and a charred piece of paper blew in through the window. I watched it flit across the room and land on the counter of the kitchenette, onto an open page of my notepad. It was a piece of an illegible letter written decades prior; all I could read was the name of the asylum on the letterhead. A wind had picked it up from the corpse of the ruin, carried it down the East River, and dropped it into the apartment of the man assigned to report about it. I was never much for signs or superstitions, but from that moment, the need to see that place stuck with me like a stone in my shoe, always there, digging in, uncomfortable and annoying until I addressed it. And the only way to address it, understand it, was to investigate it. Which is what I do.

I explained my need to see it, the ruin, by reasoning that it would be helpful to get a feel for the place, an angle for the story, to try to see why anyone would want to build a community around an abandoned insane asylum. And I was looking for a corruption slant because, let’s face it, there was always a corruption slant in New York real estate.

When I first got there, something about the place called to me. It’s hard to explain, but I needed to get inside and take a look around. In fairness, I was naturally nosy. It was a trait that made me a halfway decent journalist. Not the best writer, but a good digger. And relentless. But this time, there was something else. Something that I couldn’t quantify; I only knew that if I didn’t explore the second floor, I’d regret it.

Even as I made my way into the building, I knew it was a stupid idea. I was hard pressed to think of any reason for sneaking into a decrepit and abandoned insane asylum other than the thrill of being freaked out coupled with a sheer lack of common sense. I had spent enough time doing research for the crime desk to be well aware of what happened in abandoned buildings. Anyone could have been squatting inside, no matter how hard authorities had tried to keep it boarded up.

And, of course, there were the rumors of it being haunted, not that I believed in such a thing. But there was no denying that, to date, it was the creepiest place I had ever been.

When I put my foot on the bottom stair, it creaked, but held. I inched my way upward, testing one step after another. I held onto the scorched railing, my palm kicking up black bits of burnt wood as it slid along. The flakes of wood and ash fell, glinting in the light that shone down the central column of the staircase. A breeze must have caught them, because they began to flit around like butterflies. It was such a convincing illusion that I stood transfixed, watching the ash butterflies ride on a breeze that, oddly, I couldn’t feel.

It was quite possible that they were real butterflies. Much of the building’s interior was exposed to the elements, after all. But I had never seen butterflies so ashen dark before. I came back to myself, attributing the uncanny sensation that the sight had stirred in me to a lack of morning coffee, my lifeblood, and climbed the rest of the way.

The second floor wasn’t nearly as dilapidated as the first—most likely due to fewer trespassers being willing to brave the well of stairs. There were holes in the floor, and the soot-smeared stone walls were flaked and chipped. The asylum had been built with the blue-gray stone found on the island, so the fire wasn’t able to consume the bones of the building, only its flesh.

Even though there was plenty of light coming in from the windows and the holes in the ceiling, the shadows were harsher, darker than usual. I began to imagine what the place must have looked like when there had been patients there—what it would have sounded like when it had been full of the mentally ill, tended to by a cadre of doctors and nurses schooled in the barbaric mental health treatments of the nineteenth century. The idea wasn’t exactly a calming one.

I moved into the shadows and found a hallway. At this point, my logical self was telling me there was no reason for me to be inside the building. Nothing here had anything to do with the story I was writing. But it didn’t matter. As soon as I’d pulled up to the building, I’d known there was something inside that I needed to see. Truthfully, even before that. The moment the piece of debris landed on the blank page of my notepad, I knew. There was a story out there on that lonely sliver of island, and it was calling me.

Most of the rooms along the hallway were empty except for a handful of discarded tables and chairs, rusted or rotted through so completely that they were nothing more than skeletons of the furniture they once had been. One room, however, was littered with papers. Waterlogged newspapers, books, and magazines were strewn across the floor like autumn leaves. The fire hadn’t reached this part of the building, only smoke, so the detritus that had collected over the years remained intact, if warped and faded by the elements.

The vast majority of the papers and magazines were from the mid-twentieth century. Most fell apart when I tried to pick them up or were too weathered to read, but on a small wooden stool in the corner of the room stood a stack of books that looked relatively unscathed from years of isolation.

I scanned the spines out of curiosity. It was hard to read many of the titles, since they had faded over the years. (And I should say I committed very little of this to memory, I just keep incredible notes.) But I saw a few volumes of The Universal Library of Music; Robin Hood, illustrated by Frank Goodwin; and Papyrus Leaves, which had a gorgeously illustrated blue and gold spine that had survived the years surprisingly well. But the book that really caught my eye was once black, and now faded gray. Its title was unreadable, but I instantly recognized the image of a hippocampus at the base of the book’s spine. The strange creature, similar to a seahorse, was the mascot for Ackerly Green Publishing.

It took me a moment to remember exactly how I recognized the hippocampus, but then it hit me. Ackerly Green published a book I had desperately loved as a child, though I couldn’t remember its name. I couldn’t remember the characters, or even the story, but the idea of the book, the feeling it triggered in me, came rushing back through the decades. Seeing that little logo brought back vivid feelings of sitting on my bed and reading well into the morning hours—reading a book I’d loved so dearly but somehow couldn’t seem to recall at all.

It was a moment much like when I’d found my old childhood copy of the Berenstain Bears book, Bears in the Night. I had forgotten that book even existed, but when I’d seen the cover at the bottom of a box filled with Little Golden Books, my heart had skipped a beat, and I’d marveled at the idea that a book I’d read dozens of times as a child could have fallen so completely from my mind—but also somehow stayed with me, like a water stain on wood. Even looking at the cover, I couldn’t remember the story—only that I’d loved it, and I was excited to share it with my little boy, Sebastian, hoping he would get as much joy from it as I did.

I was about to examine the Ackerly Green book more closely when I heard crunching footsteps behind me. They were slow, heavy, deliberate. I held my breath, unsure of what to do. I could think of a dozen reasons someone would be lurking around up here and none of them were pleasant.

When the footsteps stopped directly behind me, I turned and winced. Someone clicked a flashlight directly in my eyes.

“What are you doing?”

“Sorry, I was just—”

“You’re trespassing is what you’re doing.”

When my eyes adjusted, I could see the silhouette of a police officer, a good head taller than me (though who isn’t) with one hand on his holstered sidearm.

“Yeah, my name’s Martin Rank,” I said. “I’m a writer for the New York Times.”

“I don’t care if you’re Woodward and Bernstein put together, you’re not allowed in here.”

“You’re right, you’re right. Just following up on a story. I’m all done.”

The officer followed me down the well of stairs and out to my car. “Don’t let me catch you here again,” he said.

I thanked him and drove off.

I was so angry with myself for not grabbing the book when I had the chance. It was probably too musty to be legible. Still, I would have liked to have had it, whatever title it was. I hadn’t heard of Ackerly Green since I was a kid, but now I couldn’t stop thinking of that book. The unnamed book I’d loved so much. I had to find a copy.

It was a worm, burrowing through my mind. I knew the feel of the book, the smell, the way I’d liked to pick at the embossed creature on the spine with my fingernail. But, just like with that Berenstain Bears book, I couldn’t remember what the story was. I hadn’t retained any detail of the book’s contents, or even the title. It didn’t matter, though. I’d know soon enough.

At least I thought I would.

There wasn’t a single librarian or bookstore clerk in the city that had any idea what I was going on about. I checked newspaper archives, even called the Library of Congress. As far as the world was concerned, the unnamed book from my memory didn’t exist.

As for Ackerly Green, records showed the company had put out a couple of potboiler titles for adults in the 50s, but had stopped publishing a few years after the asylum was abandoned.

The asylum.

Exactly two days after the officer told me to never step foot inside the Octagon again, I went back. If everything went well, I wouldn’t be there for very long. I’d get in, grab the book, and get out. Five minutes, tops. Maybe it would have some useful detail inside, a further reading list, an address I could write to, something.

It took me no time at all to find my way back up to the second floor and the littered room. The stack of books was still there on the stool—but the Ackerly Green book was missing. Oddly, it didn’t seem like the stack had been disturbed. There was still a heavy layer of dust and dirt on the top book, and when I lifted the stack to go through them one by one, a rectangular discoloration on the seat of the stool indicated just how long the stack had been there. If anyone had moved the books, they’d put them back exactly as they’d been.

I went through each volume, examined each spine, but there was no Ackerly Green book there. Had I imagined it? I couldn’t have. But then why wasn’t it there? And why was I so bothered by it in the first place? And why would I venture alone into an abandoned insane asylum against the orders of the police to find a book?

It made me angry, like a joke had been played on me. A joke I didn’t understand. The book was there somewhere. It had to be. I put the stack back on the stool and started rummaging through the sea of magazines and newspapers strewn on the floor. But after fifteen minutes, the only books I’d found were a few medical texts and a couple of moldering romance novels.

I sat on the floor in disbelief. Maybe I hadn’t seen the book. It was possible that something in this room had simply sparked my childhood memory. A trick of light or synapses misfiring. But it still didn’t explain why I couldn’t remember the story. The missing book was frustrating, but the missing memories?

As I sat, embarrassed and angry, I noticed movement on the stack of books—a play of light and shadow that, for a moment, I mistook for the movement of a person in the doorway. I leaned closer and saw, there on top of the books, a small black butterfly. Its wings moved slowly, the same ashen color as the butterflies I had imagined the other day on the spiral staircase. Or I thought I had imagined. They must have been real butterflies after all.

I stood and crept toward it, not wanting to scare it away, but it took to the air the moment I got too close. Instead of flying toward the door and daylight, it fluttered into the shadows in the corner of the room. I don’t know why, but I chased after it. I didn’t know if I was trying to catch it or simply see where it was going, but it didn’t matter. The butterfly flitted before me for only a few seconds before disappearing into the darkness.