Writings to Stem Your Existential Dread

The Other Side of the Bridge

The Other Side of the Bridge

Victoria K Martin

In cell 17 at Cochrane Women’s Asylum, Patient 505 began her nightly ritual. She carefully placed her Bible in the middle of her bed and sat on it, before nattering away to herself, her face buried in her hands. Occasionally she would stop to scratch her scalp, now exposed since her prized blonde hair had been shorn off and sold to a local wigmaker. But these pauses were brief, as she continued talking to herself as if her life depended on it.

One of the guards paused to look in the door for a moment before shaking his head. She had been a good-looking woman when she arrived several weeks earlier—such a shame she was crazy as a loon.

***

Hours later, her ritual finished, Patient 505 attempted to sleep. Her slumber was hardly restful however, as it came filled with dark dreams and terrors. Some were familiar, built out of memories and filled with Benjamin’s lifeless face. Months ago, she had believed this the worst nightmare she could experience, her mind toying with her by dangling the life she no longer had.

She knew better now. New images appeared before her closed eyes, her fellow patients turned into banshees, screaming their terror, pain, and rage—or maybe those feelings were actually her own.

The only respite came when she woke in the darkness and scrambled to the window of her cell. Like all patients, her view was primarily of the water surrounding the island on which the asylum was built. On clear nights, it shone and sparkled with stars and the moon. But that was not what Patient 505 looked at when she needed to remember what hope felt like. Instead, her eyes fixed on the long, narrow stone bridge that connected the island to the mainland.

One day, that bridge would take her home again. She knew this with a certainty that some here would call mad—though given how freely madness was diagnosed here, that term was almost meaningless to her now. But it wasn’t time to leave, not yet.

She had to do more to feel like she’d earned her keep.

***

The rusting gears groaned over Patient 505’s head, and she braced herself, as did the other patients chained around her. The woman beside her—no, the girl beside her, she was too young to call a woman—began to moan softly, shaking back and forth. Every few seconds she spoke what sounded like a prayer, the words indecipherable.

“It’s just water,” Patient 505 told the girl.

One of the other patients shook her head. “She don’t understand. That’s what got her here, she don’t speak a word of English.”

There was so much more to say but no time as the water came pouring down, freezing cold and reddish brown. Patient 505 shivered as it ran over her naked skin, wondering as she always did whether this made her cleaner or filthier. The smell strongly suggested the latter, the same slightly-spoilt stench that came from their gruel. She suspected that the shower machine was also used to make the slop they passed off as food, that it was just a case of waste not, want not.

Before coming here, she’d had no idea that efficiency could be terrifying.

***

“As awful as the showers are, there are worse things. The worst of them all is the place called the Thunder Room. Not everyone goes there, and I—”

Patient 505 paused, listening carefully, her right hand covering her mouth. At first, all she could hear was the soft whirring of her ring and the metallic clangs from the mechanism hidden inside her hollow Bible.

“I haven’t had the courage to get them to send me inside but I’ve heard the screams, smelt burnt hair and flesh.”

She paused again. This time, something new joined the soundscape: the steady rhythm of footsteps.

“O, what a noble mind is here o’erthrown!” she muttered into her ring. “The courtier’s, soldier’s, scholar’s, eye, tongue, sword, th’ expectation and rose of the fair state, the glass of fashion and the mould of form, th’ observ’d of all observers, quite, quite down!”

The guard walked by without a glance. It was a relief and a slap in the face. She shifted slightly so that she could look outside, eyes fixed on the bridge to safety and freedom.

“I was sane when I got here but I can feel myself slipping. This place is the cause, not the cure.”

***

“Mrs Turner?”

The name hardly felt like hers anymore, nor the life that went with it. In the two weeks she’d been here—the longest two weeks of her life—Charlotte Turner had been erased and Patient 505 took her place.

The guard opened the door. “Your family is here to claim you. Gather your things and come with me.”

She gathered her Bible, murmured a prayer to whoever might be listening that the hidden recording device would remain undetected, and followed. The guard walked swiftly and Charlotte struggled to keep up, almost tripping over her own feet several times. She expected to go directly to the exit but instead the guard paused by a door, gesturing for her to go in. “You can get changed in there,” he told her. “Make it fast.”

As if she needed the encouragement. It was glorious to get out of the filthy chemise and put on a proper gown. It was a bit large on her but it hardly mattered. Alongside the gown was a bonnet, no doubt meant to cover the state of her hair. She picked it up carefully, turning it over in her hands as she considered whether or not to put it on her head. Part of her trembled at the idea of disobeying; the rest of her reveled in it.

She left the bonnet in the room.

The guard led her out the exit now and in the distance, she got a glimpse of Benjamin’s face. But of course it wasn’t him, but his brother, James. His features, so much like her late husband’s, were filled with shock as he looked at her and she wondered at how she must look, even in clean clothing. She saw him turn and speak to the Warden but she couldn’t hear what he said, nor did she really care. She just kept walking until she reached the front door.

“My god, Charlotte,” James said, when he caught up to walk beside her, “what happened to your hair?”

She shook her head. “I don’t want to talk about it, not any of it, until we get across the bridge.”

Wisely he didn’t press further, instead helping her into the waiting carriage and giving the orders to drive home. She opened the curtains on the window and looked out, counting each inch of cobbled stone that they crossed until the island and its horrors were far enough away. Then she turned to James. “I used to think a widow’s life was hard but it is nothing compared to these women. The information I’ve recorded here…it will set the world ablaze.”

He shook his head. “I wish you would have just accepted my offer of support. You are family, no one would think twice at such an arrangement. And then I could have sent one of my women reporters to—”

“No,” she told him. “I know you may never understand this, but it had to be me. I had to do this, not just to support myself but all the women there now and those in the future who shall hopefully never have to endure such a place.”

James stared at her for a moment, then shrugged. “Very well. The front page of The Observer is yours, whenever you are ready.”

***

That night, after a long bath and a full meal, Charlotte sat down at her typewriter and began to work on her first—though she did not think her last—article. Every now and then she stopped and looked out the window of this room, located on the highest floor of her brother-in-law’s house. She wondered if he’d realized that from this vantage point, even in the darkness, she could see the other side of the bridge.