![The Doll Palace Home
[Where Cartoon Dolls Live]](http://ww2.thedollpalace.com/images/tdp_banner.gif) |
|
| Every doll has a story behind... |
|
Want to try to make one or see what other people came up with?! Every story will participate in The Doll Palace ratings. Good stories will be awarded with Dollpoints.
|
|
|
|
All created stories have to follow . We do not allow any sexually related material. The Doll Palace will be enforcing this rule and completely blocking access to the accounts that disregard our policy and create sexually oriented stories.
|
|
|
|
Hi, my name is Claire
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 | The Patients (Chapter 1) |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
 4.78 with 18 vote(s)
|
|
| Created: 2009-08-08 21:49:38 |
|
|
|
5 months in the Riverberry Asylum for Special Cases
The girl was being dragged in, just like I had to be when I first came here. She was screaming, reminding me of my first day here. Tears ran in rivulets down her cheeks, and she kept sobbing that she didn’t belong here. I had been like that when they brought me here with Charlie on that fateful day. I had been in great distress, while Charlie had just seemed resigned to his fate.
Eventually, growing tired of me, Charlie had tried to get me to hush. When he realized that that was going to be impossible, he had whispered wearily into my ear, “Just be glad that they didn’t separate us.” At that I had quieted somewhat.
In my first week here, both I and Charlie had each received a letter from Mom. After reading it several times in the small, white room that I had been given, I had eagerly taken pencil and paper from one of the white-coated nurses and started to write back. When I went to see Charlie and realized he didn’t seem like he was going to write back to Mom, I asked him why, and he asked me if I knew whether it was going to go to Mom or not.
“What do you mean?” I had returned, taken aback.
“How do you know that they won’t just throw away your letter and pretend like they sent it to Mom, just to comfort you?” Charlie had replied in an emotionless voice, gazing up at me like I was an idiot.
“I don’t, but why would they? They wouldn’t be that cruel!” I had replied, almost bursting into tears.
“Well, don’t put anything too personal in it,” he had said without facing me, “because even if they do send it to Mom, they’re going to have a lot of different people check it first.”
His words had stung. I had never before heard my brother talk to me like that, hopeless and emotionless. He had spoken to me like I was mentally ill and had to be emphasized on everything.
Over time, I had grown used to the ways of the asylum. I had forgotten what it meant to be happy. Sleep was no longer peaceful, filled with strange dreams. Sometimes, I woke up in the middle of the night, screaming. I wasn’t the only one.
There were many others like Charlie and I here, the Riverberry Asylum seemed to have a great many rooms reserved specifically for ones like us. Every morning the nurses would come with new medicine that would be administered into our bloodstreams through shots. If you were lucky this medicine only required one shot, though commonly you had to get multiple shots of it. Not like it did any good, sometimes it would make you “better” for a temporary amount of time, though commonly it made us even “worse”, whatever that meant.
Sometimes they would return one of the ones like us back to their family for a month or two, but then they would always be brought back. Whatever was wrong with us, there didn’t seem to be a cure. Every once and a while one of us would get transferred to someplace else, though so far luckily Charlie and I had been able to stay together here in the Riverberry Asylum.
I kept watching the girl as she was dragged into her room. The door of the girl’s new room was then slammed firmly shut and locked with a key dangling from the belt of one of the men who had dragged her. The two men were muscled and wearing grey uniforms, a dismal color that matched their purpose. Even in grey they stood out here, where almost everything was white.
“What’s this one’s name, Albert?” a white-robed nurse asked the man with the key wearily as she walked up, holding a wet rag to her head to try and ease her headache. In a place where there was constant screaming and sobbing and yelling, nearly everyone was liable to get a headache every now and again, especially the nurses, who were always breathless with frustration after trying to give a shot to one of the more ornery patients.
“Isabella,” the man named Albert replied gruffly. He lifted his hand up to wipe the sweat off his brow where it had collected. He was rather tall and towered over the nurse in his grey uniform, which stood out strangely against his skin, which was the color of melted chocolate.
“Ah, what a pretty name, fits a pretty girl like her. Such a pity she has to be condemned to this place,” the nurse sighed in response, dabbing the rag against her forehead.
“Pretty? She’s another one of those freaks, she can go to heck for all I care,” the man beside Albert snapped bad temperedly, his eyes were small, hard and blue, his skin was leathery and pale, and his mouth was drawn up in a tight, disapproving line.
“Joe! How could you say such a thing about such a young child?” the nurse gasped in disbelief.
“Young child, huh, she’s an evil little demon if you ask me! She should be dead, let the Devil have her,” Joe growled angrily, turning on his heel and stomping off. As he passed me and noticed me staring at him, he gave me a glare and I turned away from him with haste.
Albert shook his head in the direction of Joe. “Never understood that one, Clara, hates everyone here, but for some reason he doesn’t just leave.”
“Well, I suppose with his wife having a baby in a few months he can’t afford to quit a job that pays well enough,” the nurse, who I now knew was named Clara, replied, looking in the direction of the door that Joe had gone through. Then, noticing me watching, she asked, “Is there anything you need, dear?”
“Where’s my brother?” I asked her. The guy named Albert had walked off through the same door as Joe.
“What’s the name of your brother, sweetie?” Clara replied, putting a reassuring smile on her face.
“Charlie,” I told her, and she took a small notebook out of her pocket and flipped through it.
“Ah, yes, here we are that Charlie fellow is currently in his room. I can let you visit him for a moment,” she said, shutting the notebook and slipping it back into the pocket of her robes. I then followed her as she led me across the hall and up a small flight of stairs to another floor. Here she took me to the new room of my brother.
“I’ll give you a few minutes,” Clara told me kindly as she unlocked the door with a key much like the one Albert had used to lock the room of that Isabella girl.
As the door opened and I stepped inside, I managed a quick, “Thank you,” before the door clicked shut.
I took in the sight of the room. It was the same size as mine, except not all white. The walls were a dark, bluish grey instead of a bright white, and the floor was honey-colored carpet instead of cream tile. Also, Charlie wasn’t sitting on a completely white bed. Instead of painted metal bedposts his bed had brown wooden bedposts, instead of white sheets his bed had a blue and yellow bed cover, and instead of a white pillow his bed had a pale grey pillow. As I gaped, he took notice of me and sat up.
“So, what do you think?” he asked me, grinning for the first time in months.
“How did all this come about?” I asked in wonder, rubbing the grey wall to make sure it was real. I had never seen as much color in the whole asylum as was in Charlie’s new room.
Getting off the bed and standing up in front of me, he said, “The nurse who took me here said that this was one of the older rooms. You see, this asylum was once a children’s orphanage. All of the rooms were decorated with color like this. When the orphanage went bankrupt and the government bought this place to make an asylum to hold all of the kinds of crazy people that were springing up around here at that time, they had all of the rooms and halls repainted to make a simpler atmosphere, except for a few select rooms like this, which were still structurally sound so they didn’t need any construction work done on them.”
“So this room isn’t going to get repainted?” I asked.
Charlie shook his head. “The nurse said that the asylum is spending too much money on medicine as it is, so they don’t have enough to spare on repainting a few rooms right now.”
Smiling, I went and sat on the bed, running my hand over the bed cover. Oh, how nice a soft, fuzzy bed cover felt after sleeping with scratchy sheets for five months! “So, why did they have you change rooms anyway?”
“I think that since my former room was the regular white type, it would suit one of us who are new to this place better,” he suggested. “So, anything new happen?”
“Nothing really, a new girl arrived. Her name’s apparently Isabella, she’s locked in her new room,” I replied. I looked over at him into his bright blue eyes. I was glad to have Charlie here at the Riverberry Asylum with me. Without him, I didn’t know how I would be able to keep from having a mental breakdown in this place.
“Which room is she in?” he asked, sitting down beside me on the bed.
“Ricky’s old room, what happened to him, anyway?” I wondered, turning to look at Charlie.
Charlie shrugged. “Got transferred to someplace more secure, that’s my guess. He was always a rebel, causing a lot of trouble. The last I remember is some unlucky nurse sticking him with a tranquilizer and then some men took him away.”
“Was he one of us? I don’t think so,” I replied.
“No, he wasn’t one of us, he was a 15-year-old with a short temper who kept raving on about tomatoes and oranges,” Charlie answered.
The door to the room opened, and Clara’s head appeared. “It’s time for you to get back to your own room,” she said, looking at me. A smile of pity and sympathy remained on her mouth as I turned and gave Charlie a goodbye glance. Then I got up and followed her out. As the door shut, the familiar dull whiteness absorbed me once more. |
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
© 2008 The Doll Palace. All rights reserved.
|
|
|
|
| |
