I arrived at Clearview Psychiatric Asylum a little after ten in the morning. The facility comprised a sprawling grey-brick structure with window slits that looked like stab wounds. Stepping through the steel entrance gate, I set my jaw and determined to shrug this whole thing off. Better yet, I'd take the two weeks to devise a scheme to get rid of that blasted she-devil once and for all.
"Checking in, please," I told the desk nurse with as much bravado as a cocksure seventeen year old can muster. "Reservation under Blaze."
She looked at me with some reserve before telling me I could wait "over there" for Doctor Wheeler. When the chap finally turned up he apologised and told me that one of his patients had had a bit of an episode, refusing to eat his breakfast because he thought there were ants in his cereal.
"It's a common paranoia," said the doctor.
"Ants?"
"That we put things in the food." He wore horn-rimmed glasses and spoke with a patient yet sombre tone. His ginger hair was strictly side-parted. He told me he wasn't happy with the arrangement and I told him I wasn't exactly thrilled about it either. "My stepmother's idea of reform."
"It's dangerous," he said. "Downright illegal actually. But given that it's your father's asking, I don't really have a choice now, do I?" He went on to describe the kinds of patients currently undergoing treatment, the brutal nature of their backgrounds, their degenerate crimes, bestial tendencies, and their likely response to a well-to-do rich boy like me.
"Which is why you'll be kept on E Wing," he said. "That's the high security ward."
"I'll be locked in a cell?"
"Twenty two hours of the day. Yes." He advised me to keep my head down and under no circumstances was I to share personal information with the patients. This was both for my safety and theirs.
I snorted. "Right. Yes. Wouldn't want anything to happen to the lunatics…"
"We don't use that term," he said severely, and then called over one of the orderlies, a big guy named Paul, who led me into a small room where I handed in all my personal effects. I was told to strip down, passed through a series of metal detectors, and then handed a bundle of clothes. White underwear and socks, dark blue joggers and t-shirt.
"Not exactly cotton," I remarked at the coarseness of the fabric.
"So you can't make a rope," said Paul, handing me a pair of white pumps with no laces.
Paul led me through a succession of secure doors and hallways until we reached the high security ward itself, which was no more than a corridor of seven steel doors facing one large room, with a doctor's office at the bottom. Each door contained a square anti-shatter window fitted above a sort of letter box. The huge naked man looking out of the first cell smiled as I walked past but the guy in the next cell along was far less sociable. He had long dirty hair, a gaunt face with sharp cheekbones, and his black eyes fixed so quickly upon me, so intensely, that they arrested my feet.
"Behave yourself, Raven," warned Paul but Raven's stare did not relent from me. His bony hand came up with an apple which he suddenly bit into, the juice squirting onto the window and frothing down his chin.
Paul gave me a nudge forward. I couldn't see into the third cell because the windows had been covered with the occupant's own faeces.
"And here's you." Paul unlocked cell number four, showing me my accommodation for the next two weeks. A single bed, thin blanket, flat pillow, one desk, one chair, no window.
"Charming," I tried to say flippantly but the crack in my voice betrayed me.
"I'll be back at lunchtime," said Paul.
"I don't suppose I can have a book or something?"
"Doc has to approve it. Meantime, don't make noise." He shut the door and I heard a heavy bolt clunk into place.
That my first course of action upon being incarcerated in a mental asylum was to lie on my thin mattress and talk to myself is perhaps quite telling. But all bravado having been stripped away by that psychopath's one horrible glare, it was all I could do to not hyperventilate. I could still feel Raven's black eyes upon me. I imagined him sitting on his bed, gnashing at his apple, staring in my direction…
"No," I hurried to coo myself. "He's locked in his cell. He can't do anything. And besides, this is exactly what that she-devil wants!"
The anger steadied me. It was odd really because until my stepmother had come into the picture, anger had never lingered in my bosom. Certainly my childhood had been about as placid as one would expect. Having killed my mother during childbirth and thus alienated my father from the outset, I was placed under the care of a string of nannies. I remember only one of them, however, a very pretty girl called Vanessa who used to bake fresh bread (I would help need the dough) and then read to me from her favourite book, Don Quixote, while we ate.
My father would check-in sometime around five o'clock, putting in an efficient ten minutes with me before a lazy thirty with a well-aged scotch. I'm a bit foggy on whether or not he put anything into Vanessa, though I have often wondered how things might have turned out if my father had married her, as my little self had so hoped he would. But he hadn't. The girl was dismissed shortly before my seventh birthday whereupon I was entrusted to a regimented man called Klokov. I could tell you a great many things about Klokov but mostly I remember him overturning my bed each morning because the sheets weren't squared away enough.
"As you make your bed, so will you sleep," he would tell me.
I scoffed at the memory but the thin prison mattress started to become very uncomfortable.
Klokov kept a close eye on my education, ensuring that I accomplished all homework as soon as I returned from school. I did the work but I didn't excel at anything save literature and an innate facility for languages. Neither however is the key to social success at the preparatory or secondary level, and being a July birthday I was a full year less developed than the burly November and December boys who made up the sports teams. Had I been anybody else's son, I'd have likely had a much rougher educational experience. But with my father's notoriety preceding me, even my teachers were careful to tow the line. That said, my inevitable arrogance was less loud-and-vulgar and more of the pomp-and-sneer variety, though my facility with languages did give me a sharp tongue.
Only Ivan Pronin ever broke rank. He was an October boy with a thick neck and a father in the banking business. One lunchtime he charged up to me, saying: "Think you're better than everyone, don't you, Blaze?"
"Hard to say," I told him. "I haven't met everyone."
At which point he growled, slapped the book from my hands, and then, as I looked up, he sucker punched me in the mouth.
My father asked no questions that evening when he saw the stitches across my lips, but Ivan Pronin did not show up to school the next day, and two weeks later it was rumoured that his family had moved to New Zealand. It was the most affection my father had ever shown me. But of course it was his reputation at stake too.
So I was shunned at home and shunned at school, and quite frankly the feeling became mutual. I had no time for such lacklustre personalities anyway. Far better to keep company with the likes of Quixote, Galkin, and the two great Counts of Literature.
And then eight months ago I came home to find the person with whom my father had been keeping company.
"This is Lydia," he said. "She's going to be your stepmother."
"Hello darling." She was all hair and curves and when she leaned down to kiss my cheek her plump breasts squished against my arm. "I look forward to getting to know you."
I couldn't speak.
"Gosh. He looks just like, Sarah."
"Sarah," said my father acidly, "did not slouch."
My stepmother chuckled. "Oh I'm sure he can stand more erect if he wants to…" She winked at me as she said this and truth be told I found her intoxicating. Which only made it all the more difficult when two weeks later she accused me of stealing her underwear.
"This is not on, Joseph," she told my father. "I'm to be his stepmother. It's perverse! And those were expensive."
You can't deny a thing like that. Not even if you're innocent. And certainly not if you're a teenage boy. It's a slander that marks you permanently, always to be recalled and factored into future accusations.
And the accusations came quickly indeed.
Five days after the wedding, she accused me of pinching money from her purse. Then I was spying on her in the shower, pouring drain cleaner on her bonsai tree. When her diamond neckless went missing, the prime suspect was readily named. I, of course, denied everything only to watch horrified as my father conducted a search of my room and pulled the cursed object out of my cupboard!
"What! No, that's not possible!"
"Oh honestly," said Lydia.
"I tell you, father, I did not take that thing!"
"And what about these then?" said Lydia, thrusting her hands into my cupboard drawers and pulling out a roll of cash, a small bottle of drain cleaner, and four pairs of her lace knickers.
Thus I was condemned to Clearview Psychiatric Asylum, supposedly to be "scared straight."
"It's a proven psychology," Lydia informed my father. "Two weeks, and he'll come back a changed man."
I lay on my thin mattress and watched a spider make its way across the ceiling. I recalled the time when Vanessa had been reading to me and a large spider had suddenly dropped onto my leg. I stared screaming but Vanessa took it gently in her hand and started making conversation with it. Apparently the poor fellow was partially deaf and wanted to better hear the story of Don Quixote. It was his favourite. So I agreed (tentatively) that he could stay and listen, and having gotten to know one of them, I lost my eight-legged prejudices ever after.
"So what are you in for?" I asked the spider sharing my cell.
"Illegal website," I imagined it retorting. "And how about that guy in cell three? Gives new meaning to the word interred, doesn't he?"
I agreed that he did.
"You'd better toughen up though," said the spider. "There are things in here you could never imagine. Scary things. Things that even eight eyes can't see, and eight legs can't outrun. I'm not talking about things that scare you, but things that are actually scary. And if you want to survive them, you'll need to be strong. Do you understand?"
I said nothing. I was too busy thinking about the three doors that came after mine and what might be behind them.