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Description
                            Prologue
      It was an early dawn. The sun hadn’t yet graced the horizon when blood-curdling screams filled the stagnant air. In a matter of moments, a young girl’s blood trickled slowly on to the hard and cold cement floor of the basement of ‘Faded Dreams’, an asylum for the unaccepted and strange. That was patients’ and doctors’ pet name for the hospital Albrook Streams. A lie, a poetic lie that they laughed at and encouraged.
      The cells each cocooned the patients through the days and nightmares of common occurrence. Or so it was thought. The leakage of the insane thoughts and actions somehow still escaped the iron bars of the cells and of their twisted minds. Despite the transfer of innumerable fears from patient to patient, they weren’t afraid of each other, not at all. Patients were hiding, as best they could, from the probing and warped interests of the head doctors. Those physicians were unethical and ruthless; willing to
experiment on anyone or anything they could. Though concern or regard for any life or    any being they lacked, they were enraptured by the effects that their cruel experiments had.
       Screams were so common, far-reaching from every corner of the asylum, but none more than that night that she, the young girl, lay, lifeless and anesthetized with a new  morphine of death; spiriting her away from real thoughts and hopes, and thrusting her  into a life that blurred in and out of dreams.
      Suddenly, with one swift motion, her world made of grays, always seen through her tired, bloodshot eyes, turned a grateful and forgiving black and provided a comfort for her restless soul; that of a lost little girl. It offered that lovely darkness, like so many trips to her escapisms, her sanctuary-code; the unique, fatal recognition of the little cracks in reality that provided at least a shimmer of something in the colorless, lifeless experiment she called her existence, had done. But though she depended on it for some time, she never questioned whether it was real; it wasn’t real, it wasn’t fake… it just was.
      By the time she had closed her eyes to let herself fall forever, or even before that, when that ghost came to comfort her; she knew she’d been defeated. But the battle, no, the war; had been so tiring she felt she needed a rest; never in her mind was this quitting. This was vacationing in purgatory; this was lounging in the void of broken dreams and forgotten hopes wished away by victims of their own cynicism. She was a victim of cynicism, and entering that world allowed her the forbidden fruit of damnation, and a return to a place that was once her passion, and was now her very being. After all, wasn’t she her mother’s broken dream? Wasn’t her very existence based on the consequences of lost hope and forgotten love? Hadn’t she always been locked away, a dirty little secret?
      So she looked at the blond angel of death hovering above her with lifeless eyes wide, pleased, shocked, and frightened, and she made a note of events that preceded. She took a moment, her last moment, to burn the face into her mind and to let it haunt her while she wasted away in static emptiness, with all the others who never did anything, except stand on the line until they saw which side had won. Even though she was slipping away into another world; even though the reality around her was crumbling, inverting, and imploding, she didn’t feel defeated. There was a feeling inside her that she hadn’t lost yet; that the fun was just beginning.

                   I:All Things must be Considered

      She had been here so very long. The years all blending into one torturous, ineffectual stay. Madness at every turn, she had plotted and planned, but felt still so unable to perform her fantasies of escape. Insomnia plagued her, as usual, so she occupied herself with a small, familiar nursery rhyme. Her dark onyx eyes stared blankly at the ceiling as she softly sighed, ‘Rain, rain, go away, come again another day...’ over and over, trying to so hard to remember what love was, what right was, and what wrong could be. Everyday, since the day she had been unceremoniously dropped here, into a certain doctor’s lap, so to speak, she had wondering who could ever love or need her. She thought often of what would ever happen should she escape or grow up because at times she doubted that she would. Being accused of lunacy, of insanity, when she had been victimized and sacrificed to the bastard follower of God, was too much for someone so small and defenseless. It would be an understatement to say she was simply angry. Something human inside her broke once she realized she would not be going home. And after that moment, after that swift snap, she never opened herself to pain again. The rooms around her were empty, but she never felt alone. Yet being so isolated, so alienated, had caused a wound in her too deep to mend completely. Slowly, darkness descended upon her, creating out of a child a feral creature. Her face, her body paled; and the books of what her life might have been remained hidden, dusty and thick with insanity.
      Night after night Mai, this girl, stared at her blackness that was her ceiling, pulling her pale, thin fingers through her black hair. It lay all around her like some morose burial shroud, almost to her thighs if she was standing. Her beautiful, knowing brown eyes took on a glazed look of somber catatonia as slowly, steadily; she subjected herself to the unrealities that ruled her day. The lines narrowed, and she became part of the scenery, blending in with her non-descript hospital blue patient clothing. Standing at 5’5, she felt a small bit of power over Mimi, her cellmate. But with her hair covering her thin, frail, translucent body, Mai felt dark, mysterious, like the very shadow who watched her, and waited.
      Mai all but ignored the supposed doctors who came to ‘see’ her. Never, she knew, would a doctor have to pay another to see a patient, and timed visits of ‘therapy’ surely didn’t include the constant sex she was forced into. They enjoyed screams, and suffering, and the feeling that they were wholly safe while inside her and her cell. These men always wanted her to cry, and to beg for mercy. Power was their aphrodisiac, and in her simple stoic presence, she denied them complete satisfaction. She heard them, when they had spent themselves, walk out the door and get angry, yelling at her shadow, “I thought you said she was a screamer! A crier! I thought you said she went insane for this sort of foreplay!”
      To which he only replied, “You’re just not doing it right.”
      And maybe it was this ability, this dubious reverse-psychology, that allowed her to remain so numb. Or perhaps she was just insane, and any sort of antagonist would not be able to rile her. After all, hadn’t she survived years without a single tear leaving her eyes? And even if she hadn’t, wasn’t she still alive, if anything? One can only wonder what someone else, someone a little weaker would have done in her position. It wasn’t as if she has no way to commit suicide, but that wasn’t her thing. Mai would force herself to live. One day she was going to grow up and leave.
      But, still, she was a child. And as a child, she longed to connect herself to something, to have something to prove that she was real. She found nothing close to her, no one there to catch her when she might fall, no matter how much blood she spilled once she landed. But she would never want anything desperately. And her shadow would accompany her whenever she needed; he salvaged her, and whatever soul of the soulless remained.
      Mai wasn’t lonely; her phantom savior and punisher was a constant, but a secret and well, she had Julianne. Her good friend Julianne. Her doctor, Julianne Baites. Woman of the world, in love with occupation. Always smiling as her model thin body swayed through the white, sterile corridors of this twisted mansion. She loved Mai like a disease. And every chance she got, envy was cast upon her with such passion, that she could almost not control herself when Mai began to speak.
      If a friend existed truly for Mai, it was Mimi. She was delicate, like a flower and she lived in her own world. Mimi liked to play doctor almost every night. She used to walk back and forth about the cell they shared, on those busy nights talking to people who weren’t there, and laughing with ghosts that no one could see. She’d ask them why they came to see her and she’d tell them they’d be all right because she was a good doctor and she cared. Not that the behavior wasn’t unusual for a fourteen year old such as her, but as a suffering hebephrenic, Mimi could not help such childish, but well intentioned impulses.
      “Mai-mai, don’t you want to play with us?” she asked, looking at her with wide, blue eyes.
      “I’d rather not I hate doctors as it is,” Mai always said, an absent smirk on her pale face.
      “But Mai-mai... “, Mimi sighed.
      Mai then sat on her nondescript mattress and drew her knees to her chest, hugging them tightly. Day in and day out it was like this. Cold, lonely, aggravating. All the times she lay by herself, when she wasn’t in some washed-out haze, she thought of all the little children at home, warm in their beds. She thought of all the other kids who were allowed to live when she was unfairly forced to swallow harsh realities and mature. The hate that consumed her when she thought of what she had lost because of her father was white-hot and burning in her chest. How could someone take a child from her home and destroy whatever future she might have had simply because they were a pedophilic bastard?
      Her thoughts returned to innocent little Mimi. Mai liked to play a little herself, seeing how much she could bleed herself, or how long she could hold her breath, before she passed out. And relief lay in these blackouts, because while the floor undulated beneath her and threw her into nothingness, she was spared the reality of her state. Just one little cut brought her into this fantasy where she always wanted to stay, always wanted to drop into a pile of hopes so soft and suffocate. It didn’t matter if her mind was lying to her. She was the only one she could trust.
      She looked at her brick wall and laid her face against its cold surface. Almost as if she was dancing with it. It was at least the closest thing she could come to a splash of cool water. But it didn’t wake her up. Her heavy door opened and in stepped her vicious shadow; his very presence threatening to rip her to shreds. Her heart stopped and she couldn’t hear herself breathing anymore. She dug her nails into the wall and closed her eyes tight to take her punishment.

      Abuse of power in the asylum was disgusting but common. Objections to it were rare and usually vocalized by a specific, young, male patient. He was at odds with the doctors. But did it really matter? He was powerless; frail. He was so sad, a constant look of doom cast over his soft, somewhat feminine face that was framed by almost spiky, messy, black hair. His dark eyes looked as though they’d seen Hell. If despair were human, it would be him.
      Thirteen years of age, he knew Mai. His name was Kei and he had fallen in love. He adored her; even the way she seemed to defy all things that happened. It was just so beautiful to him. He couldn’t help himself. To him, Mai’s wistfulness and surrealism was unwavering, and so essential to his survival in this hell neither of them deserved. It was hard to live without someone to love you. He admired her in secret, always awaiting a day when finally he could tell her how he felt about her. She seemed like the only other one who hadn’t really lost their mind, she was a revolutionary; a rule-breaker who knew how to find the holes so efficiently, that authorities were amazed with her. The rebels know the rules better than the rule makers do…
      He mostly watched as …she; Julianne… broke patients’ confidence and amused herself with the destruction of various lives. And even with the screams invading his head, he wouldn’t give in to the madness that stalked the corridors. But it was everywhere; inescapable in individuality. No one even knew what was real; except Mai and him. They thought they knew everything. And even in this gross misconception they were comforted by their false sense of security and in the fact that their dreams were means of living outside the misery that was their very existences. Perhaps there’d been a time that they hadn’t been blinded by over-confidence and self-absorption, but there gets a point to where if you’re the only person who cares about you, you get selfish and cold. Such a barrier can co-exist with longings for outside communication, but whatever is left is sacrificed to self-insufficiency and hatred; loathing for the reflection in the broken mirror on the cardboard wall. And self-loathing is a way of life in selfishness, isn’t it? Where selfishness was key to keep up the lies that they told themselves, that the monster would never pull the wool over their all-seeing little teenage eyes; they had to believe in something, so why not themselves?
      Sometimes Kei sat by himself, in cold ways, ignoring the frightening screams coming from beyond his cell wall. He looked at the iron door which locked him from the world, and spoke of Mai.
      “I highly doubt she feels anything for you,” he said critically, raising one thin, dark eyebrow.
      “Oh, that’s all well, it doesn’t really matter, trust me, I will have her.”
      “You will not,” he said to himself, his voice growing angrier.
      “We’ll see; if I do get her, then… just wait and see. I will.”
      He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the voices in his brain. Neither good nor bad, he thought.
      He looked up at his dank ceiling and sighed. He remembered when they first came; the other parts of him. Like demons, like vicious demons trying to tear him to little pieces. His mother had grown concerned. How many days did he do such things? Arguing with himself, hitting himself, cutting himself. Voices, he knew they were just voices, but their physical presence seemed so real at times he could not discern which was he and which was someone else.

                    II: A Nightmare is the First Escape to Pain, from Pain

      It was hard to understand what the night brought to Mai. The dreams: most horrible; the rest strange. Forbidding her from peaceful sleep, every night her heart torn. Maybe she’d lie bleeding on the floor. Where were the scissors she stole? Cut herself to bleed, to prove and not deny. She took in the possibility that maybe her whole existence was some sick experiment and maybe she wasn’t real. How many scars did she have to have before she was real? How long did she have to wish to be real? She sighed and looked at her wall, rubbing her open wrist softly, if only to ease the necessary pain. It hurts good… She shook her head. Not good enough. She wondered day by day and in her dreams why Julianne tormented her so. Why did she go to lengths unheard of to make Mai’s life hell? She touched the scar on her cheek tenderly, remembering the incident. Perhaps it was her fault for being in the cellar. The corpse would not go away. She fingered her hair. Useless, useless, ugly and dark.
      The lines on the walls danced around her for a minute. How much blood would come for her to go away again? She reached around on the floor and found nothing. To her right, she felt them. She sat up and lifted them to her arm and saw a rain of black dots on her arm. Not close enough. She pressed the cold blade to her skin and before she felt it in, the world turned deep violet and she fell heavily to the floor. The whole room turned into a vast black-purple sky and spun around her, “It’s so pretty,” she whispered.
      Mimi crawled over to Mai, her arm covered in blood once more. “She’s visiting the purple place again?” she sighed, wishing her friend would wake up. She hugged her ratty, once-white teddy bear Slaine, and stroked Mai’s hair lightly. It was so pretty, she thought. Mai mumbled something in her sleep, but Mimi couldn’t make it out. Too late to think again. She looked at Slaine and asked him, “Why is Mai so sad?”
      He just looked at her and shrugged.
      She sighed and walked over to her mattress and sat on it. Useless bear, he never knew anything.

      Mai looked at that precious, fragile sky as she fell upwards, the wind rushing past her. She could fall, fall, fall forever. She smiled as the broken sky mended and ripped, a constant cycle of life and death she enjoyed. Lights, thousands of lights floated past her on the way to the surface of whatever she was fall up into. So pretty. But… the world was fading… the lights dimmer, the sky more gray. She was losing balance, falling back down… What was that? No more lights? No more sky. No, she didn’t want to leave. Falling, falling, where was the ground? Gray, gray, gray…
      She woke with a start, the undeniable feeling of landing still in her chest. Stupid dreams. God damned dreams! Why did she have to wake up? All the time… god she wished she never woke up. Why couldn’t she just fucking die already? There was no one here for her. No one. She couldn’t believe that she had ever wished that there would be. How stupid was she?

      Few things prompted conversations between Mai and other human beings. But one of those was the occasions on which her shadow opted to visit her. His gray eyes held something of mystique for her. He knelt near her, grabbed her hair. Mimi was always out when he came to visit, so he could make her be loud. His pale hair swayed softly in front of his eyes and nose as he bent over her and kissed her deeply. He bit her lips, ran his slender hand up her thigh and into her pants. “Mai,” he whispered her name in a serpent-sigh, “Oh, Mai, don’t ever leave me. I haven’t begun to torture you as I want.” Then he kissed her again, lifting her to his chest, undressing her, taking her.

      The wind outside the tall white square building howled, sounding like some far off wraith weeping. The thunder echoed through the halls and the lightning light up the corridors whose large bare windows drew in the moonlight. The rain was beautiful, but never ceasing. She walked through the maze that was the stairway and into her new office. It was strange, it still smelled like him. She turned on the light and looked at the mirror hanging on the wall, with a single diagonal crack in it. She sighed. Had she loved him? Perhaps. But it was over now. She yawned softly and laid her head on the desk. Here she was, Dr. Baites, unable to forget about him. She knew someone would pay. It was only a matter of time before it happened. And even if she had to wait forever for her chance, the alleviation of her pain would be so worthwhile she’d be happy. Even if happiness had been, would always be, some far away dream, maybe this time would be the one that opened the door that had been locked so tightly. She couldn’t remember the last time that the heavy iron chains of her mind had so freely dropped and dissipated while she smiled. The weighty door to her silenced pleasure swung gloriously open with every vengeful thought. And a thanking, no matter morbidity, that Mai had led her to this place where she did indeed truly belong; a world where pain slid away and disappeared into the beautiful sky. But sentimentality not being her strong suit, the praise ended as abruptly as it had begun and she suddenly felt once again very cold. Who was she now? Who was she?
      Julianne Baites. Tall, blond, and very disturbed…she was almost as pale as her patients were; lack of sleep, lack of human emotion, perhaps had caused her to appear like one of the very people she treated as underlings. She was head physician at Albrook and she directed everything, every horror, and every secret. Her efforts were lost on sciences shunned by the doctors of ethic. Her attempts numbered in the hundreds, logic giving into ridiculous failure; trying to correct the mental problem with force, with electricity; meandering through her profession with all the grace of a drunken idiot. She knew hardly anything she could stand to do could truly help these creatures, but someone had to pay for what her father had done to her…(only a child…how could he)…it didn’t matter who. She cared nothing for human life or anything close to it. And finally she got her dream of manipulating everything and everyone. It was like that cool refreshing drink, something she’d wanted ever since she was young and defenseless. She was so sadistic that even her heart was tainted. The spiral of damnation she incurred was almost complete, and she just couldn’t figure out what was missing, but somehow she could feel that it was, she could feel it.

Description
                            Prologue
      It was an early dawn. The sun hadn’t yet graced the horizon when blood-curdling screams filled the stagnant air. In a matter of moments, a young girl’s blood trickled slowly on to the hard and cold cement floor of the basement of ‘Faded Dreams’, an asylum for the unaccepted and strange. That was patients’ and doctors’ pet name for the hospital Albrook Streams. A lie, a poetic lie that they laughed at and encouraged.
      The cells each cocooned the patients through the days and nightmares of common occurrence. Or so it was thought. The leakage of the insane thoughts and actions somehow still escaped the iron bars of the cells and of their twisted minds. Despite the transfer of innumerable fears from patient to patient, they weren’t afraid of each other, not at all. Patients were hiding, as best they could, from the probing and warped interests of the head doctors. Those physicians were unethical and ruthless; willing to
experiment on anyone or anything they could. Though concern or regard for any life or    any being they lacked, they were enraptured by the effects that their cruel experiments had.
       Screams were so common, far-reaching from every corner of the asylum, but none more than that night that she, the young girl, lay, lifeless and anesthetized with a new  morphine of death; spiriting her away from real thoughts and hopes, and thrusting her  into a life that blurred in and out of dreams.
      Suddenly, with one swift motion, her world made of grays, always seen through her tired, bloodshot eyes, turned a grateful and forgiving black and provided a comfort for her restless soul; that of a lost little girl. It offered that lovely darkness, like so many trips to her escapisms, her sanctuary-code; the unique, fatal recognition of the little cracks in reality that provided at least a shimmer of something in the colorless, lifeless experiment she called her existence, had done. But though she depended on it for some time, she never questioned whether it was real; it wasn’t real, it wasn’t fake… it just was.
      By the time she had closed her eyes to let herself fall forever, or even before that, when that ghost came to comfort her; she knew she’d been defeated. But the battle, no, the war; had been so tiring she felt she needed a rest; never in her mind was this quitting. This was vacationing in purgatory; this was lounging in the void of broken dreams and forgotten hopes wished away by victims of their own cynicism. She was a victim of cynicism, and entering that world allowed her the forbidden fruit of damnation, and a return to a place that was once her passion, and was now her very being. After all, wasn’t she her mother’s broken dream? Wasn’t her very existence based on the consequences of lost hope and forgotten love? Hadn’t she always been locked away, a dirty little secret?
      So she looked at the blond angel of death hovering above her with lifeless eyes wide, pleased, shocked, and frightened, and she made a note of events that preceded. She took a moment, her last moment, to burn the face into her mind and to let it haunt her while she wasted away in static emptiness, with all the others who never did anything, except stand on the line until they saw which side had won. Even though she was slipping away into another world; even though the reality around her was crumbling, inverting, and imploding, she didn’t feel defeated. There was a feeling inside her that she hadn’t lost yet; that the fun was just beginning.

                   I:All Things must be Considered

      She had been here so very long. The years all blending into one torturous, ineffectual stay. Madness at every turn, she had plotted and planned, but felt still so unable to perform her fantasies of escape. Insomnia plagued her, as usual, so she occupied herself with a small, familiar nursery rhyme. Her dark onyx eyes stared blankly at the ceiling as she softly sighed, ‘Rain, rain, go away, come again another day...’ over and over, trying to so hard to remember what love was, what right was, and what wrong could be. Everyday, since the day she had been unceremoniously dropped here, into a certain doctor’s lap, so to speak, she had wondering who could ever love or need her. She thought often of what would ever happen should she escape or grow up because at times she doubted that she would. Being accused of lunacy, of insanity, when she had been victimized and sacrificed to the bastard follower of God, was too much for someone so small and defenseless. It would be an understatement to say she was simply angry. Something human inside her broke once she realized she would not be going home. And after that moment, after that swift snap, she never opened herself to pain again. The rooms around her were empty, but she never felt alone. Yet being so isolated, so alienated, had caused a wound in her too deep to mend completely. Slowly, darkness descended upon her, creating out of a child a feral creature. Her face, her body paled; and the books of what her life might have been remained hidden, dusty and thick with insanity.
      Night after night Mai, this girl, stared at her blackness that was her ceiling, pulling her pale, thin fingers through her black hair. It lay all around her like some morose burial shroud, almost to her thighs if she was standing. Her beautiful, knowing brown eyes took on a glazed look of somber catatonia as slowly, steadily; she subjected herself to the unrealities that ruled her day. The lines narrowed, and she became part of the scenery, blending in with her non-descript hospital blue patient clothing. Standing at 5’5, she felt a small bit of power over Mimi, her cellmate. But with her hair covering her thin, frail, translucent body, Mai felt dark, mysterious, like the very shadow who watched her, and waited.
      Mai all but ignored the supposed doctors who came to ‘see’ her. Never, she knew, would a doctor have to pay another to see a patient, and timed visits of ‘therapy’ surely didn’t include the constant sex she was forced into. They enjoyed screams, and suffering, and the feeling that they were wholly safe while inside her and her cell. These men always wanted her to cry, and to beg for mercy. Power was their aphrodisiac, and in her simple stoic presence, she denied them complete satisfaction. She heard them, when they had spent themselves, walk out the door and get angry, yelling at her shadow, “I thought you said she was a screamer! A crier! I thought you said she went insane for this sort of foreplay!”
      To which he only replied, “You’re just not doing it right.”
      And maybe it was this ability, this dubious reverse-psychology, that allowed her to remain so numb. Or perhaps she was just insane, and any sort of antagonist would not be able to rile her. After all, hadn’t she survived years without a single tear leaving her eyes? And even if she hadn’t, wasn’t she still alive, if anything? One can only wonder what someone else, someone a little weaker would have done in her position. It wasn’t as if she has no way to commit suicide, but that wasn’t her thing. Mai would force herself to live. One day she was going to grow up and leave.
      But, still, she was a child. And as a child, she longed to connect herself to something, to have something to prove that she was real. She found nothing close to her, no one there to catch her when she might fall, no matter how much blood she spilled once she landed. But she would never want anything desperately. And her shadow would accompany her whenever she needed; he salvaged her, and whatever soul of the soulless remained.
      Mai wasn’t lonely; her phantom savior and punisher was a constant, but a secret and well, she had Julianne. Her good friend Julianne. Her doctor, Julianne Baites. Woman of the world, in love with occupation. Always smiling as her model thin body swayed through the white, sterile corridors of this twisted mansion. She loved Mai like a disease. And every chance she got, envy was cast upon her with such passion, that she could almost not control herself when Mai began to speak.
      If a friend existed truly for Mai, it was Mimi. She was delicate, like a flower and she lived in her own world. Mimi liked to play doctor almost every night. She used to walk back and forth about the cell they shared, on those busy nights talking to people who weren’t there, and laughing with ghosts that no one could see. She’d ask them why they came to see her and she’d tell them they’d be all right because she was a good doctor and she cared. Not that the behavior wasn’t unusual for a fourteen year old such as her, but as a suffering hebephrenic, Mimi could not help such childish, but well intentioned impulses.
      “Mai-mai, don’t you want to play with us?” she asked, looking at her with wide, blue eyes.
      “I’d rather not I hate doctors as it is,” Mai always said, an absent smirk on her pale face.
      “But Mai-mai... “, Mimi sighed.
      Mai then sat on her nondescript mattress and drew her knees to her chest, hugging them tightly. Day in and day out it was like this. Cold, lonely, aggravating. All the times she lay by herself, when she wasn’t in some washed-out haze, she thought of all the little children at home, warm in their beds. She thought of all the other kids who were allowed to live when she was unfairly forced to swallow harsh realities and mature. The hate that consumed her when she thought of what she had lost because of her father was white-hot and burning in her chest. How could someone take a child from her home and destroy whatever future she might have had simply because they were a pedophilic bastard?
      Her thoughts returned to innocent little Mimi. Mai liked to play a little herself, seeing how much she could bleed herself, or how long she could hold her breath, before she passed out. And relief lay in these blackouts, because while the floor undulated beneath her and threw her into nothingness, she was spared the reality of her state. Just one little cut brought her into this fantasy where she always wanted to stay, always wanted to drop into a pile of hopes so soft and suffocate. It didn’t matter if her mind was lying to her. She was the only one she could trust.
      She looked at her brick wall and laid her face against its cold surface. Almost as if she was dancing with it. It was at least the closest thing she could come to a splash of cool water. But it didn’t wake her up. Her heavy door opened and in stepped her vicious shadow; his very presence threatening to rip her to shreds. Her heart stopped and she couldn’t hear herself breathing anymore. She dug her nails into the wall and closed her eyes tight to take her punishment.

      Abuse of power in the asylum was disgusting but common. Objections to it were rare and usually vocalized by a specific, young, male patient. He was at odds with the doctors. But did it really matter? He was powerless; frail. He was so sad, a constant look of doom cast over his soft, somewhat feminine face that was framed by almost spiky, messy, black hair. His dark eyes looked as though they’d seen Hell. If despair were human, it would be him.
      Thirteen years of age, he knew Mai. His name was Kei and he had fallen in love. He adored her; even the way she seemed to defy all things that happened. It was just so beautiful to him. He couldn’t help himself. To him, Mai’s wistfulness and surrealism was unwavering, and so essential to his survival in this hell neither of them deserved. It was hard to live without someone to love you. He admired her in secret, always awaiting a day when finally he could tell her how he felt about her. She seemed like the only other one who hadn’t really lost their mind, she was a revolutionary; a rule-breaker who knew how to find the holes so efficiently, that authorities were amazed with her. The rebels know the rules better than the rule makers do…
      He mostly watched as …she; Julianne… broke patients’ confidence and amused herself with the destruction of various lives. And even with the screams invading his head, he wouldn’t give in to the madness that stalked the corridors. But it was everywhere; inescapable in individuality. No one even knew what was real; except Mai and him. They thought they knew everything. And even in this gross misconception they were comforted by their false sense of security and in the fact that their dreams were means of living outside the misery that was their very existences. Perhaps there’d been a time that they hadn’t been blinded by over-confidence and self-absorption, but there gets a point to where if you’re the only person who cares about you, you get selfish and cold. Such a barrier can co-exist with longings for outside communication, but whatever is left is sacrificed to self-insufficiency and hatred; loathing for the reflection in the broken mirror on the cardboard wall. And self-loathing is a way of life in selfishness, isn’t it? Where selfishness was key to keep up the lies that they told themselves, that the monster would never pull the wool over their all-seeing little teenage eyes; they had to believe in something, so why not themselves?
      Sometimes Kei sat by himself, in cold ways, ignoring the frightening screams coming from beyond his cell wall. He looked at the iron door which locked him from the world, and spoke of Mai.
      “I highly doubt she feels anything for you,” he said critically, raising one thin, dark eyebrow.
      “Oh, that’s all well, it doesn’t really matter, trust me, I will have her.”
      “You will not,” he said to himself, his voice growing angrier.
      “We’ll see; if I do get her, then… just wait and see. I will.”
      He shook his head, trying to rid himself of the voices in his brain. Neither good nor bad, he thought.
      He looked up at his dank ceiling and sighed. He remembered when they first came; the other parts of him. Like demons, like vicious demons trying to tear him to little pieces. His mother had grown concerned. How many days did he do such things? Arguing with himself, hitting himself, cutting himself. Voices, he knew they were just voices, but their physical presence seemed so real at times he could not discern which was he and which was someone else.

                    II: A Nightmare is the First Escape to Pain, from Pain

      It was hard to understand what the night brought to Mai. The dreams: most horrible; the rest strange. Forbidding her from peaceful sleep, every night her heart torn. Maybe she’d lie bleeding on the floor. Where were the scissors she stole? Cut herself to bleed, to prove and not deny. She took in the possibility that maybe her whole existence was some sick experiment and maybe she wasn’t real. How many scars did she have to have before she was real? How long did she have to wish to be real? She sighed and looked at her wall, rubbing her open wrist softly, if only to ease the necessary pain. It hurts good… She shook her head. Not good enough. She wondered day by day and in her dreams why Julianne tormented her so. Why did she go to lengths unheard of to make Mai’s life hell? She touched the scar on her cheek tenderly, remembering the incident. Perhaps it was her fault for being in the cellar. The corpse would not go away. She fingered her hair. Useless, useless, ugly and dark.
      The lines on the walls danced around her for a minute. How much blood would come for her to go away again? She reached around on the floor and found nothing. To her right, she felt them. She sat up and lifted them to her arm and saw a rain of black dots on her arm. Not close enough. She pressed the cold blade to her skin and before she felt it in, the world turned deep violet and she fell heavily to the floor. The whole room turned into a vast black-purple sky and spun around her, “It’s so pretty,” she whispered.
      Mimi crawled over to Mai, her arm covered in blood once more. “She’s visiting the purple place again?” she sighed, wishing her friend would wake up. She hugged her ratty, once-white teddy bear Slaine, and stroked Mai’s hair lightly. It was so pretty, she thought. Mai mumbled something in her sleep, but Mimi couldn’t make it out. Too late to think again. She looked at Slaine and asked him, “Why is Mai so sad?”
      He just looked at her and shrugged.
      She sighed and walked over to her mattress and sat on it. Useless bear, he never knew anything.

      Mai looked at that precious, fragile sky as she fell upwards, the wind rushing past her. She could fall, fall, fall forever. She smiled as the broken sky mended and ripped, a constant cycle of life and death she enjoyed. Lights, thousands of lights floated past her on the way to the surface of whatever she was fall up into. So pretty. But… the world was fading… the lights dimmer, the sky more gray. She was losing balance, falling back down… What was that? No more lights? No more sky. No, she didn’t want to leave. Falling, falling, where was the ground? Gray, gray, gray…
      She woke with a start, the undeniable feeling of landing still in her chest. Stupid dreams. God damned dreams! Why did she have to wake up? All the time… god she wished she never woke up. Why couldn’t she just fucking die already? There was no one here for her. No one. She couldn’t believe that she had ever wished that there would be. How stupid was she?

      Few things prompted conversations between Mai and other human beings. But one of those was the occasions on which her shadow opted to visit her. His gray eyes held something of mystique for her. He knelt near her, grabbed her hair. Mimi was always out when he came to visit, so he could make her be loud. His pale hair swayed softly in front of his eyes and nose as he bent over her and kissed her deeply. He bit her lips, ran his slender hand up her thigh and into her pants. “Mai,” he whispered her name in a serpent-sigh, “Oh, Mai, don’t ever leave me. I haven’t begun to torture you as I want.” Then he kissed her again, lifting her to his chest, undressing her, taking her.

      The wind outside the tall white square building howled, sounding like some far off wraith weeping. The thunder echoed through the halls and the lightning light up the corridors whose large bare windows drew in the moonlight. The rain was beautiful, but never ceasing. She walked through the maze that was the stairway and into her new office. It was strange, it still smelled like him. She turned on the light and looked at the mirror hanging on the wall, with a single diagonal crack in it. She sighed. Had she loved him? Perhaps. But it was over now. She yawned softly and laid her head on the desk. Here she was, Dr. Baites, unable to forget about him. She knew someone would pay. It was only a matter of time before it happened. And even if she had to wait forever for her chance, the alleviation of her pain would be so worthwhile she’d be happy. Even if happiness had been, would always be, some far away dream, maybe this time would be the one that opened the door that had been locked so tightly. She couldn’t remember the last time that the heavy iron chains of her mind had so freely dropped and dissipated while she smiled. The weighty door to her silenced pleasure swung gloriously open with every vengeful thought. And a thanking, no matter morbidity, that Mai had led her to this place where she did indeed truly belong; a world where pain slid away and disappeared into the beautiful sky. But sentimentality not being her strong suit, the praise ended as abruptly as it had begun and she suddenly felt once again very cold. Who was she now? Who was she?
      Julianne Baites. Tall, blond, and very disturbed…she was almost as pale as her patients were; lack of sleep, lack of human emotion, perhaps had caused her to appear like one of the very people she treated as underlings. She was head physician at Albrook and she directed everything, every horror, and every secret. Her efforts were lost on sciences shunned by the doctors of ethic. Her attempts numbered in the hundreds, logic giving into ridiculous failure; trying to correct the mental problem with force, with electricity; meandering through her profession with all the grace of a drunken idiot. She knew hardly anything she could stand to do could truly help these creatures, but someone had to pay for what her father had done to her…(only a child…how could he)…it didn’t matter who. She cared nothing for human life or anything close to it. And finally she got her dream of manipulating everything and everyone. It was like that cool refreshing drink, something she’d wanted ever since she was young and defenseless. She was so sadistic that even her heart was tainted. The spiral of damnation she incurred was almost complete, and she just couldn’t figure out what was missing, but somehow she could feel that it was, she could feel it.