The Blackstone Chronicles - By John Saul Page 0,62
A week later, when she heard that Tommy had joined the army and was going to Korea, she knew she had no choice. She had to tell her parents.
She expected her dad to go into a rage, threatening to kill whoever did this to his little girl. When she told him Tommy was in the army, his face blackened with fury and he swore that if the North Koreans didn’t kill the stinking son-of-a-bitch coward, he would, no matter how long it took. Her mother demanded to know how a daughter of hers could ever let a man use her the way Tommy had, and sobbed that she would never again be able to look any of her friends in the face.
All of that, she had expected.
What she hadn’t expected was what happened the next day: Her parents took her up to the top of North Hill and committed her to the Asylum.
She sobbed and begged. She raged at her father with every bit as much fury as he’d raged at her the day before.
But her parents were implacable. She would stay in the Asylum until the baby was born.
Only then would they decide what would be best for her to do next.
For the first two months, she lived in terror, afraid even to leave her room for fear of what might happen to her. All her life she and her friends had lived in quiet fear of the building at the top of North Hill. All through her childhood there were whispered stories of terrible things that went on up there, and she’d spent more than one sleepless night cowering under her quilt at rumors that one of the “lunatics” had escaped.
The first few nights in the Asylum were the worst. She was unable to sleep, for here there was no quiet at night; instead the hours of darkness were alive with the screams and moans of the tormented souls hidden away within the forbidding stone walls. But slowly her mind became inured to the howls of anguish that echoed through the small hours of the night. Finally she began to venture forth into the dayroom, where she joined the rest of the lower security patients, who whiled away their lives playing endless games of solitaire or thumbing through magazines whose pages they never actually read.
And they smoked.
During her second month in the dayroom, she began smoking too. It passed the time, and somehow numbed the pain of loneliness and hopeless desperation.
As the weeks turned into months, and her belly swelled with the child she was carrying, she began slowly, tentatively to make friends with some of the patients. She even tried to befriend the woman who always sat perfectly still, only her constantly darting eyes betraying her consciousness. But the woman never spoke to her.
One day, the silent woman simply vanished, and though there were stories that the woman had died somewhere in the secret chambers rumored to be hidden deep in the Asylum’s basement, she didn’t quite believe the talk.
Nor did she quite disbelieve it.
Her family had not come to see her. That was no surprise: Her father was far too angry, her mother too ashamed.
And her two little sisters, both much younger than she, would be far too frightened to brave a visit to the Asylum on their own.
So the months passed.
Today, on a cold March morning after a night in which the howling of the wind had been loud enough to drown out the cries and wails of the Asylum’s occupants, she felt the first painful contraction.
She winced as it gripped her body, but didn’t let herself cry out, for over the months of her pregnancy she had come to understand that the pain of childbirth would be nothing more than punishment for the sin she and Tommy had committed.
A punishment she had vowed to bear in silence.
Within an hour, though, the contractions were coming every few minutes, and she could no longer bear the pain without crying out. The women in the dayroom called out to one of the orderlies, and the orderly summoned a nurse.
With the pains coming every two minutes, and her body feeling as if it was about to be torn apart, she was strapped onto a gurney and wheeled into a white-tiled room. From the ceiling, three brilliant lights blazed down, nearly blinding her.
The room was cold—close to freezing. The orderlies began to strip her gown from her body. She begged them not to.