Night In An Asylum

Night In An Asylum   

By Paul McCann

 

 

As a young single man with no wife or children Bobby was working hard running a petrol station . He worked seven days a week and never went out much . He lived with his parents which was of great benefit to him as he was able to save all his money he earned from managing the petrol station .

The job wasn’t physically too hard , more mentally exhausting . He looked after the customer accounts and ordered stock , did the banking and worked on the cash register .

The petrol station was open 24 hours a day seven days a week . There were three shifts each day and Bobby did the day shift .

When the person who did the night shifts left he weas asked to cover the night shifts for a while until they got someone else to do that job at first he thought it would be easier than during the day when it was always very busy but after a while on the night shifts things were getting difficult . After the pubs closed there were always drunks coming in taking things from the shelf and drives offs at the pump .

Bobby began to get stressed and his nerves were being affected /

One day he had a few days off and went to see the doctor about how he felt ,

The doctor referred him to a psychiatrist who suggested that he would be admitted into a mental hospital for a further assessment .

Bobby trusted what the specialist had said and without any refusal he took the letter from the psychiatrist and drove over the mental hospital . After reading the notes Bobby was taken in as a voluntary admission and given a bed in an overcrowded ward . They took his belongings and gave him a white gown to wear .

The more he watched the other patients , a realisation came over him that he wasn’t half as crazy as the best of them .

He tried to convince himself by thinking .,

“Yeah I mean ok , things at work had been difficult lately and the pressure of his new shift was making it hard for him to get any sleep during the day and his appetite was gone but otherwise there was nothing really out of the ordinary happening that vindicated his admission into a mental hospital .

Bobby always considered doctors as people who were able to help when you were unwell and bring cures .

He never doubted their ability until now .

So there he lay on this hospital bed with six docturs and nurses standing around him

like sharks about to go on a feeding frenzt . He listened to them throwing questions at him . Within about five minutes they had found out his favourite kind of music , his relationship status , how many cars he owned , and how much money he had saved in his bank .

He was now aware something just wasn’t right and pretended to fall asleep . He never answered anymore questions .

Later that night as he lay there, he saw two orderlies come in and put one of the patients in the ward on a trolley bed . The young man looked sedated . He was wheeled out of the ward and down the corridor .

About an hour later the same two orderlies returned into the ward and put another patient onto a trolley bed and he was wheeled away.

Bobby was now feeling very uneasy . He got out of bed and managed to find an upstairs window open and jumped from the first floor down to the ground . Some bushes in the garden cushioned his fall .He stood there in his hospital gown and walked around the building . Then he saw some hospital staff pushing trolley beds down into what looked like a basement and very carefully he went to investigate . He kept out of sight and slowly made his way over to a door that went to the basement . When it was quiet he went inside and what he saw terrified him .

He didn’t know who the real doctors and nurses were and wasn’t sure who were the patients .

Bodies lay out on trolley beds with their foreheads cut open . There was blood all over the floor . Other bodies had electrical wires placed on the side of their heads and were receiving a series of electric shocks that made their bodies shake and

teitch . More bodies were laid out on what looked like butcher tables .

They had missing limbs and some had been decapitated .

Bobby made his way back out of the basement and ran as fast as he could to the front gates of the asylum where he stood thumbing a lift .

No one stopped for a while so Bobby started to walk along the busy highway .

After a while someone must have called the police as a police car stopped and two officers went to question Bobby about what was going on .

As he told them about what he saw in the basement at first the policemen thought Bobby was on some drugs and yet as they listened more to his story and saw the state he was in,

they began to think differently .

The radioed for assistance .

A few hours later a special squad of police arrived at the hospital and burst into the basement and what they found was nothing less than a slaughter house .

While some were being arrested other doctors took their own lives .

Federal police came and took photographs of all the bodies in the basement .

There was another room connected to the basement that haf more bodies lying everywhere . Organs had been removed and some weird experiments those bodies had taken place . Scores of dead bodies had been found .

The hospital was closed and a royal commission was ordered by the government .

Bobby was one of three patients who had survived the experiments of the mad doctors in the asylum who had to stand trial for their actions .

The three survivors were sheltered from media and were put on an extensive rehabilitation program

that included group therapy sessions , medication , hydrotherapy sessions and hypnotherapy , meditation and some recreational activities . During this time all the survivors except for Bobby committed suicide .

Bobby couldn’t work again for a long time but was awarded some compensation for his trauma .

He found art a good way to express his feelings and so he joined an art class . Many doctors said Bobby would never live a normal life again . They also said due to the trauma of what he saw he could never get married and have a family .

Bobby proved everybody wrong .

He fell in love and was married and they had four beautiful children .

Bobby came came off all medication and the doctors with their wrong diagnoses had to eat their words . Bobby’s brain blocked out all of the terrible things he saw . He was able to live a full life and won many prizes for his artworks .

The government commissioned him to do a selection of artworks that would be placed inside some of the biggest hospitals in the country .

 

The End