Crown

The Asylum functioned as two separate facilities under the same roof. One side admitted private patients. A place for the wealthy to dispose of their mentally ill relatives. The other side housed convicted murderers suffering from severe psychiatric disorders. Jude Banks belonged to the latter.

When he awoke, it was not like a man surfacing from sleep, but like a man hauled from it. Dragged up by the wrists with dreams still clinging to his face. His mouth was dry and his tongue thick. The back of his throat was coated in something that tasted chalky.

He could remember taking his medication, and he remembered lying down. He remembered his bed, his pillow, the bad spring under his left hip that always squeaked if he turned too fast. But this wasn’t his room, his cell. This wasn’t his bed, it was a chair. Heavy. Solid. Wood and steel. The restraints were old leather. Cracked like dried lips. They creaked when he shifted.  His ankles were strapped. His wrists too. It was the kind of strapping that said we've done this before.

There was a faded logo on a wall, small and unimpressive. Just a circle of thorns. And then he knew. He remembered. Not just from memory but from somewhere deeper. Like his bones recognised it before his brain caught up.

Not here. Not again. 

The air was thick and smelled like an old barbershop sink. Drainage. Sweat. The faint snap of static electricity from a cheap plastic comb. A light flickered overhead. Incandescent. The yellow glow of a tired bulb trapped inside a fogged-up mason jar. 

Someone was standing to his right. Jude tried to turn his head, but the movement was restricted, secured to the back of the chair with more straps and padding. He couldn’t see much. Just a white sleeve at first. then hands, surgically gloved with a tight rubber second skin clinging to each finger. They moved with bored professionalism. The hands turned a dial and a machine beside the chair clicked on with an electrical hum. Something above him stirred and then a coil of wire slowly lowered itself from the ceiling. At the end of the wire was something shaped like a crown. It hovered over his scalp. The hum shifted up several octaves as the power increased. He flinched because of expectation. He’d been through this before. Again and again. He knew what the voltage felt like. 

But this time it was different. This wasn’t electricity like he remembered. This was closer to being a sound. Not heard through the ears. Not exactly. It came through his teeth. His spine. It hammered behind his eyes like a memory trying to punch its way out of the past. His breath caught. His pupils bloomed wide.

And then he wasn’t there anymore. He was standing somewhere else. The air had turned red. Above him, the sky was wrong, like an ocean of black water turned upside down and stitched in place. Things twisted inside it. Big things. Drowning slowly, as if they had been drowning forever and forgotten how to die.

The ground squelched underfoot. Thick, hot mud that tried to hold on. Screams echoed somewhere far off, but they were wrong. Filtered. Like listening to lungs filled with tar. And he knew this place. From faraway dreams. From before.

Ahead stood a hallway. Stone walls, damp and sweating. An arched ceiling. A wooden door, slightly ajar. Waiting. He moved. His boots creaked. His clothes weighed heavy. Wool. Black. Ceremonial. A rope hung over one shoulder. He stood on a platform. High. Ancient. The wood groaned beneath him, as if remembering all the others who had stood there.

There was a woman. Barefoot. Shivering. Her makeup had run in tracks down her face, mingled with dirt and something else. She sobbed. A guard held her by the elbows, like a marionette that had lost its strings. She tried to speak, but the words stuttered.

“Please,” she said. “Please, not like this. I have children. They need me. Please. I’m not ready…”

He stepped forward. The hood was black. Rough. It smelled of sweat, mildew, and ten thousand other desperate faces. He pulled it over her head. She flinched beneath his hands.

“I didn’t do it,” she whispered. “Please, someone else. Someone else—” She coughed. Her knees gave out. The guard kept her upright. “They won’t understand,” she muttered, barely audible now. “My babies… they’ll wait for me. They’ll keep waiting.”

He looped the rope around her neck. He tightened it and checked the knot. It was perfect. Of course it was. His fingers didn’t shake. Not even once. He stepped back. There was a lever beside him. Old steel, worn smooth by calloused hands and generations of duty. It stuck slightly. It needed a little extra pull.

She was still crying beneath the hood. The final word she spoke was “please—”

He pulled the lever. The trapdoor dropped. There was a thud. Thick. Final. Her body jerked. Then it swung. And just like that, he awoke again. 

A sharp inhale. The machine clicked off. Jude was sweating. His heart hammered in a rhythm that didn’t quite belong to him. Then a voice spoke, cold, sharp and punctuated with precision. “Tell me what you saw!”