The Secret Hidden Inside

It was pill time, he wasn’t even sure what he was taking anymore. The same shows, lunch, more shows, more pills, then on to a walk around the grounds for a while, then dinner and more shows. The same thing, every day. Every once in a while, a new face in the hallway to whom he could say, “Hey, I’m Steven!” That of course being the single most exciting moment of most of his days. Steven couldn’t even remember how long he had been there anymore. The nurses were very nice, talking to him daily, helping him hobble through the walkways around the grounds. They even explained why the fence around the grounds seemed to be so daunting, as some of the other guests of the facility were not as coherent as he, so they needed to be contained. Steven was content with life, he felt old and tired, his body ached and hurt at every motion. He could not remember much of life, but he knew he had worked hard for this easy life, so he decided now, after much internal debate, that he was going to enjoy it.

On a random Tuesday Steven was laying down in his bed right after the second round of pills for the morning when he felt something with an odd shaped corner with his arm as he crawled into bed. He hadn’t noticed that when he got up, or when he was lying there earlier in the morning watching his shows. He laid in bed for a while, attempted to watch his shows until the thoughts marching through his head got the better of him. He began to think maybe a rat had chewed into his mattress, though he had yet to see even the smallest of vermin in the facility. He got off the mattress again and checked the time, “Good, at least 2 hours until they come with afternoon pills”. He slowly began the process of lifting up the edge of the mattress, inch by inch moving it to a spot on the edge of the bed where he could better access the mattress. He noticed nothing odd about the mattress. He was about to push the mattress back in defeat, when he felt the hole in the bottom side. He ran his hands along the bottom of the mattress, feeling a ragged slit that had been cut into the mattress from beneath. He reached inside and probed his fingers around for the object that he had poked his arm with, when his fingers brushed against something smooth in the otherwise soft and fluffy insides of the bed. He grabbed what felt like the corner of a small smooth square object and guided it out of the opening. He realized that he was holding a black leather Journal. “Why would someone possibly be hiding a journal inside of a mattress?”

Steven thought that he should probably turn in this Journal to one of the nurses, as it likely belonged to whoever lived in this room before he did. Steven wasn’t a stupid man, he was well aware of what this place was. The only reason a person would vacate a room, would be because they grew too old to stick around any longer, kick the bucket and take that long gurney ride down the hallway to never come back. He had witnessed a covered bed or two wheeled toward the exit at the end of the hall, though most seemed to actively ignore it. It wouldn’t be right to open this Journal, with its well-maintained pages, behind its tempting black leather cover. He told himself that the thought had not even crossed his mind to pull back the string and open the Journal to its pages to find out what was hidden within its pages. He said out loud to himself “It would be wrong to read anything in here, who knows what it could be” as he began to read the words on the first page with writing on top. The pages were crisp in his fingers as he read “My name is Edgar and I don’t know how long I have. This place is not what it seems.”

Steven thought, “This place is not what it seems? What place?” He looked at the book again, front and back, trying to discern if it was some piece of fiction. Though he came to the conclusion that it did indeed have to be some sort of journal, given it was handwritten and there were errors all over. Steven was no English Major, or at least he did not think so, but he knew that a page was not supposed to be filled with that many exclamation marks and commas. Steven read on, “You may think that you can trust the Nurses, or the Doctors, or even the Janitors, but you can’t! Every one of them is working for the THEM! I don’t know how long I can last, I don’t know how long this journal will make it without being discovered, but if I can help one other soul it will all be worth it. I will chronical everything, I will fight to make it know what they do here. If you are reading this, now you must do the same! It is now your sacred duty, as it is mine, to carry the burden of knowledge and save another!” Steven was reading with his mouth open at this point. This could be nothing more than a joke, right? He had seen nothing but support from the nurses, the Doctors always checking in. Steven stopped short at that thought, when had he ever seen Doctors that checked in on their patients as often as his Doctors met with him. Every day, at least once but maybe as often as three times in one day? He pondered on this as he began to slide his bed back together, the journal lying next to his pillows now. Surely no one would miss the journal now. This would be an interesting change to his routine, a fun little read. Steven thought out loud, “It couldn’t hurt anything, could it?”

The next morning he awoke to the same alarm as every day, the radio slowly bringing him to consciousness with the last few notes of an old jazz tune by Ella Fitzgerald and a disk jockey with his smooth golden voice saying “Good morning on this beautiful Tue…” as he cut off the alarm. He realized that he couldn’t find the Journal once he began to probe around the bed for it. He was immediately afraid that he had left it where someone had seen it, then THEY had taken it from him so he couldn’t learn anymore. He immediately realized the absurdity of the thought and laughed. He must have just dropped it, though when he looked around the floor he did not see it anywhere. He realized that in his last pill dazed stupor of the night, he must have put it back in the one place he knew no one would possibly find it. Those last pills they gave him before bed made him feel very dizzy and tired, no wonder he could barely remember replacing it back under the mattress. He pulled the mattress and the Journal was right where it had been the first time. He began to read as Edgar told a tale of how the staff at the facility was really conducting experiments on the “patients” after hours. The worse patients that were now walking around the grounds in a zombie like stupor were the failed experiments, though no one would ever be the wiser because those people were already here for life. There was nowhere for them to go and no one to come looking for them to help them. Edgar wrote on about how it seemed to change a little at first, because they had begun to do the same to him at this point in his writing. They began by asking to change his meds, then taking him to a special room for therapy. Though this special room actually contained some metal chair that was hooked to all of these machines that hurt him and made his brain feel funny. Steven had wondered about the validity of Edgars writing so far, but the manner of Edgars writing began to change at this point. Even the style of handwriting began to change. It got sloppier, slower, more deliberate but worse. Steven could see the digression of Edgar from this story teller of great detail, into something else. Steven could not help but think.

Dinner time came and the nurse came in to see Steven reading the Journal, as Steven had been so transfixed by the latest developments of Edgar’s stories that he hadn’t realized that the nurse would be walking in any time now. He yelped as she walked in and threw the Journal into the air, the sight of the nurse legitimately scaring him for the first time that he could remember. The nurse stopped and looked at him for a moment, then walked back out of the room, the door slowly closing behind her. Steven took this brief moment to hide the Journal away, grabbing another book from his nightstand. The nurse walked back in with her tray of medication moments later, walking slowly to the bed. As he tried to smile to her, he could see something slightly different in her eyes. Where she was usually jovial and sweet, at this moment she seemed, was it scared? Was it aggressive? He couldn’t quite tell, other than he knew that she seemed different than the last time that he saw her mere hours before. She tried to sound pleasant but her voice cracked as she said, “Evening Mr S! How are we tonight? Just so you know, we decided to change your meds up just a little tonight, so you will see a blue one over here instead of…” Steven heart dropped. The line “It started small, by simply changing a couple of medications here and there” screamed out to him from Edgar’s pages. He stared at the nurse as she spoke but didn’t hear anything. His heart was pounding, his face felt hot. This was not happening, was it? Edgar was just some crazy person, not someone who had really lived through something you would see in a movie! Edgar, who sounded so crazy just hours before and who Steven had been reading for fun was not actually telling him exactly what was about to happen, was he?

The first cup Steven recognized, so he hesitantly took the pills and swallowed them. The second cup had two pills though that he did not recognize, two blue pills. Steven looked at the pills and then looked at the nurse in the eyes, he could see something in her eyes now. Was it fear? Was this nurse feeling bad for what she was about to do to the man she had been sweet talking for who knows how long? Steven was not about to sit around and find out. While their eyes had been locked, Steven had slid his hand to the lamp on the table next to his bed. The nurse looked to her side just in time to see him swing it hard at her head. The connection made a solid “THUNK” as she made an odd sound and crumpled to the floor, obviously unconscious. Steven wasn’t sure what to do, but knew now was time for action. He decided to make a run for it, he knew that the doors were all secured at night, so he grabbed the nurses name badge and ran out of his room into the hall. The long hall had a door on each end, both with glowing exit signs above. He chose the closest one to him and began to run as well as he could, the pills beginning to take effect now though, dizzying his head and making each step less and less steady. As he used the badge to unlock the door, an electronic buzz and click allowing him to push through the exit door at the end of the hall, he ran into two Doctors in the stairwell, one of which he immediately recognized as the Doctor that had visited him twice that very day. He shoved past both of the men in the white lab coats and just as he was about to run down the first step his Doctor grabbed his arm. The man yelling at him “You must calm down sir” Steven fought back though, pushing the doctor hard with both hands in the chest attempting to free himself from the Doctors grip. The younger man though, being much more sturdy in his footing didn’t budge and Steven propelled himself backwards, hard. His lower back hit the railing of the stairs and his upper body forced his top heavy torso over the rail and into a downward spin down the three flights of stairs. He began to scream as the world spun around him, though the sound did not last long as his body began to ricochet off of the sides of the protective guardrails. The sounds ending completely with a sudden landing cruelly on the flat, concrete floor three flights below. The last light fading from his eyes, the word “EXIT” lit brightly in red above the door in front of him, as if beaconing him to what lay beyond.

The two Doctors now stood over the man at the bottom of the stairs panting as they had just ran the three flights of stairs attempting to see if he had miraculously survived the fall. They found immediately that he had not. They had immediately alerted the emergency medical staff and they were now swarming the area. The two Doctors stood to the side, trying to grasp what they had just witnessed. The first Doctor asked the second, “Did you know him? I do not recognize this patient.” The second Doctor said, “Yes, sadly we thought we were making great strides with him. Until recently he had learned to live life very comfortably here, though just recently something unknown has thrown him into a downward spiral. He only was truly coherent on Tuesdays, we were very near to uncovering the mystery behind his delusions with the new medication and MRI mapping of his brain. Though now I supposed he will make a fantastic case study for the students.” The first doctor asked, “What was his name?” The second doctor replied, “Edgar Stevens”