Chapter 1 - Part 4

Stepping through the door from the visitor centre to the actual asylum was, like most of the area, a huge jump backwards in time. Obviously designed with no regards for comfort the building had been fashioned from solid stone, the walls scratched and chipped from years of prisoners and lunatics clawing at them.

“Notice,” said Bobby with obvious pride as they passed through the heavy oak doors that led to the kitchen area, “that the doors are exact replicas of the originals, based on testimonials and illustrations.”

He swept an arm around the room. “As I said before, this place was first built as a prison, hence the rather drab interior. It would be tiny by our standards; many experts suspect this is why it quickly changed to an insane asylum, although as I said before the records are quite muddled around this period. In fact, several seem to indicate that this was a prison built for madmen!”

“Sounds like the perfect place for Adam,” whispered Samantha, nudging Jonathan who chuckled quietly and nodded in agreement. They both knew Adam to be intelligent but quite eccentric, his reputation hardly improved by near-silence around anyone other than Jonathan and Samantha.

The tour continued for another half hour before they were taken up to the cells on the top floor. Converted from the original prison cells, Bobby explained, they were fabled to have held the worst and most insane of the asylums inhabitants right up to middle of the eighteenth century when the asylum was finally shut down. When given a brief break to wander around the cells themselves Jonathan went into one at random and had to admit that the bleak grey walls and tiny slit of a window would have broken his spirit pretty quickly, sane or not.

“Look at this!” said Samantha in amazement.

Moving away from the window, Jonathan realised what she was pointing at. Above the raised stone slab that would function as a bunk was writing scratched into the stone wall. Various scrawls and scribbles snaked across the stones, mostly in English but with a few other languages mixed in. Jonathan recognised Spanish and Latin and least. He was even more amazed to read a date, fifteen eighty-seven, etched into the wall. All of a sudden it really hit him that men and women had spent years in this cell, sleeping, eating, even dying. The reality of the suffering swept over him, humbling and scaring him a little, as if reading these marks could drag him backwards through those years and he too would be forced to spend his whole life in the cell. Samantha let out a low whistle that brought Adam over to observe the writing as well.

After a moment of silence he murmured, “Historical graffiti. Some things never change.”

And with that he strolled off to examine the other cells. Samantha rolled her eyes and followed.

Jonathan eyes lingered on the wall a moment more, then turned to leave. As he did so his foot snagged on one of the uneven stones that made up the floor, sending him falling downwards. He hit the ground hard, grimacing as the rock cut into his palm and knees.

And that was when he saw it. A hollow in the base of the bunk, nestled in the shadows where the bunk met the wall, barely visible in the half-light. It was only an inch deep, maybe a few inches wide. Practically invisible while standing, Jonathan had fallen into the perfect position to notice it, his nose almost touching the rock.

Inside the hollow a symbol had been carved into the rock, over and over so that it was thick and clear, unlike the shallow surface scratches that had made up the wall signatures. It was odd, like an upside down ‘V’ with a spiral moving out from the point. As Jonathan watched the engraving seemed to deepen, the shadows around it distorting his perceptions. He peered closer and the shadows seemed to darken. In fact, everything seemed to darken. Within the symbol he swore he could see flickering, as if a fire had been set inside the bunk and the light was escaping through the carving. Even as he watched the light grew brighter, piercing through the symbol, searing the rock around it. Now it was a fire, flickering and pulsating with energy streaming through the symbol. Everything seemed far away now and Jonathan felt his chest constrict with fear as the emblem seemed to expand, filling his vision entirely. He could hear a faint roaring all around him and the world seemed to rock, tilting slowly back and forth. He felt like he should run, or sit up, but he wasn’t sure he could feel his legs anymore. The symbol continued to expand, growing huge, bigger than Jonathan. The roaring grew deafening and suddenly the world lurched, throwing Jonathan at the symbol, now a giant beacon of light in complete darkness. As the world span and he was swallowed up by the fire he gave a scream he couldn’t hear. There was a huge flash of blinding light, and then everything, Jonathan and the world, was gone.