hi, i write sometimes

It was the third month of her stint in Mount Massive, and Mercy was beginning to get sick of this place. When she wasn’t at her regular group therapy sessions or in a drug-induced sleep, she spent her days wandering the grounds in a daze. The uppers they gave her to keep her awake in the daytime didn’t let her relax despite the constant exhaustion that plagued her mind. 

Today the female patients were allowed into the gymnasium. A net had been set up and a group of women were playing badminton. Mercy had wandered in from the vocational block. She had been trying her hand at mending socks with a number of other female patients, but had given up. She was too sluggish to focus on the task, and her mind was too hyperactive to let her rest.

She was standing off to the side, listlessly watching the other girls play. She closed her eyes for a moment, hoping to assuage the dryness she felt. But when she opened her eyes, things looked different. The room had aged several decades before her eyes. The wooden floor was warped horribly and covered in detritus and blood. So much blood. Ropes criss-crossed the floor. They were connected to some kind of pulley system. And above her…

Bodies hanging like wet laundry, like skinned rabbits. Naked corpses dangling from the ceiling. Some headless, some missing limbs. All male, by the looks of it. The entire width of the ceiling was crowded with them. Each mutilated in increasingly creative ways. Torn apart and then stitched back together again. The tennis net, the other patients and the orderlies were gone, leaving her alone in the bloodstained room.

The doors on the far side of the room were open, so she wandered through. She was not displaying the level of fear or panic that an ordinary person would be expected to show in this situation; she had been so dulled to extreme emotion from her ordeal that her only response was to simply carry on.

Most of the familiar hallways were clogged with discarded furniture, so she took the only path available. From the vocational block, she took the gated stairs and wandered through the upper floors of the male ward. From the window she got a good view of Mount Massive’s sprawling grounds. She could see the outline of the chapel in the distance. It was on fire. The silhouette of the cross on the steeple was stark against the backdrop of vibrant red flames. She stood there and watched for a while, noticing that the flames seemed to neither spread further nor die out. It seemed like the church was stuck at the crux of its own destruction. 

It was just before dawn, which was not the time she remembered it being. The sky was a rich indigo lightening into a sickly yellow, like a bruise. Mercy continued on.

The male ward led to the administrative block, and from there she was able to follow familiar sights until she reached the lobby. It looked different, though. She didn’t remember the large set of desks being there, or the walls being that colour. Strewn about the oval-shaped reception desk were strange, blinking devices she had never seen before. 

She ignored the bodies lying about the room, nor the piles of ambiguous red gore, and stepped into the elevator at the back of the hall. The door closed without her pushing any buttons, and the elevator began to descend. How she knew where to go was a mystery. It felt like there was an invisible string tied around her whole being, tugging her closer and closer to its source.

What she saw when the elevator door finally opened was like nothing she had ever seen before. The corridor in front of her looked like it was carved out of the mountain itself, while still being pristinely white and clean. At the end was a larger room. Behind a modern-looking desk in the center was a sign that read “MURKOFF”. The sterile room had been tainted with large streaks of blood that reminded her of brush strokes on a huge canvas.

Following an invisible path through the grey corridors, Mercy finally came upon what could only be her journey’s end. A space that reminded her of a laboratory; desks, screens and strange machines. Beyond the glass wall at the far end of the room was a gigantic machine covered in blinking lights. She thought of the asylum as a colossal, unknowable beast, and this was its heart. She had travelled through its foul organs and arteries to reach its heart and she had emerged here. 

The assembler, the feed chambers, the precursor molecules. She didn’t know much about the science at work here, but she understood what it was doing. Reprogram us, turn us into nightmare factories. This was the altar where screaming innocents were sacrificed to appease a malevolent spirit like cults she’d read about. But this spirit didn’t want flesh or blood, it wanted minds; it spread like a virus, settling in their skulls, eating away at their brains. Eating their suffering. In a place like this, where the suffering flowed like great rivers, it would surely gorge itself.

What an existence that would be, to survive on suffering.

Murkoff Minutes

1960-06-09

MURKOFF CORP

COPY

TRANSCRIPTION OF SURVEILLANCE RECORDING IN SLEEP ROOM #██; REAGENT 0917 & REAGENT 0486

EDITED FOR CLARITY

[Minutes 5-7]

0486 - Christ… do you remember anything about your life before you came here?

0917 - It’s all hazy. Vague, blurry. (inaudible) … can’t remember the details. I know I had a life before this, and that it wasn’t a good one, but I don’t know what that life was.

0486 - Well, you told me a little bit over the time we’ve known each other. Do you want me to tell you?

0917 - No.

0486 - No?

0917 - Who I used to be doesn’t matter.

0486 - Oh, Jesus. Don’t tell me you’re buying Murkoff’s brainwashing crap.

0917 - No, no. I had… a revelation while I was asleep. I had the strangest dreams…

0486 - I see.

(prolonged silence)

Murkoff Memorandums

1960.06.12

MURKOFF CORP

INTER-ORGANIZATIONAL LETTERS ONLY

COPY

PATIENT REPORT

ATTN: Dr. ██████

It came to my attention yesterday that Reagent 0917 has experienced some form of memory loss, and was interviewed to determine the extent of her amnesia. The patient is able to recall the injury that caused her extended coma, as well as specifics of the therapy she engaged in from the time she arrived in the facility to the present. She is able to recall the names and faces of those who are no longer in the facility (Reagents 0877 and 1616 she mentioned by name). However, she has no memory of her family or personal life. Memories of her childhood, and the circumstances that led her to come to the facility are foggy at best. Most importantly, she is unable to recall her own name, referring to herself as ‘Mercy’ when asked. This is likely a nickname, as the full name listed on her file is ████████ ███████. Reports also indicate other Reagents referring to her by this moniker.