Prologue
I have been writing a novel, or another novel, for the past 6 months or so. Originally it had this prologue, but then I read that some literary agents HATE a prologue as much as they hate the protagonist waking up in chapter one.
So I have culled it and jumped straight in at the panic attack. No atmospheric nuance, just pants shitting terror.
By why waste a decent short? I’ll just pop it here so it doesn’t die all alone in my Google Drive, waiting for someone to love it into reality. Let me know if you hate it with a passion you didn’t know you could still muster in the end-stage Capitalist hellscape that we currently exist in.
Lunatic
Prologue
2021
An involuntary shudder rolls over her, ghosts racing over her bones.
Emm cranes her neck to take in the sprawling mass of buildings. It’s peculiar how they feel welcoming in the daylight, but at night, under the gauzy cloak of cheap schnapps, the old hospital takes on a sinister appearance. The red and gold bricks have lost their usual warmth. She wonders about the thousands of women who have stood on this spot, staring up at their new realities, encapsulated in this monolithic feat of Victoriana.
At her back, heavy feet falling hard on the rapidly cooling asphalt. An awkward gaggle of students stumble across the carpark, shrieking, laughing, bubbling with youthful liberation.
They run from the shadows out into glaring flood lights, catching glimpses of stars and a waning gibbous moon. Grabbing at each other with awkward grasping embraces.
They are all wearing slippers or socks, like lost mental patients escaping into the night, but in reverse as they let themselves back into the hospital in hopes of spying something other-worldly. They don’t feel the sharp ground beneath their blackened and bare soles, insulated by an amour of intoxication.
A girl at the back of the group trips, her battered iPhone skates across the shingle making a sick cracking noise. She gathers it up in her hands, like an injured bird, bundling it into the pocket of her pyjama pants.
When they arrive at the rear door of the Architecture building, breathing hard from their 60 second sprint, a boy tries to punch in the key code with his fat fumbling fingers.
Each button emits a satisfying ‘clunk’. Emm loves the proliferance of old technology here. Each item from the time of switches, knobs and rotary motion. It feels tactile and archaic for teens who grew up in the era of swipescards and motion sensors.
“5, 7, 9, 0, 1. Oops no.”
“5, 6, 9, 0, 1. Shit. Fuck.”
“5, 6, 9, 0, 2. YES!”
The heavy wooden door swings open. A heaving knot of bodies spill like a dropped yoghurt pot into the industrial hallway. Their laughter hits the thick concrete walls and sprays around in audible fireworks, cutting through the deadening silence.
“Ohhh Neddy, are you scarrrred?”
“Shut the fuck up Mike you prick. Fuckin’ ghosts. I’M NOT SCARED OF YOU CUNTS!” he yells with a laugh, cutting the stagnant hospital air.
After an evening of drinking, hopping from one dorm room to another, a splinter group left the hostel to go ghost hunting in the old asylum.
They are all first year students. High on autonomy and off-brand alcopops. Newly ejected from their familial nests, they have spent their first few weeks finding their feet with peers and tutors. Now the shyness has worn off and they swagger about campus with the arrogance of a preened cockerel. You can always tell a first year from how far their head is up their own arse.
The flood lights spill in from the huge vertical windows that run the full length of the corridor. The boy with the fat fingers has his phone light trained on the floor in front of him but his drunk wobbles stop it helping in any useful way.
At the back, Emm sways down the hall, running her hand along the cold concrete as she muses on Munch’s series ‘The Sick Child’. Her first assignment - to make a copy of an art work you love, has led her down a research rabbit hole of turn of the century hospitals and medical imagery. She dreams of painting herself within a backdrop of the hospital wards as an 18th century invalid, softly coughing blood into a crisp, white hankie. The walls pulse around her with a million ideas for paintings and sculptures, for sound pieces and light displays. She has never felt so inspired. Her drunk mind repeating a mantra ‘I fuckin love this building’.
The warren of corridors have started to imprint themselves of her psyche. She spends less time getting lost between orientations and tutorials, and more time being distracted by the intricate details of the building - the shape of a single offset window, the round concrete of the stairway wall, the shapes and angles of the Victorian tiles laid in the entrance foyer.
Their hostel, Willow Hall has been a safe step between home and adult life for all of them. Some, institutionalised by years in boarding schools and educational institutions. But for many, this is the first time they have attempted to live as adults in an unwelcoming world. The big city yawns at their back with each new decision, as though they were one wrong step from homelessness. Though, in truth, none of these entitled youths are in harm's way. Their parents caring enough to support them in the gap between teenhood and self sufficiency.
“SHOW YOURSELVES GHOSTIES!!”
“YEAH, SHOW US YOUR GHOST TITS!”
“Ned, why’d you have to be so crude? Fucking hell, I hope the White Lady haunts you.”
Emm fell in love with this building at first sight. She never thought you could love an object in the way you love a person, but something about this place drew her in and made her feel welcome. It’s history pulling her close to its bosom, whispering memories into her ears.
Some students said they felt uneasy in the old asylum.
“Ugh, these old places give me the willies! I’d rather we were in the new buildings, but they’ve shoved us down here in the old rotting hospital! I wouldn’t be here if they didn’t run my fashion course. Yuck. They should just pull it all down. It’s got bad mojo anyway.”
Emm silently judges her name-less, preened colleagues who so blithely cast aside 170 years of lives lived on this spot, and the wairua of the land below.
Every day she walked the halls, feeling the presence of the thousands of souls who came before her. Lives that existed almost entirely within these foundations. Lives that mattered, humans that had thoughts and feelings and needs and loves.
Emm wanted to channel their memory into something worthwhile, something beautiful, something that showed they had existed, had never been God’s mistakes.
Tonight the souls are more active than ever.
Perhaps her youth is making her exaggerate, perhaps once the night air settled on the place, the souls of its past residents felt free to wander the halls with impunity. Perhaps she is just drunk and making shit up, but she feels an openness in the fabric of the corridors.
Emm wanders along, trailing behind her hyperactive group, bare feet sliding along the lacquered floors that look like spilled honey in the daylight and like a massacre on the forest floor at night.
The boys hide in the shadows, jumping out at random, causing squeals of hysterical laughter from the group.
No one has seen wafting lights or heard footsteps in the dark, no ghosts have floated up to greet them with messages from beyond.
Their final destination is Ward D, on the second floor looking out over the smokers area nestled between the wings. Currently the Honors department where the best and brightest are invited to stay on after graduation and continue their work in hopes of sponsorship and curatorial internships.
The old cells on this block are mostly empty, their incumbent students only starting to dribble back in after the long summer break. The heavy firestop doors swing closed behind them, pushing a wall of stale air that cradles them from behind, drawing them along the corridor. These cells had been left wholly untouched since their time as an isolation ward. Each cell begins with a tall slim door adorned with a latch made of tarnished steel. The key holes have been painted over so many times they are almost sealed. Beside each door, there is a curved recess with twin windows that look into the rooms left and right of the wall. Each viewing hatch is adorned with a shutter. Once polished metal, now each shutter had been rendered useless by year after year of white paint, sticking them ajar. The paint layered on, like time, covering, blotting out but never removing what lies beneath. Many of the numbers above the doors remain in place on thick plastic squares, some covered in paint, many still identifiable.
Emm opens the door to cell D4. The light from the tall thin window streams in and pools on the wooden floor. She walks across the small space to look out on the night. A street light on the driveway shines bright white light into the space, stripping it of all colour, making the shadows and curves monochrome. She runs her fingers along the windowsill, feeling the bumps where bars were once screwed into the concrete. Outside a huge oak tree sways gently in the night sky. She finds the view soothing, meditative, the tree offering a paternal security that makes Emm feel supported by the spirits of the land.
“You guys smell that?” she asks Mike and Katye who have walked in behind her.
“Smell what?”
“Like something’s burning.”
“Nah, all I can smell is paint and musty old rooms. You having a stroke?”
“The room feels warm tho, right?”
“Oh maybe it’s a ghost! They’ve come to tell you something Emm. Are you psychotic?”
“Like a mental or something?”
“Nah, like she can hear ghosts or some shit. Y’know like on TV”.
“You mean psychic Mike you dipshit”.
“Oh, fuck, I don’t know. I’m not a fuckin’ Brain Doctor or some shit”.
Emm listens to Katye and Mike laugh and play fight down the hall, teasing each other like 8 year old’s. She has no doubt they will hook up before the end of the night.
Emm lies on the floor in D4 in the cold street light and day dreams.
Who lived their lives here?
