The Asylum Chapter 4

Chapter 4 She sat up, her head aching – and looked down in disbelief at her clothes. And then she felt the weight of the collar round her neck – and saw where she was. But why? Why had he done this to her? She’d come to rescue him. He’d seemed so normal – but he must be insane. “Why are you doing this to me? What do you want?” Now he was, once again, the scary metal monster he’d first seemed to be. “I want freedom for all of us. Proper freedom. And we’re only going to find that in here. What do I want from you? Well, help for one thing: help setting the others free from this place. But help setting them free from what’s been done to them – and to me – as well. Let me tell you someone’s story – and what an ancestor of yours did to them.” “It’s what brought me here – my great-great grandmother’s diaries. Maybe another great there – I forget. She was a young woman, full of passion, fire, spirit…none of which were desirable attributes in her parents’ eyes. So they brought her here, having heard about Alfred Wolvercote’s ‘special services’.”
He paused, and she was seriously scared of the menace in his tones.
“And now you’re paying for what happened to her. And others…I might tell you more about them later.”
To Pete’s mind – altered far more than he realised by the machine Dr Wolvercote had used on him – this seemed perfectly reasonable. Ariadne had inherited the property – she inherited the responsibilities as well. And the other four inmates were, without doubt, a responsibility. Ariadne would have agreed with him on both those counts. But with Pete, it went deeper. She had inherited not only the present-day debts, but the ones from the past. What had been done to other people here – that was her debt to pay as well. “Somewhere in these laboratories is the information I need to set them free. But with these metal gauntlets on, I can’t do anything. You have no idea how hard it is even to straighten a finger. And they’re so thick, I can’t type. I tried. I’m hitting three keys at once each time. You’re going to do all that for me, starting now.” At least she could touch-type. Ariadne sat at the screen and typed at Pete’s orders, as he navigated his way through file after file, and line of code after line of code. To her, most of it was meaningless, but Pete seemed to know what he was looking for. And Pete looked at her and saw her only as a useful machine to serve his purpose. He would have to watch her carefully for signs of rebellion, he reflected – but he had some ideas for dealing with that if it arose. In the meantime he wanted her obedient. And off-balance, so that she wouldn’t be able to think of fighting back, but not reduced to the state Elise was in, or she’d be no use to him.
Off balance was how Ariadne felt. The clothes, the collar – she felt confused and disorientated, as though she was no longer the Ariadne who went to work in a boring office. Which, of course, was true. The next day Pete took Ariadne to the very foot of the stairs, to see if there was another way out. He’d sealed the key card firmly into the lock at the top of the stairs, to make sure that Ariadne didn’t run away and leave them all trapped up there, which meant that they couldn’t open the door into the library, but there might be another way out.
There was a door at the bottom of the stairs, and to his surprise, it opened with the key that was in the lock. Once open, he could see why it wasn’t locked electronically – it didn’t lead outside, but down a few steps into a small room, where a ladder led down into darkness. He made Ariadne climb down it, and then followed her. “I know what this was,” Pete said, when he’d found the light switch.
“And I can see what it is now. Come on – we need to know what’s along that corridor.” And he headed off along the corridor, with Ariadne following reluctantly.
There was another ladder at the other end. Ariadne could see the effort it was for Pete to climb up in his heavy suit. Ariadne came up and out into what seemed to be a gardener’s shed. And through the door, she went out into a securely fenced area. But the fence wasn’t that much higher than herself.
“Look – we could just climb the fence – and get us all out this way.”
“I don’t think so,” Pete said. “I’m pretty sure that fence is an electric one. I daren’t touch it in this suit, but – go nearer and see what you can hear. Be careful though.” She went closer and listened and yes, she could hear a faint hum. She stretched out her finger cautiously towards it, and snatched it back as she felt a tingling sensation. “So what was this? An exercise yard? A garden?”
“Not exactly – though sort of. I’ll tell you the story one day.” But his tone wasn’t very promising.
“Well, it could be a garden again. I know we’ve got food in the cupboards, but we could grow fresh food here.”
“With what?” His tone was so sarcastic and so dismissive that she was annoyed and let it show. “With the seeds I bought on my way here! For my garden! The one that I was going to plant before you kidnapped me and held me prisoner – when all I’d done was to come and rescue you!”
Pete winced. It didn’t sound so good spelt out as clearly as that.
“Oh, so you’ve got a bit of backbone after all, Miss Safety-At-Any-Cost. All right, I’ll let you – but only when I don’t need you for anything else. Now – go back in. It’s dark. We’ll look at this again tomorrow.” And, as usual, she was locked in Pete’s cell for the night, sleeping on the old settee, whilst he slept in his bed on the landing. Once again, Ariadne was ploughing through lines of code and sorting through files. Pete frowned at the screen.
“We need Olaf to help us with this. Which means that we’ve got to get him out of his cell, and shut down that visor and then take it off him. We can’t remove it while it’s active – we could cause him untold damage. You’re going to have to take a crash course in practical electronics.”
“Me? What’s your next bright idea? I don’t know the first thing about it.” Ariadne was beginning to notice that sometimes when she stood up to Pete, he seemed to become a bit more like a human being, and a bit less like a robot. But this wasn’t one of those times.
“I have no choice. I’ve only got you,” he said flatly. Ariadne was planting the seeds she’d bought so hopefully for her own garden. Pete was saying things like: there’s food enough in these cupboards for a year, if we keep on rationing it. One meal a day didn’t feel like enough, but Pete said that they were getting all the vitamins they needed, and they weren’t being very active: they’d manage nicely. But it didn’t look like she was going to get away any time soon. She felt odd in the Victorian dress. She’d pointed out to Pete that it would wear out soon, but he said there was plenty more in the cupboard: she could help herself. The collar round her neck was a constant reminder of how trapped she was. Pete had threatened to tether her by it, like a disobedient dog, if she didn’t do what he wanted. And she had no doubt that he meant it. All her adult life, all she’d wanted was safety. And now she’d lost it. And she was going to have to adjust to that.