I used to love my job, but then something happened that made me quit. Don’t get me wrong - it was never easy working in an institution most of you would call an asylum. But the day-to-day reality was far away from the horrors and cheap scares you see on TV and in movies. We took care of some of the kindest people I ever got to know. They had their fair share of problems, of course, otherwise life would not have brought them here, but most of them were sweet, intelligent and not oblivious to the state they were in, often without any fault of their own, and sought the help and support we provided.
As I said, mostly.
On my first day of work I had been warned about a patient everybody only called the batman. He lived in a section that was cut off from the general population of the asylum, in a spartanly furnished room on his own. I was told to never go to him alone, no matter the circumstances, no matter if I was the only personnel on site, no matter what the emergency was. No matter! Considering the years of experience I had accumulated working in this field, I thought that he must have been under some program belonging to the forensic psychiatry that was on occasions placed under our roof. Out of curiosity I read his file once, how couldn’t I? They referred to him as the batman because he had been found years ago in his apartment by the police. Complaining reports of his neighbours had stacked over the months prior to that. The usual stuff: Smell coming from the apartment and undefinable noises the whole night through, some mentioned screeching. When police finally opened the door to his apartment, he was naked, dirty, sitting in a corner and eating bugs. The antennae and torsos of roaches and flies were still in his mouth when he was brought away, the doctors had to pump out his stomach as his digestive canal was ridden with infections and diseases. The walls inside the apartment all torn and tainted. Maybe the weirdest fact were the bats, hanging from his bedroom ceiling. It took a whole month to clean up his flat and get those bats that were still alive to a wildlife sanctuary. Naturally, they never let him out of the system after that. Going through countless institutions, this had become his final station. He was middle-aged, not a single record around that would have shown his path into descent and obvious madness. It was as if he had not existed until the calls from his neighbours began and the police knocked at his door. No tragic backstory, nothing. He never spoke a single word. There was a possibility that he could not even talk. He remained a mystery, catatonic and silent, locked away for the time being until someone had a brilliant idea what to do with him. Plain and simple as that.
After months of working in the asylum, I had been scheduled to work in the minimal staff shifts that would usually be set on weekend evenings and nights or holidays. There were only two of us present in those shifts. And mostly, those same shifts would be nothing but a bore as many of our clients (the correct term we used for our patients) were allowed to visit their families, relatives or friends and leave the asylum, thus there was not much more to do for us than preparing medications, checking Twitter every 10 minutes and wait for the clock to signal the shift’s end and finally go home.
Then, on a Friday night in late July, it happened. Me and N. were sitting in office, talking about family and kids and sleepless nights, when we heard a murmur, followed by crunching sounds from the speaker attached to the basement floor where our very own batman was housed. Imagine the speaker as kind of an elaborate baby phone. It reacted to a predetermined volume and started transmitting to our office once this noise level was reached.
We looked at each other and counted the seconds, knowing that the sounds could only come from one person, the only one housed there at that time. Because there were two us present, according to the guidelines any distress signals should have been investigated. Knowing the history of the client, we both were more than just unwilling to find out what was going on. But a job is a job, we thought in our endless stupidity. We locked the office and took the stairs down to the basement, through the countless doors and into the tract with the patient’s living quarters. His door was open, he was nowhere to be found. His room, filled with feces and stench. We looked around in panic, thinking he had somehow escaped, not knowing what he was capable of or willing to do. We only had little time to think about, though, as N. discovered him right behind the door in the next section we entered while searching for him. There he was, crouched in a corner, his hand and long, thin fingers tapping constantly and in fast movements along the walls and the floor. He was naked and covered in dirt and his own excretions. While I was standing there silently, shocked, N. cried out. He turned around and looked in our direction, his pale eyes staring directly at us. He suddenly stood up and let out a shriek I had never heard from a human before. It felt as if it was cutting through my bones and my brain. I remember clearly how he spread his arms, flapping them as if they were wings, running towards us under the cold light of the ceiling lamps in that corridor, his mouth open, saliva running down his chin and bony chest. N. still cried and yelled, holding her fists close to her body in front of her body. I saw that he was sprinting towards her, probably attracted by the sounds she made. I was in fear, scared, and I did something I never told those that asked me afterwards about the incident: I turned around and ran. From the corner of my eyes I saw him jumping her, biting into her face, tearing her skin apart. I shut the door and locked it. I will never forget her cries, her whining and my name she called, just before her voice changed into a numb gargling. And I ran, I ran.
The police found him sitting atop of her. I had called them. It took them a whole 40 minutes to reach us. I showed them the way and stayed behind. The report says that he had devoured massive chunks of her tissue and skin, she had lost both eyes and part of her tongue. No way to save her. Nobody blamed me. I told them that I had tried to fight him off, but that he was completely focussed on her. Nobody ever blamed me for that. They understood that I had to quit and even sent me away with a big bonus.
I don’t know what happened to the patient afterwards. He was found completely catatonic, whining, sitting atop of my friend. I try to forget. But he left me something that night in July. As he was jumping to reach her, drips of his saliva had splattered into my eyes and my mouth. I can taste the rotten smell of it even today, gulping and gulping to make it go away, but the taste still lingers in my throat and the back of my nose. I dream of bats and find myself tearing away the chitin armour from the torsos of insects I find in my apartment or in the nearby park. My family has left. I had a beautiful daughter. My wife forbade her to visit me after she discovered the bats in my sleeping room. They speak to me now. It’s getting hard to concentrate, even harder to write. These fingers feel too long, they are twitching out of my control. Throat feels dry all the time. Can’t drink water. It hurts. It burns my head and my throat.
I should have died that day.
If you find this, please know I’m sorry. And never forget I was like you, once.