The Orphan of Awkward Falls
Read The Orphan of Awkward Falls Online
Authors: Keith Graves
Tags: #Mystery, #Young Adult, #Horror, #Childrens
To Boris and Mel
The little town of Awkward Falls was known for two things: its canned sauerkraut and its insane asylum. Both had achieved notoriety for their repulsiveness. The canned sauerkraut contained cabbage, vinegar, and other appalling ingredients, the smell of which prevented most sane people from actually attempting to eat it. The Asylum for the Dangerously Insane contained insane murderers. Both were to be avoided at all costs, as one was likely to cause gas, and the other, death.
The asylum, despite its name, was anything but a safe haven for its inhabitants. Although it was listed in the phone book under “hospitals,” and the criminals locked inside were referred to as “patients,” the Asylum for the Dangerously Insane was actually a maximum-security prison. It was like a black hole for the criminally crazy, swallowing mad killers by the hundreds, their deranged faces never to be seen again by the outside world.
Even at its grand opening nearly a century ago, the asylum looked ancient and gray, like an enormous tomb. Only a few small
windows dotted its bleak façade, and most of these were crisscrossed with iron bars. Its walls were constructed of thick granite, so as to allow nothing, not even a sound, to escape from inside.
Deep within the asylum, a team of surgeons marched down a dim corridor, their shoes squeaking like frightened mice. In black rubber gloves and white cloaks buttoned up to their necks, the surgeons looked more like slaughterhouse workers than men of medicine. The hallway was lined with identical cell doors, distinguishable only by the numbers stamped into their rusty steel plating.
“Here we are, gentlemen—number one-six-six-five-three,” said the team leader, as the group stopped in front of one of the doors. “Mr. F. Stenchley.”
Like all the other cells in the asylum, this one was windowless, no larger than a closet, and inhabited by a single patient. The surgeons dutifully consulted their clipboards to make sure this was the correct cell, but there was really no need. They had visited this cell so often they could have found it with their eyes closed.
“Are we really going to take the little monster out, Dr. Penrose?” one of the surgeons asked the team leader, nervously eyeing the bright red C stamped at the top of Stenchley’s chart. “I mean, given the patient’s violent history, it seems…unwise.” The group all murmured their consent with this assessment.
Penrose nodded. “I understand your concern, Dr. Smoot. But you must admit the patient has made great progress since we began the new round of Treatments. There have been no biting incidents
in weeks, and we rarely need to use the muzzle on him anymore. According to the Cell-Cam tapes, he has even stopped eating bugs and rodents, for the most part.”
“Still, sir, asylum policy clearly says—”
“I know what the policy says, Smoot, yet our orders are very clear! As you can all see on your charts, Dr. Herringbone himself has signed off on the whole thing.”
The sensitive ears of Mr. Fetid Stenchley, the notorious killer inside number 16653, heard every word of their discussion. His scrambled egg of a brain buzzed with sinister ideas at the thought of finally being taken out of his cell. For ten years he had not set foot outside this cold iron room, except to receive a Treatment.
In an institution packed to the rafters with vile, repulsive criminals, Stenchley stood out. He was a crooked little humpbacked man with apelike arms that hung nearly to the floor. Much stronger than most men his size, he had knotty hands capable of snapping a bone or wringing a neck so quickly his victims barely knew they were in danger before they found themselves taking their last breath.
Though short for a murderer and so remarkably ugly that he almost inspired sympathy, Stenchley was regarded by both the doctors and his fellow inmates as something of an all-star in the world of criminals. Like the others, of course, he was a homicidal maniac whose instinct for murder was built into his very genes. But Stenchley brought a little something extra to the business of taking lives that even the most brutal of his peers could never have even
contemplated. It was the reason for the ominous red C at the top of his psychiatric chart. Fetid Stenchley was a cannibal.
The peephole in the heavy iron door of Stenchley’s cell slid open, and a surgeon’s eyeball looked in at him.
Stenchley sat on his plank bed, the cell’s only furniture, counting on his fingers. “You’re one hour and six minutes late,” he mumbled. His voice seemed to come from his nostrils as much as from his mouth, a result of a nasal infection he had suffered from most of his adult life. For the last ten years, the surgeons had come like clockwork, at the same time every day, seven days a week, 365 days a year. Even with no clock or windows to tell the time, Stenchley had learned to predict their arrival to the minute.
The eye blinked, and the peephole snapped shut again. Next came the familiar jangle of keys, which caused Stenchley’s pulse to quicken instinctively. Keys meant that he was about to receive the Treatment.
The Treatment was based on the theory that searing heat applied directly to certain regions of the brain would curb the subject’s desire to stab, choke, shoot, shove out of windows, drown, gag, poison, bonk repeatedly on the head with heavy objects, or otherwise exterminate his fellow man. In simple terms, the surgeons believed that a roasted brain was a peaceful brain.
The asylum required that each of its patients receive the Treatment at least once, which was usually more than enough. The Level One Treatment combined microwave heating of the brain’s frontal lobe with spinal cord microelectrocution and could be counted on to reduce even lifelong criminals to whimpering blobs of obedient flesh. For those rare few killers who emerged from Level One with their desire to be naughty still intact, there was Level Two. Using intra-ear laser-probe insertion to deliver over three hundred degrees of heat to the patient’s brain, followed by a complete flushing of bodily fluids using a patented system of pressure hoses, Level Two always worked.
Except in the case of Fetid Stenchley.
The Level Three Treatment had been developed solely for the mad hunchback and required a special generator to create the enormous electrical voltage. Few other human beings could even survive a Level Three. But Stenchley had received one each day for nearly a year.
Recently, this intense regimen had begun to show positive results. Stenchley’s taste for flesh seemed to have been curbed, and he no longer required a team of linebacker-sized orderlies to drag him from his cell for his daily Treatment. Still, experience had taught the surgical team to enter Stenchley’s cell with extreme caution. Many of them had scars in the shape of the madman’s teeth scattered around their bodies from past visits, and regarded him as only slightly more evolved than a pit bull.
But today the little man-eater sat quietly in his straitjacket, watching the surgeons tiptoe in.
“Hello, Mr. Stenchley!” said the team leader, with a tense smile pasted on his face. The surgeons all kept as far away from the madman as the tiny cell permitted. “As you correctly observed, we have indeed come for you a little later than usual. You are a very perceptive chap!”
“Am I gettin’ my Treatment now, sir?” Stenchley asked, innocently.
“Yes, don’t worry, Mr. Stenchley. You will have your Treatment just like always, I promise. But today we have some special visitors who want to meet you. The mayor himself is making a special appointment just to see what a nice fellow you’ve become! Isn’t that exciting, Mr. Stenchley?”
Stenchley was unsure exactly what a mayor was, but if it meant that he was going to be let out of his cell, then it was definitely exciting. He drooled and nodded, imagining what a mayor might taste like.