Forsaken Dreamscape (Nevermor #2)

Chapter Two

Forsaken Dreamscape

Chapter Two

1

Wren peered into the cage, watching the birds hop from perch to perch.  They seemed content enough, even though they were locked away behind steel bars that would not let them soar.

Yet if they were free, there would be dangers for them, Wren knew.  Perhaps it is best that they are caged.  Behind these bars, they are protected.

The inmates were allowed to enjoy the birds, but were quickly chastised if they tried to open the cage doors.  Still, Wren often reached her fingers through the bars to feel the soft feathers as their warm little bodies darted past.  They were flickers of life in this colorless place.  The birds talked happily together and none of it was directed at her.  She didn’t have to respond.

Two years, she reflected.  Two years in this cage.  The irony of her name had made her sigh helplessly on more than one occasion.

Wren stared at the birds now, absently watching the blur of their colors as they swooped by.  Across the room, a few female patients were staring into adjacent cages – some muttering quietly, some licking their chapped lips.  Sometimes they tried to open the doors and grab the birds inside, but there were always nurses nearby to scold them.  They were constantly supervised as if they were children.

We are not children.  We are like the birds, Wren mused.  All of us are birds, cooped up together.

Wren lifted her eyes through the cage to peer across the room, observing those who shared the ward with her.  The girls housed at the asylum were of different kinds and from different places, with assorted coloring and breeding.  Some of them had been normal in the beginning, but years of confinement had broken them, and even the improvements to treatment had not been able to fix their tangled minds.  Others were just on the verge of slipping away – like herself – while a handful or two were complete, raving lunatics.

There was Trudy, for example, who screamed every night about the wolves in the walls – who had tried to cut into another girl with a razor to expose the secret monster inside her.  Trudy had always been that way, since her first day here.  She was no worse, but not yet improved.  There were a few others like Trudy, but there were also more docile types that had never been meant for a place like this.

Clea, with her lovely red hair, had been married to an older man who’d been very jealous of her and had eventually become so paranoid of her flirting that he’d sent her here as punishment, claiming incurable promiscuity – at least, that was what Wren had heard the nurses say.

Yes, we are exactly like the birds.

Wren rested near the cage, her head on her arm and fingers outstretched through the bars.  A young cardinal hopped down and pecked at her finger before retreating.  She was languid now, wishing to drift away.  Through a dream fog in her mind, she saw the face of a boy, distant but emerging slowly in her memory.  She reached for him –

With a short gasp, Wren snapped awake, suddenly aware of a presence nearby.  She lifted her eyes to see that another girl had approached her, looming now like a crooked gargoyle on the eave of a cathedral.  Wren knew the girl’s face – pale and homely with the sunken eyes of the abused.  Her name was Adele, and though Wren had never spoken to her much, she knew something of the girl’s behavior.

Adele was of the sort that needed constant attention, and when she’d chosen a target, she would not relent until she got the acknowledgment she desired.  She often added the other patients’ problems to her own just for sport, and was an annoyance to most who dealt with her.