Amberly Wolf Adventures

Patient 329

"Nurse Jolanda? What do you make of this?"
Dr. Friederich stood in his long white coat before the door to Patient 329's cell. He peered through the bars into the austere room, where the foreign patient sat on the floor, deeply focused as she ran her hand over the ground and her bare feet. She had removed her shoes, despite the winter chill, and looked very calm-almost happy. Nurse Jolanda cast a disapproving glance through the barred window and clicked her tongue. "There's no saving her, if you ask me, Doctor. No matter how well we look after her, she's nothing but a sick soul with very little wit," she declared.
Dr. Friederich sighed-not because her words stung, but because he was utterly exhausted from working with all these madmen.
A pity about the girl, he thought to himself. She was quite attractive, once you looked past her unusual appearance, and she spoke the language remarkably well for someone who clearly wasn't from around here. Yes, a pity-a great, great pity. But then again, Nurse Jolanda was probably right. His own medical expertise told him the same thing; he had to accept the truth. And yet... "One last course of treatment, Nurse! Just one final session. I want to see if she might be cured by electroshock therapy. Or a lobotomy. Yes, we'd best try both. Then we'll see."
With that, the doctor continued his rounds.
Nurse Jolanda conscientiously noted everything down, even though she considered it a waste of time. Lobotomies and electric shocks rarely helped and were quite costly. This patient really wasn't worth it. But if the doctor insisted...
She shrugged, then followed him to the next patient.

Patient 329 sat in her cell, gazing at the ceiling. Although she had been confined in this cell at the psychiatric hospital by the Rhine for several weeks now, she wasn't bored. Quite the opposite. Mind you, at first, she had been in a panic herself. She had raged and screamed, pleaded and threatened. She didn't just want to get out somehow; she wanted the doctors themselves to realize that a mistake had been made-a stupid coincidence. But with every second she spent sitting in the cell, she realized that wasn't going to happen anytime soon. Then came the soup, the bread, and the water they brought her; the therapies and treatments-and she felt strangely reminded of her childhood.
So she stayed.
Not forever-no, certainly not. But right now...
Ceilings were actually quite entertaining, she thought. You could always spot new patterns in them, depending on the way the light fell, the texture, the perspective...
She lay on her back and sighed with happiness at the simple things-like the indescribably beautiful fact that she could lie there pondering ceiling patterns, far removed from major worries. Well, at least she was still far removed from major worries. She realized, of course, that this was bound to change soon. But for the moment, she enjoyed the quiet, the time she could spend thinking about ceiling patterns. She tried to tune out the screams drifting down the corridors to her cell. She tried to shut out anything that fueled her fears. She tried to block out the voice that was slowly but surely gaining the upper hand-growing louder, slowly but surely. Whispering ideas to her that she wished she'd never had. The patient cursed herself inwardly and tried once more to focus solely on the patterns on the ceiling. That was more important-far more important-than such thoughts. After a while, her eyes slowly drifted shut, and she became lost in her confused dreams...