Page 6 of No Asylum Here

We have reviewed your resume and would like to formally offer you a position at Saint Bartholomew’s Center for the Criminally Insane. This is a live-in institute, and our salaries are comparable and negotiable.

We are in desperate need of physicians, and for a doctor of your caliber, we believe you would be right at home here at Saint Bartholomew’s.

Below you will find our formal offer. Please respond immediately.

Regards,

Dr. Malcolm Rook,

Facility Medical Director

After I read the letter, I scanned it again. Then once more for good measure. The craziest thing wasn’t that I was being offered a position that I never applied for—or that this Dr. Rook seemed to think that I was a physician with prestige—but rather, his one particular line in the letter.

We believe you would be right at home here at Saint Bartholomew’s.

My heart hammered in my throat.

Those words. They were in a different order, but I’d heard them before. In my dream.

I could sit here all day and pore over my old textbooks from the Oneirology course I’d taken in school. I knew I wouldn’t find answers there.

Steeling myself, I reached for my cell phone and dialed the number printed below Dr. Malcolm Rook’s name.

It rang three times, and with each ring, I counted, breathing in, then out.

One. Two. Three.

One. Two. Three.

Click.

"This is Dr. Rook’s office.”

“Hello, this is Dr. Tuesday Beckett.”

Chapter Three

Patient Seventeen

"Meal time, Seventeen."

The slot in my cell door opened, and a plastic tray with a foul-smelling bowl of slop slid through the metal flap. The ward attendant shoved the tray hard enough that the food splattered onto the floor. It didn't matter. The food was spiked—always was.

That was his game. Keep me too sedated to fight back when the demons come. Even in my dreams, there was no escape.

All the fucking years I’d been locked up like an animal in Saint Bart’s, monsters tormented my mind while I slept—and if I couldn’t sleep, sometimes I’d see them anyway.

I clung desperately to the fragments of what I remembered from my dream last night.

Tuesday.

None of Rook’s demons were like her. If she was one of his nightmares, she was different. Disarmingly beautiful, with a deep intellect behind her eyes, and a bridled ferocity I longed to claw from her with my bare fucking hands.

Or, she could have been a product of my own lonely subconscious… But when was the last time I’d had a dream of my own? Dreams weren’t to be trusted when you lived in Hell. Not when everything about this place was engineered to make its inmates suffer. My mysterious dream woman was probably just another by-product of the poison Rook called his miracle “Treatment.”

I didn’t care. I found myself wishing with every cell in my body that I’d dream of her again.

She’d felt so real—I had to touch her again.