Bed of Nails Read Free

Essondale.
    Essondale.
    Does that not sound like a loony bin?
    The “work” in “work therapy” was done on the flatlands below. A 450-acre patch was diked and ditched as Colony Farm, and by 1911, the slave labor at Essondale was producing more than seven hundred tons of crops and twenty thousand gallons of milk. Colony Farm was described as having “the best-equipped barns, stables, dairy equipment, and yards in Canada, if not the continent.” Befitting that picture-postcard image, a line of elm trees was planted along one side of the road that bisected the farmland.
    The Second World War saw major advances in treating the insane. Electro-convulsive shock therapy—ECT—was introduced in 1942. One hundred and thirty-eight Essondale patients were strapped to restraining chairs the following year. With gags wedged between their teeth so they wouldn’t bite off their tongues and electrodes taped to their temples to zap in therapeutic juice, their brains were cooked to unscramble their minds. Psycho-surgery arrived in 1945. Disruptive inmates were treated by neurosurgeons who lobotomized them, separating the troubled chunks from their “good” gray matter. Insulin shock was used to plunge others into a chemical coma.
    Now do you feel better?
    A new facility built at Colony Farm was intended to house veterans injured in the war. The complex, however, was never used for that. Instead, Essondale was revamped in the postwar years. The asylum on the mountain became Riverview, and the war vets’ hospital a mile away on the miasmic flats spreading out to the Fraser became the Riverside Unit for the criminally insane. There, only the spookiest psychos were caged at the end of the eeriest mile.
    Riverside.
    Does that, too, not sound like a madhouse?
    The rising moon beamed down on the flats as the black van turned off the highway onto Colony Farm Road. If the Goth had driven across this lonely marsh a few years ago, it would have seemed as if Halloween had summoned its monsters and demons here after last night’s festivities. Leaves shedding from the skeletal limbs of the overhanging elms would have tumbled about the windshield for the entire mile. The fleeting form of a werewolf might have lurked in the jerky shadows between the tree trunks, its chilling howl masked by those of local coyotes baying at the full moon. And surely those wisps exhaled by the murky marsh were ghosts haunting the graveyard of some forgotten tribe, for the bank at the end of this road was an Indian reserve.
    The farm, however, had not been worked for many years. That neglect had resulted in ditches not being drained, which had caused water to rot the roots of the towering elms, and that in turn had brought several trees crashing down across the road. It was only a matter of time until someone got crushed, so the government had been forced to fell all but a few of the trees. Consequently, the eeriest mile had lost its creepy shadows, and the road the Goth drove tonight was a wide-open space of moonlit grass, thistle, and bramble mats.
    Gone, too, was the brooding haunted house.
    Its back to the dikes along the polluted Fraser River, the Riverside Unit for the criminally insane had exuded an ominous mood. On a full-moon night like tonight, the light of lunacy would shine down upon the three floors of that dual-winged snake pit. Through the crosshatched bars in rows of darkened windows would glare the eyes of freaked-out men trapped inside, accompanied by screams from those with cooked and cut-up brains. Black crows perched along the eaves of the flat roof would caw at cars that ran the gauntlet of the eeriest mile.
    But no longer.
    For Riverside was rubble.
    All that remained of the booby hatch that housed the damned in a not-so-distant past was an empty, overgrown lot behind a chain-link fence. Sixty million dollars—that’s what it had cost to construct the new Forensic Psychiatric Hospital at Colony Farm. Built not a stone’s throw away from the