Sabrina Carpenter approached the Stannhauser Asylum for the Criminally Insane.
That was what people still called it, at any rate. It had probably been renamed at some point since the 1950s--likely at the same time they'd daubed the walls with murals of frolicking kittens and puppies--but to what, she didn't know..
Now it's probably called St Nonjudgmental's Center for Growth and Healing, or some shit.
She thought before the gates.
And the guards are "angels" and the inmates are "guests".
But the structure had been built in a less politically-correct time, and divulged the facility's purpose.
Walls clawed upward like castle parapets. Bulwarks jagged like knives pressed against the throat of the sky. This place was a fortress. One that was far, far easier to get into than to get out of.
Stannhauser was the place they locked you when an entire Home Depot's worth of screws started rolling around loose in your head.
* * *
In the shadow of the gate, she hesitated. Couldn't take the first step.
Keep walking. Go inside.
Sabrina squared her shoulders, pushed her anonymizing glasses further up her nose, and wrapped her jacket closer around her body.
And tried to be brave.
Her press agent, Nigel Penridge, cleared his throat, and rested a hand on his client's shoulder.
"Let's not do this. I'll make phone calls. We'll find the best PR guy in the business to launch the single. You don't need...this person."
His doubt--his
disbelief
--was a fire lit in her. It scorched away doubt and fear. She put a foot down, then the next footstep happened of its own accord, and then was forging ahead through the gate. Nigel's cultured Ivy elocution became a shrill wheedle. "Don't do this! You're making a mistake!"
"Not doing it would be a bigger one."
* * *
"Name?" the front-desk officer drawled behind a layer of bulletproof glass.
"Sabrina Annlynn Carpenter."
"Reason for your visit?"
"I have a meeting with Robert Goffman."
He whistled, as if impressed by her cojones.
"Goffman is a classification nine-three-nine. You need a court order to see those."
Ten steps ahead, Sabrina slid a form through the slot in the glass. The officer stared nonplussed at the judge's signature on the form, then back up at her.
"What do you want with Goffman? He's completely bugfuck. Came in nuts and turned even nuttier. He's started referring to himself in the third person, for some reason. Are you gonna work with him, or sumthin'?"
"Are you gonna buzz me through, or sumthin'?" Sabrina tossed her head. Her tawny wolfcut hair tumbled around her shoulders. "Are you gonna keep your job, or sumthin'?"
"Fine." The man muttered
bitch
just loud enough for her to hear. "We need to metal-wand you for contraband.."
An orderly swept a metal-detector up and down her 5'2 body.
It hit her breasts, and flashed red.
Beep.
Sabrina looked confused. Then she sighed.
"I was just at dance rehearsals. I'm still wearing the rhinestone bikini. Do you have somewhere private I can take it off?"
"Not really," the desk guy said, enjoying her discomfort. "Take it off right here, or don't come in."
If he was thinking he'd called her bluff, he was mistaken.
Sabrina ripped her jacket wide open, exposing her bikini-clad body. A explosion of flesh dazzled the room like a flashbang grenade. Guards did double-takes behind their desks. She heard intakes of breath.
Her body was physically ruinous: short but explosively thick, packed with muscle and puppy fat. Under the rhinestone bra and matching bottoms, a taut, voluptuous ocean of hot, sexy young girlfmeat rolled and seethed in restless currents.
Her thighs had the sculpted thickness of Grecian pillars. Disney-cultivated dance fibers shimmered and flexed beneath the taut skin of her quadriceps. Bulges of delicious meat swelled and spilled out from the straps of her bra and thong, as though her gaminish figure resisted any form of clothing, no matter how minimal. Tan-lines criss-crossed the girdle of her hips.
Reaching behind her back, she unclipped the rhinestone bikini and peeled it free.
Her apple-sized breasts bobbed free, capturing a chiaroscuro of light and shadow as they lolled audaciously. Twin moons, offering disclosures of light and dark, locked in a phase that was always full. Her nipples swiftly erected in the cold air.
She was defiant. Immodest. Didn't seem to care that she'd just gotten naked in front of six total strangers in a mental asylum.
She didn't flinch from the stares; just picked up the jacket she'd discarded on the floor, and belted it tight around her hot naked body. This was a hard, masculine place. Inside it, Sabrina was a soft, warm, intensely sexual veldt of womanhood.
Every single person in the room wanted to fuck her. Even if they didn't, they still would have stared. She was
discord
.
"You got what you want. Now give me what I want."
She flung the rhinestone bikini on the man's desk.
Clank.
"Twenty minutes with Goffman. Alone."
* * *
"I need your help, Robert." She said in a private interview room.
"Robert does not exist," the skeletal figure sitting crosslegged before her said. "You are talking to The Fourth Day."
Robert Goffman--the disgraced former promoter who'd once styled himself The Fourth Day--was nightmarishly tall. 6'6? 6'8? Hard to tell, sitting down. He looked like a human origami sculpture, his huge frame bent and angled and folded.
He was in his early forties. Lanky. Tattooed. His institution shirt hung like a sail from his ragged, hard-ribbed torso.
Ten years ago, this dishevelled madman had been the greatest PR svengali in the business. A shock-and-awe promoter of the Malcolm McLaren stripe, Goffman prided himself on results. He could polish a flattened dog turd into a hit record, could send Helen Keller to number one.
He was so successful, in fact, that everyone had spent an embarrassing length of time ignoring the fact that he was clearly insane.
In 2013, he'd finally sunk his career. Amidst drug abuse, death threats, and delirious megalomania, he'd been arrested. Only small-time charges, and he probably could have skated with fines or community service, but he'd made the fateful decision to represent himself in court.
His behavior--which had included public nudity, a ten minute prayer to the aliens orbiting the courthouse, and an attempt to sacrifice a live goat to Satan--had so appalled the judge that she'd involuntarily committed him.
He'd now been entombed inside Stannhauser Asylum for over a decade.
