SILVERTON HIGH -- PRESENT DAY: "When the Great Depression hit they really couldn't afford to replace O'Reilly's, especially with more people checking in because of depression and suicidal thoughts from losing everything," declared Gina.
"That's when they caught Dr. Frankenstein doing his experiments with the patients, wasn't it?" asked her boyfriend Paul.
"What?! Some guy was sewing body parts together?" Barbara asked with disgust.
"No. They called him Frankenstein because his name was Frank or something like that, but he was actually experimenting with living patients, playing sick mind games that he claimed were just radical treatments trying to break them out of their psychoses."
Barb's boyfriend Jerry picked up the tale. "And just like the rapist orderly he ended up confined in his own asylum, babbling about the Red Spirit."
O'REILLY'S ASYLUM -- 1930: Dr. Gabriel Franck took his mid-morning dose of laudanum. He denied his addiction, denied his deteriorating mental health, denied the existence of a red-haired ghost in his hospital while at the same time blaming her for his actions. Yes, it was the Red Spirit who made him do the things he did, but at the same time, if these "treatments" worked, then he was certain he would no longer hallucinate about a pale, red-haired vixen that drove him to the proverbial heights of ecstasy and depths of despair.
One of the ways he justified his opiate use to himself was that it "opened his mind" enough to allow him to psychoanalyze himself. Something no self- respecting psychiatrist would attempt, especially based on the increasingly rejected theories of Sigmund Freud, but Gabriel Franck was well beyond respect.
He'd concluded that his confusion over his own sexuality, especially his erotic thoughts about men, was based on never having gotten out from under his domineering mother's thumb. This had led him to marry an equally domineering wife. Unfortunately, she did not bring that domination to an active sex life, but rather, ignored her husband in bed, while nagging and chiding him throughout their waking hours.
Today Gabriel Franck was going to exorcise the hovering memory of his mother and free himself from a life of submission. Today he was going to turn the tables and dominate his mother.
Well, she wasn't really his mother, who had passed away four years ago, but she was a suitable surrogate. One of the surge of patients that had ended up at O'Reilly's asylum following the sudden onslaught of the Great Crash a year ago. In fact, today being Halloween, it was exactly a year and two days since Black Tuesday had brought the lives of so many crashing down around their ears.
Agnes Thompson was used to a life of ease and luxury. Those things had only become more expected during the stock market's hey day in the 1920's as her husband sunk more and more of their wealth into the market and reaped its rich rewards. Unfortunately, when the bubble burst, especially those three big pops in late October 1929, her husband decided to follow their fortunes into the pit and leapt from a railroad bridge into a deep, narrow ravine west of town.
Agnes's depression had been also been deep and with no one to care for her the penniless widow had ended up at O'Reilly's. The same age as the late Mrs. Franck and bearing a striking resemblance to said matriarch, Agnes had immediately gained the special attention of the asylum's top doctor.
He made his way to her room at the very end of the hall and found his "treatment" team already waiting for him. Yes, what he had planned for Agnes Thompson was going to be good for her, he told himself again. Her deep depression that left her out of touch with reality and harboring thoughts of joining her husband in suicide had been brought on by massive shock. Massive shock was just what was needed to snap her out of it. The fact that inflicting that shock would also help Gabriel with his own issues was a side benefit.
"How are you today, Mrs. Thompson?" he asked smoothly as he lifted her hand from the mattress and felt her pulse.
"Very well, thank you," the old woman answered dreamily. Between her response and pulse Dr. Franck decided that today's dose of laudanum had been just right. He'd tried this shock treatment on other patients who had been much more highly sedated so they wouldn't be able to remember and complain about it later, but it hadn't given him the release he was seeking. In the doctor's twisted analysis that simply indicated that facing down an angry bitch while she was basically sleeping was not enough of a challenge to his deeply held neuroses. He needed to stand up to the beast while she was snarling and snapping; only by not backing down in the face of that challenge would he finally be free of his weak character and amoral thoughts.
Molly had been drawn to this room like a moth to a flame, or a shark to blood in the water. Ever since her encounter with Jane Rostick some eight years earlier had restored her to a certain level of energy, of substance, she had been keeping the cycle going by compelling patients and staff to release their inhibitions and act out their sexual urges. As she circled the room, doing her own checking of pulses and finding them pleasingly strong and increasing, she sensed that all that energy was focused on the only quiet one in the room, the woman on the bed.
Molly certainly could thrive on a rapist's energy, but the greatest pay off for her came when everyone was a willing participant with no one holding back. The long-dead Irish slut began to channel the energy from Dr. Franck and the others in the room into the prone woman. She flowed into Agnes's mind searching for the right switch. Ah, here it was. For Agnes it was just an unfulfilled fantasy, but for Molly it was one of her favorite railroad memories - pulling a train.
"Mrs. Thompson? Agnes?" soothed Dr. Franck. "You've been having a lot of trouble, haven't you? A lot of sadness?" The patient nodded slightly. "Well I've been thinking long and hard about your situation," Franck continued, his voice beginning to lower, "and I've come to the conclusion that it's your own fault."
He was getting closer to a growl as he closed on the woman, looming over her bedside while his colleagues circled in. "Yes, you've been a demanding, greedy woman, always pushing your husband for more, more, more! And when the crash came and your luxury disappeared like smoke, did you show him sympathy, did you support him and remember your wedding vow of 'for richer, for poorer'? No! You just kept pushing until you pushed him right off that bridge!" The drug-addled, semi-psychotic doctor was nearly frothing at the mouth as Agnes became his mother, became the root of all his problems.
"If only I had put you in your place!" Gabriel ranted. "It would have been better for you and for me."
"What?" the dazed woman asked confusedly.
"I mean for him, better for you and your husband," Franck corrected himself through his confusion. "Well today we're going to set that right, we're going to show you your real place in the world, we're going to teach you what happens to women who keep asking for more, more, more!"
Two orderlies on either side of the bed took hold of Agnes's arms and pinned them down. Dr. Franck leaned in close, nearly kissing the old woman as he spoke. "For a patient to begin to heal her mind she must first expose herself, expose her flaws and weaknesses." With those words he took hold of her gown by the neckline and ripped it open, shredding the thin cotton down the middle until it lay to either side of Mrs. Thompson's body like a discarded cocoon.
The society matron's chest was covered in a bullet-proof vest of a brassiere, enclosing a very large bosom. A few inches of her fat belly was exposed beneath it before a high-rising slip took over protection of the woman's modesty. Franck reached his hand back like a surgeon at an operating table. Another assistant quickly placed some bandage shears in his hand. The doctor laid their blunted tips on the patient's sternum and began cutting through the fabric and whale bone encasing her big mams.
When he peeled the beehive molds to the sides the tits underneath flowed and sagged to the side. If the woman stood up they would probably hang almost to her naval he thought. But they must have been magnificent when she was young, when she was nursing. She probably could have kept three or four babies satisfied with these huge jugs. He reached down and gathered them in his hands, still solid, still heavy -- as heavy as he'd always imagined.
He bent down and took the warm flesh into his mouth. "What...what are you doing?" the old woman quailed. Molly's attentions had her coming out of her drug- induced daze faster, but she hadn't yet gone all the way into Molly's red haze. "Stop that, stop..."