Okay. So really nervous about posting this, but please don't be shy in critiquing my work. I love hearing feedback, after all it's people like you who will be reading my work once I publish it.

This is the beginning of the first chapter. My story takes place in 1932, just so you know. You'll no doubt notice some similarities between Amber Peace Asylum and the asylum featured in 'Shutter Island'. But the layout of the asylum is completely different from the one in the movie and it's also located in northern Washington State, close to the Canadian border, nearly two hours from the nearest town. The history of the asylum is also inspired by the history of the Searcy State Mental Hospital located in Mt. Vernon, Alabama and the infamous Winchester House. >:3

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    She couldn’t see the top of the table. The dining room set loomed over her like the bodies of grazing animals standing on thin wooden legs. There was a ringing in her ears, as though a bomb had gone off next to her. A painful static filled her body as blood seeped from the enormous gashes across her face, her throat, her pregnant belly. There was a man standing in the door way, his face pale, gaunt, frightened. He dropped the shotgun on the living room floor, and moved towards her as though through a gel. He gently pushed her over onto her back, and took her hand as he kneeled next to her. He was saying something, but she could no longer make sense of his words. Although her body was wrapped in severe pain, tears fell from her calm, brown eyes. “Save her,â€� she said, laying a trembling, blood covered hand on the baby twisting inside her.

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    Although I was born in the spring of 1914, they named me Autumn. Autumn Ophelia Isen. After my grandmother. At least, that’s what my foster father, Dr. Benjamin Hallowell, told me. I was born two months too soon. My mother died in childbirth, and my father in The Great War. Someone once told me that my father had died of a wound that wouldn’t heal. The notion somehow reminded me of my mother. The mythology of the tale often triggered nightmares of my mother being mauled by a pack of vicious, shadowy creatures. Sometimes, she would be pregnant with me, and I would be ripped from her womb like a pit from a plum. I even had a dream one time where I had tore my own way out, emerging from her bloated belly like a moth from a cocoon. I would stand, fully grown, over a red and black wasteland, the air rippled with heat from the flames of fallen bombs.

    My foster father usually dismissed them as a side effect of my medication. I was on several, each to treat different symptoms. Because the doctors couldn’t put a name to the illness, they had to give me a pill for every inconvenience. It was nearly always the same when I went to the physician; he would check me over, listening to my heart, my breathing, take a few blood samples, argue with my father over what it could be that was causing me to become dizzy, to cough up blood on occasion, to suffer migraines, lethargy, weakness, achiness, insomnia, lack of appetite, nausea, vomiting, and the occasional fever. More than one tried to convince him that it was all in my head; that it was part of a bid to garner attention. True, Dr. Hallowell was a very busy man. He was head doctor at Amber Peace Asylum for the Mentally Insane in upstate Washington. We also lived there, along with a number of the other staff. Even so, I never felt like I needed to feign illness to conjure up attention. I was quite sick of it, to be honest. I began to resent people’s pity, although my day didn’t quite feel complete if someone hadn’t asked me how I ‘felt’ or how I was ‘doing’, as though I were one of the seventy-six mental patients wandering the grounds.

    It was awkward to live in an insane asylum and not be insane yourself, nor a member of the staff. I was allowed behind closed doors and had twenty-four hour access to the cafeteria’s pantry, but I didn’t have to attend shock therapy or go over my daily routine with my psychiatrist. I could help hand out medications to the other patients, help sweep floors, or even aid in preparing meals. I was everyone’s little pet. I enjoyed the positive reinforcement, although I was still very lonely there. There were no other girls or boys my age to play with so I had to amuse myself most days. I acquired many hobbies, including drawing, painting, reading, and playing my violin, which my foster father had one of the nurses teach me when she was available. I would also sometimes go through phases of collecting things. One week it was feathers, and all of the staff would give me any feather they found lying on the grounds. Another it was stones, small, round, ones. They had to be the right size otherwise I couldn’t use them in the diorama I was constructing. I never finished it, having moved onto
other things as children often did.

    Even as I got older, I still played with imaginary friends who went on imaginary adventures usually based on whatever I was reading at the time. One of my favourites was Gulliver’s Travels. I had a lot of fun pretending to be a giant smashing through the city of Lilliput. I even made cardboard cut outs for the buildings. Sometimes, I was allowed to play with some of the other, less threatening patients. But our interactions were always supervised and sometimes very tense as I wasn’t sure how to act around them. Their strange behaviour could be made stranger by saying the wrong thing or looking the wrong way. I much preferred playing by myself.

    My only other friend aside from my small herd of stuffed animals and dolls, was Pastor Noles. I remember being quite disappointed when I learned that my father lacked the funds to send me away to boarding school. I had my heart set on seeing the outside world and playing with other children who also liked Gulliver’s Travels and building dioramas. So he made an arrangement with the elderly pastor who headed our local chapel. Pastor Noles instructed me on everything from mathematics to history even though he always insisted that he was by no means a scholar. As a young, easily impressed mind, I was always awed by his ability to have an answer for everything. Even for some of my weirdest, most inane questions, such as; “Why is the sky blue?â€� “Because God thought it went nicely with all the greens and browns of the earth,â€� he would say. “Why do we breathe air?â€� “Because breathing water is too hard,â€� would be his prompt reply. “Why do we all look different?â€� “Because I don’t think the name ‘Autumn’ suits me, do you?â€� he would add, with a gentle, clever smile.

    Pastor Noles was probably the best friend I ever had. He’s still hard to beat. Whenever I was upset or angry, he would always soothe me with a prayer and one of his kind smiles. He was the reason I believed in God. I always wanted him to be my real father, because the one I currently had often felt distant, distracted, or cold. His hugs never felt right, his words seldom soothing. And so, I was very upset the day Pastor Noles passed away. I felt a part of my life had died with him; a chapter had come to a close, because that’s when everything began to change. Drastically.

    It was shortly after my fourteenth birthday and I was looking forward to today’s lesson as I skipped through the long, white hallways with my books held tightly to my chest. I always liked the clicking sound my Mary Janes made on the parkay floors. In the main lobby, they were made of marble and my shoes tapped musically with every step, sending tight, little chirps around the stone pillars that supported the second level like birdsong through a petrified forest. The analogy was only complemented by the Baroque-style flourishes along the banisters and the borders of the ceiling, like idealized leafy branches. There was even a large chandelier in the main lobby. It was suspended from the ceiling just as you entered, reminding me of some wide, glowing stalactite made of crystal and ice.

    Amber Peace had once been a civil war fort, from what my foster father had told me. But, its construction was left unfinished as the war ended soon after they broke ground. The beginnings of it were abandoned, and would later become C ward. The land was then purchased by an eccentric millionaire, or so they say, who renovated the main building, now A ward, and then a guest house, which was later expanded and became B ward. He had named the estate after his late daughter, Amber, who passed away from tuberculosis in the late 1800s. A few years later, the millionaire also fell ill, and his assets were sold to the highest bidder. I suppose he had no one else to leave his millions to. My foster father purchased it not too long after that. They had dropped the price due to rumours of the land being cursed. Of course, he didn’t believe in such superstition and I can attest to the fact that I had lived there all my life and had yet to see any ghosts, much to my disappointment.

    Still, I believe Amber Peace earned its reputation through its decor and layout. Many of the rooms in the main building were wide open spaces with high ceilings and large, vaulted windows. The hallways were similar, almost rooms unto themselves, save for the innermost ones, which felt more curiously compact and plain by comparison. There were strange leafy embellishments on the tops of nearly every corridor, and if one had a keen enough eye, they could make out the stone gargoyles peeking over the entrance on the roof of A ward. It made me think that perhaps, the former owners were still there, watching us as the gargoyles did; leaning over the gutters on their haunches, cheeks resting in their hands, surveying us with empty sockets for eyes. When I was smaller, I used to think they came alive at night, and I was afraid of them until I read in a book that they were supposed to scare off evil spirits, not embody them.

    Amber Peace had seen at least three renovations, with the third and hopefully final one completed a mere six years before Pastor Noles passed away. All of the dormitories for the main staff had been updated, and much of the flooring had been replaced. I remember it taking a long time, mostly because they kept finding hidden passageways and other oddities. Some of the doors opened into walls, and there was supposedly a staircase that also led nowhere. The chapel was also something of an anomaly as it was supposedly the very first thing to have been completed as they started to build the fort back during the Civil War. Why they decided to have a chapel outside the fort was beyond me, but such was the character of Amber Peace.

    Its rich history could be read in all its strange, little attributes, the fact that it was occupied by madmen and women seemed only to complement it. But perhaps because it had once served as a home to a normal (relatively speaking of course) family, there were large parts of it that felt as though it retained that feeling. Perhaps it was because I lived there myself, and had come to associate its peculiarities with familiarity. Once such place was the library, where I often took my lessons.

    It was one of the few rooms that continued to maintain its original purpose. Very little changes had been made to it over the years. Oak book shelves were embedded in the walls and stretched all the way around the room, from dark, wooden floor to ceiling, which loomed over one’s head at roughly twenty or so feet. Large squares with detailed edges were pressed into it, and the occasional candelabra – now with light bulbs in place of candles, hung down like the prongs of some strange, fruiting tree. The wall of endless books on the opposite side of the windows was only interrupted by the door and a large fire place, with the mantle also having been carved from oak and painted a deep, rich, reddish lustre. On the farthest side of the library was another, smaller door that led to a back room, where the librarian kept her office. It also acted as a store room.

    Two rows of long, heavy wooden tables stood in the centre, and I laid my books down upon the one closest to the entrance. I knew something was wrong almost immediately when I came in. Pastor Noles was not there, but my father was. He stood near the high, vaulted windows chatting with old Mrs. Gunry, the librarian. She was only there on weekends as the drive from town was nearly two hours by bus and there was no point in keeping on a librarian all the time for one this small, even if it was quite extensive for an insane asylum.
“Hi, daddy,� I said, looking about the room uncomfortably, as Mrs. Gurny quietly retreated into her office. “Where’s Pastor Noles today?�

    “I’m sorry, Autumn,â€� he said, removing his spectacles. “But Pastor Noles is no longer with us. He passed away in the night... from a stroke.â€�

    My eyes widened and I looked down at my books, uncertain as to how I should feel. I suddenly felt more tired than usual, as if a heavy lathe had suddenly been draped upon my shoulders.

    “I am sorry. I know you two were close,â€� he said, patting my shoulder.
I embraced him, anticipating tears that somehow stubbornly refused to form. “Was it painful?� I murmured.

    “No,â€� he said, with some hesitation. I looked at him again to search for honesty in his blank expression, partially hidden beneath a neatly trimmed, white beard. He smiled in that certain way that meant he was lying, but I was too weary to accuse him of it. “He passed away quietly in his sleep.â€� There was a pause as he comforted me in his arms. “You may do whatever you please for the rest of the day. Tomorrow you will meet your new tutor.â€�

    I nodded slowly as he stepped away from me. He looked as though he wanted to say something further. He frowned, his light brown eyes troubled, and I could see where years of worry had carved grooves into his face which deepened every time he thought too much on something.

    Almost out of habit, he felt my forehead with his wrist.

    I furrowed my eyebrows in annoyance and pushed away.  “My friend just died, of course I’m not feeling well,â€� I said, indignantly.

    “I just wanted to be sure,â€� he replied, with calm irritation. “You’ve been looking rather flush today, you know? Have you been taking your medication?...All of it?â€�

    “Yes,â€� I mumbled, finally feeling the burning touch of tears welling up in my eyes. I wasn’t sure why they had chosen that moment when I felt so numb inside. “Can we talk about this later? I’d like to mourn my friend in peace.â€�

    “Yes. Yes, of course,â€� he nodded, looking a little apprehensive. “I’ll just...leave you alone.â€�

    He kissed my forehead and left the room. I sat down in a chair that faced the windows and watched the rain for a time, contemplating the significance of death. Being constantly ill, it was a concept that was never far from my mind. I was sure that Pastor Noles’ death had not been a pleasant one, especially after seeing the expression on my father’s face when I inquired about it. The silence in the library was like a death, I thought. No one was there but me, and perhaps a few mice nibbling furtively on the pages of the many books. Had this been a tomb, the mice would be nibbling on other things. If I listened carefully, I could make out the rustling of paper in the next room.

    Numbly, I watched several of the patients in the front yard, meticulously caring for the newly flowering bushes and uselessly sweeping away the water and leaves from the sidewalk. The wind and rain quickly replaced whatever they attempted to remove. Many of the others would be in the recreational room down the hall, but there were always some who had an obsessive compulsion to finish whatever it was they were doing. Come Hell or high water, or a light rain. Sometimes, it was best to just leave them be.

    An older gentlemen, his dull, hazel eyes slightly too close together was shuffling down the hedge beneath the library windows, picking off the dead pink flowers so that new ones could emerge. He smiled at me, crossing his eyes just ever so and without meaning to, I was certain. He waved. Shyly, I smiled and waved back. He waved a bit too long before returning to the mission at hand.

    As he stepped aside, the sunshine burst forth from the rain clouds, and in a brief moment, pain filled my eyes. I had never known a migraine to approach so quickly and without warning. I gasped, leaning forward to cover my eyes. It seemed to do very little, as the burning ache continued to spread into my temples and the back of my neck, until I felt as though I were wearing a vice around my head. Dizziness suddenly seized me and shoved me off the chair. I cried out pitifully. For a few moments, I was completely blind, and I began to panic as my hands traveled hesitantly from the cold, wooden floors to my face. Pulsating shadows with fuzzy edges concealed the outside world. It took a moment before I found the courage to call out again, a tentative but frightened “Help! S-somebody help me, please!â€�