Byberry (Part 2)

‘One, two, three and we’re ready to go,’ a voice inside my head says. I take the rope and tie it into a knot. The other end is all ready tied to the barred windows. ‘On the out of three,’ I say to myself. ‘One, I can’t believe I’m doing this. Two, its time. Three, here we go.’ I jump. Feeling myself in free fall for a few seconds I think. My whole life flashes before my eyes. Although it’s only a few seconds it feels like hours. Finally I feel the rope tighten. These are my final thoughts. Goodbye..

And she awoke. Sitting in her rock-hard bed, sweat drenching her cotton sheets, she wondered, was that a dream? Anne recognizes the pale blue room as part of the hospital wing, possibly a room she had occupied before. Her suicide attempts had brought her here several times. Laying there, gripping the sheets in her fists, she reviewed her dream. The other patients in the room had left, one by one, and she had jumped. Another attempt, no doubt, but why? This, she had always asked herself, but never found an answer. Anne remembered rope. She had tried to hang herself. The door opened and a nurse walked in. A woman, very pretty in Anne’s opinion, asked if she was all right. That was a lot more than anyone else, in her dim memory of Byberry, had bothered to do. Wait a minute… Where was she? Anne got up and looked around. There was a mirror and a door. As she walked past the mirror, she glanced at her reflection. She noticed rope burns on her neck. It’s not the she didn’t expect the scars; they were just healed more than they should’ve been. When she walked out of the door, she barely recognized Byberry. The walls were painted, and it looked happier, like it was actually a safe place to be. She ducked, almost subconsciously, as she passed the guard station. Everything, Anne realized, was the same, just in a new package. It didn’t fool her though. The staff, the building, the aura was pure evil. It made people do things they would never normally do. A Hell on earth was what the patients called it, though they were probably long gone. She went past the rooms of her old friends, only to find new, younger patients. They looked at her as if she was a poisonous spider, as they inched to the parts of their rooms that were farthest away from her. Anne slowly said to herself as she dawdled down the hallway, "9 sins are stupidity, pretentiousness, solipsism…" Suddenly, she was tackled to the ground from behind and dragged into the nearest closet. Kicking and punching as her attacker slowly managed his goal, she realized that it was her long lost lover, Henry. As he explained what had happened in the past six years, she looked at his changed, matured features. Anne had in fact attempted suicide, but Henry had come to her rescue. The doctors and nurses said she was in a coma, though he knew it was drug induced. She had been isolated in the hospital wing, until today. After a few moments of planning, they knew how they would escape. They both realized that the only way to truly get away from Byberry and never return would be death. Henry and Anne both agreed upon choice of weapon and time of death. They would each steal a scalpel from the nurse stations and kill each other, when the rest of the patients and the majority of the nurses were sleeping.