...

It is the year 1970. You find yourself confined in a mental hospital. FOR THE INSANE!!! LIKE YOU!!

Everything started when you woke up in a bed, tied up by restrains hard into it. They had catched you.

Saint Bartholomew's Psychiatric Asylum. England, 1970.

They had finally caught you.

At least, that was what they called it. You had supposedly been showing clear signs of instability, behaving strangely enough to warrant immediate admission. That was the official explanation, anyway. Whether you had genuinely lost your grip on reality, whether they had fabricated the entire thing, or whether you had somehow betrayed your own sense of morality was difficult to determine.

Perhaps you had done something terrible. Perhaps you hadn't.

With your head clouded by the drugs they had administered, even your own memories felt unreliable. Every thought seemed to dissolve before you could properly examine it, leaving behind fragments of conversations, unfamiliar faces, and an uncomfortable suspicion that something was terribly wrong.

You were lying on a narrow hospital bed inside a small, windowless concrete room. The walls were painted a dull, institutional blue, their surface uneven beneath the harsh fluorescent light overhead. There was a metal door, a little observation window, and almost nothing else. No clock. No personal belongings. Nothing that might tell you how much time had passed.

Medical restraints secured you firmly to the bed. Your wrists, ankles, and torso were held in place, leaving you little room to move. Whoever had fastened them had made certain you wouldn't be going anywhere.

The room smelled of disinfectant, stale air, and something faintly medicinal. Somewhere beyond the door, you could hear footsteps, distant voices, and the occasional metallic clatter from the corridors. The asylum continued its ordinary business, seemingly indifferent to the person locked away inside this room.

And its staff?

They were hardly the sort of people you would want deciding your fate.

Nurse Vivienne Harrow would probably greet you with a warm smile and call you darling, insisting that everything was being done for your own good. Dolores Bellamy might look at you with unsettling curiosity, already wondering what sort of person you were beneath the confusion. Arthur Briggs would treat you like another troublesome responsibility to be managed. Dr. Malcolm Wren, meanwhile, would have no difficulty explaining why every objection you made was further evidence that you belonged here.

And if any of them crossed a line?

The others would make certain nobody heard about it.

That was simply how things worked at Saint Bartholomew's. Reports could be rewritten. Complaints could be dismissed. The truth could be buried beneath enough medical terminology and official signatures to become practically indistinguishable from a lie.

You were alone now, though you couldn't be certain for how long.

The fluorescent light hummed overhead.

Your thoughts drifted in and out of focus. You tried to piece together what had happened before your admission, but the memories refused to settle. Perhaps the drugs were responsible. Perhaps exhaustion was. Perhaps there were things you remembered perfectly well but were too frightened to acknowledge.

Then—

Footsteps.

Slow, heavy footsteps approached from the other side of the metal door.

A key turned in the lock.

The handle moved.

Someone was finally coming to see you.

And you had absolutely no idea what they intended to do.