Ice-fishing Horror Project Background, Take II
This is a revision of the backstory for my developing horror idea. Commentary encouraged, by e-mail or comment. Short character bios and an outline of the actual story will likely come soon.
Konrad Adelmann was an orphan, a foster child who attended college and then medical school by the charity of a group of Lutherans in rural Illinois. When the congregation's pastor was afflicted with a temporary dementia during Konrad's last year of schooling the young doctor followed the case carefully, frequently visiting the asylum where the pastor had been committed. Those were the 1940s.
The pastor recovered within the year. But what Konrad saw at the madhouse was a place where a human avalanche of incurable lunatics made the treatment of those less madówho might actually be healedóall but impossible. Had it not been for Konrad's close attention, even the pastor might have been lost forever in the manic shuffle of the place.
At about that time, eugenics was at the height of its popularity in American intellectual circles. Konrad embraced the movement, which would strengthen the human race over time by breeding the greatest human specimens and preventing those with degenerate germ plasm from reproducing. Konrad's unknown (and therefore questionable) parentage made him that much the greater zealot.
The ink on his diploma still wet, Konrad willed into existence his vision: a last stop for America's incurably mad. He collected the most demented madmen from the region's most overwhelmed madhouses, accepting moderate payments from the besieged superintendents of those places, who collaborated with their silence, happy to be rid of the most undesirable patients that they might concentrate on those who could benefit from their attention. Konrad pledged to care for those in his charge until the end of their days.
His promise was sincere. He transported the patients to a parcel of lake property donated to the cause in the will of a Lutheran congregant. Starting in secondhand army surplus tents, Konrad built and expanded his asylum of last resort from wood and will. He hired only a few caretakers to help himóand many were criminals and vagrantsóbut what he lacked in manpower he made up in restraints, straightjackets, locked cellsóeven wooden chests. Sometimes the mad were confined for days at a time, stewing in their own vomit and feces until comatose from thirst and hunger.
And if they died, was it any great loss? In fact, did not the death of Konrad's patients' his the asylum's administration easier?
What localsóthe closest of whom were an hour away on dark dirt tracksóknew about the place was a mixture of superstition and invention. It was a rest home for the wealthy, a work house for the wayward, a secluded compound home to a reclusive robber baron's inbred descendants, a haunted logging camp abandoned after a fire in the days of voyageurs. Over time the superstition and invention receded into the community's collective unconscious, no more actively remembered than the names of distant cousins who lived back in Scandinavia.
As months turned to years and years to decades, the constant at the asylum was Konrad Adelmann's unconquerable will that his enterprise should continueóthat it must continue. Over time, he carried out patient recruitment in greater and greater secrecy. The circle of superintendents continued to silently collaborate, willfully ignoring (for the greater good, they told themselves) what they knew must be true about Adelmann's institution.
By the sixties, when Adelmann was in his forties, it was standard procedure that some new patients were slain outright upon arrival. Others became fodder for experiments Adelmann conceived to further his understanding of the human will, soul, and intellect. Unburdened of moral concern for his subjects, he created a place of unqualified horror and inhumanity.
And then the unthinkable began to manifest: Adelmann's institution of unrelenting depravity took on a literal life of its own. At first, physical items went missing in the asylum. Later, spontaneous injuries appeared on the flesh of lunatics completely restrained. Visible lights without sources, spectral images of those he had killed, madnesses inflicted on the institution's caretakers. Once, a fire that started before Adelmann's eyes from no visible source of flame. The doctor had slain so many with such cruelty that their spirits rebelled in death, congregating into a collective wraith-soul tied to the place, growing in power even as he continued to carry out his experiments.
Even in the face of this, Adelmann believed unreservedly (and correctly) in his own sanity. He began to assert his will upon his former patients even in their afterlife, learning over time to suppress and then overwhelmóthrough naught but the force of his psycheótheir angry outbursts from beyond mortality. Bound to the site of their death, these mad ghosts were doomed to rail impotently against Adelmann's will.
By the mid-seventies, Adelmann stopped taking new patients. The last caretaker opened his wrists. A handful of lunatics remained in a facility that had once imprisoned one hundred. Adelmann devoted most of his strength in the years that followed to suppressing the malevolent thrashings of the asylum's wraith-soul. What stamina he had left he dedicated to keeping himself vital, mentally and physically.
In the early eighties, at a time when public disinterest for funding public wellness demanded that houses of mental health close, a bureaucrat chanced on a record of the asylum's existence. Although the public subsidy of Adelmann's facility was miniscule, a public servant trekked from St. Paul to inform him that the place must be shut down and the land sold at public auction. Adelmann's last four patients were turned loose.
On the night before Adelmann was to quit the asylum, he felt the tendrils of the wraith-soul flapping at the edges of his consciousness, eagerly anticipating freedom from his domination. He resolved that it would not happen, that he would sooner die. Without hesitation or second thought he removed a straight razoe from the case he had packed and, businesslike, slit both of his wrists. As the last ounce of life leaked from him, the wraith-soul surged, exhilarated. But when he breathed his last and his eyes fell dead, the wraith-soul recoiled. His spirit was truly inexorable, for Adelmann's spirit bound the wraith-soul as surely in life as it had in death.
Adelmann's body was discovered and buried in the cemetery behind the asylum that had been used for patients for decades. As planned, the lake and its shores were sold, purchased by a developer who built a lodge for summer retreat between April and August of the following year. The construction was weighted by misfortune: broken tools, supplies burned and gone missing, a plague of injuries, an architect's unexpected disappearance, a fight in which two laborers drowned one another in the lake.
The year after, the developer and his staff returned to the lodge at winter's end (the place was never planned for cold-weather habitation) to welcome a summer's vacationers. In scarcely a month of madness and horror, the hunters and anglers were driven off. The staff followed in short order. The developer himself fell out of society's awareness.
When the developer contacted his family again almost fifteen years later he had been working odd jobs across the country for a long time, trying to drive from his mind whatever had transpired at the end of the lodge's only summer of occupation. When he died last year, the courts discovered the deed to the lake and property, still in his name. His brother, an avid ice-fisherman who would have loved to make use of the old lodge in the wintertime, didn't even get a chance to visit it before his physician discovered a mass of tumors that gave him no more than three months to put his affairs in order. The developer's probate ended the day his brother died, and the property passed immediately, in equal portion, to the developer's nephew and niece, his only surviving kin.
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