TUNNEL VISION Chapter 3 "The Tunnels"
Dr. Kinney enters the Tunnels for the first time.
Chapter Three
The Tunnels
The Northern Michigan Insane Asylum features a great expanse of tunnels connecting the separate wards, Building 50 and many of the doctors’ residences. This allows for the seamless transportation of goods necessary to the running of the facility, ensuring that your family member will not be aggravated by anything unsightly. Additionally, the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum has separate wards for men, women, and those from higher paying members of our society. There are separate wards for those patients of lower classes who are supported by the estate. The segregation of wards and the underlying tunnel systems ensures that your family member will never be exposed to someone of a different class level or mix with those of more dangerous afflictions.
--Promotional Material for The Northern Michigan Insane Asylum, 1915
We have been notified that there has been a breakdown of the tunneling system. Several patients have gone missing from locked wards and have been located in the caverns of the facility. We assure the board that this matter has been dealt with efficiently and promptly. All escaped inmates have been found and reassigned. The rumors currently circulating in the Traverse City community are without validity. As you know, with the recent influx of patients, we are experiencing a shortage of beds and materials. We graciously request additional support in both remedial staff and in two to four more physicians so that we can ensure all patients are accounted for at all times. The issue of the tunnels has been addressed and is currently being mended.
--A letter to the Board of Trustees dated 1931
The next morning Kinney was up before Mallie Lyn Peters could knock on the door. “I’m sorry to disturb you, sir,” she began and then “Why! You’re an early riser, aren’t you? I stopped by the kitchen for some bread for you sir, if you want, and this time I remembered. I told that rascal Charlie—I mean—Mister Young to not disturb me and I had a purpose. Mr. Young said I, I’ve got…” Mallie’s hand went to her mouth again, a look of horror spreading its wings over her face. “Oh, sir. I clean forgot the bread. I went on so much about Mr. Young disturbing me from my purpose that I clean forgot that I meant to get you some bread! Would you like me to go back?”
“What I would like, Miss Peters,” he said, using her formal name to slow her down and draw her attention,
“What I would like is to be taken into the tunnels.”
Mallie did not breathe and the natural rose of her cheeks withered. “I’m not sure I understand, sir. Today you’re to be meeting with the board again.”
“I’ve had enough meetings. It is time for me to get to work. It is time for me to do the job that they brought me here to do and that is to tend to the distorted minds that are brought into this facility. Now if you would kindly take me to the tunnels, please.” He issued the ‘please’ as a command and Mallie Lyn understood it as such.
“The Tunnels,” she said softly. She said the phrase as if it were a name and Kinney understood that here it was. “They’re meant only to take us between buildings sir, when the weather is rough, or someone is very…ill…and needs to be taken swiftly to the infirmary, or of course when... There isn’t anyone down there for you. Your patients are housed in a separate facility and I can walk you across the courtyard if you would like to get there sooner.” Kinney studied Mallie’s face. So there were depths to her too, he thought. She appeared innocent and girlish and yet there was an element of steel to her. He wondered if, like a knife, she also had blade.
“You may take me to my office, but I should like to go via The Tunnels.” This time he called it by its name instead of saying the words as a descriptor.
“Very well,” Mallie said and curtsied, but the way she said the words made it very clear to Kinney that it was not at all very well. “But if you don’t mind, sir, it won’t be me taking you down there. It’s not…it’s not a place for someone like me.”
Kinney did not hear Harvey Biggart approach, but rather felt his shadow in the doorway. “If you’ll come with me, Doctor Kinney. I will show you the way.” Harvey stretched out his hand, as large (it seemed to Kinney) as a paddle, and Kinney took the first step out of his room and into the sunlight.
*
Elliott, I love you. I love you. I love you. Don’t look at me! Don’t! Take a step back, Elliott or I swear I’ll…
He did not hear Rose’s words as much as feel them radiating throughout his body as he stepped into The Tunnels. The system was accessed through a rather secret door in the lower levels of Building 50. Harvey explained that there were several such entrances (or exits) throughout the property, mostly camouflaged so that they blended in with the environment. He took a rusted key from his shirt pocket and opened the gate.
Kinney stepped into the darkness. It smelled, as he expected, of damp earth. But there was something else too. Something foul. Something beyond the remnants of refuse that they transported through the tunnels. And with that, Kinney thought, again of Rose. How near the end of her illness she had a similar scent. It was the scent of caged animals. A zoo. “I’ll lead the way,” Harvey said and Kinney nodded, following him.
The tunnel was wide and tall, as if a gigantic earthworm burrowed beneath and left a cavern in its wake. The walls were lined with brick and dripped with condensation. With each step Kinney took into the underbelly of the facility, he felt as if he were taking a step back in time, somehow impossibly taking a step closer to Rose. Love me again, she’d cried that final day, pleading, on her knees. And he had said no. Just one word. Just one word and it was as if he had unlocked the final door of her madness.
What was it about being here that brought her so very close to him? Her illness had begun simply enough. She’d always had a dreamy quality to her, but it was that very distance to her, as if she was seeing into another world just beyond his reach, that he had found so desperately attractive. She’d seemed to belong both of his world and a place where everything was brighter and more beautiful. She used to joke that she could hear music playing wherever she went and he had laughed at her, thinking she was talking with poetry. And then she’d begun to hear voices talking to her. Telling her to do things. He’d thought that by studying dementia praecox he’d easily be able to cure her. He had been wrong. There was the day he’d returned from the infirmary to find her standing at the kitchen sink, her hands bloodied and still holding the clumps of brown hair she’d ripped from her own scalp. “It’s the music, Elliott,” she’d said. “I’ve been trying to get it out.” At that moment he knew that she had slipped away from him and he had shut his heart to her. He thought he’d chosen a beauty to love for all eternity; she had transformed into a beast and had to be hidden away.
In this way, the tunnels reminded Kinney of his late wife. Not that they were twisted and dark and scary, though they were that, but he imagined if his wife now existed in another plane, it was not someplace magical, but rather someplace evil like these tunnels.
Harvey Biggart walked briskly in front of him, at first just a pace or two ahead, but soon stretching the space between them that if it were a rope, it could snap in two. Harvey walked deftly around puddles and cracked bricks, while Kinney’s ankle twisted and his feet seemed ill-prepared for this kind of footing. “Watch your step now, Doctor Kinney,” Harvey called to him, his words echoing. “We’re almost to your place.”
“Biggart, slow down!” Kinney called and Harvey paused, allowing him to catch up. He found that he was gulping for air, a waterless fish. “Could you. Explain about. The Tunnels. A bit please. Of the truth.” Kinney looked to him, expecting the man to give another version of the tour he’d already received, but this time he’d tell the truth. Truth that already Kinney suspected. He’d been given the sanitized tour of the facility. They were keeping things from him. Hiding patients from him. They’d cleaned thoroughly anticipating his arrival. Later, after he’d signed away his life to be employed by them, only then would he see the reality of the place. But Harvey did not give him a tour. He moved his head ever so slightly which Kinney deciphered as a ‘no’. And they resumed their walk through the belly of the asylum, Harvey steadily increasing speed until he was a bent shadow just out of reach.
At what point did Kinney begin to hear his name breathed to him from the walls? Surely there was a moment when there was silence, and then his name, but he did not realize when that moment happened. He was nearly running to keep up with the stooped figure ahead of him, listening to water drip, and the echo of their footsteps through the corridor. He was trying to place where exactly they were under the facility. Surely they’d passed Building 50 and the men’s ward. Perhaps they were inching under the women’s ward now. But at what point did the sound of his own desperate breathing change to the awareness that the walls were calling to him. Daahhhhkkkterrrrrrr Kinnnnnnnneeeeeey it breathed, soft, barely audible, as if the earth herself were sighing. And not just once, but his name became a loop upon itself, one syllable followed by its twin by its twin and its twin until his name became a horrible twisted sound of an echo turned against itself. He stopped in the tunnel, his heart beating so hard it seemed to want to careen from his chest. He tried to call out to Harvey, to make him stop, but he found he had no voice. He reached out to steady himself against the wall and touched not the wet, cold surface of stone, but the thick damp mass of a tangle of hair.
Gothic Blovel: Chapter Two -- Exploring
Chapter Two of the gothic blovel continues with Dr. Kinney touring the Traverse City Insane Asylum.
Chapter Two--Exploring
1952
Traverse City, Michigan
I am seven months along now and there is little I can do. My neighbor Katy Peck says I am expecting twin boys, but I just shake my head at her. It’s a girl. I know it is. I know it without even having to ask how.
Until now, my days have been filled with cleaning the house and cooking meals for us. In the summer months I can fresh preserves and pickles. I do not can cherries, of course, not when Ray works at the Traverse City Canning Factory. The palms of his hands are stained red, though we never mention it. He says he’ll never eat another cherry; that you’d have to kill him to get him to eat one. Sometimes in June when the cherries are ripening, I will cut them into little pieces and bake them into a chocolate cake. Ray eats two or more slices in a sitting.
Lately though I find that doing even the simple things is hard. My daughter is heavy. She pulls on the muscles of my stomach. Sometimes she flips around and jabs me. It’s the strangest thing to feel her flutter around, and something that only she and I share. During these times, I go for a walk to the beach. It’s just two blocks away and it seems to calm her. Or maybe it just calms me. At any rate, she quiets and we listen to the waves lap against the shore. I gently pull my dress up to my knees (if no one is looking) and wade in to the cool water.
It’s on the day that I find a Petoskey stone as big as my hand that I think of my mother. If you ask me, I will tell you my mother is Mallie Lyn Young and my father is Charlie Young and that I am the oldest of three, Irish girls. My sisters are as red headed as my parents. My hair is dark as a secret.
A Petoskey stone has a story to tell. It’s made of hundreds of tiny hexagons side by side, of coral long dead. Somehow, over the years, it transformed. It started as coral and became something else, something millions of years later I can hold in the palm of my hand. I am like a Petoskey stone: I started as someone else’s child and became Mallie and Charlie Young’s.
My mother did not want me to know, but she gave me the box anyway. You should know this, she said, and I could tell her how much it pained her to tell me the truth. She was afraid I would not love her. It only made me love her more.
Inside I found the papers that haunt me to this day, and it’s this I think of while trying to calm my own growing child.
I was born to parents Rose and Elliott Kinney in September, 1933. This would be enough for me to wonder, but it’s the second piece of paper that troubles me, and I have not been able to say a word of it to Ray. How do I tell him what I know? It is hard enough to say that I was adopted. Somehow it’s a shame on me. So how I could I tell him about the yellowed slip of paper? It’s a death certificate for Rose Margaret Kinney dated December 1930; and yet I hold my birth certificate dated September 1933 and Rose Margaret Kinney is listed as my mother. My real mother died three years before I was born. How is this possible? What does it mean?
Of course it isn’t possible…it isn’t. Who then was my mother?
I smooth my thumb over the surface of the stone and toss it as far as I can. I hope the bay swallows it whole and won’t release it again for another thousand years.
*
1932
Northern Michigan Insane Asylum
My Dearest Elliott,
You loved me once. Love me again. That’s all I ask of you.
Just try and do that and I promise, I promise, a hundred
times I promise that I will do better. I will be a better wife to you.
--A letter to Elliott Kinney, signed Rose
He dreamed of walking through a cherry orchard when in bloom. White blossoms laced with pink clung to the trees. Miles and miles all around him of green hills and cloudlike blossoms. The lake stretching out in front of him just a blue strip across the horizon. He could feel her reaching to him and he went to her, slowly, as if she would disappear like smoke if he approached too quickly. She did not. He wrapped his arms around her, pulled him close to his chest. He could feel her. He could honestly feel her. He unbuttoned the top two buttons of her dress, at the nape of her neck, tilted her head forward and lifted her dark hair so that her spine rose before him. Then, slowly, he lowered his lips and then he kissed the skin that lay exposed and vulnerable before him. “Love me again, Elliott,” she said and before he could stop himself, he said “No” nd let go of her hair.
“Good morning, sir, I do apologize for waking you and coming into your chambers and all, sir.” It was a young girl with curly red hair tucked haphazardly into a white bonnet, nineteen or so, and her hand rested against his shoulder, her bare hand touching the fabric of his shirt, burning with heat to his very skin. “I’m Mallie Lyn Peters, sir," she continued in her pronounced Irish accent. "I help with cleaning and such sir.” She covered her mouth with her hands. “For the doctors, sir, not for the others. There’s nurses and specialists who tend to them and I ain’t…”
Kinney lifted himself in bed, temporarily interrupting the girl. Her face blushed crimson. “Continue,” he said.
“I shouldn’t of woke you up sir, but Doctor Grooms is here and he’s ready to get you started and he said I mustn’t hesitate but to wake you up directly and I did too, only first I stopped in the kitchen to grab you a bit of bread and then I got to talking to one of the attendants and then well, I ate that piece of bread sir what with Charlie…I mean Mr. Young talking on and on and so and then I remembered that I needed to…”
Kinney yawned, none too discreetly. “Thank you, Mallie. If you could…”
“You want something to eat? I could go back to the kitchen.”
“I’d like to get dressed,” he said pointedly. The pink flush to her skin soon deepened to a positive burn.
“Course sir, excuse me sir. I’ll wait outside and then show you the way. It’s awful easy to get lost in here. Why I’ve heard about a woman once who…”
“Thank you, Mallie. That will be all.”
Mallie swallowed hard, curtsied, and then retreated out of his room.
Kinney stepped out of his bed gingerly, as if expecting there to be pain when he walked, the way, he was sure, a mermaid new to legs would expect and anticipate pain. There was none. He walked to the window, drew open the curtains and for the first time he could see the ground of the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum before him. It was beautiful. Simply beautiful. Like a dream itself. He wondered, briefly, what price they paid to keep up such beauty. In Doctor Kinney’s experience beauty was never without its opposite for long.
*
Mallie led Dr. Kinney through a vast network of winding corridors until he arrived, breathless, into a great open room with twenty or so wooden tables. “We’re in one of the dining rooms, sir,” Mallie said.
Kinney looked around. Each table was set for four or more. There were tall, thin windows that reached from floor to ceiling. Sun didn’t so much as pour through the windows but somehow managed to illuminate the space from within. The floor was tiled and scrubbed clean. The effect was of an efficient hospital-like cafeteria, but it still managed to be somewhat homey. “Is there anything else I can get for you, Dr. Kinney?” Mallie asked, her Irish accent lilting. “If you wouldn’t mind I’d like to be on my way and back to my other duties before Doctor Grooms gets here. He doesn’t like to deal so much with the lesser support staff and I’d just as well like to get about my day, if you don’t mind.”
He studied her face for a moment. He’d begun his career as a medical doctor but had switched to psychiatry when his wife fell ill. He had trained himself to be sensitive to what the body said as well as how a person spoke. So much meaning clung not to what was said but to how it was voiced and sometimes, more importantly, the words held back. Mallie’s cheeks were flushed, which might have been a natural state for her. There was, however, something in the tautness of her smile and her eyes did not shine with humor but were, perhaps, dulled from a lack of it. This was a girl who, for whatever reason, was afraid.
“Certainly, Mallie. You are excused.”
She curtsied and said with relief, “Thank you, sir, kindly. If you need anything else, sir, do not hesitate to call for me. You may not always see me about, but I am sir, or someone is who knows where to find me. You have only to call my name.”
And then with a swishing of he skirts, she was gone.
Kinney walked to the window. The curtains were already tied back to allow for the sunlight and so all he had to do was to simply look outside. Funny, he thought, one would never guess that this was the home of the mentally deranged. One would guess, looking at the couples strolling arm in arm that this was some place of respite or a grand park, if it weren’t for the fact that many of the people walking were clothed in striped pajamas, their partners clothed in the white of the medical profession. And the couples, of course, were all of the same gender. There was no mixing of the sexes at the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum. Kinney knew from his research that men and women were housed in entirely separate complexes. There were also several cottages on the premises where doctors could reside if they chose. And except for the communal walking areas, the place was effectively segregated.
He wondered if the criminally insane were as effectively segregated. Surely there must be some place that they resided. It was, after all, for their care the he had been summoned, not for the care of simple depressives and drug addicts. No. Dr. Kinney’s specialty was for psychoses of a higher sort, and which he had dedicated his life and his scientific method into curing by any means possible.
“Good morning to you, Doctor Kinney,” said a deep, melodic voice. “Welcome to your new life.” The man, surely Dr. Grooms, spread his arms open wide and smiled. Kinney noted the smile, here too, did not reach his eyes.
*
In life, as things happen, they happen in a linear fashion. One thing follows the next. One foot goes in front of the other and then is followed again. And so the tour of the facilities and grounds did occur in a linear way. Kinney followed Dr. Grooms and listened to him and nodded, and noticed the way their shoes echoed on the spotless floors, and how sunlight was fierce in its intensity. He nodded to inmates and did his best not to immediately notice they were damaged. He saw the men’s wing and the women’s. The dining hall. The medical ward. He was brought to an office and given a coat to wear and shown how to fill out forms. Everything was precise and orderly.
Why then, when at dinner, did he remember the day not as in one moment after the next, or one thing happening after another, but as an impression? As a whole? It was as if the day and all the moments in between had melded together and formed some kind of painting in his mind. There were the cows the patients milked. And there were the rows of beds they slept in. And there was the sunlight. The unforgiving sunlight and then…there were the shadows and the eyes, and the pale skin and taut faces looking at him, hiding from him. And there was the laughter and the screams in the distance, although he only saw patients who walked and smiled happily. And at dinner time as he sat with the board and tried to cut his steak, it was not the rooms or the grounds or even the patients of the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum that he thought of at all. No. He thought of the tunnels that connected everything and inched beneath the surface.
“No need to tour that area, Dr. Kinney,” Dr. Grooms had said with a hint of ice in his voice. “That is for the unseemly things, as we like to say. The transportation of refuse and occasionally of those patients who finally surrender their lives to an illness we cannot cure.”
“But where are the others?” Kinney asked. “Where are the ones I was brought her to treat? Surely they are not strolling the grounds, whistling or milking cows of all things.”
“It is as I said,” Dr. Grooms said evenly. “The tunnels are for refuse. You will see it in good time, but today, today let us focus on all the pleasantries our facility offers.”
Kinney chewed his beef and thought how he too was guilty of hiding something that had once been beautiful and had become so unseemly.
COMING NEXT WEEK: Dr. Kinney in The Tunnels and a strange vision.
BLOVEL--CH 1 Cont'd
Chapter One Continues
Chapter One Contiued
Dr. Kinney Arrives--Building 50
He wasn’t sure what he’d expected upon his arrival. Perhaps to enter the great facility alone and in solitude. He imagined he would call out for assistance, hear his words echo along the corridors. At after 9PM in the evening on a Tuesday he certainly did not expect to be greeted by two rows of nurses and orderlies, dressed in bright white, men in pants and collared shirts, the women in white dresses with white aprons and white hats. He did not expect to walk through the aisle they made for him and certainly had not anticipated the applause. Two men stood at the end of the line, one dressed in a dark suit, the other in dark working clothes. He expected the gentleman would be one of the board members who had hired him to assist Doctor Christopher Grooms, and Kinney was not disappointed. This, at least, fit with his expectations.
The thin gentleman with spectacles reached out to grab his hand and the applause abruptly quieted. “Doctor Kinney, a pleasure! A pleasure! Do come in.” His handshake was warm, firm, and sustained. “I am Mr. Harrison, Edward Harrison, and this is Mr. Biggart.” Mr. Harrison dropped his hand and it was promptly captured in the meaty embrace of Mr. Biggart.
“Name’s Harvey,” Mr. Biggart said. His palm was cool and moist and once the handshake was over, Kinney discreetly wiped his palm against the fabric of his coat. “I’m in charge of the facility management.”
“And I’m the president of the board,” added Mr. Harrison. “I do apologize that the rest of the board is not here to meet you but that will change in due time. In due time. Come along now. I’ll have someone carry your bags to your room.” He motioned and the precise white lines of nurses and orderlies dispersed, as silently as snow falling. “We have you stationed in Building Fifty for the time being and then will move you to one of the cottages on our site. Of course, should you choose, you may want to purchase a home near the waters. Traverse City is beautiful. That is, of course, if you stay.” Mr. Harrison looked at Kinney as if expecting a response.
“Ah,” he said.
“Very good then, very good. To your room and then we shall reconvene for dinner and a tour if that is all right with you.”
Kinney hesitated to pull his pocket watch out. The weight of his travelling from Detroit played heavily on him. Mr. Harrison adjusted his spectacles and then winked. “Of course, perhaps you prefer a little solitude tonight. I will show you to your room and we can reconvene for breakfast and a tour. At that point, I can turn you over to Doctor Grooms and the support team. Will that be too your liking?”
Kinney offered a smile thinned by fatigue but heavy with gratitude.
“To your room then!”
Kinney followed Edward Harrison up the ornate staircase and down three or more corridors. “You’ll learn all this in time,” Mr. Harrison said over his shoulder as he quickly navigated the labyrinth. “Ah. And here we are.” He stopped in front of a door labeled DR. E. KINNEY, withdrew a skeleton key and opened the door. The room was expansive, with an ornate bed and his bags already waiting with him, dripping slightly with rain.
“How on earth…” Kinney started.
“Magic,” Mr. Harrison said soberly. “In other words, Harvey Biggart. He’s a master at coming and going as is most of the support staff. They move around like whispers. It’s really quite astounding. All so that we do not disturb the graceful minds of our patients. And on that note, I will leave you to your solitude.” He adjusted his spectacles one more time, turned and was gone.
And with that, Doctor Elliott Kinney entered his room and was alone. Of course, he had been entirely alone for two years now, and though he appreciated the quiet he found no comfort that night in his solitude—not when the presence of Rose was almost so palpable that he could smell the hint of her perfume lingering in the air.
Kinney sat on the bed. He tried not to breathe too deeply. When sleep finally took him, it did not soothe him. Even though this was a new place, a new start, it seemed his wife had followed him again, even into the deepest of shadows; and she was with him still.
Gothic Blovel -- Ch 1--The Doctor Arrives
Doctor Kinney arrives at the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum, 1932
Northern Michigan Insane Asylum features sprawling green hills and landscaping as relaxing as it is beautiful. Your loved one will be as well tended as our gardens. The asylum follows the Kirkbride Plan in which patients are treated with kindness, comfort and pleasure. Indeed, restraints are considered barbaric. A chaotic mind must have peace and beauty in which to flourish, and a place of safety to do work. Patients at the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum will be comforted by music, gardening, and the great gentle beauty of Nature herself.
--Promotional Material for The Northern Michigan Insane Asylum, 1915
The Board of Directors at the Northern Michigan Insane Asylum request additional funding to support not only its current residents, but also to expand the program. While we follow the Kirkbride Plan of treating all patients with kindness, comfort and pleasure, there are certain minds that are so badly fractured they need additional care. The Northern Michigan Insane Asylum features a system of tunnels connecting the more than 4 acres of facilities. This allows for the transfer of unsightly goods such as refuse, as well as maintenance issues to the facility. Additionally, there is ample space located in the basement of the facility for those members of our society who are too disturbed to participate in the outside world. They receive kindness, understanding and the best scientific practices possible. Please consider our request for additional support…
--Grant request for funding to the State of Michigan, 1920
CHAPTER ONE
THE DOCTOR ARRIVES
1932
Northern Michigan Asylum for the Insane