The only thing more vivid than the imagination of a child, is that of a psychiatric patient experiencing hallucinations. Silas Coldren was twenty-three years old when he admitted himself to Hope Haven Mental Institution in 1976. He arrived with hope. After returning home from Vietnam in ’75, Silas had wanted nothing more than to see his beautiful fiancée, Annie. What he hadn’t prepared himself for were the excruciatingly realistic hallucinations and the nights he would wake screaming, drenched in a cold sweat.
Annie Murphy was all he had. His father left him and his mother after she caught him stealing from the offering plate on Sunday mornings. That night, he fled for the Alabama-Missouri line with all the money from the church, plus the money he had cheated from the guys during the Thursday night poker games. He turned up dead eight years later in New York after being shot by some big shot mafia man. A couple years after Silas’s father left them, his mother married into a well-to-do family from South Carolina. She moved in with Charles Bassingham after six months of knowing him and his two daughters, Jane and Margaret. Silas was forced to move along, for nine years until he was able to enlist in the army. Once Silas left for training and his mother was able to get a better taste of the high-life, she sort of….forgot about him. Silas returned home one spring day on leave and walked into the old, familiar mansion to find something quite alarming. What he saw as he stepped in the door was not his mother’s corduroy jacket hanging on the coat rack, or his step-father’s brown trench coat. They were not Margaret and Jane’s baby pictures hanging down the hall way. He stepped into the parlor, and it was not his mother that he saw. Next, he heard a scream, and then he was being chased out of the house by a tall man holding a shot-gun. Silas never returned and he never heard from his mother again.
Silas’s nightmares and hallucinations had turned into something that affected him physically within a very short time. Before long, he became so lost in the fiction of his life that he could barely cling to the reality. There was one night when the world was dead quiet and a fog was setting over the tree tops as a soft rain began to dance around the house when Silas could no longer control himself. By this time, Annie had been staying with Silas to look after him when he started to panic or had nightmares. This night was particularly worse than others, though. He woke up thrashing and screaming. Annie ran upstairs to Silas’s bedroom from the coach where she had fallen asleep the night before. Before she could make it to the top of the staircase, she could hear glass breaking. When she made it to the door, she hesitated. No longer had she reached for the door knob when Silas busted through the door and fell onto Annie. He began throwing fists and flailing. He began kicking the walls. He screamed for help, and all Annie could do was hold him as he did.
The next morning, Silas had woken up to find Annie covered in bruises. She was lying on the floor next to him in the hallway. Blood covered her nose and lips. He panicked. He had no recollection of what happened. He shook her arm. Nothing. He called out her name. Nothing. He felt her face. He threw his hand back from shock. She was as cold as a stone lying on the ground in below freezing temperatures.
This was the day that Silas admitted himself to Hope Haven Mental Institution.
When he arrived, he had hope. He had hope for recovery. He had hope that he would be able to cope with the fact that Annie was gone. He had hope that he would be safe. He had hope that others would be safe. Little did Silas know that he wouldn’t receive any of this.
During his stay at Hope Haven, Silas was given a number of psychiatric evaluations and consultations. The psychiatrists would enter his room that resembled a master suite. They would have him sit at the long, mahogany desk across from his bed while they pulled up a rolling chair that looked like it was made of metal. They would ask him questions like how it started, how he felt about Annie, and what he wished to get out of his stay. This continued for a couple weeks. Silas had a lot of issues coping with what he did. It would eat at his brain until he couldn’t take it. His heart rate would increase so much at a time that a little alarm would go off in his room and the medics would rush in to see what was going on. Every time this happened, they would inject a needle filled with a medicated fluid into Silas’s neck. Then, he became unconscious. When Silas would awaken, he would wake to himself screaming. He would see Annie standing in front of him. He would see the blood dripping from her face, and the bruises all over her arms.
After a couple months of Silas’s stay, he realized his condition had actually worsened. His hallucinations started happening more frequently, and they began to turn into things other than about Annie and the war. He swore that sometimes even when he knew the hallucinations were over, they seeped through the cracks of his room and appeared behind the door when he would enter his own bathroom. The counselors just assured him it was an effect of paranoia.
It had been six months since Silas admitted himself. He had lost forty pounds, developed depression, anxiety, schizophrenia, and paranoia. He could barely get out of bed. He couldn’t sleep. He couldn’t eat. He would dream with his eyes open. The monsters he created in his head were no longer there. They were standing directly in front of him. They were monsters of disguise. They seemed like normal people-until they turned. They would lurk in the corners and shadows. They weren’t what you thought.
Silas had gotten used to the hallucinations, even when he knew they were real; even when the monsters would walk up right up to him and he would look down to find cuts inches deep and blood all over his clothes. The counselors never questioned the blood. There was one day that no one showed up when Silas had his hallucinations. There was no one there to give him his medication. Out of pure curiosity, Silas crawled out of his bed and onto the floor to make his way out the door. He didn’t have enough strength to walk, so he crawled on the ground. He was surprised to find the door unlocked. Or maybe it had always been unlocked and he had never thought to try and open it. He skeptically peered into the hallway after getting the door open. It was dark. He slowly crept out the door. As he made his way across the tile floor, he felt something warm seeping into his pants. He looked down to find a red stain growing larger and larger the longer he sat there. It was blood. Silas looked up, panicked. Everything was coming into view now. The bodies hanging from the ceiling were dripping blood. The puddles were growing more by the second. A couple of bodies lie strewn across the hallway. Nurses and counselors were spread out along the level, looking still as stone. Silas didn’t have time to think about what was going on before he saw a shadow sweep across the hallway perpendicular to his door. It was them. It was the monsters. He knew it. He could barely stifle a scream when he noticed another shadow creeping behind him. He turned around. Nothing was there. It had to have been there. He knew it was there. It was the monsters. He crawled back into his room and shut the door. He sat there for a few minutes and then opened it back up cautiously. He could see the blood flowing down the hallway like a small stream. He knew it wasn’t a hallucination. He knew it wasn’t…. He knew it wasn’t….
Everyone died in that institution. Everyone died, except for Silas. Silas was left alone to dwell on his thoughts and ideas and imagination and nightmares. He slept forever in this tainted reality that seemed like a hallucination where Annie, his mother, his father, his step-sisters and step-father, and the monsters that were real liked to play games with him.