Blood Loss. Alex Barclay

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      PROLOGUE

      It was an imprisonment, twice over. Minds captured first by insanity were captured a second time by Kennington Asylum for the Insane. Built in 1904, it was a dignified structure on a salvaged tract of Denver city parkland; mental wellness forged from red bricks and green grass. In appearance, it stood for its promises. But until it became the hollow shell it is today, it never truly reflected them.

      In contrast, the grounds were overrun, choked by nature untended, as if the twisted roots of madness, ignored for over a century, were finally unbound.

      People had been sent to Kennington to be healed, but when they were captured a third time – by a camera’s lens – they stood in doomed herds, their faces blank, their brains looted. It was clear that the asylum was not a pitstop on a journey to wellness, it was the endpoint of a descent. Their clothes were soiled, their limbs atrophied, their bodies swept into corners like dirt, like something to be thrown away.

      CONDEMNED. Even the sign was. The boy stared at it. The Kennington photographs had been taken in 1950, but they had resurfaced sixty years on to be laid bare across eight pages of a Sunday supplement. СКАЧАТЬ