The Asylum

By Barbara Avon

It's Christmas Eve in 1985 and Bradley Combs just lost the woman he wanted to marry.  Despondent, he travels to a neighbouring township to drink his sorrow away in a seedy motel that's situated across from a bar called The Asylum. Combs decides to have a few drinks at the bar and it's between its walls that he discovers he can't seek asylum from his pain. 

 

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barbara Avon
• Release date: Dec 20, 2022
• ISBN: 9798215601563

Book preview

Please note that there are dark, and sensitive themes mentioned throughout this story.

To my husband Danny who understands how difficult this time of year is for me.

...And to all the brokenhearted who suffer at Christmastime.

A new year awaits.

One

Christmas Eve 1985

Someone had spray painted the sign: You Are Now Entering Everland – Where Community Matters. A giant N preceded the first E in a clever attempt to change the name to something magical and born of a child’s imagination. Its blurry white legs were bleeding down the hunter green placard and at its base, a can of spray paint was left behind by a delinquent who was hitchhiking his way to a better life.

The unseasonably warm weather erased all Yuletide cheer. Trees were barren and stark against the outline of a drear sky. An odour of waste and garbage permeated the air, drifting from the nearby Landfill where in a dark corner, a corpse found its final resting place wedged between a sullied mattress and a doorless refrigerator. Somewhere in suburbia, a wife was hanging the dead man’s stocking, hoping that he would soon walk through the door, oblivious to the thousands of dollars of dirty money her husband had hidden in the bag of the old Hoover vacuum cleaner that she never used since she was allergic to all wifely duties, including those of a carnal nature.

Mud splashed the hood of a fire red 1978 Dodge Magnum as it sped down country roads, painting the car with abstract shapes like those ridiculous pieces of canvas art that only millionaires could afford. Bradley Combs drove with his knees while attempting to fill a pipe with marijuana. Electric Lettuce, his supplier Scully had called it as he whispered into the phone, paranoid that the cops were listening. They had met at the usual location, an alleyway that served as a retreat for the homeless, and kids who were too young to know the difference between lust, and love, and hid in the shadows seducing one another with come-hither stares until one of them got bored and went home to watch reruns of Emergency! on their black and white televisions.

Combs wasn’t a drug addict. He was a contractor who earned most of his income by doing jobs under the table for hardcore businessmen who preferred to forgo the banks and keep their own financial ledgers. I’m not signing no paper with my blood,   Stewart Mortimer, owner of Mortimer’s Need & Feed, liked to say. Blood suckers. All of them.

Combs wasn’t a user. He was running, escaping from his life, his girlfriend, himself. The drug helped calm him down, and unlike his dopehead friends who weren’t left with a single brain cell after inhaling, he was