The Chosen

sensationalized, and hackneyed. The chapter recounted the takeover of Wroxton Hall in the early nineteen hundreds as a state sanitarium. Apparently the superintendent, a man named Flues, hadn’t placed much priority into the care of his patients. Most of the state funds that maintained the facility were diverted by Flues himself, to support a predilection for the finer things in life: imported gim-cracks, English carriages, opium, and a conclave of young, fiscally demanding mistresses. He therefore left the entirety of the hospital’s logistics and in-patient care to a cadre of ruffians and a pittance of a maintenance allowance. “A majority of the staff,” the author reported, “had not been adequately screened for an aptitude in such intense hospital services. Many were ex-convicts and former mental patients themselves, and some such warders demonstrated ravenous—as well as distinctly aberrant—libidos upon the more desirable female patients, schizophrenia, manic-depression, and acute catatonia notwithstanding. A staff journal, confiscated during the state inquest which would follow, detailed countless acts of unnamable sexual abuse…” The author proceeded to name each unnamable act.

The frequent pregnancies, of course, were blamed on insensible male patients, and were expeditiously aborted via the crude surgical standards of the day. Things went as such for years, in complete ignorance of the authorities, and eventually warders of higher rank developed a knack for, shall we say, creative entrepreneurship. To serve the occasions when patients died, a cemetery was fashioned beyond the estate’s grounds, in a secluded dell, though it was later discerned, after much digging, that not a single cubic inch of earth had ever been turned beneath the countless dozens of gravestones. The bodies, in reality, were sold to out-of-the-way medical schools, and to increase the financial gain of the warders, some of the less manageable and more obscure patients were quickened along to their eventual passings, with the thoughtful assistance of garrotes, bars of soap in socks, and pharmaceutical overdoses. In the early forties, when the country’s involvement in World War II became un-disputable, human freight, for research purposes, became quite lucrative. A discreet lab facility at the Edgewood Arsenal, enthusiastic about germ warfare, paid top-dollar under the table for “lab specimens” of a particular nature, that nature being that they be delivered live to the facility. The warders of Wroxton Hall were all too eager to assist in the defense of their nation, and many times logged certain patients as “deceased” when they were in fact still among the living, only to transport them without reluctance to the open arms of the Edgewood Arsenal.

But this proved merely the icing on the cake. What went on on a daily basis at the hall was even more disturbing. Unruly patients were taken aside and disciplined by a coterie of “technicians” that would make the Inquisitors of the Holy Office look like the cast of Sesame Street. Of course, this was regarded instead as “behavioral therapy”; it was difficult to get out of line when one’s orbital lobe had been thoroughly routed by knitting-needle lobotomies administered up through the anterior eye socket. (Staff members, naturally, sterilized the knitting-needles before each application.) A less sophisticated manner of taming rowdy patients involved a simple tourniquet fashioned about the throat just under the jawline, which cut off blood-flow to the brain. The tourniquet was maintained for just a period of time to effect the level of brain damage desired to take some of the zing out of said patient. The relatively unsupervised staff, too, when they weren’t applying such contemporary behavioral therapies, were quite forthcoming in the application of sexual therapies. All manner of libidinous abuse was pursued at Wroxton Hall, no perversity ignored, and no orifice unplundered. Boys will be boys, after all. And since the induction of semen into fecund vaginal passages was known to result in pregnancies, Wroxton Hall became perhaps the most expeditious abortion clinic in history.

Certain patients however, upon expiration, and due to the extreme state of physical disrepair racked by decades of subhuman living conditions, were deemed not only sexually undesirable, but also unpurchasable by the buyers from the medical schools and the illustrious Edgewood Arsenal, but that did not mean that some profitable utility couldn’t be found for them. In other words, when the state investigators came, it was more than pork that was discovered in the briny stew that served as the patients’ daily food ration.

Shortly thereafter, Superintendant Flues died in prison of tertiary syphillis. Many of the hospital staff were either executed or incarcerated. Wroxton Hall was closed down, sealed