Episode 14: The Riddle of Logan Riley

Episode 14: The Riddle of Logan Riley

Dr. Nachtensbach: The Needle Prophet

Tuesday morning arrives like a judgment. I have an appointment with Dr. Halbrook's replacement, Dr. Nachtensbach. The name tastes like copper pennies and old regret.

He talks to me like we're old friends sharing secrets over beer. "Billy, how good to meet you," he says, extending a hand that I don't take. He smells of antiseptic and ancient books, like a librarian who moonlights as a mortician.

"You are progressing, yes?" The German accent curls around each syllable like smoke from a crematorium.

I don't answer. What would be the point?

"The mind is a cathedral, Billy. Magnificent architecture, but sometimes..." He gestures vaguely at the air between us. "Sometimes we must clean the stained glass. Polish the altar. Replace the broken pews." His smile reveals teeth too white, too straight. "Don't worry. We're here to help you. I have some new medicine I'd like you to try. Something revolutionary. I think you're going to find it... illuminating."

The needle slides in like a silver whisper. I don't resist, what would be the point of that either?

But I can feel it. He's building something inside me. Rewiring the circuits. Installing new software in the cathedral of my skull.

I hate him with a purity that surprises me.

The Architect of Dreams

Back in my room, the walls breathe. The ceiling pulses like a heartbeat seen from inside the chest. I'm woozy, but not sleepy, more like I'm floating three inches above my own life, watching myself exist.

After several minutes of this strange levitation, my feet find the floor again. That's when I notice it, a restlessness, an itch behind my sternum that demands movement. I wander, letting my legs choose the direction.

The hospital has sections I've never seen before. Corridors that bend at impossible angles. Stairwells that descend into shadow. I find myself in what must be a basement storage room, filled with the debris of forgotten treatments: wheelchairs with bent spokes, filing cabinets with their guts spilled across the concrete floor, and boxes marked with dates from decades past.

In the corner, half-hidden behind a stack of moldering patient records, I spot something that doesn't belong, a cupboard door, small and wooden, nailed shut with boards that look freshly placed. The wood around the nails is lighter than the rest, as if someone recently tried very hard to keep something in. Or out.

I pry at the boards with a metal ruler I find among the clutter. The nails shriek as they give way, and behind the door I discover not a cupboard but a passage, narrow, just wide enough for crawling, disappearing into darkness that seems to have weight.

The Underground Gospel

The passage leads to a staircase carved directly into living rock. Dim emergency lights cast everything in sickly amber, creating shadows that move independently of their sources. Each step down feels like descending through layers of sedimentary madness.

The stairway ends at the mouth of a natural cave system. Here, the emergency lights give up, leaving me in absolute darkness that presses against my eyeballs like velvet fingers. I crawl forward, hands reading the stone like braille, following some primitive compass that might be instinct or might be the drug still singing in my bloodstream.

After what feels like hours but might be minutes, I see it, a pinprick of light ahead, growing larger as I approach. The cave mouth opens onto forest, and I emerge blinking into afternoon sunlight that feels like a religious experience.

A stream chatters nearby, leading to a dirt road that winds through pines and possibility. I follow it like a pilgrim, still wearing my hospital gown like a monk's robe, until I see salvation in the form of a small house set back from the road, a car parked beside it like an answered prayer.

The Prophet and the Hitchhiker

The young woman who emerges from the house has kind eyes and careful posture, someone who's learned to read danger in small gestures. "Hi," I say, because what else do you say when you're a mental patient who just crawled out of the earth?

"Hi," she responds, and I like her immediately for not running.

We make small talk while she evaluates whether I'm harmless or just haven't revealed my harm yet. That's when we both notice him, a young man with long hair like a biblical apostle, thumb extended toward the sky, walking down the road with the patient gait of someone who's been walking for a very long time.

The woman's posture changes instantly, muscles coiling like springs. "Oh God," she whispers.

"What's wrong?"

"That might be him. The hitchhiking killer." Her voice drops to a whisper, as if the wind might carry our words to him. "It was all over the news this morning. They said he escaped from some asylum, been killing people who pick him up. They said to be especially careful of anyone who looks... different."

The irony tastes like copper pennies.

"Could you..." she looks at me, then at her car, calculating risks. "I need to get to town, but I'm afraid to drive past him alone. Would you come with me? Just until we get to the main road?"

I nod, and we climb into her car. She backs down the driveway with the careful precision of someone defusing a bomb. We drive past the hitchhiker, who watches us with eyes that seem to hold entire conversations.

For ten minutes, we chat about safe things, weather, the forest, how long she's lived here. Then something shifts in her expression, like clouds passing over the sun.

She pulls into a roadside turnout and stops the engine.

"It's you," she says quietly. "You're him. The one who escaped."

The accusation hangs between us like smoke. "No," I say. "I didn't kill anyone. I just escaped because they wouldn't let me go."

She looks at me with a mixture of terror and resignation that breaks something inside my chest. "Go ahead," she whispers. "Kill me if you must. Just... don't make it hurt."

"Which one of us is crazy?" I ask, but I'm already reaching for the door handle. "I'm not going to kill you. I'm going to get out, and you're going to drive away, and hopefully you won't tell anyone about me."

I step out onto the gravel. "Take care," I tell her, because even escaped mental patients should have manners.

The Facility at World's End

The trail leads through increasingly dense forest to an enormous field that stretches toward the horizon. In the distance, incongruous as a spaceship, sits a building that looks like it was designed by someone who'd read too much science fiction and had too much government funding.

Three stories of gleaming metal and glass, surrounded by a fence that practically hums with electricity. One end of the building cantilevered over a cliff, suspended above the ocean like it's preparing to take flight. At the other end, a security checkpoint guards a driveway that disappears back into the forest.

Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back. I cross the field, keeping low, until I reach a gully that runs like a scar beneath the fence. The earth under the fence is soft, recently disturbed, as if others have used this route before me.

The building's cliff-side entrance is unguarded, unmarked. I turn the handle, expecting resistance, expecting alarms.

It opens.

The Laboratory of Souls

Inside, the corridors are hospital-white but somehow different, cleaner, newer, more purposeful. People in white coats move with the efficient choreography of important work. I'm still wearing my hospital gown, but somehow I blend in, as if madness were just another uniform.

I find an elevator, press 3, and rise through layers of increasing strangeness. The third floor is pure science fiction, laboratories filled with equipment I can't name, computers displaying data that looks like poetry written in numbers.

A technician stops me in the hallway. "Return to your room immediately," he says with the urgency of someone delivering a battle report. "The perimeter has been breached. We have an infiltration situation."

He points down a corridor, and I follow his direction like an obedient patient. But the room I enter isn't empty, a Korean security guard intercepts me with suspicious efficiency.

"What are you doing here?" he demands.

"Going to my room," I say, because it's technically true.

Confusion flickers across his face, and in that moment of uncertainty, I kick his knee with all the fury of months of captivity. He goes down hard, reaching for his sidearm with the desperation of someone who's realized he's made a fundamental miscalculation.

I kick him again, harder, take his pistol, and shoot him.

The sound echoes through the building like a confession.

The Ocean's Embrace

Everything after that happens with the surreal logic of dreams. Running through corridors that stretch like taffy. An elevator that descends through floors that might not exist. An exit that opens onto chaos, guards shouting, spotlights sweeping, the night suddenly alive with violence.

I run back to the gully, but they've seen me now. Pursuit follows like a thunderstorm, all sound and fury and inevitable conclusion. The gully leads to the cliff, and the cliff leads to nowhere, just a hundred feet of salt air between me and the ocean's dark mouth.

I turn, fire at the pursuing lights. They fire back, and something hot punches through my chest like a fist made of lightning.

Falling.

Falling through air that tastes like freedom and salt and the last breath before drowning.

The water hits me like the end of the world.

Baptism by Ice

I wake up drowning in a different ocean, an ice bath in the hospital, orderlies holding me down while my body convulses back to unwanted consciousness.

"What the hell?" I gasp, because even revelations need profanity.

"He's back," one of the orderlies announces with the satisfaction of someone who's just solved a difficult equation.

"You had a reaction to the medication," they explain, as if that explains anything. "Dr. Nachtensbach said it was expected."

Expected. The word tastes like betrayal.

"Holy Christ," I whisper, because some experiences require divine intervention to process.

They hand me a towel. "Dry yourself off."

I do, but something inside me stays wet, drenched in the memory of escape, drenched in the knowledge that freedom might be just another room in the same infinite hospital.

After the Ice: The Persistence of Wetness

They dragged me from one ocean into another. Or maybe I never left the first one. Maybe the facility was the dream, and the ice bath was reality, and reality was just another side effect of Dr. Nachtensbach's revolutionary medicine.

The boundaries have become negotiable.

The orderlies called it a "reaction," as if my mind were just a chemistry experiment that had produced unexpected results. Dr. Achenbach called it "expected," which somehow made it worse, the idea that my breakdown had been carefully calculated, a predetermined destination on his map of my consciousness.

I dried my skin, but something deeper remained saturated. Fear had soaked into my bones. Memory had flooded my basement levels. And somewhere in the dripping corners of my mind, I now carried the knowledge that escape might be just another room in the same endless building.

Logan Riley: The Arrival of Riddles

He appeared at lunch like a question mark made flesh.

While the rest of us focused on the eternal mystery of institutional meat loaf, Logan Riley sat at the far end of our table, wrapped in what looked like a prayer shawl that had survived several apocalypses. He didn't eat, just stared at his food with the intensity of someone receiving divine revelation through mashed potatoes.

Then, in a voice like wind through broken windows, he whispered:

"The moon is a wound that never closes."

Terry stopped galloping long enough to glance over. Marlene paused mid-hum. Even Leon looked up from his internal diagnostic procedures.

But then we all went back to our respective madnesses, filing Logan's words under the vast category of Things Crazy People Say.

Everyone except me.

I heard it. More than heard it, I felt it resonate in the wet places where Dr. Nachtensbach's drugs had taken root.

The Riddle-Walker's Grammar

For two weeks, I practiced avoidance like a spiritual discipline. Logan spoke in fragments that felt like prophecy. He danced in circles that might have been prayers. He drew spirals on the walls with pudding, creating mandalas that the orderlies would scrub away each morning, only to find them redrawn by evening.

He was weird, even by mental hospital standards, which is saying something.

But then one day, as I sat contemplating the fundamental meaninglessness of afternoon recreation time, he slid into the chair beside me with the fluid grace of water finding its level.

"You fell into the ocean," he said without preamble, "but you didn't drown. That means you're still dreaming."

I looked at him, really looked, for the first time. His eyes held depths that had nothing to do with madness and everything to do with seeing too clearly.

He smiled, and it was like sunrise over ruins.

We became friends.

The Prophecies of Logan Riley

He speaks in poetry disguised as psychosis:

"The doctors are gardeners. They prune the soul until only the acceptable branches remain."

"The pills are keys, but the doors they open are always the same room."

"You are not Billy. You are the echo of Billy, and echoes grow fainter with each repetition."

I don't understand him completely, his words feel like ancient texts that require translation. But somehow, in his presence, I feel understood in a way that has nothing to do with comprehension and everything to do with recognition.

"I come from a line of wanderers," he told me once during evening medication distribution. "My grandmother read stars like newspapers. My father read bones like love letters. I read minds like suicide notes."

"What do you see in mine?" I asked, because when someone offers to read your soul, it seems rude not to let them.

His smile turned sad around the edges. "A storm pretending to be a person. And a lighthouse, but the lighthouse is sinking into the same ocean it's trying to illuminate."

The Fellowship Reformed

Logan's arrival changes the atmospheric pressure of our little community. Terry starts galloping with renewed purpose, his invisible steed carrying him toward horizons only he can see. Marlene's humming takes on melodic complexity, as if she's remembering songs from before the medication flattened her inner orchestra. Leon diagnoses Logan as "a mythic anomaly presenting with acute prophetic syndrome," which, coming from Leon, is practically a love letter.

Even Sister Agnes emerges from her holy catatonia long enough to offer Logan the sacred Twinkie, which he accepts with the solemnity of someone receiving communion.

Dr. Bellamy seems lighter too, as if Logan's presence has reminded her why she became a doctor instead of an undertaker.

We gather in the common room like a congregation of the beautifully broken. We talk about everything and nothing. We laugh at jokes that make sense only to us. We remember who we were before we became our diagnoses.

Logan watches over us like a shepherd made of starlight and compassion.

"Madness is a language," he tells us one evening as the sun dies behind the reinforced windows. "The problem isn't that we're speaking it. The problem is that no one else bothers to learn the grammar."

And for the first time since my baptism in Dr. Nachtensbach's ice bath, I think I might be ready to stop translating myself for people who were never going to understand anyway.

Maybe it's time to let the riddles speak for themselves.

Billy’s Journal Fragment, found in the basement.

I escaped. I fell. I drowned. I woke. But maybe I never left. Maybe the cave was my mind. Maybe the ocean was my soul. Maybe the bullet was the truth. Dr. Nachtensbach is building something in me. But Logan is unbuilding it. He speaks in riddles. I speak in scars. Together, we are learning a new alphabet. I think I’m ready to write again. I think I’m ready to remember. I think I’m ready to believe.