Read Online By Reason of Insanity by Shane Stevens - Free Book Online

body, contorting his features and causing him to howl like an injured animal. During such times he would attack anyone near him and was kept mostly in a camisole. He was given more shock treatments, more chemotherapy. After several months the spasms subsided and gradually disappeared. He had somehow learned again to control his rage.
    His new ward was on the other side of the main building and on a higher floor. A maximum-security ward, it housed those patients who had acted out their homicidal inclinations. Massive doors were always kept locked, the steel-frame windows were iron-barred. Guards with leather thongs seemed to be everywhere. For eight months Bishop lived in that prison, ate its food, cleaned its floors. He thought he was living in hell itself For eight months he slept next to demented animals, and was surprised to find himself alive each morning. When he finally left for another ward in February 1973 he vowed never to return. He would die first.
    Hospital officials, noting his good behavior since the rampage of the previous year, put him in an experimental ward in a new two-story building. Here each bed had a foot locker underneath and a night table. Six-foot plastic partitions separated the rows of beds, giving each man some bit of privacy. And here Bishop lay each night thinking about the mistake he had made, going over it again and again in his mind. He had trusted people to act fairly, to set him free if he became one of them. He had learned to talk like them, learned all their games. But nothing worked for him because they did not want him free. They were afraid of him. He was too smart, too clever to be set free.
    He knew now that he would never get out. They would keep him locked up until he died. There was no hope. And so, hopeless, he began thinking of escape.
    Bishop had been lucky in at least one way. The previous year his spirit had been broken in isolation, but only temporarily. Though some attendants thought it permanent because of his new docility and willingness to cooperate, he knew better. The answer to his problem, he now saw, was not to be like them but to be subservient. Then they would not be frightened of him, not be antagonistic. It was a lesson he did not intend to forget.
    After his release from isolation he became more subdued, more respectful of authority. In the maximum-security ward he promptly carried out the orders of the guards. When others caused trouble he moved away quickly. It was once again an act he was performing, but this time it worked because his new role fit their expectations of him. By the time he was transferred to the new ward it was believed that he had accepted his fate and was settling down to a peaceful existence.
    In his new home Bishop rapidly became a group leader, responsible for the daily actions of several fellow patients. The job pleased him, he had a certain flair for organization. It also gave him more freedom of movement to look around the hospital grounds.
    Had he been an ordinary homicidal maniac or, in the psychiatric language of the hospital staff, a severely disturbed patient with homicidal tendencies, he would have been bothersome perhaps but not particularly dangerous. There were dozens of such men in the institutions. But he was much more. His mother, Sara Bishop Owens, and his father, whoever he might have been, had created a creature with a wonderfully devious brain in a marvelously resilient body. Fate then had turned the boy into a shrewd cunning animal, trapped and badly wounded. By the time he reached his majority Bishop had become brilliantly clever at normal disguise and an expert tactician in matters of survival. He had also become an authentic monster, with no true feelings except hatred and no real goals except destruction.
    In his views of the world and himself Bishop was as insane as would be expected from his tortured life. But when his mind turned to solving a specific problem, his quick animal sense and calculated contempt for