Illusion (Asylum for the Mechanically Insane Book 1) Read online

  Asylum for the

  Mechanically Insane

  Book I – Illusion

  Sahara Kelly

  Copyright 2014 Sahara Kelly for

  SK Private Label Publications

  Cover Art Copyright 2014

  S.L. Carpenter for P and N Graphics, LLC

  Acknowledgements

  My thanks go out to all the readers who have taken a chance and tried one of my books, and enjoyed it. If I can make you smile, or laugh, or think a little about something different, then I have accomplished what I set out to do—entertain you. I hope we’ll continue this journey together for as long as it lasts.

  And to my writing partner and best friend, my deepest gratitude. He’s one of the few people with whom I can laugh when the ride is good and scream when it plummets into the void. And he never seems to mind the fingernail marks in his hand. Thanks, Scott.

  Author’s Note

  For those accustomed to my erotic romances, please be aware that this is something of a different genre for me. Every now and again, I believe a writer benefits from taking a sabbatical, a vacation from their comfort zone, a trip down a previously unexplored lane. In my case (although I’ve poked around this place once or twice before) when it came to actually walking slap into gothic horror and building a world there…well that’s an adventure of gargantuan proportions. So eschew normality, shed your preconceptions, take a breath and follow me—if you dare.

  Cast of Characters

  Currently residing in, and owners of, Harbury Hall

  Lord Randall Harbury --- Inherited Harbury Hall on the “death”

  Lady Alwynne Harbury --- of their nephew, Devon Harbury

  Malcolm --- Butler to the Harburys

  Other Household Staff --- Housekeeper, Servants, etc.

  Residents and workers in the Harbury Laboratories

  Dr. Matthew Henderson --- Scientist, Reanimator

  Miss Emily Warren --- His Assistant

  Dr. Merrill Ringwood --- Scientist, Unstable Elements

  Mr. ‘Enry --- The Cook

  Other Servants --- Residents of Level One

  Devon Harbury --- Inmate, Level Seven

  A number of other men --- Inmates, Level Seven

  Various physicians and scientists --- As yet unrevealed experiments

  Residents of Chase Park, A Small Estate near Harbury Hall

  Sir Josiah Fielding --- Landowner, Gentleman

  Lady Fielding --- His Wife

  Miss Miranda Fielding --- Eldest Daughter, Local Beauty

  Miss Portia Fielding --- Second Daughter

  Mr. Oswin Fielding --- Son and Heir

  Mr. Richard Fielding --- Second Son

  Three other Fielding Siblings --- Not identified

  Other Interested Parties

  James Burke, Inspector --- Attached to the Lord Lieutenant’s Office

  Mrs. Louise Onslow --- Milliner, Little Harbury

  Chapter 1

  Harbury Hall – a day’s ride from London –

  during the reign of Her Royal Majesty Queen Victoria

  “Drat and bother…”

  Emily Warren pressed the lift button again, watching the copper-ringed circle of glass shimmer with an unearthly blue glow. If the annoying thing didn’t crank to this level soon, she’d be late.

  She shuffled her feet, her thick rubber-soled boots squeaking a little on the highly polished marble floor. Finally she breathed a sigh of relief as the grinding and squeaking sounds stopped, and the wrought iron partition slid aside admitting her into the lift.

  “About time.” She made sure her skirts weren’t caught on any stray decorative metal edges and slid the door back in place before pressing the button for Level Six.

  Her reflection shone from the smooth walls of the shaft, sliding slowly upward as she sank down into the hidden depths of Harbury Hall. Her lace-trimmed cap glowed white, the buckles on her stiff leather corset twinkled erratically and she even caught a glimpse of her pantaloons where the looped up sections of her skirt revealed a tiny sliver of white cotton.

  Sighing, she adjusted the straps that held her thick skirt and her petticoat above her boots, regretting the necessity but glad she didn’t have to launder the heavy garment more often.

  The boots were mandatory, insulating her from the variety of dangerous electro-psychical charges she traversed on a daily basis. The leather corset offered additional protection and the embossed bracers encasing her wrists added strength to her grasp.

  Today, she might well need it.

  A tiny ding and the warning bell announced her arrival.

  Six was the second-to-last level, almost as low into the ground as she could go. And it was cool, always cool, with an odd smell created from formaldehyde, electrical machines, a coal-powered steam generator and something she could only describe as fear.

  A faint mechanical hum prickled against the back of her neck and once again she experienced the oddly arousing sensation of the hairs on her body lifting in response to the statically enhanced air.

  She walked down the center of the dimly lit corridor toward the laboratory at the end. Dr. Henderson would be there, probably poring over another table full of his tools, his notes and his tiny inventions. And he’d be wondering where she was if she was more than a few minutes late.

  She picked up her pace and opened the heavy iron door, blinking for a moment as her eyes adjusted to the strong green-tinted glare.

  “Morning, Emily. Close the door, there’s a good girl. Don’t want a draft on this.” A tall figure addressed her from the end of the lab, barely glancing in her direction.

  “Good morning, Doctor.” She obediently shut the door and walked over to his table. “How’s it looking this morning?”

  “Not bad. But I don’t like the adhesion over the left brow. Go and see what you think while I make sure these are coming along satisfactorily.”

  Turning away, she moved to one wall and turned up a set of overhead gaslights, illuminating a covered figure at the far end of the large chamber. The walls were made of stone and there was always a sense of sepulchral solemnity about the positioning of the experiments. As if they were statues to be worshipped, honored with offerings of flowers and fruit like ancient Vestal Virgins.

  Emily smiled at her thoughts and whisked the protective sheet off the figure currently featuring as star of Dr. Henderson’s latest work.

  He’d named her Galatea in one of his few whimsical moments. She was tall, her body as complete and as perfect as machinery could make it. The solid porcelain of her bones was covered with heavy rubber musculature, connected by hydraulics and gears the likes of which aboveground scientists could never imagine. Her skin was the thinnest and softest rubber coating, blended with touches of velvet and other things. It was strangely warm, so human that Emily derived much pleasure from stroking it.

  But her face…that was the continuing glitch in the experiment.

  This was the fourth one they’d tried and, sadly, the doctor was right. For some reason the knitting bugs were failing to adequately make the crucial sub-dermal connections over the left eyebrow.

  Sighing, she tipped her head to one side and observed the nude figure before her.

  The skin was flawless cream, the breasts high, full and firm. The waist dipped inward, the stomach was a gentle swell of feminine flesh and between the rounded thighs was a dark tuft of silk-soft pubic hair. She was, in essence, perfection. Stunning and unimpeachable beauty, every nuance of womanhood reflected in her pose.

  She stood tall, elegant, proud of her nakedness and her mechanical abilities. Emily knew that a slight motion with
the tiny control box and Galatea would walk slowly and sensually around the room, making every man groan with barely repressed lust.

  Her buttocks would roll from side to side as her legs parted in strides that revealed brief glimpses of her impossibly lovely sex.

  Dr. Henderson was half in love with her, although as her creator he probably had the right to be.

  But one little problem still needed to be solved.

  There was a slight twitch and Emily immediately stepped back.

  What had been a beautiful woman’s face with closed eyes, resting in sleep atop that magnificent body, became something else.

  The jawline sagged, shaping the mouth to a silent scream of distorted agony.

  The eyelids drooped, stretched and opened slowly, allowing a glimpse into the empty sockets beneath, dark and forbidding, lending their own pain to the increasingly horrific expression.

  Stepping further back, even Emily couldn’t repress a gasp as the features contorted into a terrifying grimace, suddenly human in its torment.

  The adhesions failed, the sound of ripping flesh echoed around her ears and she winced as Galatea’s face slid free, landing on the floor of the lab with a succulent squish and plop. It left a trail of red over the creamy breasts, dappling the rest of the body with gruesomely colored smears.

  Emily skittered backward to avoid the spatter of residual blood and other fluids, noting the waving neural tentacles now emerging from the skull. They frantically sought connections that were no longer there.

  From one goddess to another, she mused. One moment it had been Venus. Now it was Medusa.

  She shrugged as she turned away from the failed experiment. Galatea wasn’t that different to a human woman.

  We all lose our looks one way or another. She just lost hers all at once. And I’m going to have to clean them up. Again. Shit.

  *~~*~~*

  A man huddled uncomfortably against a stone wall, shivering a little as the skin of his back met damp granite through the insubstantial shirt he wore.

  For the umpteenth time, Devon Harbury asked himself how the fuck he’d ended up here, a prisoner on the seventh sub-level of his own home. And for the umpteenth time, he shifted his position, bending his knees and pulling his feet nearer to his body for warmth.

  He knew he’d lost weight since his incarceration—he could feel his bones now, not the firm muscled flesh he’d been so proud of in his youth. Of course, not eating much accounted for that. And it had nothing to do with the food he was offered. There was plenty of it. Richly flavored stews, ripe with chunks of meat and herbs.

  Something in that stew didn’t agree with him. He couldn’t identify the meat, and after what he’d experienced, the mere thought of the possibilities turned his stomach. It hadn’t taken too long for his captors to make the connection and he’d been approved for a vegetarian diet. It was to their advantage to keep him alive and relatively healthy.

  For everyone’s convenience he was now restricted to vegetables, eggs, and the local cheeses, which he particularly favored. Not elegant, nor terribly nutritious, at least he could keep it down. He wasn’t robust, by any means, but he was surviving.

  However, it wasn’t a sustaining diet for a man of two and thirty, who was more used to training his own horses, managing his estates and clubbing in London with his peers.

  The same peers who now believed him dead.

  Devon sighed. He hoped they’d given him a good sendoff. Perhaps Daisy Fortescue had shed a tear when she’d learned he’d no longer be slipping into her bed and fucking her eyebrows off.

  God, she’d been incredible.

  His cock stiffened at the memory, but he immediately dashed his head backward, hitting the wall, stifling a choked cry at the pain. It was a move he’d perfected, bruising but not damaging, and guaranteed to deflate any kind of an erection.

  Because if his arousal was observed by any of the staff passing his cell, he knew what the consequences would be.

  He’d find himself strapped to the table in the laboratory down the hall. The place he had come to think of as his personal seventh level of hell and whatever it took to keep off that table and out of those straps he’d do. He had managed to stay away for what he calculated was about a month. Soon, inevitably, they’d come for him, but the longer he could postpone it the better.

  Or they’d send a whore. It was getting near that time as well.

  Some well endowed, spotlessly clean and pretty little thing, who would have been attractive to any man. To an isolated prisoner, she would be an angel of mercy ready to suck the seed from his balls. What any of them were paid he had no idea.

  That they were all whores…well, there was no question. Even with the elegant dresses, there were no ladies of his acquaintance who would willingly strip and fuck a stranger while several white-coated staff assistants observed the entire event and took notes.

  At first, he’d been confused, terrified and befuddled by it all. Then, slowly, as time passed and he found himself on that table in the laboratory, understanding set in.

  He was no idiot. No indeed. Devon Harbury had taken a first at Oxford in natural sciences. A guaranteed successor to his brilliant father, had said the Deans, nodding in agreement. So sad about his father, they added. Such a tragedy to lose one so brilliant at such a young age.

  Devon agreed.

  But he knew, deep in his heart, that his father had been driven screamingly insane by his addiction to opiates—his accidental death was, in truth, an aborted attempt to fly from the highest balcony of Harbury Hall.

  He’d thought he’d seen the worst of insanity and the darkest of chemically induced madness that man could experience.

  He was wrong.

  Movement and a sound from outside his cell recalled him to the present and he blinked, noticing the bars on the door were more visible—there was a light moving toward him.

  He was used to the sounds, the low murmurs, the occasional cry or scream. Now they were louder, animalistic, the noises of his fellow inmates who were disturbed by the passage of someone—something—past their similarly barred enclosures.

  He gathered his strength and stood, resting a hand against the stone blocks to steady himself.

  “Eleven.”

  The man was short, his white coat a bit stained, the clipboard in his hands drawing his full attention.

  “Yes.” Devon’s voice was rough from disuse, and he cleared his throat. “My name is…”

  “Don’t give a fuck. To me you’re eleven. Shut up and follow me. You know the drill. Give me any trouble and you’re in for it. Got it?” The man waved a slim wand at him. The glow at the end told Devon all he needed to know.

  It was a jab-stick. A rod that would be charged just enough to administer a sharp jolt of statically savage electrical pain.

  On the arm it hurt. On the balls it redefined agony.

  If he’d been strong enough, Devon would have fought. He’d tried early on, every time they came for him. He still had a few lingering scars.

  And of course the missing finger.

  So he stood silent as his cell was unlocked, then followed the orderly, padding down the long dim passageway past other cells. They numbered twelve in all, and he’d had enough time to observe that eleven were occupied, including his own.

  All men. And all, as far as Devon could tell, suffering from some form of madness. It was a Bedlam of strangeness, a gathering of the mentally disturbed. He was smack in the middle of it all, not because he was insane, but because he possessed something else. The ownership of Harbury Hall.

  Oh, and those bloody maddening psychical powers…

  Chapter 2

  “I don’t know, Emily. I have no idea why Galatea won’t hold a face.” Dr. Matthew Henderson stood next to his assistant and stroked his chin absently.

  The figure before him was as perfect as he could ever hope for. The structure was sound, the mechanics were ideal and once the face was completed, the influx of electro-psychic energy
could be channeled into it. Into her.

  She would live.

  But there was just one problem and the neural connections lying lax from the skull cavities gave mute testament to the nature of that problem.

  “I know we referenced the type matching to the tissues.” Emily’s voice was thoughtful. “And I personally cross checked the adhesion levels last night before I left.”

  “I know, dear.” Matthew stroked her arm. “It isn’t your fault.”

  “You’re very kind, Doctor.” She touched him gently. “What is our next step? Where do we go from here?”

  He sighed. “I don’t like it, but of course we must replace it. Can I leave that in your hands?”

  “You know you can.” Emily nodded. “I’ve already compiled a potential list of necessary attributes and within a day or so I should be able to narrow down the candidates.”

  “It must be exact, Emily. We simply can’t lose another one.”

  “I understand.”

  “Everything must be right, physiologically. Type and cross match, insert the knit bugs more frequently if you must, and let’s try some of that organic adhesion packing as well.”

  “Good idea.”

  “But above all, make sure the procuration is clean and hygienically handled. And as fresh as possible.” He frowned. “I have to wonder if there wasn’t a little contamination somewhere in this one that might have loosened the adherence process.”

  “Rest assured the next one will be perfect, Doctor. She deserves nothing but the best. You know I believe that.”

  Matthew watched Emily reach out and caress Galatea’s full breast, a gesture so erotically natural that his cock stirred in response.

  “You are an amazing assistant, my dear.” He let his gaze linger on Emily’s breasts, the upper mounds of which were thrust into prominence by her corset. They were not, truth to tell, unlike Galatea’s.