A Suffocating Summer’s Eve
By Scarlet Richard-Sephton
Looming tall gum trees look on as we saunter towards the abandoned quad of buildings, the sarcastic laughter of my four mates falling flat in the stiflingly hot and sweaty summer night. The stench of lemon myrtle flowers creeps in through our noses and settles in our throats, and the long dry grass we traipse through threatens of slithering nightmares in the hot dusk. Wondering why on earth I’d agreed to completing this pointless stupid dare in this dead-end country town, I sigh into the midnight darkness;
“Bet you this’ll be boring as bat shit,” I mutter under my breath.
I’d been told the decrepit ancient infrastructure was built in the 1870’s, a looney bin for the freaks of society if you will. Apparently some crazy shit went down here in the old days, heaps of suicides and a couple outbreaks of influenza. Military boys also camped there, since it was a hospital for ‘em in the second world war. Earlier in the night, me and the boys were on the piss and Harry suggested coming here, since it’s ‘the most haunted asylum in Australia’. Complete bullshit that is.
The buildings are surrounded by a tall intimidating fence with a sign reading ‘Trespassers will be prosecuted’ stapled onto it haphazardly. The writing glares at us directly in our faces, daring us to ignore it.
“Inviting ain’t it,” Harry grins, his tan hands gripping the gate and hoisting his toned body over it, his cheeky shout of glee echoing through the otherwise dead silent quad as his feet hit the ground on the other side.
“Come on pussy’s, let’s fucking go!”. Laughter ensues.
Being the last one left to jump the fence, my clammy palms grasp the sticky metal gate. With legs dangling halfway over, the left leg of my Nike trackies gets caught on a loose piece of sharp wire, and it tears along my skin. Great. Of course this happens to me of all people.
“Oi, you right mate?” Charlie says amused, as I jump down onto the ground. Wincing slightly, I say nothing. None of them notice the blood beginning to ooze down my thigh, thank god.
The two storey buildings loom over our small group of four as we stare up at them, blocking out the bright white light of the moon with their ominous architecture that casts us into humid, stale gloom. Vines grow up the outside walls, snaking in and out of smashed cross-hatch glass windows as if the plant was an entity in itself, slowly but steadily suffocating and eating the asylum from the outside inwards. A ‘Danger: Asbestos’ sign coloured blood red bores down upon us from above the entrance doorway. After deciding to kick the hard wooden door down, Jackson and Harry’s loud banter cracks the eerie dead silence of the place, over some bullshit about who has been gyming for the longest and has the strongest legs. These dickheads didn’t think this through beforehand? Their crap is beginning to get on my nerves, and the woozy feeling from my cut is starting to get to my head.
“I reckon,” Jackson leers, “Bruno should go in there by himself.”
“Yooo,” the others crack up.
“Unless he’s too pussy. Scared of ghosts are you Bruno?” he tickles my neck jokingly, but his eyes are serious and threatening, daring me to prove myself to him. I roll my eyes.
“Shut up cunt, ghosts ain’t real you fucking dipshit,” I say. Sticking the rude finger up at them, I walk into the place alone. I have funner places to be, better get this over with.
The crunch of broken glass and scuttle of rats breaks the dingy silence as my pupils expand to let the darkness of the room engulf me. I am met with damp graffitied walls, a spiralling staircase to my left, and a narrow claustrophobic corridor directly in front of me leading to who-the-fuck-knows. What looks to be finger-nail scratches cover the dark dank walls. Why the hell am I even here? I smile weakly. This isn’t even scary.
A destroyed piano lay silent, defeated on its side in a cramped room thick with the stench of bat piss. Walking in, I am greeted with the graffitied message stretching across all four walls in red dripping paint, “I always lock the door when I creep by daylight”. With a closer look, I realise the paint looks wet. Of course Harry would make up some fucked bullshit like that to scare people, of course they followed me in here to mess with me.
“Oi Harry,” I shout down the hall, “Fucking good one!” My sentence falls flat in the air, a lump forming in the back of my throat when no one answers in return. Looking down, I realise my left pant leg had slowly become drenched in a dark liquid substance, with a familiar metallic smell wafting up into my nostrils. My phone light flickers, shutting itself off as the small battery of the machine runs low. Dammit.
Cautiously wandering out of the room and back towards the distant banter of my mates down the hall, my muscles begin to relax, relieved, and my stride gains speed and confidence, the dank walls on either side seeming a little less unsettling.
Their familiar guffaw comforts me from around the corner. Walking faster in excitement, I exclaim in alarm,
“You fuckheads thought I wouldn’t know it was you–” I choke on my words.
I am slapped in the face by empty, desolate surroundings, a hard, cold smack. My mind spins. My senses falter. Where the fuck am I? Who the fuck was laughing? I am wildly thrown into spiralling circles of dizzy confusion. The long, rectangular room I’d just thrown myself into was covered in piles and piles of musty vintage clothing on the floor, mixed with urine and what I hoped was only animal shit. “It’s all in your head” grinned sinisterly at me in scarlet ink on the walls. The room was entirely devoid of life, not an inch of movement remained, the sudden silence deafening. Until it wasn’t. These walls have eyes. They stared at me mockingly, while invisible cold fingers coaxing the hairs on the back of my neck to rigidly stand up. With a million unseen pupils laser focused on every inch of my frozen stiff body, I slowly turn around to face the doorway. As if to say, “get the fuck out”, I am shoved out the door by unseen strong claws, fingernails digging deep into my back as I fall face first on the ground. My muscles suddenly unlock and filled with adrenaline I scramble up, my sticky, wet thighs jerkingly hurtle down the hallway as if of their own accord. I hear ear-splitting screaming surrounding my head, digging into my brain like hungry maggots. I vaguely wondered who was dying. Snapping into reality, I realise those deafening wails were coming right out of my very own throat. Why am I suddenly lying down? From the ceiling, scarlet drops of liquid trickle slowly into my eyes, blocking out my already swirling vision. I’m gonna fucking die in this fucked up place. For fuck sake.
+ + +
“Bruno.”
“Oi Bruno, are you feelin’ alright bro?”
I awake to light slaps of my cheek and the amused snickering of my so-called friends.
“Wake the fuck up man.”
Charlie is crouched over me holding a bottle of water, judgement in his light blue eyes, his blonde curtains flopping effortlessly across his forehead. Harry and Jackson stand behind him looking over me, disdain on their taunting faces. I sit up, my head still woozy, asking what happened.
“Why the fuck would you faint man… It’s like having a fucking chick in our group you’re so damn sensitive.” Harry sneers, walking away with Jackson.
Having explained that they found me passed out on the hallway floor after being missing for hours on end, Charlie grabs my arm and pulls me up, arm under my shoulder, and we follow the other two outside into the dank 30 degree 3am air. My chest loosens and relaxes suddenly, as if I hadn’t breathed properly in hours. The violent nausea in my stomach subsides slightly, until I look down at my leg. The gash was far worse than I had realised, my pant leg drenched and dripping with blood. The boys are of course still too preoccupied to notice the extent of my stupid injury, and I’m glad. I’ve had enough bullshit taunting from them for one night. But at least I’m alive.
The car ride home was loud, jarring and long. The boys still had a few leftover beers they cracked open, and were singing at the top of their lungs to some shit song on the crackling old car stereo. I refused to drink. The dull throbbing pain in my leg had worsened, but it was numb compared to the mental agony I felt after my experience in that demonic, fucked up place. There truly was something in there, something sinister. Something evil. I knew we shouldn’t have come.
Rationale
My text's central theme is about the prevalence of toxic masculinity in contemporary society, and is a critique of how it can be harmful to young boys and teenagers. Toxic masculinity is a term referring to cultural pressures for men to behave in a certain way. Toxic masculinity refers to the notion that some people’s idea of “manliness” perpetuates domination, homophobia, and aggression. This notion that men need to act tough and avoid showing all emotions can be harmful to their mental health and can have serious consequences for society (Morin, 2020). The American Psychological Association warns that extreme forms of certain “traditional” masculine traits are linked to aggression, misogyny, and negative health outcomes (Salter, 2019). Toxic masculinity can also contribute to larger societal issues, such as gender-based violence, sexual assault, and gun violence (Sheppard, 2020).
The gothic genre generally explores and exposes taboo issues and the hidden aspects of society, and toxic masculinity, while prevalent in today's society, is not widely discussed or even accepted as a reality that has major negative consequences for many young people, boys and girls alike. As a result, my target audience for this text would be teenage boys, in the hopes that they will recognise and accept that this is an issue within their social circles, and that they may and should speak out about it, as they might get themselves into trouble if they don't. Therefore the purpose of my text is to highlight the negative effects of toxic masculinity and peer pressure in adolescent social groups.
In gothic literature, the convention/archetype of the ‘damsel in distress’ is often used. This is when a woman, usually considered weak, pure, and innocent, gets herself into a dangerous situation and therefore needs to be saved by a strong male hero since she is incapable of saving herself. To convey my text's meaning, I chose to subvert this convention in the main character Bruno. In the beginning of the story, he is in a high school friend group of classically masculine, popular, sporty boys who consider being scared a flaw and weakness that makes someone less of a man. Bruno begins thinking the supernatural is not real and he is unbothered, but when he enters the haunted asylum he experiences a character arc where he realises ghosts exist and that is he truly afraid. He also gets a serious leg injury that he hides from his friends, afraid that they will tease him for being weak. This means he faints due to blood loss in the asylum because of this toxic idea of not being allowed to show any weakness, and becomes the ‘man in distress’ in this situation. He is saved by his friends, who tease him anyway, “Why the fuck would you faint man… It’s like having a fucking chick in our group you’re so damn sensitive.” Harry sneers”. This subverts from classic gothic stories, and shows that toxic masculinity can be toxic; it can place a man in real danger.
Another gothic convention that I chose to subert was the setting, specifically the weather. In gothic stories, the weather is usually used as a bad omen for what is to come, with storms, rain, clouds, and cold temperatures. In contrast, my story depicts the sweltering heat of an Australian summer, and how, while not traditionally unpleasant, it can be just as foreboding a setting as stormy weather. I chose oppressive heat to symbolise the oppression he felt from his male peer group. I was also inspired by the novel The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone by Felicity Mclean, in the way of making the setting of the story a hot, sticky, Australian summer, and making this setting just as unsettling as the typical gothic setting of a stormy, cold, wet night. A quote from The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone that shows this technique is “That valley had smelled bad long before any of the Van Apfel girls ever went missing there…the stench would waft up the fully and smack us in the face on a hot dry day.” (p20). I tried to use this technique by describing the Australian landscape in a stifling and ominous way, for example, “the stench of lemon myrtle flowers creeps in through our noses and settles in our throats, and the long dry grass we traipse through threatens of slithering nightmares in the hot dusk.”
I got inspiration for my story’s plot and theme from my own recent experience exploring an allegedly haunted abandoned mental asylum, and my own frustration with the group of people I went with as they did not take the experience seriously. I chose to dramatise my own experience, and make it into a gothic story with a theme and purpose that is quite important for teenagers in our current society to comprehend. I was also inspired to write about madness from reading The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman, and the theme of my story was also influenced by it as well. The Yellow Wallpaper is all about sexism, and how women have been trapped by society and men’s expectations of them. The theme of my story is not about the hardships that women face, but instead about the hardships that society inflicts on men in the way of toxic masculinity. I used a quote to directly nod at The Yellow Wallpaper in my own story, “I always lock the door when I creep by daylight” was graffitied on the walls of the asylum that my characters explore.
The theme of my narrative is heavily influenced by the social context of our current society, with toxic masculinity being a prominent issue among social groups of teenagers my own age. I played with classic old style gothic descriptions of scenery, mixed with dialect and speech used often in teenage social groups of our contemporary society. This was to explore the convention often used in gothic literature of ‘old vs new’, and give the audience something to relate to while sweeping them into a classic gothic imaginary landscape.
References
Gilman, C. P. (1981). The Yellow Wallpaper. Virago Press.
McLean, F. (2020). The Van Apfel Girls Are Gone. London: Point Blank.
Morin, A. (2020, November 25). What is Toxic Masculinity? VeryWellMind. https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-toxic-masculinity-5075107
Salter, M. (2019, February 28). The Problem With a Fight Against Toxic Masculinity. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2019/02/toxic-masculinity-history/583411/
Sheppard, S. (2020, November 11). The Dangerous Effects of Toxic Masculinity. VeryWellMind. https://www.verywellmind.com/the-dangerous-mental-health-effects-of-toxic-masculinity-5073957#:~:text=When%20men%20actively%20avoid%20vulnerability,sexual%20assault%2C%20and%20gun%20violence.