In the overgrown courtyard of Sunderwall, where the ivy grew straight through brick and the weeping patients carved their names into their own skin, there perched a cockatoo that knew too much.
The orderlies called it The Screamer , though it never made a sound. Its feathers were the blinding white of straitjackets, its crest permanently raised like a coronet of needles. The asylum director kept it chained to a rusted perch, believing the bird absorbed madness like a sponge—which it did, just not in the way he imagined.
Here’s how it worked:
— When a schizophrenic scratched at invisible insects, the cockatoo would pluck one from the air and eat it with a sound like cracking bone
— Depressives who stood too close found their tears crystallizing into tiny salt statues in its cage
— Every suicide attempt coincided with the bird molting a single perfect feather, always found inserted between the victim’s teeth
Dr. Voss recorded these phenomena in his leather-bound journal, convinced the bird was a diagnostic tool. He failed to notice how the entries he wrote near it changed when read aloud , revealing his own buried atrocities in acrostics.
Then Patient Twelve, a mute girl who drew collapsing cities in her own blood, touched the cockatoo’s beak.
The asylum’s walls breathed inward .
Every barred window bent like ribs around a dying breath. The director’s prized pocket watch spat its gears into his palm, each one etched with a patient’s name. And the cockatoo—now perched on Twelve’s shoulder—finally spoke:
"Let’s discuss what you did to the children in Ward C."
Its voice was the exact timbre of the asylum’s first victim, a boy who’d carved his accusation into the chapel pews before vanishing.
By dawn, Sunderwall stood empty save for Twelve, her cockatoo, and the doctor—now permanently curled in the fetal position inside his own safe, his mouth stitched shut with white feathers .
If you visit today, you’ll hear no screams. Just the occasional click-click of a beak testing the locks…
…and the soft rustle of pages turning in a journal that writes itself.