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  At seventeen, June Hardie is everything a young woman in 1951 shouldn’t be—independent, rebellious, a dreamer. June longs to travel, to attend college and to write the dark science fiction stories that consume her waking hours. But her parents only care about making June a better young woman. Her mother grooms her to be a perfect little homemaker while her father pushes her to marry his business partner’s domineering son. When June resists, her whole world is shattered—suburbia isn’t the only prison for different women...

  June’s parents commit her to Burrow Place Asylum, aka the Institution. With its sickening conditions, terrifying staff and brutal “medical treatments,” the Institution preys on June’s darkest secrets and deepest fears. And she’s not alone. The Institution terrorizes June’s fragile roommate, Eleanor, and the other women locked away within its crumbling walls. Those who dare speak up disappear...or worse. Trapped between a gruesome reality and increasingly sinister hallucinations, June isn’t sure where her nightmares end and real life begins. But she does know one thing: in order to survive, she must destroy the Institution before it finally claims them all.

  Also by Amy Lukavics:

  Daughters unto Devils

  The Women in the Walls

  The Ravenous

  Nightingale

  Amy Lukavics

  dedicated to all the weird girls

  Contents

  1951 the institution

  days past

  days past

  the institution

  the institution

  the institution

  days past

  days past

  the institution

  the institution

  days past

  days past

  the institution

  the institution

  the institution

  days past

  days past

  the institution

  the institution

  days past

  days past

  the institution

  days past

  the institution

  days past

  awake

  epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Excerpt from The Ravenous by Amy Lukavics

  1951

  the institution

  There was a dead girl in the bed next to June’s.

  The corpse was giggling uncontrollably into her pillow, muffling the sound, making it much quieter than the shrieks and cackles coming from behind the closed door leading to the hallway, a wicked harmony of pain and grief and fear.

  Hysteria.

  June knew that she wasn’t actually dead. She just believed she was, and when June had first met her earlier that afternoon, she’d refused to give up her name and instead had insisted June simply think of her as “the dead girl.” This was proving to be quite difficult, given how very loud this dead girl was. Shouldn’t she have been still and quiet at least some of the time?

  “I think we should go to sleep now,” June said shakily after licking her lips, feeling the least tired she’d ever been in her entire life, despite the fact that she hadn’t slept for days. She was desperate for the dead girl to stop laughing at her. June was so exhausted from the events of the morning, and sleep felt impossible, just as it had in the days leading up to this.

  What on earth would happen to her tomorrow?

  “What’s sleep?” the dead girl asked, the laughter completely gone now, her voice hollow and fearful instead. June heard her sit up suddenly in the dark, the mattress springs screaming in strain. “I remember sleep. It used to be comfortable. It used to be quiet. It used to just...be.”

  June nodded, even though her back was turned and the lights were out. She suspected it was only the first night she would lose significant amounts of sleep, devastating amounts, but deep in her heart of hearts, she knew right then, with her allegedly dead roommate bouncing up and down on the squeaking mattress and giggling again, that things were truly about to change in all of the very worst ways.

  “Sorry,” the girl said. “I’m kind of high right now—those damn nurses. This is not a great way to welcome somebody new. Nobody new ever comes, let alone comes to sleep in my room. It’s exciting. It’s actually quite difficult to remember what came before this excitement.”

  June poked at the memory of this morning in her brain like a hesitant tongue fearing blistering heat. Mom and Dad, at breakfast. The way they’d looked at her when she screamed at the sound of Mom’s voice. Good morning, Nightingale. Then, the way they had acted, as though they had no idea what June was scared of, what she was shrieking about, what was the matter with her.

  “We’re your parents,” they’d cooed desperately, as June had backed up against the counter, taken the butcher knife from the drawer beside her and pointed it back and forth between them. “Of course we are! June, honey, what is wrong with you?”

  Only it wasn’t them. It wasn’t them at all. They were liars.

  They were something else.

  Maybe I could be happy to be here, June thought suddenly, the silver lining showing itself at last. At least here I won’t have to continue living how I was. I won’t have to break myself into pieces just to show them that I can.

  Maybe this place is my destiny.

  Somewhere outside the locked door leading to the hallway, someone screamed the Lord’s Prayer, getting half of the words wrong.

  And—she continued to ruminate, as her roommate finally quieted down and settled into her bed because apparently even dead girls needed sleep despite acting as though they never did. How dramatic!—at least whatever happened to Mom and Dad won’t be able to happen to me. I’ll be much safer locked in here.

  Part of June understood that she belonged in here, understood that she was the one who wasn’t safe for others to be around. But most of that was buried by the emotions, wild and shrill, magnified by the insomnia, muddled by the desperate insistence that she was sane. She had to be, she had to be sane, she had to be safe.

  Safe. The word echoed itself within the confines of June’s skull, a desperate promise, a needed reality. Safe safe safe safe safe.

  But then she remembered what she’d seen when she’d first walked through the common area and hallways of Burrow Place Asylum. Women shivering in shallow baths, begging for a towel, their teeth chattering and their body hairs sticking out from their goose-fleshed follicles like quills. Women wandering alone, mumbling under their breath, and the nurses occasionally barking for them to get away from other patients’ doors. Women sitting with their backs to the wall, forgotten cigarettes smoking away between their fingers as they stared ahead, their eyes blank and staring into nothing, no doubt doped out of their minds.

  June wondered about that. About her upcoming treatments, as they’d been so ominously alluded to her during check-in.

  “Don’t you worry, Tulip,” the intake nurse had said to June with a wink, a terrifying glimmer in her eye. “You’ll be right as rain after you go through your treatments. We’re here to help.”

  Something seemed wrong about it, though. “Here to help” didn’t fit what June had seen walking through the stone archway leading to the hospital’s common room. This had been after changing into the plain blue housedress uniform, a straw-colored sweater worn open on top. And now the sun had fallen, and dinner had been eaten and all those women she had seen earlier were stuffed like mice into the boxlike rooms that lined each side of the single long hallway. Safe wasn’t anywhere close to how June felt.

  Nowhere was safe.

  Nobody was trustworthy.

&n
bsp; For all she knew, they could all be replaced, every person she’d seen since this morning, all of them walking, talking duplicates that would endlessly act as though June had lost her mind. A much worse thought bloomed within June, a thought that made her hands tingle beneath the scratchy covers of her bed.

  What if, she thought slowly, biting her tongue behind closed lips, Mom and Dad weren’t actually replaced at all?

  What if I was?

  No, no, no. June turned over onto her other side, now facing her roommate, asleep at last and snoring, one arm hanging limply off the side of her mattress. June had not been replaced. Of course not. Something in the world had changed, some time between going to sleep last night and waking this morning. Mom and Dad—they weren’t themselves anymore. They’d been taken, and impostors had been put in their place.

  Things haven’t been right for a long time, a wicked voice whispered in her mind. Your unraveling has just been too slow and steady to notice over time.

  She thought about all the things that had happened leading up to this: clues that had suggested the worst. The inability to control herself. The creatures that hid in her bedroom at night, peering at her in the dark, expecting things from her. The story she wrote.

  June suddenly thought about Robert and of how he might have felt about what’d happened. Who cared about whatever Robert thought, though? It wasn’t as though he was important to her, she told herself; she was simply used to having to pretend like he was. She could drop that now, especially after what had happened last night. She doubted he’d ever speak to her again after what she had done.

  Besides, what if Robert was replaced, too, just like Mom and Dad had been?

  Something is happening, she thought to herself, the pills the nurse made her swallow before bed finally coming into effect. She felt heavy, her ears still adjusting to the sound of the newly quieted hallway.

  Something is coming for us all.

  days past

  “June Hardie!” her mother bellowed up the stairs, twenty minutes after the alarm clock had gone off. “Breakfast, I said!”

  Upstairs, June sat on the edge of her unmade bed, her short hair in a bird’s nest of a mess around her ears. The room was unkempt, the air thick with the smell of morning breath, and she went over to the window to open it for some fresh air.

  It was a Saturday, what should have been a warmly welcomed break from school, which June found tiring and worrisome, although deep down she had to admit to herself that the real source of the anxiety came from those damned mathematics. Whenever June was being talked through a math problem, she often couldn’t even follow along with the first step, but the teacher would continue as though she clearly understood, and the idea of interrupting to admit that she didn’t made her heart race and her palms sweat. If only every class was English!

  Despite the potential for math sweats, June thought she’d rather be in school today.

  Outside, her older brother, Fred, was mowing the lawn, his hair combed to the side, his slacks rolled up around his ankles. June stared blankly out the window, unblinking as she combed through the tangle of thoughts in her head, until she realized that Fred had stopped mowing the lawn and was now staring up at her in uneasy confusion. After a moment, she stepped away from the window, letting the delicate white curtain fall back into place.

  Yesterday, June’s mother had told her that by the time she came down to breakfast every morning, she needed to have already gotten dressed, with her hair brushed, her nose powdered and her lipstick applied.

  “You need to learn to be a better young woman,” Mom had said, her arms crossed over her butter-yellow dress, the one with the white buttons that she always wore the first day after wash. “This week I’m going to teach you how to make meat loaf and boil potatoes and keep the house clean.”

  June couldn’t think of anything more disgusting than squeezing mounds of raw ground meat in between her fingers, the waxy fat coating her skin and gathering under her fingernails, embedded with salt and pepper and dicings of onion. She was a lousy cook—always had been. Mom had a hard time accepting that. So today June would be touching the raw meat, forming it into a loaf, baking it into a bubbling brown log and then slathering it with ketchup before cutting it up into slices for Dad and Fred and Robert.

  But first, June knew, the day would be filled with all sorts of other lessons. Cleaning, keeping house, being a better young woman. What was a “better young woman”? June had wondered, not for the first time. She stared at herself in the mirror atop her unorganized vanity, her wild hair and frowning face an unpleasant sight to behold. Someone who can bite her tongue during maddening conversations between men? Someone who can keep her house so it looks straight out of a magazine? Someone who can follow in the footsteps of Betty Crocker without mistakes or, God forbid, letting a curl fall hopelessly out of place?

  June supposed she had other thoughts about what would make a “better young woman,” but she knew that her feelings on the subject didn’t matter, or at the very least, they weren’t supposed to. Still, she couldn’t resist fantasizing about being the type of woman who lived unapologetically, who experienced and learned and applied the knowledge gathered along the way to enable herself to thrive. The type of woman who learned to navigate her way out of the impossible labyrinth of family history and tradition. One who unlearned the inherited toxic traits that were handed down to her and bound her to an unstable and wildly limited path like angry, unbreakable vines.

  It wasn’t about the cooking or the cleaning. The specifics were different for everybody. It was about the source of the expectation, what drove it. And in a world that seemed to constantly be going to shit, June thought, surely life was too short to spend it settling in the name of unthinking compliance.

  “June!” The knock on the door was sharp, unrepentant. “For goodness’ sake, didn’t you hear me hollering for you? It’s time for breakfast now. We have lots of chores to get through today, if you don’t mind.”

  “Be down in a minute,” June called back, shocked at how level her voice sounded, how devoid of emotion. Usually, she’d feel irritated or sassy or ready for an argument over this, but today she felt different: calmer, more dead inside. It was like she’d understood fully, for the first time, that Mom and Dad were who they were and always would be, no matter what June thought or how she felt. They’d never be happy with the idea of letting her go study in a college somewhere far away. They’d never support her dreams of travel. They would accept one thing, and one thing only.

  Be a better young woman.

  She chose a dress, green to match how her stomach felt, and used her comb to fluff out the bob haircut she’d gotten a few weeks before. It was miraculous, June mused as she brushed her teeth in the en suite bathroom, how much she’d aged in the last two weeks. She was still seventeen but felt about forty. Is that how changing into an adult worked? Overnight, and with the weight of a million pounds? If so, June sorely wished somebody had warned her.

  June came down the stairs and had a quick look around the house, which already looked to her like it’d been cleaned, but she knew Mom had different standards. The kitchen smelled like eggs and bacon. The table had three dirty plates in the places where Mom, Dad, and Fred usually sat. June’s spot had a loaded plate waiting for her, with glasses of both orange juice and milk, as well as a small plate piled high with toast.

  “Eat fast,” Mom said without turning from the sink, where she scrubbed at a pan and set it gingerly in the mouth of the brand-new dishwasher. They’d had it for a little over a month now, ever since Dad had closed the big business deal with his new partner, Mr. Dennings.

  Mr. Dennings, whose son, Robert, was twenty.

  Robert, who June had been agreeing to see on dates ever since the business deal was just a plan in Dad’s back pocket. What a tangled web that had been!

  It had started one evening after dinner, a school n
ight, and June had had her feet up on the couch while she read a textbook. Dad hadn’t been parked in front of the television where he usually had his drink; instead, he had turned his armchair around to face Mom as she wiped down the kitchen table.

  “I have something to tell the both of you,” Dad had said. “I already talked to Fred about it this morning, since he has bowling practice tonight.”

  Mom put her cloth down, wiping her hands on her apron front as she stepped into the living room and scolded June for having her feet on the couch. June sat up, put her book on her lap, folded her hands out of habit. She studied Dad’s face as he swirled his drink mindlessly in its short glass, but she had no inkling that something so serious was about to be broached. June and her mother sat silently side by side, waiting.

  “There’s a chance I can take my business to the next level,” he finally announced, setting the drink down and leaning forward in the armchair. “You’ll both help me to secure a partnership with Stewart Dennings. The economy is booming, and we’re both ready to cash in on it. We talked all about it at Stan Reuben’s poker night last week. Now I just have to convince Stewart to make the leap and invest.”

  The radio played in the background, some band playing live from New York City. June’s mother shifted in her seat.

  “That sounds wonderful, honey,” she said softly. “But how are June and I supposed to help?”

  “I’m getting to that,” Dad said. His fingers tightened ever so slightly around his glass. “If you’d keep your mouth shut and let me, please.”

  Mom apologized and straightened her back. June fought not to roll her eyes.

  “I’m going to start bringing Stewart around here for dinner some evenings,” Dad continued. “As well as his son, Robert, who’s just joined the family business. Stewart’s wife passed away last year.”

  June was still waiting to hear the reason she was involved in any of this. Likely so she could assist Mom in whatever dinners were coming—not that she was any help with that sort of thing. Still, saying as much to Dad would be pointless, so June continued to listen.