The mental hospital where my mother resided was a long way off town, but with a car you could cover that distance within a quarter-hour. Grandpa didn't say a word about my mother on the way to the facility, maybe out of fear of startling me. Looking back at it, I can still remember vividly the expression of dismal on grandpa's face when he parked his vehicle in the parking lot. He was conscious of the seriousness of the facts, none of the petty tales his wife spun would've had an effect on me, yet he persisted in keeping the truth under wraps until I'd see it with my own eyes.
Contrary to my expectations, the hospital standing before us didn't give off any unnerving vibe and had nothing to do with the depictions seen in movies. Scores of high windows looking out on the expanse of grass and the parking lot made the appearance of the leaden building more pleasant to the human sight, on top of which stood a small turret surmounted by an imposing cupola with a cross.
We mounted the stairs and went in through the main entrance. Across the hallway there was a reception where my grandpa was to ask which room was assigned to my mom. The receptionist leered sidelong at me for a handful of seconds before hanging up the phone, her sunken eyes looked grim and devoid of hope and they hardly reflected any images. I believed she would've flashed a fake smile at me or that the sight of a young visitor would've put her mind at ease somehow, but she limited herself to telling us plainly and simply where my mother's room was located.
Following her directions, we made our way down the aisles of the hospital. I looked sporadically through the vision panels of the doors as we went, a mixture of unintelligible cries, classical movements and reproaches from the doctors who shushed the patients resonated in the hallways. My composure began to dwindle at the idea of seeing my mother in this state, and the atmosphere turned so macabre as to bring back to mind Dante's hell circles for some reason or another.  Grandpa walked amidst the confusion of the corridors without so much as a flinch, and his unconcerned gait made him look like a soldier heading to the trenches. At length we came to my mother's room, the nurse inside informed us about her current psychological condition and suggested to take the utmost caution, then left us alone. Even though the sedatives they had given her reduced her irritability, no one ensured us her illness wouldn't take the upper hand and bring about an abrupt change in her demeanor. She laid down on her cot when we went into the room, and she was still sprawled on it when the nurse left. Grandpa greeted her, but she only raised her head to glance intently at him for a moment, then laid it back on the cot and stared at the ceiling.
Grandpa tapped on my shoulder and nodded towards her, fear stranded me for the most part, but I summoned the will to take no more than a step forward. The torpid silence inside the room dropped uneasiness on my mind, and I stood still hoping that my mom'd perceive my presence. Her gaze was fixed upwards, as if bent on burning a hole through the grey ceiling, and remained fixed on the ceiling until my call finally set them in motion.
"Who are you?" she asked me once her eyes caught my figure.
Her awkward question perplexed and frightened me at the same time, was she joking? I deluded myself into thinking so.
"It's me, Allie, your son." I stepped forward again.
"You don’t need to remind me." she looked at me sharply.
My mother was now sitting upright on the side of the cot, her interrogating eyes froze me up, and it was unusual of her to articulate words so clearly at this stage of her illness.
"You’re no son of mine" she went on "you've done nothing to make me proud of you. And what's more, you think the whole world is out to get you."
"Settle down now, Rita, show some respect for your son. He argued tooth and nails against his grandmother to see you." Grandpa broke in.
My mother never addressed me in that reproachful tone, and her words sent the confidence I had piled up flying. She stopped a moment to spit on the ground, then started again.
"That's rich coming from the man who supported him for a lifetime. Has the money you wasted on him gone to your head, dad?" She looked at him for a couple of seconds, then flung her eyes back to me.
"You're old enough to understand what your grandparents went through to tend to you, aren't you?"
I gave inclined my head forcedly.
"But you never ask, because you're too scared of carrying the guilt on your back. You're a coward, Allie, you're a vile, ungrateful, pathetic leech living off his guardians." She mercilessly degraded me with a barrage of insults "If you gave a damn about them, you'd pay them in the same coin, but self-pitying is all you're ever good for."
The vicious remarks mother attacked me with decimated the last bit of self-esteem left within me, grandpa would try to stop her short, but she instantly shut him up with the fierceness of a tiger.
"You know what I should have done with you while I still had the chance to go through with it, little Allison?" She hopped off the cot and began to walk in my direction "I should have gotten rid of you, my life would have taken a different turn if I had the courage to start over."
There my mind wandered off and I listened passively to what she said, without letting regret get the best of me. As she drew near, her ferocious gaze and viperish tongue went all out to break through my defenses, but my mind was already settled in an impenetrable state of daydream.
She hastened towards me knitting her brows as a demon. What could I have possibly done to deserve her resentment? Myriads ran through my head as I flinched and fearfully made a step back.
"Come on now, Allie..." she assumed a gentler tone to lure me in, the roughness in her voice didn't go unheard "Your mom must set right the fourteen year old mistake."
I turned back and noticed that grandpa wasn't inside the room. The best guess that rained down on me was that he hurried out of the room to call a nurse, but at the moment we were left with no witnesses. To my misfortune, the room wasn't equipped with security cameras to monitor the patient. On taking cognizance of this my terror redoubled and I sprang instinctively to the end of the room, but her hands closed around my neck before I could get mine on the door knob.
She gripped me with the force of an elephant, or that's what went through my head in that moment of panic, her nails were sharp like a unhinged tiger's and they sunk deeply into my skin. I couldn't turn my head, but from the corner of my eye, the incomplete details of this diabolical show were minutely recorded, and they haunted me in my sleep ever since.
"Keep quiet, you'll wake the whole neighborhood." She whispered in my ears when I tried to break free from her, which slightly loosened as I kicked her with my heels, only to make her tighten it afterwards.
The strength with which she choked me was astounding, and eventually my senses began to waver in her tightening grip. The harder I kicked back, the more her nails dipped in my flesh.
"We're almost there, you're going to hell, it’s where bad kids like you belong." I heard her saying while my vision blurred and I gasped for air. My brief life flashed before my eyes while the poundings of my fear-stricken heart became so loud as to almost summon two figures clothed in black (which a moment later I figured out were officers) who busted in all of a sudden.
The door was kicked open and the booming sound made my mom jolt. Her hands were still holding me firmly, but amidst the confusion I managed to breathe in and remain conscious for as long as it took for the officers to let me escape from her hold.
"Back out! We'll take care of this." One of them cried out after hitting with full force her arm with the baton in her belt and seeing me breathing frantically once I slipped out of the perpetrator's hands.
My mother wailed in pain, the two officers seized her arms and restrained her. She cried my name out at the top of her lungs one last time before being struck by a stun gun and falling silent. Once I breathed in enough air to make out the surrounding area, I leaped out of the room without turning back and hurried back to the receptionist, who told me my grandfather was waiting outside the hospital.
He waited for me beside the front door of the car and asked me if my wounds hurt.
"Which wounds?" I winced and my voice resounded in my mind but I wasn't sure if the question had been spelled out, then I cast a glance at the side mirror.
From the top of my neck, red worms seemed to crawl down my body. At a first sight, they looked like worms, but squinting my eyes enabled me to conclude that they weren't living beings, but narrow trickles of blood gushing out of some tiny holes where my skin was peeled off.
"Want to drop by the hospital?" Grandpa looked concerned.
"Let's go home and stick some band-aids on them, it's nothing to worry about." Was what I yearned to say if the words would've just come out of my mouth, yet not a syllabe passed my lips. In the end I shook my head to communicate my dissent. Grandpa saw fit not to inquire any further on the incident, and he confided in me only halfway home.
"I know I ought to have warned you beforehand, but you see..." he paused for a moment as he drove and looked ahead "Rita isn't what she used to be. I went to visit her on the side through the week, when you were with your grandmother, and I thought that she'd come to herself on the off chance that she'd see you. But instead I dropped you into a lion's den. Look at yourself, you'd be dead now if I hadn't called the security guards."
I listened to his confessions in silence and saw the sheer regret on his face from the front mirror. The unusually plaintive voice he spoke with disturbed me.
"I ought to have listened to your grandmother, bringing you there was a mistake." he ventured to say sometime before parking his car along the curb of the sidewalk.
"You ought to take with a grain of salt what she's said about you." he went on in a low tone inside the dimly lit entrance hall "She's losing her mind to the illness. The best we can do is leave her alone under the care of the doctors." his face was still tinged with sorrow as we went upstairs. When grandma saw my wounds she broke into tears again and patched me up until my neck was covered with band aids. The next day we made arrangements not to see my mother ever again unless one day she'd recover from her chronic illness with which I complied solely by nodding in agreement. Nevertheless we never heard of her again, and on account of my abrupt loss of speech, the unsettling dreams and insomnia that resulted from the incident, every subject revolving around my mom melted into a taboo.

Students from every year flocked around me to see my wounds in the middle of recess, asking me all sorts of questions I couldn't respond to. The prospect that I'd be stuck as a permanent mute alarmed the teachers, who in turn aggravated my grandparents' worries.
But my speech began to come back soon enough, and a week later, when they began to debate whether I should be taken to a psychologist, they were taken by surprise at my negative answer. The upsetting dreams diminished over time, and so did my insomnia, although the latter keeps occasionally ambushing me to this day. Towards the end of my last middle school year, I called in sick and skipped my graduation ceremony. The fear that my classmates would have spoiled the whole thing crept over me the night earlier, but I believe that the real reason which drove me to make the choice was that I wished to steer clear of that agonizing life and turn over a new leaf.