Editing Libraries of Faerie (section)

===Middleton State Hospital's Files on 'Scoots' Williams===

Walter Williams is called 'Scoots' by the orderlies who care for him. 

He lives in a small room at the Middleton State Hospital in Middleton, South Carolina.

Its not a terrible mental facility, but its not a good one. All of its employees are good people who do what they can. The cooks in the kitchen, to the orderlies and nurses, to the doctors and even Mrs. Goldberg, who runs the hospital, they all truly care.

Its a good thing, too, because the state of South Carolina gives Middleton State Hospital little money to work with.

Scoots is a favorite of the hospital. Doctors and nurses pay him regular visits, and there is always at least one orderly in his room.

Even Mrs. Goldberg visits him, on occasion.

The thing is, Scoots is never quite the same person twice. He plays chess, with one of the doctors, and three of the orderlies. Sometimes, he is excellent, other times, his opponent has to remind him how the horsey moves. Sometimes, he just looks at his opponent, and says "I will beat you in 12 moves." And he does.

Sometimes, he is open, and talkative, and smart, and charming. one nurse had to be let go because she begain sleeping with Scoots. No one blamed her though. Scoots could be very seductive when he wanted to.

Other times, he won't talk for weeks at a time.

During these times when he doesn't talk, he writes. Not words. He writes little squiggles and spirals, and happy faces, and other doodles.

He writes them in notebooks, or scraps of paper. If he runs out of paper, he'll write them on the walls. If the pens run out of ink, or the pencils break, he'll bite his thumb, and write in his own blood, or carve into the cheap walls with the empty pens, or broken bits of pencil.

The orderlies are careful to make sure he has enough paper, and enough pens.

Each line, each squiggle, and each picture is a book. No one knows how it works, but every little doodle he makes contains so much beauty, and so much information.

A small frowny-face, when looked at for only a second, might be Hamlet. A stick figure could be a complete set of the Encylopedia Brittanica, and a swirling line could be the collected works of Nietzsche.

No one at the Middleton State Hospital understands these doodles, but almost everyone reads them. 

Many orderlies know several languages, and every word of "the Prince" and "the Divine Comedy" from looking at a picture of a house, with a sun above it, and a stick figure family standing outside of it. 

One nurse went back to medical school, and aced all of her classes because of a series of randomly curving lines. She is a doctor now, working again at Middleton State Hospital.

Even though Mrs. Goldberg has these writings locked away, nearly everyone who regularly deals with Scoots has a copy of the key. 

Sometimes, the employees sneak some of these writings out of the hospital. Perhaps they want their children to learn Spanish, or they want their wives or husbands to read "Love in the Time of Cholera". This is rare; however, as the Middleton State Hospital's employees know that they cannot explain these writings to their families. And, frankly, their frightening.

Scoots has made the hospital into an odd family, by virtue of this strange and bizarre secret they all share. Mrs. Goldberg secretly hopes and dreads the coming of the day she will have to show these writings to someone outside of the hospital.