A Night at the Asylum (20 page)

Nothing happened. Everything was eerily
quiet. My phone vibrated again.

GO. NOW.

And I ran. Down the hall, through the double
doors, back onto the crumbling staircase where I would climb to the
third floor. It didn’t make any sense when there were so many other
ways out. But since I wasn’t going to leave here without Emmett,
and my brother’s irreverent ghost knew more than I did about Ead’s
whereabouts, I’d have to trust I was headed in the right
direction.

It seemed to take forever to get to the top
of the stairs. I burst through the double doors to the Women’s
Ward, panting and sweating, lightning flashing through the broken
windows and thunder rolling loudly in the half-dark. Everyone was
gone - the teenagers, the drunks, the protesters. There was no one.
As soon as this revelation hit me, so did the floor. I tripped on
something and went sliding over the muck face first.

The police had gone wing by wing, evacuating
each and every last straggler. They were making sure everybody was
out in preparation for the demolition.

The asylum yawned before me, silent,
empty.

Empty except for Ead, Emmett, me, and the
ghosts.

****

Eleven O’Clock

By eleven that morning everyone was out of
the asylum that could leave of their own free will. Anyone caught
straggling was arrested on sight. Police radios broke through the
tense rumble of thunder, but even their sound dwindled as the cops
exited the building.

I was hiding under a desk on the third floor,
led there by my dead brother through a text message while the guy I
was in love with was being chased by his psychotic sibling. My best
friend who had just spent the last hour possessed by a spirit
guide/demon was outside with my gay ex-boyfriend and the brother of
the girl whose body I’d probably find in this very building.

It was all in a day’s work for me.

I knew there wasn’t much time. All that stuff
about destiny that Joey had been spouting off was starting to sink
in. Maybe everyone had a destiny and maybe this was mine. I was
terrified, for myself and for Emmett. I started to cry again, but
forced myself to stop. I couldn’t just give in so easily. Ead had
killed my brother and Jenny. He’d tried to kill Emmett, and maybe
finally succeeded. There would be no more crying. He would only get
away with more if I didn’t stop him.

That didn’t make the thought of confronting
him any less frightening.

One problem was that I was empty handed. And
Ead now had the gun.

My baleful ponderings were interrupted by the
vibration in my pocket. Scooting further under the desk, I opened
the phone with a whisper. “Raymond?”

“Sara? Are you okay? Are you still inside? I
tried to come back in but the cops wouldn’t let me. I even tried
going halfway down the road and they still—”

“Raymond, listen,” I interrupted. “Don’t...do
anything. Stay with Jamie.” I gritted my teeth; it was excruciating
not to tell him everything, but I would not risk him coming in here
after me. I had to keep him safe. “Everything’s…fine. I’ll be out
really soon.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“I just – I have to go.”

“But I heard gunshots,” Raymond hissed. “Some
of the cops even went running in after that. What happened?”

“I don't know.” My voice quavered, broke.
Thank God I was losing my signal. “Call my dad, okay? Tell him I
love him.” I hung up, cursing myself for being an idiot. I
shouldn’t even have answered the phone. Raymond would never get
past the cops now anyway. I expected him to try to call me back,
but he didn’t. I breathed a sigh of finality.

I needed a weapon. I needed a backbone.

I needed a fucking miracle.

The desk was one of those semi-circular
nurses’ desks, but it had been pushed into a corner of the dining
area on this floor. My knees started to hurt from being pressed
into the hard tile floor. Interestingly, I was starting to feel
sleepy. Why was it so quiet in here? Why couldn't I hear footsteps,
voices, a struggle, anything? Where were all the cops that had
supposedly run in here to check out the source of the gunshots?

I wanted so desperately to cry out to Emmett,
to know that he was okay. Strange, but the thought was only now
occurring to me that I didn’t know if he carried a cell phone with
him. My own had gone completely silent. Where was my brother? Had
he left me here, disappeared into wherever it was that ghosts
go?

I couldn’t wait anymore. Carefully I scooted
toward the front of the desk. I inched my head out of the darkness,
trying to look at the littered floor around me, searching the piles
of crumbled plaster and wet mounds of old books. I needed something
I could hit someone with. Of course this would be one of the
cleanest rooms in the entire asylum. My sleep-deprived mind was
full of words, disjointed phrases, accusations that I had been
imagining all of this – that I really was alone here. I wanted to
lie down where I was and just take a little nap, just wake up when
all of this was over.

Thinking of Emmett kept me awake.

Crawling to the very edge of the desk, I
craned my neck so I could look around it. I coughed as I inhaled
the powdery mud-caked floor. About 8 feet away in a water closet I
could see a pipe that had fallen halfway to the floor, torn from
its brackets. The pipe would not compare to a gun, but it was
something.

“Tommy…should I go?” I asked. I waited for a
full five minutes. My phone did not make a sound. “I’ll take that
as a no…and I’ll do it anyway,” I muttered.

I crept out from behind the desk and scurried
to the tiny water closet, ducking behind the half-open door. Every
few seconds I stopped to listen for an attack, but I heard nothing.
The floor was gritty under my shoes, and the thunder overhead faded
in and out. The pipe was just hanging there like it had been
waiting for me, and I took hold of it, grappling with every ounce
of strength I had.

The brackets groaned loudly. I braced my
sneaker against the wall and pulled as hard as I could. It wouldn’t
budge. “Come on, damn you!” I growled. The brackets twisted and
warped, but the bolts refused to let go.

I collapsed against the wall, out of breath.
Somewhere in the near distance, I heard a police radio. As calmly
and as quietly as I could, I closed the water closet door. Heavy
footsteps came and went outside of it. I listened to their
voices.

“Daisy to Romero. You got an all-clear?” The
radio cop was a bleat of static.

“Yeah...Sutter says he was shooting at a
cat.”

“Dammit, get that gun away from him.
Commissioner says he wants an all-clear in five minutes.”

I wished I knew if Romero was one of the ones
I could trust. Most likely, none of them were. My phone vibrated. I
opened it as quietly as possible and looked down at the screen.

STAY.

Yes,
I thought.
Yes. Thank
you.

My hope was renewed.

I waited for the sound of the footsteps and
the static-filled radio to fade away. Then I went back to cranking
on the pipe. It was difficult to grunt quietly. The brackets made
the most obnoxious grinding noise and my sneaker left a muddy
footprint on the already grimy wall. When I finally did get the
pipe loose, it sent me flying across the room, where the crash was
what I thought a wrecking ball to the top floor might sound like. I
expected it to hurt a lot worse than it did, but the pipe was free,
and I was in one piece. I stood up, shaking the disorientation
off.

I opened the door to the water closet,
holding the pipe over my head, poised to swing it. I looked back
and forth, trying to make out anything with a vaguely human shape
in the dimness, but there was no one. Creeping back toward the
semi-circle desk, I stood still for a moment. I needed to catch my
breath.

The all-clear should have been in force by
now. Did that mean Ead had left too? Or Emmett? I didn’t believe it
for a minute. I knew I should now storm the halls looking for them,
but I just stood there, paralyzed with fear.

Another text. ALLCLR. The cops were gone.
Except the ones who lingered behind, waiting to murder
people,
I thought.

I slid to the floor, placing the pipe beside
me with as little noise as possible, gulping deep, tumultuous
breaths.
I can do this. Calm down. I can do this.
As I
leaned my head back, willing myself to somehow scramble up courage,
my eyes traced the lines of random exposed pipes and tangled wires
spilling out of the ceiling. Did the sprinklers up there still
work?

I suddenly remembered the cigarettes in my
pocket. I pulled the lighter out before I had a chance to think
twice about what I was doing. I had to find a way to get Ead’s
attention, to lead him to me so I could ambush him.

I grabbed a handful of muddy papers off of
the circular desk and held them to the flame. It took a couple of
minutes, thanks to their dampness, but when they lit I stuffed them
into the end of the pipe. Carefully I climbed onto the desk,
standing on tiptoe, reaching as high as I could. I hoped the fire
would do its job before I gravely injured myself.

And then it happened. I heard the siren
ringing loudly nearby, and then the fountain of water rained down
on my head. If it worked the way I assumed it would, only the
sirens and sprinkler on this floor would be activated, and the
location would be easy for Ead to track. When he showed up, I would
be ready for him.

Wouldn’t I?

I crouched behind the desk again with the
burnt pipe over my head, shaking, but not because of the cold water
soaking through my clothes. I was terrified. What the hell had I
just done?

A flash of lightning blinded me, and I felt
my body float slowly backward, as if I were picked up on a breeze
and laid gently down again. I recognized the precursor to the
spiritual acid trip I’d already experienced twice before. When I
opened my eyes I was lying on pavement, the fields around me dark,
warm night air shifting about my body. I was dizzy and disoriented,
but not in any pain. I tried to raise myself up off the road and
heard rocks and gravel crackling under me as I moved.

My vision was blurred slightly...no, not
blurred, tinted. I was looking through something, like plastic. I
touched my head.

I was wearing a motorcycle helmet.

There were taillights in the near distance,
and reverse lights that beamed white beneath them. A car was
backing up. Was someone stopping to help me? I looked over at a
tree a few feet off to my right. There was a huge, twisted pile of
black metal there, smoke pouring from its mutilated corpse. It was
a bike.

It was
my
bike.

I tried to get up from the pavement but my
body was too heavy. My neck protested, and when I touched it, I
noticed the fingertips of my gloves were burned off. I must have
slid and stopped myself with my hands. It was a miracle I was
alive. If I had still been on that bike when it met with the tree,
I'd have been smoking like the hulk of tin it was now.

I waved my arms at the reversing car, hoping
I could flag them down. Mom and Dad were going to kill me for this.
Bonita was waiting for me. A surge of affection pulsed through me
when I thought of her. How I loved her. She’d said she had
something important to tell me. She sounded so upset, so freaked
out. I had something to tell her too. It was about Jenny.

And my sister expected me to meet her at the
game. Now I’d have to get a ride.

A memory of fear suddenly overtook me. I had
been afraid when I'd come here. I should be afraid now. I rolled
out of the way of the reversing car just as it smashed over the
spot where I'd been lying two seconds ago. Recognition of what I
was doing here and what was happening hit me so hard it knocked
away my breath. I had to get up. I had to run. Why hadn't I seen
this coming?

I’d known he had spotted me in his car
earlier. I’d been worried enough to wear this stupid helmet. I’d
been watching out for that car, expecting it even – and yet it had
barreled out of the dark before I could react and sideswiped my
bike, throwing me off into the ditch and my bike into the tree.
Damn. Irony was never kind to me…and it had really screwed me this
time, hadn’t it?

I heard the car door slamming. Footsteps.
Boots on gravel. Looming over me I saw a face, narrow and twisted
and full of hate and anger. His eyes were as empty as a dried-up
well. His smile, full of evil retribution, was one of the last
things I was going to see.

A metal-tipped boot swung out and I felt
cracks spread across ribs I was sure hadn't been broken in the
accident. Was this really happening to me? I could not breathe,
could not react. I tried to flounder away again and felt a blow to
my back that threatened to empty the contents of my stomach. The
helmet was jerked off my head and the warm breeze cooled the sweat
on my brow. Things were so quiet for a moment that I thought the
attack was all over. But as I turned to look behind me, I saw my
perpetrator advance toward me with a broken branch raised over his
head. I screamed but no noise came out. Ead. No. Don't do this. His
eyes had been taken over, his throat growling and teeth bared, by
the evil that had lived within him all along. He was a twisted
product of his father's abuse, his mother's torment, his own
depraved soul. Who knew why he was doing this? All I knew was that
he'd hurt my friend, had done the worst sort of things you could do
to a person, the sickest, most horrifying torture, and now he was
going to end me. I tried to kick my legs, to thrash my arms, but I
wasn't fast enough. The car engine hummed beside me, singing me
into permanent sleep. I didn’t want to go like this. I had too much
to do. I had so much I wanted.