A Night at the Asylum (9 page)

Almost immediately the dream began. This time
I knew it was just that – a dream – but that didn’t make it any
less frightening. The phone in the kitchen at home rang in the
middle of the night and I raced down the stairs to get it, sure the
noise would awaken my parents.

I snatched up the receiver. “Hello?” There
was nothing but obscenely loud breathing on the other end. “Who's
playing phone perv again?” I asked with a sigh, glancing down at
the caller ID. The display read “Joey”. Where had I heard that name
before?

“Who is this?” I shouted, forgetting about my
sleeping parents, gasping when the person at the other end finally
began to speak.

“Sara, this is Roy Conroy,” came the answer,
and it
was
Roy, sounding more nervous than he ever had.
“There’s been an accident.”

Fear seized me, overpowered only by the
strongest feeling of déjà vu. “Who?” I asked frantically. “Who’s
had an accident?” My grip on the phone tightened.

“It’s Tommy,” he replied, his voice fading in
and out, garbling as he went on. “You need to come down to the
station right away.”

The floor swayed beneath my feet. I thought I
was suffocating, like the temperature had climbed to a hundred
degrees and choked the air out of the tiny room. This had happened
before, but not quite like this. In my mind in the dream I knew
Tommy was dead, but instead of devastation, the phone call gave me
hope. The twisted logic began to get the better of me. If Tommy had
been in an accident in the dream, he couldn’t be dead in real life.
It would make no sense upon waking, but here it was perfectly
reasonable.

“I’ll be right there,” I heard myself saying,
and exited the kitchen straight away. The cold, musty air of the
garage hit me in the face and I gulped it in. The only vehicle
inside was the big black beast of a motorcycle Tommy had been
riding when he was killed. My nonsensical hope surged again; the
bike looked absolutely perfect. There was no way it had been bent
in half around a tree almost five years ago.

It took me exactly three seconds to realize I
would have to ride the thing.

Impossible
, I thought, but how else
was I going to get to the police station?

I straddled the bike, feeling its
much-too-real weight between my legs, threatening to toss me over
onto the ground. It took a moment to get used to the balance. Then
it occurred to me – I needed a helmet. Tommy had a jet black helmet
with orange flames going up the sides, but he never wore it. Now
that I looked around the garage it was not hanging in its usual
spot, or anywhere else, for that matter. I was going to have to
ride without it.

Considering I’d never ridden a motorcycle
before, I wasn’t the least bit nervous. Maybe it was the
subconscious knowledge that this was definitely a dream, and
nothing could hurt me here. Was I sure of that? I put my foot on
the clutch of the motorcycle, lifted my body and struck downward,
and like magic the bike roared to life. It was the loudest,
meanest, most intimidating sound I’d ever heard.

I wasn’t sure how it happened but suddenly I
was on the road, flying like the wind. It was so easy to get caught
up in the uninhibited feeling of it that I almost missed the turn
to the station. When I parked the bike in front of the squat brick
building, my old foreboding feelings from earlier in the kitchen
crept slowly back into my stomach.

Only one light burned at the front desk but I
didn’t have to wait there long. The sound of drunken footsteps
stumbled down the hall, and around the corner Emmett Sutter came to
greet me. Despite his shuffling walk, he looked surprisingly sober.
There were bruises on his angelic face and he had an IV port
attached to his arm. Behind him he dragged the pole, strung up to
its little bag of medicine.

The sight of him created emotional
pandemonium inside my body. A part of me was terrified. Another
part of me longed to reach out to him. “Where is my brother?” I
asked him instead, once again shoving my feelings away. I stayed on
the other side of the front desk, deliberately keeping my
distance.

“I saw him,” Emmett answered cryptically and
made a sweeping gesture with his arm. “Right this way, Sara.” Once
again there was that stir of exhilaration when he spoke my name. I
followed as he glided back down the hall like a phantom, his
striped hooded sweatshirt a deranged contrast against the white
cinderblock walls.

He stopped in front of the interrogation
rooms and held his arm out once more. I suddenly had the
overwhelming fear that I was about to be shown a dead body.
And
behind door number one, your decapitated brother!
Then he was
leading me down the hall toward the jail cells, where he stopped.
“Your brother’s here, because I told Ead what I saw,” Emmett
offered, his red lips twisted into a grimace. I was being lured,
like a child by a piece of candy, but there was no resisting. He
repeated his words from earlier in the night, the words he’d said
to me in waking life. “I did it Sara. It was me. I’m so sorry.”

“But I was told there'd been an accident,” I
murmured, my eyes wide as they searched the jail cell in front of
me.

“He’s right in here, behind this door.”

“No.” I shook my head. “No, he isn’t.”
Reality exploded in my subconscious then and I fell to my knees,
bashing them against the hard cement floor. “My brother is dead.
Don’t you remember, Brad?”

For some unfathomable reason I’d invoked pure
evil, and suddenly Emmett was gone and Brad Sutter stood in front
of me, his tall frame menacing against the wall. He had no face. He
was just a skull with a serpentine smile.

“What are you talking about, Sara?” he
growled in his low voice. “Tommy is right here.” His bony fingers
swung the cell door open and the room changed, furnished with only
a white table and one metal chair.

My brother wasn’t there. It was a girl
instead, in a long white dress, her dark ringlets twirling in a
breeze I couldn’t feel. She looked vaguely familiar, but I couldn’t
place who she was. Her lips were moving, but I couldn’t understand
what she was saying. Frustration coursed through me. I stepped
closer.

She cupped her hands together, beckoning me
forward, her soft-spoken words finally reaching my ears. “He knows
the truth.” She blew a ghostly breath into her cupped fingers, and
white, glassy powder swirled into the air around me. “Give him
sugar,” she whispered mysteriously.

Suddenly she stepped aside, revealing what
rested on the metal table behind her. A large black sphere was
perched in front of me, shining like a beacon on the darkest of
nights. Flames tore up the sides of it, and the front was clear
plastic, a window that allowed its wearer to see. It was Tommy’s
helmet.

The sight of it was so horrifying, so
bewilderingly grotesque, that I covered my eyes with my hands and
screamed. Though I had never seen Tommy wear it once while he was
alive, we’d realized the stupid thing was missing after he died.
And now in my nightmares, here it was.

And it was a monster.

When I took my hands away from my eyes the
police station with its cinderblock rooms had vanished, and I was
lying in a deep hole, looking up at a clear blue sky. A different
girl was staring at me over the side of the rectangular hole, an
angel with long blonde hair and dancing blue eyes. I would have
recognized her anywhere. As a teenager I’d idolized her. Jon's
girlfriend and Cole's sister…Bonita’s best friend and cornerstone
of Tommy’s group...one could not forget Jenny Allison.

I clamped my eyes shut again and when I
opened them she was lying in the hole beside me. Her eyes were the
color of the sky passing overhead. Something about her beautiful
face was frightening. Her icy smile reflected the coldness of
death.

“Sara,” she whispered. I couldn't speak,
couldn't move, and her voice crackled like lightning, making my
hair stand on end. She reached up with one hand and caressed my
face. Her skin smelled like the mildew that clung to an old stone
wall, the stench of abandonment and decay. I was frozen, not only
by the iciness of her touch, but by the absoluteness of her
presence. “Just make sure you don't forget about me!” she
screeched, and her words were so shrill they followed me out of
sleep.

I sat up in the backseat, my eardrums still
vibrating with Jenny’s voice. We were pulling into my driveway, the
yellowy porch light washing over us. I saw that Jamie had nodded
off too. Cole reached over and gently shook her awake.

“Thanks for the ride, Cole.” I took a deep
breath, still reeling from the dream, fighting the urge to jump out
of the car and run. “Tell Raymond to…just call me later, okay?” I
didn’t add that I probably wouldn’t answer.

Jamie yawned and stretched as we both climbed
out. “How embarrassing,” she whispered. “I hope I didn’t
snore.”

I was suspicious about her little nap, though
the reason why escaped me. “Are you coming?” I asked, grabbing the
paper sack off the backseat and closing the car door behind me.

She looked at me guiltily. “Hey…would it be
cool if I met you at the restaurant later?” she asked, a smile
twitching at the corner of her lips. “I kind of thought I’d hang
out with Cole till he’s done at the hospital…”

“Sure,” I said weakly, smiling. “No problem.”
If she didn’t go with him, she’d keep me awake yapping about
him.

“Really? Thanks!” she squealed quietly and
squeezed me in a too-tight hug before I could resist. Then she
climbed back into the passenger seat. She and Cole both waved at me
as the car pulled away.

I turned around, looking up at my warm,
invitingly ordinary house. The only thing dampening my relief at
being here was the feeling of being so very alone.

I had to use the spare key under the plastic
dog poo since I’d left my own house keys in my jacket. The empty
porch swing trembled ever so slightly in the late-night breeze.
Suddenly frantic to get inside, I scurried up the cement steps,
collapsing on the other side of the oak door. I hung the key on the
hook on the wall and stepped into the living room.

A disembodied voice spoke from somewhere in
the dark. “So there you are,” it said.

****

Five O’Clock

“Where the hell have you been?”

The lamp clicked on in the corner of the
living room, flooding the area with dim yellow light.

“Jeez, Dad! Don’t do that!” I cried
breathlessly.

My father’s face looked particularly haggard
in the soupy glow. I was always taken aback when I noticed how much
he had aged in the last five years. His hair had turned from a
humble brown to a peppered gray, the lines in his face like chasms
separating the two halves of his life – the years before he had
buried his son and the years after. He’d gained some weight and
lost it again, his appetite inconsistent, now non-existent. Still,
he was faring better than my mother, whose main source of protein
these days was sedatives.

“I’ve been up since three and you haven’t
been here,” my father accused, folding his hands across his
lap.

If he only knew…and thank God he didn’t. It
was obvious he wasn’t really angry with me, but it was always
important to go through the motions. We had to maintain some
semblance of a normal relationship, after all.

“You know, I’m starting to believe that crap
about me having to open the restaurant because you need more
rest.”

“It’s good for you,” he answered stubbornly.
“It teaches responsibility. Builds character.”

“Really?”

He frowned, the deep dark corners of his
mouth sinking. “Alright,” he sighed. “I couldn’t sleep.”

My heart softened, and I sat down across from
him in our big squeaky armchair, the one Tommy used to leap off of
wearing a pillow-case cape. “Neither could I. That’s why I was
out.”

“Oh yeah?” Dad raised his eyebrows. “Who were
you with?”

“Jamie, Dad. And Jenny Allison’s brother,
Cole. You remember him?”

“Yeah. No Raymond, huh?” He was
sympathetic.

“Nope. We’re still over.”

“I’m sorry sweetheart. You two will work it
out.”

“Yeah, right.” I stood up, clearing my throat
loudly. “I’m going to go change, and then I’ll head on up to the
restaurant.” Sleeping was not an option anymore; the late hour and
recurring nightmares had convinced me of it. Suddenly realizing I
hadn’t even gone to the bathroom since leaving the house, I raced
up the stairs, my bladder urging me painfully ahead.

Once that particular disaster was averted, I
went straight to my room and threw on a sweat shirt, cursing the
clock. If those ovens weren’t heated and the coffee brewing before
six-thirty, there were going to be some angry old men bitching my
ear off, my father included. That fatigue, so cumbersome before my
little nap in the car, had completely abated. The second wind
seemed strange, since the maybe six minutes of actual sleep I’d had
were consumed by my second horrific dream of the night. I set about
packing up my messenger bag – with its revolving collection of
paperbacks and magazines used to stave off insanity during slow
times at the restaurant – and tossed my cigarettes, phone, and
exorbitant gas station procurements inside. I threw my charger in
too, partly because having an extra battery still seemed a bit
extreme barring a hurricane or the impending apocalypse or
something. After one last definitive look around my room, I turned
off the light and pulled the door closed quietly.

I found myself face-to-face with Tommy’s
bedroom then, which was directly across the hall from mine. The
door was open again, as it often was for no apparent reason. I
usually just silently closed it.

This time I went in.