A Night at the Asylum (10 page)

Almost immediately I had that distinct but
now familiar feeling that I wasn’t alone. Adrenaline shot through
my stomach and I listened, holding my breath. “Dad?” I whispered,
not really expecting an answer. He’d apparently never left the
living room. I could hear the microwave running and the TV quietly
doling out the morning news.

The air in Tommy’s bedroom was cold. It had
been so long since I’d been in here. The walls were bare, his
posters and drawings and other reminders of his existence shoved
into containers in the back of the closet.

I sat on the neatly made bed. Tommy’s black
comforter had been replaced by a generic beige one that was meant
for guests to use. As if we ever had any guests. As my eyes ran
horizontally along the naked walls, I saw all the things Tommy and
I used to do. Crashing into each other wearing football
helmets…arguing about the levelness of a shelf we were
hanging…fixing the flickering blacklight bulb…basketball in the
corner…board games on the floor…there were so many ghosts in this
room, imprints of moments and conversations. It was hard to
remember any particular instance, but at the same time every single
thing was impossible to forget. Once there was a group of friends
here, sharing pizza and playing video games on a TV that had long
since been donated to the little boy across the street. These
friends were inseparable. They weren’t my friends, but I wanted to
be like them. At five years younger, I was sort of just tagging
along.

It had been Jon and Jenny, Bonita and Tommy –
friends all their lives, until the unthinkable happened. Jenny was
taken from them, from all of us. Jon had headed endless
unsuccessful crusades alongside the Allisons to find her. Then
three months later there had been Tommy, his motorcycle, and the
tree. Bonita had simply left without a word to anyone, off to live
with her father, a bigwig prosecuting attorney in another state.
She was always threatening to run away and live with him, and no
one ever believed her. The day before Tommy’s funeral she was gone,
and she hadn’t come back…until now.

So many ghosts…and not even the kind I could
speak to…not even the kind I could legitimately fear. Taking a
quick look to make sure my dad wasn’t coming down the hall, I
kneeled on the floor. My memories of all of us in this room had
given me an idea. Tommy had one of those beds with the drawers
under it, the drawers now empty. I pulled the left one off the
track and set it on the carpet, reaching my hand into the empty
hole. For a second I was frozen by the fear that something was
going to grab me.

Grow up
, I chided myself. I pushed my
hand around the space and my heart thumped triumphantly when it
struck a tin box.
Pay dirt
. I couldn’t believe it was still
here. I pulled the box out and opened it quietly on the carpet.
Inside were a spiral notebook, a wooden game board, and a tiny
digital voice recorder (along with a package of brand new tapes),
all bound together with a huge rubber band.

“
There’s still the board, but you refuse
to pick it up.”

I was picking it up now, dammit.

When your father was raised on a reservation
and your mother was a devout Catholic, it wasn’t porn you hid under
your mattress, it was occult paraphernalia. Tommy had a fascination
with paranormal accoutrements of any kind. And while he often spent
his money on advanced ghost-hunting equipment, he always went back
to his old standard, The Board. It wasn’t a parlor game – this
thing was made out of solid oak and hand-carved, something he’d
probably picked up from a psychic fair or specialty shop. He kept
the spiral notebook – a detailed account of any messages he
received from the spirit board – as a kind of journal of his
self-education. Saying he’d been obsessed, especially after Jenny
was abducted, was probably a gross understatement. I removed the
notebook from beneath the rubber band carefully and opened it.
Normally I would have been hesitant about intruding into Tommy’s
private property but tonight I was compelled. I had all but
forgotten my hurry to make it to the restaurant in time to meet the
supply and demand of the morning’s caffeine and bacon.

Opening to the first page, I was overcome
with emotion just seeing my brother’s familiar handwriting after so
long, the left-handed scrawls in blue ink that represented his best
penmanship. Clearly this journal had been important to him. I
closed it, fighting tears, then held it to my heart until it
started to feel silly. He would have made fun of me for such a
display of mush. I looked at the book again.

Everything was dated, mostly far apart at
first. Near the last three months of his life, the entries became
almost daily. Many were flanked by questions Tommy jotted down
about the process of using the board, things he didn’t understand.
Some were observations. Others were direct questions, and then the
recorded answers. He’d included passages that he found interesting,
paragraphs from articles on the internet or books he’d read. It had
been widely believed in my family (and continuously lamented by my
mother) that Tommy was an atheist, but I knew it wasn’t true. If
anything, he was more spiritual than the rest of us with his
collection of convictions.

I wanted to believe there was another side to
our world. I wanted to believe he was still out there. But I’d
never had an experience that solidified for me that it was true. On
the inside cover of the notebook, Tommy had scrawled this tiny
line: “Religion is a defense against the experience of God. –Carl
Jung.” To my brother, his questions were his truth. He didn’t need
religion. He felt he had moved beyond its cynical limits.

There were paragraphs about astral
projection, ghosts, about the physical body being a “machine” that
we used for life on the physical plane. There was an entry labeled
“Psychic Fair” and this one I remembered. I’d been banned from
Tommy’s room shortly after he’d written this. I held the notebook
closer to make out the scrawled letters. Yes, this was something I
could never forget.

Tommy had gone to see a woman at a psychic
gathering in Kansas City. She went by the name of Evening Star. I
remembered his face when he came home that night, how bright his
eyes were. He’d steered me into his room and shut the door behind
us, as always careful not to wake Mom and Dad. Then he’d relayed
the whole incredible story: the psychic had told him he was a
gifted clairvoyant, that he’d been chosen to do something very
important with his talents, and that he had a spirit guide who
would help him communicate with the other side until he was fluent
on his own. Of course I was skeptical, and usually pointed this out
as gently as possible, but this day I could not keep my cynicism
contained. “She told me my spirit guide’s name, Sara, his
name
.” Tommy was raving. “And whenever I want to, I can just
talk to him. He’s like my interpreter. And I can find out anything
I need to know. I can train myself to listen.”

I rolled my eyes the way only an
unenlightened fourteen year-old girl can. If he couldn’t believe in
the stuff they blathered about at church, why was Tommy buying into
this crap? “What’s his name then?” I asked scornfully, calling his
bluff.

Tommy reached out and grasped my shoulders,
apparently bracing me for the impending awesomeness. “His name…is
Joey,” he answered triumphantly.

For a moment I could only stare at him. Then
before I could stop myself, my face cracked in two and peals of
laughter poured out. Was he serious? He had to be joking! Finally I
pulled myself together, seeing his expression, how offended he was.
My mouth clapped shut. “I’m s-s-sorry,” I coughed, suppressing more
giggles, “but…come on! A real life supposed psychic tells you that
you have a spirit guide…which, by the way…what the hell is
that—”

“A being that chooses to help humans and
serves as an intermediate between this world and the astral world,”
Tommy recited begrudgingly.

“Yeah, that – and you can ask him anything at
any time…and his name is…Joey?” Laughter tumbled out of me
again.

“Yeah, so?”

“I’m sorry. It just doesn’t sound
very…omnipotent.” Yeah. I was a precocious one. That was the end of
Tommy sharing his psychic adventures with me.

There was no maniacal laughter that time as
his door slammed in my face.

The sound in my ears and the memory of it was
like a lightning strike into the present.

Joey.

It echoed through me as I remembered the
caller ID display from my dream. I shivered. It had been buried
deep in my subconscious, that’s all. It meant nothing. Right?

In the margin of the entry in the notebook,
as if on cue, I noticed these words: “There is no such thing as
chance; and what to us seems merest accident springs from the
deepest source of destiny. -Friedrich Schiller.”

Like I said before...my brother…what a
kidder. A shiver moved through me.

Screw this
, I thought defiantly,
picking up the digital recorder that lay innocently on the carpet.
Tommy used this little device to supposedly capture the sounds of
spirits. He’d taken it to the asylum many times. I considered
listening to some of his old stuff for a moment but I couldn’t do
it. I couldn’t handle hearing his voice, his silly excursion
through our local house of horrors, so blissfully unaware of his
own impending doom. I was already nightmarishly over-emotional.

And how could Tommy have considered anything
recorded at the asylum evidence? It was such a huge place with so
many shadowy corners, so many opportunities for contamination. I
turned the device over in my hands, loaded one of the blank tapes,
and pressed record. I put the microphone up to my mouth
half-heartedly and spoke. “I wish I knew where you are…what you
want from me…” For a second I just sat there, lost in my own grief.
Then the feeling of foolishness I could always count on overwhelmed
me and I turned the recorder off.

The low battery light flashed. I tucked the
recorder into my messenger bag.

I turned to the next page in the notebook.
There was a quote from the Great American Ghost Hunter’s Handbook.
“Spirits use batteries and electronics as a means of communication.
It takes an enormous amount of energy for a spiritual being to
manifest and be seen by the human eye. Therefore bring extra
batteries when you go on your hunts. They will use the energy!”

Of course.

An explanation for everything.

On the next page there was an unusual-looking
entry. In fact, I realized, it was the very last entry in the book.
There was no date. There were no questions accompanying it, but
clearly it was a session with the spirit board. Only the answers
were written down, and they seemed cryptic and disorganized. I read
them over and over, daring them to make sense.

thisisjennya

necklasincar

eadonthehiway

hiddeninasylum

Murderd – I stared at this last word and,
flipping back through a few of the earlier entries, a sickening
understanding began to form in my mind. It was abundantly clear
Tommy believed he was communicating with Jenny Allison, not long
after she had been reported missing, her car left abandoned on the
highway.

How much time had gone by before he’d tried
to reach her this way? Had these “messages” convinced him she was
not simply missing, but dead? Certainly he hadn’t told her parents,
who went to my church. Had he told Jon about this? I shuddered at
my last thought. No. Jon was Tommy’s best friend and he was
desperate to find out what had happened to Jenny, but he wouldn’t
have accepted any of this. Tommy would have been completely on his
own.

I went down the short list individually,
staring at each word until it blurred before my eyes.

necklasincar

The first words stumped me. I had no idea
what they meant. I moved on to the next.

eadonthehiway

Maybe a letter was missing in this one? Could
it mean “dead on the hi-way?” I wasn’t sure. It was hard to tell
the context of the answers when there were no questions. Why had
Tommy not recorded those, as he’d done so meticulously every other
time? His writing was sloppy, as if hurried.

hiddeninasylum

This message was unmistakable. But it also
did not elaborate.
What
was hidden in the asylum? On which
of the three floors, in which of the scores of rooms?

murderd

I felt sick to my stomach. I closed the
book.

On the back cover was an inspirational
passage, surrounded in elaborate, flowery ink pen sketches. I
recognized Jenny’s loopy cursive. I could almost see her leaning
over my brother’s desk during study hall or a shared detention,
doodling like she always used to do.

A small envelope was taped just below the
passage. I opened the envelope and reached inside. There was only a
tiny gold chain with a cross. I turned the necklace over in my
hand; it looked familiar, but I wasn’t sure why. Without thinking,
I tucked it into my pocket.

Footsteps advanced down the thick carpet of
the hallway and I suddenly remembered where I was and what I was
supposed to be doing. I shoved the board and notebook into my bag
and the tin box back under the bed, hurriedly replacing the drawer
just as my dad peeked his head into the room.

“Sara?” There was concern in his voice at
finding me here. “I thought you were leaving.”

“I am.”

“I come here sometimes too,” he murmured
wistfully, looking around. “I don’t know why, though.”

“What do you mean?” I didn’t want to abandon
him, but for some reason I was eager to get to the restaurant now.
Maybe so I could pull out the notebook and try deciphering it once
again.

“I don’t know. It just doesn’t seem like he’s
here anymore.”

My skin tingled at his words, like icy
fingertips on the back of my neck. “N-no,” I stammered, “he isn’t.
He’s not anywhere in this house anymore.” I didn’t mean just
spiritually. Tommy’s artwork, his belongings, every picture of him
– in the living room, in the kitchen, throughout the entire house –
had been closeted, like we’d tried to write him out of our lives.
When yours is a family torn apart by death, a smiling face can be
too painful a reminder. I realized then that I wasn’t the only one
for which time was standing still.