A Night at the Asylum (18 page)

Hello
. Upside down, the numbers 07734
spelled HELLO.

My brother and I played this game often. When
we were kids (and grounded from the internet) we would sit on the
couch, our heads together, making words on the calculator by typing
in numbers and turning it upside down. In the calculator game, if
you turned the number 58008 – the number from the Caller ID –
upside down, it spelled BOOBS. It never got old; we’d laugh every
single time.

“Perfect,” I said, shaking my head. Of course
he couldn’t just say who he was, he had to be himself. At the same
time, I realized, he was reaching out to me in a way there would be
no question that it was him. “You’re even
more
clever as a
ghost,” I said dryly, but inside, my heart was bursting. I felt a
swell of affection and held the phone close to me as I continued
walking.

Amazing.

Another text. This one was straightforward.
DOWNSTRS. I found the staircase that led from the first arm of the
Women’s Ward and carefully descended. This was difficult because
someone had piled random chairs all over the place. Finally I
reached the double doors leading to the first floor and opened
them.

COLD.

I was momentarily confused. I had gone
downstairs, just like he told me to. I went back through the double
doors. The only other place to go was the basement.

Oh, Lord, I did not want to go to the
basement.

VIEWG RM

“What? Where the hell is that?” I asked
aloud, but I knew exactly where it was. It was a room just off the
morgue. There was a glass panel there, where families could safely
view the bodies of their loved ones who had died from highly
contagious diseases. “Nice,” I grumbled. Tommy knew how much I
hated the morgue.

The staircase was a shocking contrast to the
room it branched off of, which was practically pristine. It gave
the sense that the square hallway abruptly eroded into oblivion.
The guard rail had crumbled completely, leaving only a skeletal
iron bar amid chunks of broken stone. The three-tier window and the
steps beneath it were littered with broken glass and cobwebs. An
elaborate checkerboard tile pattern that wound round the bottom
half of the wall had pulled away from its backing, leaving gaping
wounds of grime, the painted surface above it molting like insect
skin. Abandoned window frames were propped haphazardly in the
corner, prickling with rusty, bent nails.

Still, I carried on.

HOT was the next text. I pushed open the
double doors and found myself in the boiler room. The giant boiler
was like a great rusting monster, and absolutely every inch of
paint on it was curling upward toward the ceiling.

Considering the circumstances I supposed it
was natural to be a little spooked, but when a loud crash sounded
behind me I couldn't stop myself from taking off in a sprint. I
burst through the doors in front of me and was dumped into a
too-white corridor with floor-to-ceiling windows its entire length.
There were dark paint swipes on the glass, yielding a disorienting
zigzag pattern of shadows on the opposite wall. It was as if
someone had started to paint them over and had stopped, thinking
better of it. As I hurried past them the swaths played spastically
across my face, making me dizzy. I narrowly avoided crashing into a
wheelchair and pressed myself against the wall again in an effort
to force myself to a halt. It was too dangerous to run here, and
nothing that was after me could take me out faster than being
oblivious to where I was going. So I closed my eyes to get the
panic under control, panting and sweating as I sagged against the
scored plaster, my ears alert for more sounds of a human
agenda.

The phone bleated a text alert and I looked
down at it. Nothing froze my heart faster than reading that one
word.

STAY.

I'd only just closed the phone and was
slipping it back into my pocket when the door in front of me began
to creak open. Five fingers encased in a black leather glove
appeared, grasping the side of the door for leverage, as the metal
groaned in protest at being opened. I tried to control my rapidly
thumping heart.

I knew that glove.

And before I'd had time to consciously
acknowledge it, my mind burst into another flash of memory that had
been placed there, handpicked, by someone else. I saw Ead's face,
his dull gray-blue eyes, slender nose, and twisted mouth. He was
pacing slowly, far away at first, then instantly closer. Too close.
“You think I should let you go when you won't even give me the time
of day?” His voice was a snarl, his expression morphing from calm
to evil in a split second's time. The image jumped, as if someone
had hit fast forward. We were in the car again. Ead was tearing at
my clothes and his own. All the while he kept a firm grip on my
neck with only one black-gloved hand. His strength was
unbelievable. Even as I struggled against him, the hate he felt for
me completely overpowered any fear I could use to my advantage. I
was not going to escape this, I knew. I’d seen it happen before.
These were Jenny’s memories again. She was trying to warn me. She
was giving me a reason to be afraid.

As if I wasn't terrified already.

Quick as it came, the flash was gone, and a
scuffle in the other room caused the hand to withdraw from the door
as well. I heard a police radio going off in the distance. That one
second was all the opportunity I needed. Ead was here. He'd be
looking for me. He’d be looking for Tommy’s helmet. I only hoped he
had not found Emmett. The path back to the other door seemed
impossibly long, though it was only a few steps. As the metal door
he’d been holding scraped closed loudly after its release, I took
advantage of the noise and hit the other door at the same time. My
body spilled out into the hall with the spiral staircase, only this
time I noticed a portal with no handle directly in front of me. It
was painted the same color as the wall as if to disguise it. I
pried at it with my fingers. It wouldn't budge.

There was another text, this time from
Raymond. My signal must have come back for a few minutes. “Lost
site of Ead” it read. “RU OK?”

I typed back a quick, reassuring message. I
had to keep him out of here. I couldn’t put anyone else in danger,
and I couldn’t take the chance of accidentally calling attention to
myself. Whatever I was going to do, I had to do it quickly and get
the hell out.

Creeping back to the rusted door that led to
the hall where I'd seen Ead, I waited. Waited for a sign. There was
nothing.

Minutes passed. “Come on, Tommy,” I
whispered. “I need to know if I can keep going.” He didn’t answer.
My phone beeped with the low battery signal again. I expected
another text but instead it flashed horrendously and then died.

“What? No!” I hissed, much too loudly. I
turned the phone back on. Immediately it shut itself down again.
Two batteries, one bought at a gas station, and still I was out of
luck. Irony was no longer irony if it was just the way your life
always turned out.

I sat down on the dirty floor, limp and
exhausted. As a last ditch effort I took out the tape recorder, but
it wouldn’t even turn on. Tommy must have used the energy from
everything I’d brought to send me those text messages.

In desperation, I took out the board. Trying
to keep an eye on the door in front of me and point the plastic
cursor at the same time, I asked the questions in a whisper.
“Should I go?” I waited. There was no reply.

After ten minutes I could no longer deny the
feeling of being totally alone. It wasn’t just the silence. It was
a physical sensation of the absence of energy. I shoved the board
back into my bag dejectedly. Where had Tommy gone? I had to fight
the urge once again to break down, resist those feelings that this
was like losing him all over again. I looked around. The hallway
was completely empty, no furniture, no holes in the walls, nowhere
to hide anything. This was not where I needed to be. I had to keep
going, Ead or no Ead.

I pushed myself up from the floor cautiously,
taking a few slow steps toward the door where I’d seen the glove.
Through it was another hallway, and directly across from it I saw
another door, half-gaping, like Tommy’s bedroom door often was.
There was a metal sign that read “Viewing Room”. This was where
Tommy had told me to go.

I stepped inside and waited, positioning
myself to run if I had to. But there was no answering scuffle, no
hurried footsteps coming toward me. I was in a beautiful old
waiting room, with four tattered couches arranged in a square and a
small, round nurses’ desk jutting out from the corner. I turned in
a circle for a moment. Why did Tommy want me here?

I searched the desk, the shelves, but saw
nothing. Then behind the nurses’ desk I noticed a panel of
wallpaper that didn’t quite match the others. It was just like the
door in the other hallway that had been painted to blend into the
wall. What happened next just seemed too easy. Instead of prying at
it I pushed gently against the panel and it popped out, budging
toward me the slightest bit.

I grasped the tiny edge that had pushed
itself away from the frame and the door opened into a long, narrow
rectangle of a room. There was shelving along one wall, a desk with
chairs facing a tall, halfway boarded-up window on the other. I
felt like a sardine in here. It was so dark. The door retracted,
popping back into place. I realized then that it didn’t open from
this side. I was stuck.

I envisioned myself going insane and bursting
through the old window like a cannonball.

That’s when I heard a shuffling noise coming
from the back corner of the room. It was loud, and sounded like it
was made by something very large. Mouse? Dog? Rabid raccoon?
Of
course
this was the only thing that could happen next.

So much time passed as I stood holding my
breath in the dark that I began to think I had imagined the sound.
But then I heard a distinct cough, and a scraping of rubber against
tile…stumbling footsteps. There was no mistaking this. I backed
away until I smacked into the paneled wall again. What had I shut
myself in here with? Or more specifically, who? My heart began a
rapid thumping in my ears and I jerked my messenger bag off my
back, searching inside for a weapon. “Stay away,” I threatened,
“I’m armed.” That’s when I remembered I actually did have a gun –
Emmett’s – in the zippered side pouch.

For a split second I was filled with
incredible, yet superficial, relief. I tore the gun out of the
pouch and stuck it out blindly in front of me. I didn't know how to
use it, but I'd figure it out. I couldn’t see past the barrel. “Do
you hear me? Seriously, I really
am
armed!” I thought I
might pass out before I had to pull the trigger, I was so scared.
He’s found me, I thought. Ead Sutter has finally found me. I felt
the pain from the flashback, saw his pointed, evil face. How could
I have been so stupid? And how could Tommy have led me into this
dead-end room?

I was no longer irony’s bitch. I was its most
tragic, most unwitting victim.

****

Ten O’Clock

I was more frightened than I’d ever been
before, and it had nothing to do with ghosts. At this moment I was
much more afraid of the living. I could now make out a figure, a
dark, ominous hulk coming toward me. There was nowhere left to back
away to.

The face that came out of the shadows then,
however, wasn’t Ead’s. I cried out when the dim beam from the
flashlight caught a glint of green eyes that I recognized as
Emmett's. Unbelievably, inconceivably, he was standing here in
front of me. His hands were up in a gesture of surrender. He called
my name softly. “Oh, my God, I almost shot you!” I screamed, and
before I knew it I had jumped into his arms, surprising both of us.
The emotion that overcame me as I felt his warmth, his genuineness,
I could no longer control. He was real, he was solid, he was here
with me.

I started to cry, really wailing it out. All
the horror I’d been holding in, my extraordinary relief at
realizing who he was and that he wasn't in the backseat of my
mother’s Buick dying but very much alive, collided at that moment
and I simply couldn’t bear it. Emmett held on to me as tightly as I
held him, and for what seemed like hours we just stood there in the
blackness, clutching each other without words. There was no more
reality. There was only this. I felt the stubble on his face
against my wet cheeks and realized I was bawling all over him. He
didn’t seem to mind. He raised a hand to brush my hair back and the
gesture was so gentle, so innocent, that my heart lurched and fresh
tears began to flow. He whispered reassurances, his breath warm in
my ear. He loved me. He’d never let anyone hurt me. He would always
be here for me. When had this happened between us? When had we
become essential to each other? I didn’t know, and I couldn’t have
cared less. I just knew that I would never leave him again, and I
would do whatever I had to do to make sure Ead didn’t hurt him
anymore. I wasn't sure if I said it aloud or if I just thought it
but either way I know he heard it. My fingers tangled around his
long hair and I dragged his mouth down to mine. He picked me up and
I felt the strength in his arms, the life I'd thought had been
draining out of him. Everything terrible that had happened to me
seemed to go away for just an inimitable moment, just a split
second of time that I could never get back, a complete absence of
pain and fear. But it was enough to restore my sense of purpose and
give me the strength to go on. When we broke apart, I didn’t feel
like crying anymore. He was looking at me, and a smile flitted
across his face, revealing those two deep dimples in his cheeks. So
rarely did I ever see him smile. I could have melted into oblivion;
it was awesome. I almost believed there was nothing in the world
that could harm either of us ever again.