Asylum

by Kristen Selleck

  “You didn’t unlock the door or drop anything off?” he asked again.

  “No,” she whispered.

  “And neither of you have been back to the room since you left it this morning?”

  Sam and Chloe both shook their heads.

  “And you locked the door this morning?” Seth prodded.

  “No,” Sam’s voice cracked. “No,” she repeated louder, “we ran out in a hurry, I don’t…I don’t think we locked it.” Sam looked to Chloe for agreement.

  “I didn’t lock it,” Chloe offered.

  Seth nodded his head as though to say “that’s-what-I-thought”. He held up his hands and clapped a few times to get everyone’s attention.

  “Alright everybody, listen up!” he called. “Floor meeting…TONIGHT! It’s mandatory, tell everyone. I have a list of names, I will be checking them to make sure that everyone on the floor is there. Eight o’clock, downstairs in the Garner Room. It’s right next to the cafeteria. Eight o’clock, mandatory!”

  Seth swung the door shut and ordered everyone to clear out. Some did. Others loitered around, making no attempt to conceal the fact that they were staring at both Chloe and Sam. Seth put a hand on the small of Chloe’s back and steered her away from the door.

  “Sam!” he called.

  Sam jumped out from her frozen position against the wall and followed them. Back in his room, Seth grabbed a set of keys and pointed to the grubby recliner.

  “Sit down. Stay right here…both of you. I’ll be back in a few minutes,” He shut the door and was gone.

  Sam dropped into his chair, and stared off into space. Chloe fought the urge to pace, forcing herself to sit down on the rolling chair. Her leg bounced nervously, and she twisted her hands together in her lap.

  “He thinks someone went into our room and did that…to scare us,” Sam mumbled.

  “That would be the logical thing to assume,” Chloe said in an empty voice.

  “Is that what you think?” Sam demanded.

  Chloe tried to say ‘yes’. She wanted to say ‘yes’, wanted to close the door against what she already knew. She wanted to warn Sam to stop talking about it, that even thinking about it would make it worse. She knew this. She had been through it before. Instead she said nothing, not even daring to look at Sam.

  “You know it’s real,” Sam pushed.

  A knock at the door made them both jump.

  “Do we answer it?” Sam whispered.

  “It’s probably someone for Seth,” Chloe whispered back, “I don’t know. I’m not going to get it.”

  Another knock and the door opened a crack.

  “Guys?” Jen stuck her head in the room, “You are here! Someone said they saw you with Seth. Where’d he go?”

  “I dunno,” Sam said, watching Jen warily as she walked in and closed the door.

  “So what happened? Nikki said someone broke into your room and wrote all over the walls.”

  “Yeah,” Chloe agreed quickly, cutting Sam off with a sharp look.

  “So it doesn’t have anything to do with like, ghosts or anything?” Jen asked, her eyes gleaming curiously.

  “Why would you think that?” Sam asked.

  “Nikki, that’s Melanie’s friend, she knows the guys that live next to you and they said they heard you guys screaming in your room this morning, and I just thought since you were up on the roof with the Ouija board, maybe it had something to do with that.”

  “No,” Chloe said confidently, “The ceiling light burned out and we scared ourselves.”

  “Uh-huh, why does it say ‘help’ all over your walls?” Jen asked suspiciously.

  “We don’t know, do we?” Chloe asked Sam.

  “Don’t know,” Sam echoed.

  Jen looked from one to the other. She waited a minute and when neither girl volunteered anything more, she smirked and nodded her head.

  “Okay…alright, whatever. Look, if you guys are done with the Ouija board then can I get it back? Because Mel and I were thinking about-”

  “Oh crap! I forgot about that!” Sam said smacking her head, “I was going to try and find it this morning and I just forgot.”

  “Try and find it?” Jen asked.

  “Yeah, up on the roof…the wind…it kind of blew it right off. It blew off the side,” Sam explained, “I’m sure it’s behind the building somewhere.”

  Jen’s face wore an expression of understanding. She smiled mysteriously.

  “You know, somebody told me that if you don‘t put the board away when you’re done, you leave a…a door or portal or something open to bad vibes.” Her tone was light but she was watching Sam as she spoke,

  Sam and Chloe glanced at one another, a look Jen was quick to notice and acknowledge with a nod.

  “We should go find it,” Sam said, “Just so…so it doesn’t get ruined, or stolen or something.”

  Sam jumped out of her seat with Chloe and Jen at her heels.

  Out in the hallway, most of the students were already gone. A few open doors flooded the hall with natural light and snippets of conversation. Chloe didn’t try to listen. She felt sure they would all be talking about her and Sam, or complaining about having to go to a floor meeting. Sam was moving so fast she was almost running. Chloe tried to keep up.

  She followed Sam down the stairs, through the cafeteria and out the back doors to the square.

  The square was a grassy space behind the dormitory, bordered on one side by the tall glass windows of the cafeteria, and by the dormitory wings on the other two sides. The last side was framed by a sidewalk which ran between their hall and Goodman-Harker Hall next door. The square was sheltered from strong breezes and shady. A few picnic tables were spaced around for when the weather was nice and students wanted to eat outside. They were used in all weather by students who smoked, and the ground around each was littered with cigarette butts. A few tall white pines grew close to the building on either side, each encircled by its own carpet of orange pine needles. A neatly trimmed row of hedges grew at the base of the cafeteria windows.

  After making a quick survey of the square, Sam began poking around in the hedge, while Chloe walked tight against the building, looking carefully at the ground. Jen went down the other side of the building.

  Over the past year, Chloe had done her best not to let herself think on anything for very long. It seemed to her that withdrawing into your own head and discussing things with only yourself was highly dangerous. You might lose your grip on reality and not find your way back.

  It had happened before, in high school. Strange and unexplained voices, whispers, things out of place…the more she had withdrawn to think about these things, the more she had lost touch with what was real and important. She was living in a world she had created for herself, and a psychologist had to come in and find her. It had been hard to let go and admit the things she had heard and seen weren’t real, that she had created them. There were times when those awful, sneaking inner thoughts would suggest to her that they were real, that they had been real, and it was the psychologist that had been wrong after all. She had taught herself to shut them down when they suggested it, when they tried to tempt her back. She would shut them out by focusing on trying to find shapes or patterns in the world around her, or by counting. Little tricks she had developed to stop the voices. She could teach those to Sam now.

  She glanced back to see Sam ripping through the bushes, her mouth set firmly, her eyes still looking bright and wild. Sam was her, a few years ago. When it started she was sure it was the supernatural, sure something was trying to communicate to her, Chloe Adams. She was eager to define it, pin it down, to try and understand its message. But what her therapist had said made more sense. Of course it asked for help. It was a vague request, it would keep the sickness progressing. Right now, Sam believed it was something external. She thought it was something outside of them both, something that she could stop, by doing something. She had jumped at Jen’s suggestion that the board was the cause. Chloe wo
uld have done the same a year earlier. The real question was, could she have made Sam this way? Was it her fault? Mental sickness wasn’t like a cold, a virus that you could catch, but it seemed-

  Her memory quickly handed her the comparison she was looking for. A book…a play…Arthur Miller’s classic work, the Crucible. The story of the Salem witch trials, and how the citizens used it for their own ends. The girls fainting, screaming, seeing things no one else could. When one of them had confessed that it was all a lie, the judge had asked her to faint or act as she had in court, and she couldn’t. She couldn’t because she had said it wasn’t the same, it wasn’t as easy to do as when they were all together, egging one another on. Chloe was the ringleader. She couldn’t make Sam sick, she couldn’t make Sam see things, but Sam already had some problems of her own, didn’t she? And Chloe was the catalyst for making them worse.

  Chloe sighed and rubbed her face. The smart thing to do would be to separate. Go to someone in the dormitory and say that she and Sam couldn’t get along and needed to switch rooms. That sort of thing probably happened a lot. They could both get new roommates, start over. That would be the right thing to do, but Chloe was not going to do that. She already knew as much. Some part of her still thought she could deal with it. The important thing was to get a handle on it quickly, before it got any worse. Right now, she might still be able to convince Sam to let it drop, but if other people got involved--

  She looked over at Jen walking slowly along the far wall, kicking at the long grass that grew against the side of the building. If she didn’t nip this thing in the bud, then pretty soon either half the dormitory would be in hysterics, or she and Sam would be the butt of every joke. Just like high school, all over again.

  And then there was Seth. He seemed to think that someone was trying to scare them. It was definitely to his credit that he didn’t think that either she or Sam had written on the walls themselves. Chloe wasn’t so sure. In her own bedroom, in a little two-story farmhouse seven hours away, you could still see the marks through the paint where the word “help” had been written so hard, the pen had dug into the drywall. The marks that apparently she had made. Though try as she might, she honestly couldn’t remember doing it.

  A spot of white in the grass called her attention back. It was the planchette. Chloe bent to grab it. The sidewalk wasn’t far, and beyond that, there was nothing but grass, no Ouija board.

  “I found the pointer,” Chloe yelled, waving it above her head.

  Sam was at the end of the hedgerow. She gave the bush one last angry jab with her hand and jogged over to where Chloe stood. Jen, having finished her inspection of the far wall, walked over as well.

  “I can’t find the board,” Sam huffed, “You’d think it’d be somewhere around here, they fell off together.”

  They all glanced around at the ground, as though the board would suddenly appear.

  “Someone must have picked it up and taken it,” Chloe decided.

  “Yeah, I guess that-” Sam stopped mid-sentence, her eyes lit up with an idea, “wait a minute.”

  She took off, heading towards the cafeteria. Jen and Chloe followed. Sam stopped in front of the large trash bins next to the door, and reaching in, shifted something out of the way.

  “Here it is!” she called, pulling it out of the trash and shaking it to get rid of a clingy piece of cellophane paper from a cigarette pack.

  “We’ve got the box in our room,” Sam said, as Chloe and Jen followed her into the cafeteria. “Just let us put it away, and you can have it back.”

  “Something did happen, didn’t it?” Jen asked again. “You guys can tell me, I’m not going to tell anyone else. Not even Mel, I promise.”

  Chloe wished there was a way to warn Sam not to say anything. Sam was climbing the steps ahead of them. Chloe stared at the back of her head, willing the thought into Sam’s head.

  “Yeah,” Sam agreed at last, “Something did happen. At first it didn’t work, but then it spelled out “help” and “trapped”, and we think it means that there’s like a spirit or something, trapped here, in this building. Then our light burned out this morning, and when I came back to the room, just a little bit ago, and the word “help” was written all over our walls.”

  “That is really scary,” Jen decided excitedly, “so what are you going to do?”

  “Nothing,” Chloe cut in, “We’re going to put the Ouija board away and never mess with this kind of stuff again.”

  “You guys! We should have a séance in your room,” Jen insisted, ignoring Chloe completely, “we can get a bunch of the girls together and, like, light some candles and stuff. I’ll go Google séance and see how it’s supposed to work and-”

  “No!” snapped Chloe, “Absolutely not! And you just told us that you weren’t going to tell anyone.”

  Jen shrugged guiltily. “Okay, I won’t tell, but I still think it would be a pretty cool idea. Can I at least see your room? You know, look at the walls and stuff?”

  “Seth told us to wait in his room, I don’t think we should go back in there until he comes back,” Chloe said.

  “We’ll show you later,” Sam said, “Stop by before the floor meeting and we’ll give you your board back too.”

  “Can Mel know too, because she’ll want to see,” Jen wheedled.

  “Fine, fine,” Sam agreed.

  “Alright, we’ll be there at like…quarter to eight,” Jen said, passing Sam and walking quickly down the hall. “And don’t forget, you’re buying all our drinks at the Eat this Friday,” she called over her shoulder.

  “I did forget,” Sam pouted.

  “Why did you tell her?” Chloe hissed.

  “Who cares? So what if she knows? Maybe she’ll use the Ouija and it’ll go bother her instead of us.”

  Chloe snorted ungraciously, but didn’t argue. It wasn’t the time or place to explain to Sam just what could happen.

  The girls glanced at their door as they passed it. Neither suggested that they go in. They gave it a wide berth, staying as close to the far wall as they could and walking just a bit faster as they passed by.

  Back in Seth’s room, Sam threw herself into his old chair with a sigh of frustration. She flipped the board open and closed a few times and then tossed it off to the side.

  “Where do you think he went anyways?” she demanded.

  “I dunno, it’s been awhile though, hasn’t it?” Chloe asked, walking around the room to examine it closer. The books on his desk were mostly school textbooks. They all had titles like, principles of agronomy, wood technology, or forestry law. They looked very boring to Chloe. His shelf was more promising. There he kept a stash of well-worn paperbacks that Chloe was able to recognize. A lot of Steinbeck and Hemmingway, but also-

  “Jane Eyre?” Chloe wondered out loud.

  “What are you talking about?” Sam demanded in a bored tone of voice.

  “Nothing, I just…I was looking at his books,” Chloe explained.

  “What’s Jane Ear?” Sam asked politely, pulling the handle on the recliner to pop out the foot rest.

  “Just a book, never mind,” Chloe soothed, still examining titles. Many of them she had never heard of, but the collection was such a mishmash of genres, authors, and periods, that it didn’t seem like he had any kind of literary preference. She looked at the framed newspaper clipping. It had a black and white photo of Seth scoring a goal at the top, and an article that mentioned him by name as the leading scorer for the Birch Harbor Bears. At the bottom of the frame, a post-it note was attached that read: “Couldn’t help it! I saw it in the paper this morning and had to get it framed! So proud!!! Love, Mom”

  Chloe smiled…Seth’s mom. She imagined a June Cleaver-esque woman with Seth’s dark hair, carrying a turkey on a platter with a big smile.

  The frame rested on a photo album. Chloe reached for it, and then hesitated. She glanced at the door. It would probably be rude to pick up someone’s photo album, and if he happened to walk in…but it wasn�
��t like it was a diary or anything. She glanced again at the door. Just a peek, she reasoned, just open it up and look at the first page, it’ll just be for a second.

  Silently moving the picture frame, so Sam wouldn’t turn around, Chloe lifted the thick album off the shelf and opened it to the first page. The picture showed Seth standing on a trail in the woods carrying a girl with long, dark hair piggyback. They were both wearing identical grins. The caption underneath read “Don’t forget to come home once in awhile, I’ll miss you a ton, Squirrelfarts! I love you!!! -Rachel”

  “What’s that?” Sam asked, craning her neck.

  “N-nothing, just-” Chloe slapped the cover shut and tried to shove the album back on the shelf, but Sam was faster. She leapt out of her seat and snatched the book from Chloe with a mischievous grin.

  “Oooohhhh, lemme see…what’s this?” Sam held the book out of Chloe’s reach, and turned her back to her, opening the photo album to the first page.

  “Sam, put it back!” Chloe pleaded, “He’ll be back any second!”

  “What’s this? Squirrelfarts?” Sam laughed. “I wonder who Rachel is though…she’s cute.”

  “My sister.”

  Seth stood in the doorway holding a bucket and a jug of cleaner. He set his equipment down and reached out to take the photo album from Sam. Chloe noticed that his fingers were stained red.

  “Rachel’s my little sister, she made me a scrapbook when I first left for college,” he explained, setting the photo album back on his shelf, “and you guys are pretty nosy.”

  Chloe’s face burned. She couldn’t think of any excuse to justify looking through his personal things. She twisted her hands together and stared at the floor. Sam appeared completely undaunted.

  “Sorry about that… Squirrelfarts,” Sam giggled.

  Chloe looked up to see Seth grin and roll his eyes.

  “That’s an inside joke,” he explained. “When I first told my family I was going to study forestry, they had no idea what it was, and when my Dad asked what exactly I was going to learn, Rachel, being a real smart ass, told everyone that it was very deep stuff. That I was off to ask the unanswerable questions, like if a squirrel farted in the woods, and no one was around to hear it, does it actually make a noise? From then on…well, let’s just say ‘squirrelfarts’ kind of stuck, much to my dismay.”