Asylum

by Kristen Selleck

  “What the hell is going on?” Someone whispered.

  “Somebody should stop her!” another voice seethed.

  Chloe slipped past Sam and weaved through the other students. The onlookers had given Melanie a wide berth. She stood at the center of the crowd, completely unaware of the eyes that ringed her in. Chloe approached her cautiously and touched her shoulder very gently. The girl froze, her hand stopping in mid word. Chloe shivered from the contact. Even through the thin cotton t-shirt, Melanie’s skin was unnaturally cold. Slowly, horribly slowly, Melanie pivoted on her heel to face her. Chloe held her breath trying to keep the desire to scream in Melanie‘s face, to slap, or shake her, inside.

  Long strands of sweaty, dishwater-blonde hair covered Melanie’s face, her head hung forward as though it was too heavy to support. She struggled to lift her chin and then lolled her head from side to side in a lazy effort to see through the hair. With one hard jerk, the girl’s head flung backwards. Those eyes again. They were terrifying close up. Black wells underneath a bloodshot opaque film, they stared her down without blinking. The mouth hung open. It moved, smacking its lips as though parched, and uttered something too hoarse to understand. It sounded like footsteps on gravel. It wet the lips and tried again. This time words creaked out.

  “Understand…waited so long…to stop…” the words came in and out like a bad radio station, like something that didn’t have the ability to master breathing and speaking at the same time. Chloe blanched, it was speaking to her, directly to her. She took a step back, she would have run if it hadn’t been for the wall of bodies that surrounded them. The Melanie-thing reached out and grabbed her wrist, yanking her closer.

  “Understand!” It demanded clearly.

  And with that, the eyes rolled upwards and Melanie‘s body dropped to the floor. No longer obscured by Melanie, the words scrawled on the wall became visible. Chloe squeezed her eyes shut and backed away. When I open them again, she thought, I’ll be awake. One, two…

  CHAPTER TEN

  Before she got to three, a loud, complaining voice broke the silence.

  “What the fuck is going on around here?”

  She couldn’t identify the voice, it was male and came from somewhere within the crowd. A loud buzzing followed the angry question. If she focused, she could pick individual thoughts out of the angry mob hum:

  “It’s a bunch of freshmen bitches just messing around, thinking they’re funny or something-”

  “Now watch, another floor meeting because of this crap.”

  “Is she alright? I don’t think she’s alright, somebody should call someone-”

  “…I told you, the dorm is strange, weird shit happens here all the time, this one guy told me…”

  “That right there is why freshmen should have their own dorm, can’t handle their liquor…”

  “Are you calling someone? I think we should call someone-”

  Chloe opened her eyes. The fear was still there, but she was going to hold it down. She could still salvage this, but she had to act quickly. What could she do? Why would anyone listen to her? She needed someone with authority, an adult or something. Maybe he was still downstairs.

  Ignoring the angry murmur of voices, which were quickly becoming louder, and Melanie’s prostrate body, Chloe pushed roughly through a few people to get to Sam.

  “Take Jen to our room and then help me with Melanie. I don’t care if we have to drag her, and, do you have your phone?”

  Sam nodded. She dug into her pocket and tossed the phone to Chloe, who flipped it open and stepped back, shielding Melanie.

  “I’m calling her parents,” Chloe said loudly enough for everyone to hear, but not speaking specifically to anyone, “It’s happened before. She had a breakdown last year, so I’m just going to call them to come and get her.”

  Chloe dialed numbers at random and mimed hitting the send button. She crouched down over Melanie’s body. The girl was breathing normally. She looked to be asleep.

  “Yes is this Mrs.-” Chloe paused, realizing she didn’t know Melanie’s last name. Maybe no one else in the crowd did either. “Mrs. Smith? Hi, this is Chloe Adams, I’m a friend of Melanie’s. Yes. Yes, I’m calling because I think she’s had another…episode. You need to come and get her.” She paused as though listening to a voice on the other end, the crowd had grown silent again, everyone listening to her feigned conversation. “Yes, at the dormitory…. We’ll wait with her… Yes… No, no ambulance or anything, of course… Thank-you,” Chloe faked half the conversation making appropriate pauses in between sentences and nodding her head as though a concerned mother was ad libbing on the other end.

  A few people had already walked away. Several others were moving towards their rooms. Only two or three had edged closer, eyeing Melanie nervously, and glancing intermittently at Chloe. Fortunately, Sam returned and crouched down next to her, trying to get Mel to sit up.

  “They’re not leaving,” Sam whispered. Chloe nodded.

  “And I take it you’ve read the uhhh… ‘writing-on-the-wall’?” Sam asked, smiling tightly. Chloe nodded again, staring determinedly at the floor.

  “Mel!” Sam urged, gently shaking Melanie. The girl’s eyelids fluttered and dropped. “Mel!” she insisted. This time she got no response. Chloe got down and slid an arm under Mel’s back.

  “Just give me a hand getting her in the room, I might have an idea about how to get rid of everyone,”

  Sam and Chloe each took an arm, hauling Melanie upright and suspended her between the two of them by draping her arms around their shoulders. They half-carried, half-dragged her back to their room.

  “Hey! Hey!” a girl’s voice called out, “you shouldn’t be moving her! Hey!”

  Chloe and Sam walked faster.

  “She needs a doctor, someone should call a doctor or the police or something. Freshman die of alcohol poisoning all the time because their friends don’t do anything! We need to call a-”

  Sam slammed the door shut, effectively stemming the protest.

  “Alright,” Sam said, dropping her half of Melanie on Chloe’s bed, “What now? I’m willing to bet that somebody’s going to be up here banging on our door in like, five minutes.”

  “Yeah,” Chloe agreed, passing through Jen’s wide-eyed, thousand-mile stare and going to the window. The snow had begun to fall lightly again. Below them, the dark sedan was still parked in front of the building, engine running. “I thought so,” Chloe whispered to herself, and then louder so that Sam could hear, “Okay, go out to the hallway and see if you can get that crap off the walls. Take a picture with your camera phone and then see if it’ll scrub off, because so far, the only thing I think we can get in any trouble for is that. They’ll call it vandalism or something.”

  “What are you going to do?” Sam asked suspiciously.

  “Damage control,” Chloe called over her shoulder.

  Outside, the temperature seemed to have dropped substantially. Chloe ran towards the idling car and pounded on the passenger side window. It buzzed down.

  “I need your help with something,” Chloe said, “Can you come in for a minute?”

  The headlights snapped off as Dr. Willard got out. He didn’t bother putting money in the meter, Chloe didn’t give him time.

  “What’s going on?” Dr. Willard asked catching up.

  “Why are you still here?” Chloe asked.

  “I was concerned. That girl seemed so distraught. I thought I’d wait a few minutes to see if you or Miss. Klingeman would come back. I thought at the very least I could still offer you a ride to the game,” he explained.

  “We do have a problem. There’s a girl on our floor…she’s had some kind of an episode. Like a mental breakdown or something and a lot of people saw it. Our R.A. is at the game and everyone’s kind of wandering around up there trying to figure out what to do. The thing is that this girl has some…problems, and her parents don’t want a big deal made out of it. They’re coming to get her, but in the meant
ime, I need someone to tell them that it’s under control and for everyone to go back to their rooms. I need someone who looks like they have some authority and you’re a professor…” Chloe trailed off.

  “Oh…very well. Certainly,” he agreed. “If you don’t mind my asking, what exactly do you mean by a mental breakdown?”

  Chloe hurried up the stairs, taking them two at a time. She didn’t check to see if Dr. Willard was keeping up. You’ll see, she thought.

  At the top of the first flight she paused and waited a minute for him to fall into step next to her.

  “Right here,” she said. Though she needn’t have pointed it out. It was the only hallway, probably in the whole dormitory, that showed any trace of life that night. People were still milling around, talking it over. A group had formed noticeably around her and Sam’s door, someone was already on a cell phone.

  Dr. Willard stood conspicuously in the center of the hall and clapped his hands for attention.

  “Everyone!” he called, “Please listen! I’m Dr. Willard, the dean of the college of life sciences. I need everyone to vacate this hallway immediately. Everything is under control, so go back to your rooms…now.”

  Slowly, and with a few appraising glances and a few whispered mustache jokes, the students began to dissipate. Chloe gave Dr. Willard a discreet thumbs-up, but he didn’t notice. His attention had become absorbed by the hastily scrawled list on the wall. He strolled towards it casually, as though he wasn’t really that interested in it, like it was just something to look at while he waited for the hallway to clear.

  Chloe briefly wished she had waited long enough to give Sam time to clean the wall off. Dr. Willard would recognize a lot of those names, and he would definitely want an explanation, one she wasn’t ready to give, especially not to a psychologist.

  She went and stood behind him as he read the wall. She didn’t have to read it again. She could close her eyes and see it, and probably would for a long while. It was another list of names, at the top of which was a five-pointed star made of five lines, three of which were darkened so that the letter ‘A’ was clearly visible in it. Underneath the symbol the names began. Thomas Heenan, Benjamin Soule, Wiley Williams, Charles Avery… she didn’t recognize the names until almost the middle of the list. There she read Elizabeth Mathers and a few under that, was the now familiar name of George Townsend. But worst of all, and seeming to Chloe to stand out more than all the others, at the very bottom, her own name, Chloe Adams.

  Dr. Willard rubbed his chin thoughtfully. He glanced at Chloe with a confused expression and then back to the wall to study the names again.

  “I don’t understand,” he said slowly, “I…what is this? These are all…all…what have you done?”

  “Nothing!” Chloe said reproachfully. “I had nothing to do with this. It was the girl I was telling you about. She flipped out, came out here and started writing names on the wall, she was already done by the time we got here. I have no idea what this is supposed to be!”

  “These names,” Dr. Willard began, “I recognize most of them. This here-” He stabbed the name George Townsend with one finger. “He was on the list I just gave you, a ledger from Traverse City mentioned him as a former patient at several state asylums, and this one-” He pointed at another name. “I have pages and pages of research on. He escaped from Ionia Asylum twice and was admitted a total of five times. And this one…” He laid a finger thoughtfully under the name of Wiley Williams at the top of the list. “Well, it’s the name of the man who shot Thomas Kirkbride, another escaped patient from Philadelphia. I don’t know that it’s that uncommon of a name for the time but…” Dr. Willard trailed off, and then started again. “You know, the interesting thing is, you would think that this is supposed to be a group, but if these people are some of the patients I think they are, they’re spread out for more than hundred years, and then…Chloe Adams…that’s supposed to be you?”

  “I don’t know,” Chloe lied.

  “Right here-” Dr. Willard trailed his finger down the wall, coming to a stop on the name directly above Chloe’s. “Will Gannon…I know that sounds familiar. It sounds familiar and…recent. Where do I know that name from?”

  Down the hallway, Sam appeared, carrying a bucket. She stopped short when she noticed Dr. Willard, almost like she was going to turn around, but then, made eye contact with Chloe and continued walking.

  “Hey there, Dr. Willard,” Sam called, “You’re missing the game, you know.” She shot him her most innocent and friendly smile. Dr. Willard nodded at her but didn’t answer. He had resumed rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

  “And this…” He said, pointing at the star symbol. “What do you suppose…? Where is the girl that did this, did you say?”

  “She’s-” Chloe began.

  “She’s sleeping it off in our room,” Sam cut in. “Yeah, her and Jen got smashed. Well look at this crazy shit, of course she was!”

  “I’d like to speak with her,” Dr. Willard decided.

  “Ummm…sure. I just don’t think right now is the uhhh…best time,” Sam dropped her bucket of soapy water and fished a sponge out of it.

  “Wait! Hold on just a minute, you’re washing this off?” Dr. Willard jumped between Sam and the wall.

  “I was going to,” Sam agreed patiently.

  “Hold on! Hold on just a minute here. Let me at least…let me-” Dr. Willard fumbled wildly for something in his pocket. He slapped at it and then across his chest. “Can I borrow a pen, and uhh…a piece of paper?” he asked.

  Chloe wished she could think of a reason to say no, but there was none. She gave a resigned sigh and motioned for Dr. Willard to follow.

  Jen was sitting at the desk with her arms around herself. Her still enormous eyes followed the rise and fall of Mel’s body as she slept curled in the fetal position on Chloe’s bed.

  “It was so sudden,” Jen whispered, “It was just, like…one minute we were laughing, doing shots, and then bam, she falls over. I thought she passed out. I didn’t even get the chance to check. She jumps up, and starts pacing…staggering though…and she wouldn’t answer me, she wouldn’t say nothing. I thought…I thought…” Jen crammed her knuckles into her mouth again.

  Chloe nodded sympathetically and snatched a pen off the desk. She had let the door fall against the latch instead of closing it, and she could sense Dr. Willard standing on the other side, waiting. Probably listening.

  “I was scared,” Jen admitted, pulling her hands away from her face. “I wasn’t running to find help. At least, not at first. I was running because I was scared.”

  “Okay, Jen. Don’t worry about it,” Chloe soothed in a low voice, “we’ll talk all about it. Me and you and Sam, and Mel’s going to be fine too. We’ll figure this all out in a little bit. Just give me a second, okay? I’ll be right back.”

  Chloe snatched a handful of paper off her desk, swung the door open and shoved it at Dr. Willard. He glanced over her shoulder at Jen curiously.

  “Is that-” he began.

  “No, that’s not the girl that did it.” Chloe said. She took a step into the hallway and pulled the door closed behind her, shielding Jen. “Her name’s Mel. It sounds like she was really drunk and I don’t know how she came up with all those names. If you want…I can tell her you want to talk to her about it when she wakes up tomorrow. From the sounds of it though, she’s going to be pretty hung-over.” Chloe shrugged, it almost turned into a shiver.

  She was very close. Too close. If only she could keep everything in its place…Mel and Jen safely in their room, Dr. Willard in the basement of the library, with his files and his stupid book, and the whole horrible awful experience behind the locked door in her head. Maybe when she was alone, or lying in bed across the room from Sam, she would take it out and look at it. Think about it. Maybe she would figure it out. Until then, she had to keep the walls from collapsing on her. She needed to get Dr. Willard out of Kirkbride Hall.

  He was already down the hallway sta
nding by Sam, scribbling as fast as he could, while she held the sponge pressed against the wall, waiting for the all clear.

  Chloe took a breath. She rubbed her hands together nervously and struggled at forming an escape plan. With her back to the main stairs, she couldn’t see that someone was approaching. She didn’t hear the footsteps. It was just a feeling. Apprehension, a tightening of the gut, that awful precursor that usually meant-

  “Chloe?”

  Chloe whirled around and cringed. It was fear, horrible incapaciting anxiety-driven fear that showed on her face and she knew it. Guilty! She thought, I look guilty and she’ll know. She always knows, she watches for it.

  Her mother seemed confused. She looked from Chloe to Sam and Dr. Willard by the wall to Chloe again. Comprehension dawned across her face. The confusion melted and spread into an aggressive smugness.

  “I see,” she said in a voice that was horribly sympathetic.

  Before Chloe could think of anything to say, Diana Adams marched past her. She walked, or stomped, with such fierceness, that Chloe was sure she could hear the muffled clack of those heels as she went.

  Her mother was reading the wall as she walked, Chloe could tell by how she slowed as she got closer. She stopped behind where Dr. Willard stood scribbling away and barked a short angry laugh.

  “Signing your work now, are you?” she called back to Chloe.

  Too much, warned the sane voice, the one that made all the rules, Too much at once, you’re not able to handle all this. Leave. Leave now.

  She hates you, hissed the other, hated you when you were just a red screaming baby and it’s grown since then.

  Chloe agreed with them both. Still she couldn’t move, her feet had fused with the carpet. She watched the show unwillingly, stuck, growing smaller and smaller. Sam was talking now.