He was dirty. Grime settled in the creases around his eyes and across his forehead making it look as though the lines were drawn onto his face. He had a short, ragged, white beard, stained yellow around the mouth, and his hair was a mess of white fluff that stuck out in every direction. His overly large nose was sharp…hooked and red. With his huge dark eyes, which seemed yellowed where they should be white, he made Chloe think of an owl. She half-expected him to twist his head around and stare at her from upside down.
“Mr. Gannon?” she asked.
He grunted through a mouth missing most of its teeth, and continued to watch them.
“Will, these kids were looking for you,” Steve began, “they’re doing research on the hospital and they heard about you, said they want to buy some letters.”
Chloe was about to speak, when Seth stepped in front of her and held a hand out to the old man.
“I’m Seth Maird, we’re from Birch Harbor and he’s right, we’re doing some research on the hospital. We were hoping we could ask you some questions,” he said in businesslike tones.
Will Gannon stared at him and blinked his huge owl eyes. He didn’t reach out to take Seth’s hand. With a disdainful look, he turned his back on them and began walking away.
“Sir?” Seth called after him.
“I ain’t talking to no stupid kids bout that old place. You all thinkin’ you know so much. Smug little bastards is what you is,” Will grumbled without turning around.
Chloe felt panic rise up in her, Sam gave her a push. It meant say something! He was their only chance to figure out what the ghost wanted.
“George Townsend!” Chloe called out at Will’s retreating back. “George Townsend sent us a message. Help…trapped…the letters A and M. Does that mean anything to you?”
Will Gannon stopped. Still, he didn’t turn around.
“George Townsend, Elizabeth Mathers,” Chloe called out searching desperately in her memory for more, “Wiley Williams, Margaret Ford, Will Gannon-”
“Hush your mouth!” Will hissed, spinning around. “Ain’t you got no sense in your head? Yelling so loud, anybody could hear ya!”
He fixed Chloe with an angry glare and took a step towards them.
“I done what I was supposed to!” he declared, “I done more than any of ‘em. I’m done, I don’t owe them nothing, already gave ‘em most my life.”
“Will you tell us? Tell us what they want? That’s all we’re asking,” Chloe pleaded.
“For your research?” Will laughed and it turned into a hacking cough. “Research my ass,” he declared catching his breath. “They’re still recruiting, that’s what. I know what you all are. Think they can still stop him, but they can’t. I know that.”
“Tell us,” Chloe asked quietly, beside her Sam nodded.
Will Gannon continued to stare at them, and then ventured a few steps nearer.
“Steve!” he barked, “Get yourself gone boy.”
Steve gave Chloe an embarrassed smile and a shrug before beating a hasty retreat. Seth turned around and glanced at her and Sam. It seemed he was trying to decide if the situation was dangerous enough to drag them both out of there. Chloe tried to look reassuring.
“Come with me,” Will ordered.
“Why can’t we talk here?” Seth asked.
Without answering, Will Gannon turned his back on them again and began shuffling away. With an apologetic look at Seth, Chloe raced after Will, with Sam hot on her feet. Seth gave an agitated sigh, but fell in behind them anyway.
They followed Will over a slight rise. At the top, they looked down to see a mildewed, orange tent pitched near a mucky, leaf-clogged basin. Small black pools of water formed between the roots of several trees. There were random sticks driven into the ground all over the hill.
“So I know where I puts stuff,” Will said gruffly, following Chloe’s gaze. “I pull ‘em out when I leave, but until then I leave them in so I can memorize where stuff is. Don’t think about coming back here though, I got my traps.”
Chloe shook her head quickly, trying to assure him that she would never think of it.
Will clambered slowly down the descent. Near the tent, he rolled an old log away from a pile, set it on its end and sat down. Following his lead, Chloe and Sam did the same. Seth remained standing.
“Let’s get one thing straight,” Will began. “I ain’t helping with nothing. I did my bit, and I’m not in it no more.”
“What is A.M.?” Chloe pushed.
“Abraham’s Men,” Will said casually. Chloe felt a shiver go up her back. It was like he was telling her something that deep down, she already knew.
Will kicked aside some leaves, exposing the black earth beneath. Then, with a stick he drew a star, digging deeper across the lines that formed the A.
“We’ve seen that sign,” Sam breathed.
“That’s the sign for us…for them,” Will corrected. “For Abraham’s Men. It meant that they were there, that they were keeping a watch at a place, at a hospital or asylum mostly.
“And they were watching…?” Sam prompted.
“The bad ones,” Will replied. “And don’t ask who they is exactly cause I never knew. But I do know that they were responsible for those places, for building them. They built em up, all the same. Great big traps for poor, sick people, so they could never leave. Never, mind you. I been in ‘em since I was young. Sometimes I get to drinking and I can’t keep the thoughts in my head out of my mouth, so off to the asylum and then it’s months and sometimes years before I can get out again. I was in Elsie, then Kalamazoo, and the third time here in Traverse City, and that’s where I met The Men. My roommate was one of ‘em. One night I kept hearing them, the dead ones, the ones trapped there, and I couldn’t sleep, got to yelling at them, and that’s how he knew, my roommate, I mean. He took me to meet the Men, and they told me all about the bad ones, and I ate it up. You do when you’re young. When you’re young you think you can fight back. You want to fight back, then you get old…”
“What did they tell you about the bad ones?” Sam asked.
“They had a reason for trapping them, those poor souls. An experiment. They knew how to trap them, but didn’t know how to use them, they were still working it out,” Will mumbled.
“What were they going to use them for?” Sam asked intently.
“Something bad. Life and death experiments, they had a purpose,” Will mused.
“But you don’t know what that was, right?” Seth smirked.
“I never said I knew everything!” Will snapped. “I knew they was trapped there! I heard ‘em say it myself. Couldn’t get out, couldn’t see anything, they were in hell, I knew that much! They were still there, after the place closed, still waiting to be used for something, I know that too! I figured it out, without anybody’s help, I was the last of Abraham’s Men and I let them out.”
“How?” Chloe whispered.
“They was digging things up around there, getting ready to renovate the place. They were working on the foundation, and I go up there one night-” Will lowered his voice and leaned in towards Chloe a little. “I found the cornerstone, the first block they laid on that place, all marked up with their devil symbols. I smashed it to dust. That’s how I did it. It made a hole, a place they could get out from, and now they’re all gone, all free, and the bad ones can’t use them for their purposes no more.”
“It’s the building itself that traps them?” Chloe asked.
“Sure it is. S’why they built them all the same. It was Kirkbride that thought of it. He must have been one of the first bad ones, but the Men figured it out almost as soon as they started building those traps. Wiley was one of ‘em. He escaped, then he got a gun and he hid in a tree and he waited for that no good doctor, waited all day, and when he finally sees him, he shot that sonofabitch right in the head. But the devil knows his own, wouldn’t take him to hell. That bastard lived. Shot in the head and he was up walking around the next day. The papers said his hat s
topped the bullet. Don’t know what kind of hat stops a bullet!” Will said angrily.
“Do you know anything about George Townsend?” Chloe pressed.
“I know a lot of names. We was always trying to figure out ways to stop them. George Townsend was one of the early ones, long before my time. We’d tried fire before, but they always stopped us, or they just rebuilt. George Townsend burned down a place up north while they were still having it built. It never became an asylum, because of him.”
“And yet he’s still trapped there,” Chloe said.
“If he died inside it, he’s still there, sure. Lots of the Men are still in those places. I damn near cheer every time I hear another one of ‘em’s been bulldozed.”
“We heard that you had a letter or something that mentioned him,” Chloe said.
“From his doctor at Traverse City to another doctor at Newberry, when they transferred him. We used to try to find these things. That was another part of being one of the Men. We found any type of document or paper that might suggest that we existed and got rid of it. The bad ones knew we existed, knew it the same as we knew about them, but they never knew how many of us there was or just who we was. We kept our secrets a long time, sometimes under torture,” Will said darkly.
“Yet you were trying to sell this piece of evidence to an antique shop?” Seth observed.
“I gotta eat!” Will hollered. “I gotta live! I give them my whole life and I got nothing to show for it! They can feed me, I done enough for them!”
“Will,” Chloe said quietly, trying to calm him. “The bad ones…are they still around, do they still exist?”
Will looked around, checking to see if someone had somehow crept up while they were speaking. He leaned in again towards Chloe and Sam, ignoring Seth completely.
“Of course they do!” he hissed. “Of course! And I’ll tell you something else, they’re winning! This is just another step in their plan! The old asylums all closed up because they wanted them to. They’ve got enough dead ones now, and they’ve got…privacy, and time. There’s none of the Men left to stop them either. I’m the only one I know. They waited for that too.”
“What are they planning?” Chloe whispered. In the silence of the woods, it seemed to carry far.
Will shook his head.
“I dunno, and I’m not going to help anyone find out either. I told you, I’m done with all that. You can’t even kill ‘em, look at old Kirkbride,” Will said.
“But he’s dead now, I’m sure he probably died of old age like a hundred years ago or something,” Sam argued.
“Maybe,” Will said and refused to meet their eyes.
Seth snorted.
“Can we see the letter? We’ll buy it from you,” Sam remembered.
Will considered it, stretching out his fingers and staring at the back of his hands. His fingernails were filthy. Long and yellow and caked with thick black lines of dirt underneath where the nail met the skin.
“I suppose so,” Will said at last. “I won’t take less than forty dollars for it though.”
“Done!” Sam agreed.
While Chloe wrote out his name and the amount on Dr. Willard’s check, Will went and pulled up one of the sticks on the hillside and began digging with his hands. In a few minutes he had uncovered a large ziplock bag filled with yellowed papers.
“Here,” he said thrusting an envelope addressed to Dr. Whitney Chelis at Chloe. She took it gently and handed him the check, which he thrust into his pocket without looking at. “Now, take off,” he ordered. “This ain’t the kind of stuff I like having to think about no more.”
“Gladly,” Seth said. “Which direction is the hospital?”
Will pointed the way, and the girls followed as Seth began briskly trekking back to the road.
“Wow,” whispered Sam when they were far enough away.
“I know,” Chloe said.
“Really…wow. I just…I wasn’t expecting all that,” Sam continued.
“I know,” Chloe said.
Seth stopped, and whirled on them.
“You are not, I repeat NOT going to go digging around Kirkbride Hall so that you can try and smash up a foundation stone…right?” he demanded.
“Of course not,” Sam lied. Her eyes connected with Chloe’s for a long meaningful second.
“I saw that,” said Seth.
CHAPTER TWELVE
Chloe sighed and flopped down on the bed. With Sam gone, the room seemed depressingly empty. Out in the hall, she could hear students calling their goodbyes to one another, some making loud plans to meet up over break. Sam had gone the night before, after receiving a call from a friend at home who had phoned to tell her about a big party that weekend.
Chloe had different holiday plans. The letter they had bought off of Will Gannon turned out to be devoid of any meaningful information. It was basically one doctor describing to another the patient’s condition. ‘Monomania’ was a term used over and over, and the new doctor was advised to keep constant surveillance, as the patient had always been deemed an escape hazard. ‘Reasonably intelligent’ had been another term in the letter that Chloe hadn’t liked. It made her wonder how the doctors at Woodhaven would have arrogantly described her.
Dr. Willard had seemed very excited by the find, however. When Chloe told him about Abraham’s Men, he had leapt to his feet and began talking animatedly about the importance of such a find, slapping his hand on his desk when trying to emphasize that they had to find out more. Like a kid at Christmas, Sam had said, and she was right. He had taken off on a fact finding mission only the week before, having found the star mark on the walls of an old asylum down south. Another member of his department had taken over the last week of classes with assurances that their professor would be back next semester. Neither Chloe nor Sam had a class with Dr. Willard in the next semester, though they both assumed that he would expect them to continue with their work in his library.
Dr. Willard had been able to fill in even more details for them. The term ‘Abraham’s men’ must have been somewhat tongue in cheek, as it had another meaning. It was used to describe a class of beggars who claimed to be lunatics discharged from the Abraham Ward of Bedlam in 16th century England. Dr. Willard had even postulated that it may have meant that the group members considered themselves to be sane, but were acting the part of lunatics in order to further their plans. Though what those plans actually were, he didn’t know. Chloe hadn’t told him about Will Gannon smashing the cornerstone at the old hospital, nor about the man’s theory that the old asylums were soul traps. It just seemed too…crazy, and Dr. Willard was, first and foremost, a psychologist.
Chloe rolled onto her side and stared at the bulletin board across the room. Since Seth was pretty much in on the whole thing, they didn’t bother covering it up with the hockey schedule anymore. It looked almost the same as it had when they started it two months before. Of course, now that they didn’t have Mel and Jen to help them…
Mel had gone home that night-- the night Chloe and Sam had gone to Traverse City-- and never come back. The rumor was that she was failing several classes and had had a mental breakdown from the stress. The rumors also went on to assure the listener that though she had dropped out, she was living at home and was planning on going back to a community college near there. Jen, on the other hand, had returned, though not to their dormitory. She had moved in with friends at a dorm on the other side of campus. Vetch Hall, the most modern of the dorm buildings, having been constructed some time in the 1980s. Sam and Chloe wouldn’t have known what had happened to her if Sam hadn’t run into her at the library one night. According to Sam, Jen had ignored her, and walked as fast as she could in the other direction. Chloe could have told her that you can’t ignore Sam, and true to form, Sam had chased the girl down and started hurling questions at her. What had happened to Mel? Where had Jen gone? Where was she living now? Why hadn’t she heard from either of them? Jen had been vague on everything, even to the point of refusing t
o answer where she had moved to. When Sam had continued to press, Jen had basically told her off and then said she wanted no further contact with her or Chloe.
Which was fine with Chloe. She didn’t blame Jen in the least. College was supposed to be about cramming for finals and binge drinking. You shouldn’t have to worry that you might be possessed by a ghost or come home to cryptic messages written all over your walls. It was Sam who had asked around and ascertained that Jen had transferred to another dorm.
And now the bulletin board had no new clippings. It wasn’t that they weren’t still looking. Both she and Sam had taken turns looking through reels of microfilm and searching through binders full of old articles from the Birch Harbor Gazette. Sam had even asked a librarian how they might get their hands on blueprints of Kirkbride Hall. The librarian’s only answer was a suspicious glare. The problem was that they weren’t exactly sure how to proceed. They both agreed that they had to find the cornerstone of the building. They had tried that almost immediately, walking around the whole building looking at all the blocks at eye level. Seth had been the one to suggest that it would be underground. He explained that a cornerstone was usually the first block laid, it was normally done with a ceremony, and the block would probably bare a date or an inscription of some sort.
They had found an article or two about the construction, but so far, no pictures or clippings of the groundbreaking, and no way of telling where the first block may have been laid for the massive building. But she now had the whole of winter break to go snooping around in the basement. The hall would be pretty much empty, so she might even be able to dig around the foundation at night.
On her desk, to the left of the bulletin board, sat two beautifully-wrapped packages, stacked on top of one another and tied with a bow. It was Seth’s present. She had given Sam her gift (a fifth of vodka and a two liter of redpop) the night before. She had hoped that Seth would drop-in before he left for home, but eyeing the present she started to feel a bit of anxiety. He might assume she had already left. She might miss him somehow. It would probably be better to give it to him now.
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