Asylum

by Kristen Selleck

  “No! No, there won’t be!” she cut him off. “No! That’s the last thing I’m going to agree to! You…rearranging your whole life to make me feel better! Absolutely not!”

  “We can still get a house or an apartment somewhere, even if I left, I could still leave you money to help with-”

  “No, don’t,” she chided him. “Really. I’m fine here. I LIKE Kirkbride Hall. I like my vulgar, wild, drunken roommate, and having you right down the Hallway. I like this! It’s normal! It’s college!”

  “Clo…you were possessed by a ghost that, apparently, haunts our dormitory. I don’t want to take that chance…that something could happen to you, that you could be hurt.”

  “You mean, George?” Chloe asked.

  She closed her eyes and listened to the silence in the dark room for awhile.

  “Seth, George wasn’t trying to hurt me. He was trying to help, and besides…I’m pretty sure he’s gone now,” she said.

  “How do you know?” he asked.

  “Because he did what he wanted to do. He made sure someone had the information to keep the battle going, to fight the bad ones. George is gone now. He left at Father Andrew’s house. He was outside of the building, lost his point of connection to our world,” she said slowly.

  “I don’t understand any of that,” he sighed.

  “Don’t worry about it,” she soothed. “George…well, somehow I have this feeling that he’s gone on to something better. He must have. There was this light that I saw…”

  She wasn‘t ready to put what she saw into words. George had admitted faith in something more than the human experience could prove. She was sure she had seen it. He must have found it. He had fought on the side of right, he must have obtained his reward. Imagining that he had expanded into nothingness was too terrifying to contemplate.

  “Well, at least it’s over now,” Seth agreed. “It’s all done with, and someday, this will be something we won’t even have to talk about.”

  “Mmmmm,” Chloe said.

  “Clo?” he asked.

  Chloe made her breathing slow and even.

  “Right, Clo?” he prodded.

  “Mmmmm…” she answered snuggling deeper against his chest.

  “Clo, you don’t fool me,” he said.

  She let the silence hang, hoping he would forget his question, or really believe that she had fallen asleep. She made sure to keep her breath deep and regular.

  “CLO!” He used his arm to shake her violently.

  She caught her breath and pretended to wake up.

  “Wha…?” she asked sleepily.

  “Tell me that it’s over now, please” he reminded her.

  “That it’s over now, please” she mumbled.

  “Be serious,” he told her.

  “Awww, Seth, I’m soo tired,” she complained, carefully measuring the amount of unconcerned whine she added to her voice.

  “No, babe,” he whispered back, “not good enough, promise me.”

  Chloe pushed herself away from him, and rolled over onto her side, giving him her back. He wrapped his arm around her again, and pulled her against himself.

  “Clo…?” he whispered.

  She turned back, placing her hand against his face, then running her finger down the line of his jaw, across his neck…down his chest. She felt him shiver under her touch. She kissed his chin, the spot where his jaw met his neck, the hollow spot between the back of his ear and a neck muscle. Either this, or bring up hockey, she thought, trying not to giggle. He kissed her in return, under her chin, lips against her neck. His hand skimmed smoothly up her side, across the curve of her hip, the indent on her side, between the hip and the gradual upward plane of her torso, coming to a rest under her arm, and then slowly running down, across her chest. His weathered hand rough against the soft silky fabric of Sam’s nightgown.

  “Clo… come on, promise me-”

  She pressed her lips against his, effectively stemming his request.

  Seth broke away first.

  “That’s a ‘no’ isn’t it?” he decided.

  “Ssshhhh…” she hushed him, reaching to try and kiss him again.

  He pulled farther away.

  “No,” he said.

  Chloe pulled away, feigning hurt. It had to be past four in the morning. He was trying to bring up something that would take way too much time to explain.

  “Why? Why won’t you let it go? You heard Father Andrew, all his talk about the Devil being sneaky and all that. You’re messing with something you shouldn’t.”

  “It will never leave me alone,” she murmured. “I don’t have a choice. I’m part of this. I wish you didn’t have to be, but I have to. I was born into this. My dad knew it, and I’m starting to think…I’m starting to think, maybe my Mom does too.”

  “Clo…” he pleaded.

  “I’m staying put,” she cut him off. “And I’m going home this summer…maybe sooner, I have to…and you’re going to Costa Rica, and we’re going to be fine.”

  He didn’t say anything, just let out a long sigh that tickled the back of her neck.

  “Okay,” he said. “Can you promise me that you won’t go looking for it…without me? That you won’t try to handle it on your own?”

  “I promise,” Chloe said quickly. Though in her head, a hundred objections flew up. She would never really be alone. What was it George had said…something about how when you fight on the side of right, you’ll always find help?

  “Never by myself again,” she agreed.

  “And no more secrets,” he mumbled against her back, already losing the battle against exhaustion.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Chloe soothed.

  She wasn’t sure if he heard. He was already breathing the slow regular breaths of deep sleep.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  One more secret, she thought, staring at the ceiling hours later. One more, a secret she had only begun to guess it, and she wasn’t really sure she was ready to share it. It had to be just hers, for a little while longer.

  Chloe glanced at Seth. He slept with his mouth slightly open, a strand of his long dark hair stuck to his lips. Carefully--slowly and carefully--she lifted his arm and slipped out of the bed, dropping onto the floor.

  Her eyes had long since adjusted to seeing in the faint light that filtered in under the door from the hallway. She moved through the room stealthily, grabbed her room keys off the desk, cracked the door and slid out. Down the hallway she hurried, one hand on the wall, squinting against the suddenly bright light.

  She was painstakingly careful not to make a sound as she opened the door. She crept through the room, keeping one eye on Sam all the while, finally reaching her bed.

  She knew right where it was. Lifting up the mattress with one hand, she shoved the other hand underneath and found the battered old paperback.

  Frankenstein.

  Although she hadn’t wanted to believe George, his tale about the bad ones, the science of an eternal body…he had struck an immediate chord. The mysterious book she had received for her thirteenth birthday. Right before she started hearing the voices, before her father had died. It had reminded her of more than just the obvious connection of the reanimated corpse. There was also the inscription, the one no one knew about. She had never shown it to anyone. To be honest, it had always frightened her a little.

  Chloe clutched the book to her chest. She just had to look at it, had to read it again. She had the strangest feeling that there was something about it that she had missed, something that would make sense now.

  Where to go? If she turned the light on, Sam might wake up and catch her at it, ask her about it. If she went back to Seth’s room, the same could happen. As it was almost dawn, she didn’t want to stand out in the hallway, awkwardly conspicuous to any early risers in her nightgown, reading a book.

  There was only one place she could think of where she could go…where no one would think to look.

  Chloe yanked Sam’s bathrobe of the hook and belted
it around herself. Then she grabbed her coat off the floor and went out.

  Hoping not to meet anyone, she made for the stairs and climbed up to the fourth floor. She remembered where the maintenance stairwell was and after quickly checking both ways for any sign of life, she climbed over the chain that blocked them off and raced up the narrow steps to the bell tower.

  It was freezing. of course. Open to all the winds, and above the protection of the trees, Chloe was sure it had to be the coldest spot in the whole U.P. Yet, there was just enough light. The grey dawn that was slowly rising, combined with the orange glow of the parking lot lights afforded her just enough to read by.

  Chloe opened the book to it’s first page, the blank before the title page. Here her father had inscribed a poem, in a shaky hand with a blobby ink pen which seemed to die and then suddenly write very dark bold-faced letters:

  Methought I walked a dismal place, Dim horrors all around;

  The air was thick with many a face, And black as night the ground. I saw a monster come with speed, Its face of grimmliest green, On human beings used to feed, Most dreadful to be seen. I could not speak, I could not fly, I fell down in that place, I saw the monster’s horrid eye Come leering in my face! Amidst my scarcely-stifled groans, Amidst my moanings deep, I heard a voice, “Wake! Mr. Jones, you’re screaming in your sleep!”

  Chloe read it for perhaps the one hundred thousandth time, she knew already that he had not written the poem. It was entitled ‘Horrors’ and had been written by Lewis Carroll in 1850. She had been able to Google that much. She often wondered why he would choose to send her ‘Horrors’ as a thirteenth birthday present. Before, she had chided herself with the knowledge that the man definitely had a few screws loose, and it probably was no more than some erratic ramblings on his part. The messy handwriting, and broken pen seemed to confirm as much.

  Huddling inside her thick winter coat, leaving the book open in her lap, she glanced up into the empty belfry.

  “What do you think George?” she whispered. “Definite connection or wishful thinking?”

  Not a breath of wind answered her. Chloe sighed.

  “You really are gone, aren’t you?” she whispered. The absolute stillness of the early morning seemed to tell her it was so.

  “Good luck then, and wish me the same, because I’m going to fight them,” she said to no one.

  She was about to close the book when her eyes fell on the single darkened word ‘you’. She ran her finger over the sentence, almost lovingly, and then paused. Quickly, she rubbed her finger across the line again, and again. The word ‘you’ was written so hard, it was slightly indented. Pressing the pen hard against the paper had caused it to be darker than the words around it. Not a dying, blobby pen at all, a purposely darkened word among the others, she glanced back at the other words, many of them containing a single darkened vowel or constant. She could have slapped her forehead. The poem contained a message! All the times she had read it over, why had she never noticed it before?

  She went back to the start and read the darkened letters in order:

  Chloe , find Ian rose. London. Do not fear. I love you.

  Chloe gasped. Behind her eyes, tears welled. It was as though he had come back for a moment, come back purposely for her, to tell her for the first and only time in her life, that he loved her, that he actually thought about her.

  “Find Ian Rose, London,” she repeated out loud.

  It was a start anyway, a clue. She had no idea how she was going to get there, no idea how to find Ian Rose if she somehow managed to travel halfway around the world, but it was something. She hugged the book to her chest. It was something.

  Over the tops of snow-covered pines, she caught the first glimpse of a hazy orange disk. The grey dawn was starting to glow in shades of pink, mauve, and purple. If she was lucky, she still had a few hours to try and steal a nap in Seth’s arms, and then, corned beef hash with Sam. She wondered how she was going to break it to them.

  “Well guys,” she practiced. “I think my father was one of Abraham’s Men. He left me a message, hidden in a poem, hidden in a book, and it turns out I’ve got to go somewhere in London and find a guy named Ian Rose.”

  She smiled, realizing it definitely sounded crazy. She was fortunate. They were both pretty much okay with crazy.

  Acknowledgements

  Thank-you and love to: Maggie, for being the ALPHA-beta reader; my writer pals Peazy ‘mom’ Monellon, Anthony ‘his infernal majesty’ Miller, and Heather ‘the editor’ Bserani for all the encouragement, editing, advice and for inspiring me to work harder; all my lab cronies at Ingham and Ionia--but especially Jill, Beth, and Stacy (You guys believed in me more than I believed in myself sometimes); Ivy for the awesome photo job; Andrew & Matt--because no friend will ever be to you what a brother is--; and for Randall ‘James’ and Laura ‘Agnes’-- of course I would write you both into a story and not realize it. You’re part of who I am and everything I do.