Rookwood Asylum

by David Longhorn

  More like inmates, prisoners, he thought. Trapped thanks to an unnatural death. Unquiet souls, maybe.

  Paul thought of his own mother, and wondered if her suffering and confusion lived on, in some form, in a New York State mental institution. He could do nothing to help her, at least not now. But perhaps he could do something to dispel the pall of misery and violence that clearly beset Rookwood. For the first time, he might be able to face his own fear, the ever-present dread of ending up like his mother.

  Help others, and so help myself, he thought. Okay, it’s a cliché. But that doesn’t make it wrong.

  After a few moments of thought, he opened his laptop and wrote an email to Max Rodria. Then he read it over, rewrote it so it had a much more obsequious tone, and sent it. He picked up his phone and called Mike to talk over just how they might go about solving the mystery of Rookwood Asylum. His friend was keen to help, but also wary of ‘doing anything too daft.’

  “They’re calling in a professional psychic,” Paul said.

  Mike sighed.

  “Reality TV nonsense. But if you want moral support at the séance, I’ll come along. I’ll be the one sitting right by the exit.”

  As always, Mike’s cheerful irreverence made Paul feel better. After they finished talking, Paul decided to call Kate.

  I can’t make this place my special project without her support, he mused. And if she’s willing to let spiritualists into the place, she can hardly object to a resident doing a little research.

  He started to search for her number, but suddenly found himself unable to work his cell phone. He gazed at the device in puzzlement, wondering what to do next. The silence of the apartment closed in around him as he sat, motionless. His mind struggled to make sense of the thing he held, the strange black rectangle with the bright pictures. It was almost magical, like something from another world.

  It’s like a tiny television set! The sort of thing they might have in the future, when people are living on the Moon.

  The puzzling interlude ended as suddenly as it had begun. Normality reasserted itself, and Paul flicked a thumb across the screen to find his contacts list. He dismissed the momentary aberration as a symptom of stress.

  Chapter 7

  “I was a stupid kid,” said Declan. “But I sort of knew what I was getting into.”

  He was sitting opposite Kate in the Grey Horse, a pub just down the road from Rookwood. It was a weekday evening, and the place was half full, reasonably quiet. The clientele seemed to be a mixture of professional types grabbing a meal after work, and younger people just beginning a night out.

  “This was in Belfast?” Kate asked.

  He nodded, took a swig from his pint of Guinness, wiped the froth from his mouth. Kate waited patiently, and for the first time, Declan felt he could probably trust her. If not with his whole story, then maybe with some of it.

  “I got involved with one side in the Troubles, as they called them,” he said. “This was in the late Eighties, early Nineties, when things were really bad. I had family involved with the paramilitaries, so I started out as a kind of messenger boy, lookout, that sort of thing.”

  He took another gulp of stout, wiped his mouth reflexively. Kate produced a small tissue, leaned over, and dabbed some foam away. The gesture surprised him. He mumbled thanks, laughed.

  “The curse of the big beard,” he said. “Maybe I should switch to wine.”

  Kate laughed in turn.

  “Not your style,” she remarked. “But go on, Dec, what happened?”

  “I got in too deep,” he explained. “I ended up – people got hurt because of what I did, and what I didn’t do. I was quite the good little Catholic then. Mass on Sunday, confession, the whole thing. I couldn’t reconcile my faith with what I was doing. So I went to the other side for help. I offered them some information, if they could get me out of the bloody mess I was in.”

  He saw realization dawning on Kate’s face as the implications of what he said sank in.

  “The other side – you mean M.I.5, something like that?”

  Declan shrugged. He recalled the covert meetings with a succession of hard-faced men whose names were obviously fabricated. A John, a Charlie, a Keith, no last names. He tried to describe the way he had gradually become entangled in the security forces’ web, become a British agent before he even knew it.

  “And you were still a teenager?” Kate asked, aghast.

  He nodded.

  “And then the people I was betraying found out,” he said simply. “Both sides had their informers, you see. I had to get out. After a lot of moving around, I ended up here.”

  “And you’re afraid of them catching up with you, the terrorists?” Kate asked. “Okay, but why be scared of the police?”

  Declan sighed, made a helpless gesture.

  “First, because any kind of criminal investigation might generate publicity, and certain people might notice me,” he explained. “And second, because there are people embedded in the police who still report back to my old comrades.”

  Kate nodded, then reached out and put her hand on his. Again, it was a surprisingly tender gesture, and for a moment, he wondered if she had feelings for him. He dismissed the idea as irrelevant.

  “But what happened in the washroom?” Kate asked. “That had nothing to do with the police, right?”

  Declan tried to explain the sense of menace he had felt since starting at Rookwood. He described the visions he had had, of masked men sent to punish him. It was as if his nightmares had bled over into his waking hours.

  “Hallucinations,” Kate said. “Surely that’s all they were.”

  “Hallucinations can’t smash your kneecap, or make it seem like it’s smashed,” he retorted. “Sure, maybe it is all in my mind. But if that’s so, I’m going barmy, properly insane. And, given all the other things that have happened, how can it all be up here?”

  Declan tapped his forehead with an index finger. He noticed Kate looking slightly uncomfortable, and realized he had raised his voice, come close to ranting at her in fact. Some of the talk at nearer tables faltered, creating an awkward silence, before the chatter resumed. Glancing around, Declan wondered what the normal, everyday people talking, drinking, eating, would think of his story.

  They’d think I was barmy, he thought ruefully. And they might be right.

  “Okay,” Kate sighed, “I’ve tried very hard to ignore the weird stuff. Focus on the job, career, all that jazz. But you’re right. There’s something seriously wrong at Rookwood.”

  “You think this TV psychic will do any good?” he asked, trying not to sound incredulous.

  Kate shrugged.

  “Give the people what they want,” she said.

  Declan groaned quietly.

  “I’ve seen what a lot of people want, believe me,” he said, picking up his pint again. “And it can be pretty stupid and dangerous.”

  Kate was about to speak when her phone rang. She spoke to someone for a few moments, then explained where she and Declan were before ending the call.

  “That’s our new American tenant,” she explained to Declan. “He wants to talk to me about the haunting.”

  ***

  Paul set off for the Grey Horse, mulling over what he might say to Kate Bewick and the caretaker. Both must be well aware of the strange situation at Rookwood, he reasoned. And yet, they might not agree that his approach, trying to find the root of the problem, was best.

  But I’m a historian, he thought, as he walked down toward the open gates. Digging into the past is what I do.

  “We must study the past if we’re to understand the present,” he said under his breath, rehearsing the argument he might have to make.

  As he left the bounds of Rookwood, Paul noticed the gray-haired lady he had seen on his first visit. On a sudden impulse he decided to speak to her, reasoning that if she had worked at the old asylum, she might have some useful information. When she saw him approaching, she looked disconcerted and started to
hurry away. She took out a remote and unlocked a small, powder-blue Fiat.

  “Please wait,” he called after the woman. “I just want to talk about Rookwood.”

  The woman paused, hand on the car door. She looked him up and down as he walked up to her, her expression a mixture of worry and suspicion.

  “What do you want?” she asked. “It’s not a crime to stand on a public street, not in this country anyway.”

  “I know,” he said in a placatory tone, “but you seem to spend a lot of time outside that place.”

  He nodded at Rookwood, just visible over its surrounding walls.

  “What do you want?” she repeated, opening the car door. “If you’ve got nothing sensible to say, I’ve got better things to do.”

  “Did you work there, in the old asylum?” he asked, bluntly. “Because if so, you must know some bad things happened there. Something that left a – a kind of residue.”

  Now the woman looked genuinely annoyed.

  “How dare you?” she demanded. “Do I look that old? Of course, I didn’t work there. Nobody who worked there is still alive.”

  “Because they died in a fire, right?” he asked.

  The woman nodded reluctantly.

  “And what caused the fire?” Paul went on.

  “I don’t know!” she replied, sounding exasperated. “I was less than a year old when it happened, young man.”

  Paul decided to give up. She was clearly not in the mood to volunteer information. But as he turned to walk away, the woman called after him.

  “Have you seen – any of them?”

  He stopped and turned. The woman was still standing, her expression anxious. He wondered how much she knew about recent events inside Rookwood.

  “You mean ghosts?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “Yeah,” he said. “I’ve seen a girl called Liz. She’s about sixteen, I think. Or was, when she died. And I’m not the only one to see her. There was some kind of doctor as well. Why do you ask?”

  Instead of replying, the woman stared at him, her mouth moving silently. Then she climbed into the car, slammed the door, and started the engine. He watched as the Fiat sped off, swerving erratically in the light traffic, and wondered what the woman’s deal was.

  Too young to work there, he thought. But maybe her mother or father did. She might be wondering how and why they died.

  He filed the idea away for future reference and resumed his walk to the Grey Horse. Not for the first time, he noticed that his spirits had lifted simply by leaving the environs of Rookwood.

  ***

  Nearly two hours had passed since Paul had met with Kate and Declan. In that time, he had been totally open about his experiences since arriving at Rookwood. He was fairly sure, reading non-verbal signals, that Declan had not been so forthcoming. Kate, for her part, insisted that she had never felt anything more concrete than ‘cold spots’ and ‘a sense of being watched sometimes.’

  “I wonder if that’s because you’re less vulnerable,” Paul suggested. “If I have my mother’s tendency towards – well, let’s call it what it is, mental illness, I might be more susceptible. You might be altogether more well-balanced, Kate – a stable personality, with no dark corners or suppressed traumas.”

  She laughed at the suggestion, but nervously.

  “Yeah, we’re talking about a taboo subject,” Paul went on. “Not ghosts or hauntings, but lunacy, madness, being crazy – all the usual terms apply. Nobody’s comfortable with it. It’s so much easier to be afraid of ghosts than of going insane.”

  “And you think,” Declan said slowly, “that Rookwood puts those two fears together, preys on people’s mental vulnerability?”

  Paul nodded, glad that the caretaker wasn’t dismissing his ideas out of hand.

  “It does make a kind of sense,” he pointed out. “A place where terrible mental torment occurred. What Ella Cotter said about bad men keeps bugging me. Could she have meant the – let’s call them ghosts, psychic residue, whatever – were kind of driving Jeff Bowman to commit some heinous crime?”

  Kate shook her head, frowning.

  “But how does that square with him being flung out of the window?” she asked. “This Liz character you and Ella both encountered seems to have protected the girl.”

  “Two rival factions,” Declan said. “Or rather, rival forces. Liz on the one hand, this doctor you saw on the other.”

  “Except that Ella said ‘bad men,’” Paul pointed out. “That implies some kind of group, perhaps former inmates. Or maybe staff members.”

  They discussed the possibility for a while but reached no conclusion. However, Kate surprised Paul by giving a possible name to the doctor.

  “Miles Rugeley Palmer,” she said. “He’s listed as the last director of the asylum. He died, along with most of the staff and patients, when it was burned down. When I took the job I did a little background research, that was one of the details I thought was irrelevant. But the name stuck in my mind – it’s rather unusual.”

  A few seconds of Googling confirmed what Kate had said. Paul noted that the doctor’s body had been identified from dental records after the asylum was gutted by fire. He found news reports that stated almost everyone in the building had ‘perished from burns or smoke inhalation.’ The cause of the fire, however, was apparently never established.

  “So that’s where you’ll start?” Declan asked. “Trying to find out what went on in the run-up to the fire?”

  “It seems logical,” Paul said. “Even if it was just a horrendous accident, we’re still living through a kind of paranormal aftermath. If we’re going to do something about it, we have to at least try to understand it.”

  “But what can we do?” Kate asked. “Exorcise the spirits?”

  “Tell Annie’s story,” Paul said. “How about that? You must have seen those words. Maybe we can identify her. Perhaps simply telling the truth will free the captive spirits, or whatever you want to call them.”

  Kate and Declan both looked dubious, but did not disagree outright. Paul could not blame them for being skeptical. He felt sure that getting at the truth would help in some way.

  But maybe that’s the professional historian in me, he thought. Always assuming knowledge confers power.

  “We’d better be getting back,” Kate said, checking her watch. “That woman will be here soon.”

  “What woman?” Paul asked, then realized who she meant.

  “Yep,” Kate said, seeing his appalled expression. “Imelda Troubridge, famed psychic, is coming to have a look around tonight. Apparently, she was very keen to drop everything and rush up here from Manchester. Her train should be arriving in a few minutes.”

  Declan gave a contemptuous grunt.

  “Yeah, violent death – it brings these publicity seekers buzzing around like flies.”

  As they walked back to Rookwood, the summer sun began to set, bathing the old asylum in a garish red light.

  ***

  Imelda Troubridge was a short, middle-aged woman wearing a striking amount of jewelry. Every finger was adorned with flashy rings, and her throat and wrists were festooned with a prodigious amount of gold. As she breezed into the foyer of Rookwood, Paul wondered how long it took the alleged psychic to get through airport security. She was also dressed in flowing garments that, to Paul, seemed to be somewhere between a nightdress and a sari. Imelda was accompanied by a stocky, tough-looking man with a camera, who seemed to follow her every tinkling move.

  Sadie Prescott was at the head of a small welcoming committee of about a dozen residents, most of whom Paul knew by sight. Before Kate Bewick could say anything, Sadie rushed forward to greet the celebrity.

  “We’re all so grateful you could come!”

  “Ah yes!” Imelda breathed, dramatically. “I already feel turbulence in the mental atmosphere. There are so many troubled souls here.”

  As her cameraman continued filming, the psychic was introduced to Kate and Declan, then th
e residents. Paul noticed, as he stayed at the back of the small crowd, that Imelda made a point of holding onto a person’s hand a little longer than normal. She also looked people in the eye with a practiced show of sincerity. To him, she reeked of phoniness, like a too-slick politician. But she was clearly more impressive to others.

  After the introductions, Imelda asked to be taken to the ‘main focus of the disturbance.’ This prompted some discussion, as the Cotter’s flat was the site of the most recent incident. However, after a couple of minutes it was agreed that the East Wing was, as Declan put it, ‘the spookiest part of the building.’ As soon as she heard this, the psychic declared that she would ‘conduct a preliminary investigation’ and swept out of the foyer.

  “This is like a cheap sideshow,” Paul said to Kate. “How can anyone be taken in by this stuff?”

  Kate looked helpless.

  “If something serious happens, I could be sacked,” she lamented. “But if I’d kept her out, I’d have Sadie making formal complaints to my bosses in London.”

  “There’s a good chance nothing will happen,” said Paul, keen to reassure her. “It’s not as if she has any special abilities. And these ghosts seem to zero in on individuals who are isolated to some degree, not people in crowds.”

  By the time Paul and Kate caught up with the main group, Imelda was standing in the middle of the first room. The woman was breathing deeply, eyes closed, hand raised for silence. Her taciturn assistant had turned on his camera light, as the sunlight was almost gone, and the room was deep in shadow. The sky visible through the plastic-covered windows was the color of blood.

  “Yes,” said Imelda. “Yes! I sense troubled souls, swarming around us, seeking peace, but not finding it. There is no death, merely transition. But sometimes that process is stalled, and spirits that have suffered great trauma linger in the places they knew in, what we call, life.”

  The medium walked around the room where the drill incident had occurred, making comments that – to Paul – merely proved she could follow news reports. Again, however, her audience seemed impressed. There was rapt silence from the onlookers as Imelda turned slowly in the center of the room, jewelry tinkling.