by R. A. Evans
While working at The Tribune, Brady had on occasion found himself lurking about the Cook County Morgue. Always nasty and full of god-awful smells, morgues were notorious for dark humor and loose lips. Here, however, in the crypt beneath the Lake View Asylum, secrets were plentiful and Brady was in no mood for laughter.
The room was much bigger than Brady had imagined even possible. Creeping forward into the darkness, he expected his light to eventually fall across a wall or doorway. Instead, the thin beam continued to slice deeper into the darkness. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the glow from Brady’s flashlight revealed an end to the massive room.
Although still tiled in the same pale green color, the far wall was stained a deep rust color. Tracing his light along the length of wall, Brady was sickened by what it revealed. Anchored deep into the walls, heavy chains hung, ending in thick manacles.
Brady followed the trail of chains down the wall, his light dimming as it neared the corner. He crept forward, convinced that something waited in the shadows. His clumsy feet stumbled through debris. Redirecting the light to the floor before him, he found himself amidst a sea of skeletal remains.
“What the fuck?” he wondered, raising the light from the floor and back to the shadows ahead. Through the gloom, two red orbs blazed like beacons. With a final nervous step, the light from Brady’s flashlight fell across the last set of chains. Clasped together by time in the rusted manacles, with rotted rags hanging from its shoulders hung the skeletal remains of what had assuredly been a most unfortunate soul. From within its empty eye sockets, a pulsing red light emanated. Brady heard the scraping of bones as the skull twisted, turning its attention upon him.
The bracelet in Brady’s hand came to life, snaking its way tightly about his wrist, biting into the exposed flesh. Brady looked from the glowing eyes to his arm and back again a chilling voice tight with rage filling the room.
“I do believe you requested a dance.”
Abby awoke from her nap screaming. Gruff immediately began to howl as April and Maddie came running in from the next room.
“Right here, baby, mommy’s right here,” April sat cautiously beside her troubled daughter, still weary from their last encounter. She took Gruff’s lack of a growl as a permissive gesture on the part of her daughter’s furry guardian and wrapped her arms soothingly around the child. Maddie hovered nearby hands clasped nervously over her face.
“It’s okay, baby,” April stroked Abby’s blond hair, rocking her back and forth on the edge of the couch. “Mommy’s right here. Nothing is going to hurt you.”
Abby slowly caught her breath, wiping her tear-stained cheeks on her mother’s shoulder. “It’s not me, mommy,’ she said between sobs, “it’s Brady.”
April looked nervously from her daughter to Maddie. The Sheriff’s wife shook her head slowly, not understanding the child’s fears.
“What is it, Abby? Why are you afraid for Brady?”
The answer came with a crack of thunder overhead, accompanied by a bolt of lightning which instantly made the darkness beyond the windows light like fire. As the light exploded outside, inside the world went dark. All of the electrical appliances went dead as the power went out with a spinning finality that left behind nothing by a murky silence. April, Abby and Gruff all looked to Ms. Griggs as the sudden silence was pierced by the first shill sound of the warning sirens erupting through the storm. Maddie ushered her guests to the basement.
Brady was unsure which disturbed him more, the blood dripping to the tile floor from the constriction of the plastic bracelet about his wrist or the surreal conversation he was preparing to undertake with the mass of bones chained to the wall.
“Well,” Brady glanced down at his bracelet biting into his wrist, “can I assume that this blood debt has been repaid?”
The voice in the room laughed.
“I seem to recall your grandfather being equally as humorous,” the disembodied voice stated. “Of course, his laughter died with a single bullet. Pity, really. Much of this…nastiness could have been avoided if he had not taken the coward’s way out.”
Brady’s years of verbal sparring with his father-in-law had proven very enlightening. He could now recognize and deflect goading attempts for confrontation. While the ghostly voice teased, Brady contemplated possible next moves. His reckless planning had only taken him so far; roughly here and he quickly found his once clear thoughts now overtaken by panic.
“That’s one way to look at it, Ellis,” Brady was slowly backing away from the skeletal form chained to the wall. “I can call you Ellis, right?”
The red orbs brightened as the skeleton’s boney arms rose, snapping the chains free from the wall. With two staggering steps, the thing that was Ellis stood before Brady.
“Why yes,” it hissed, “that would be just fine.” It leaned closer, “I do believe you were about to make a point.”
Brady paused, collecting his thoughts, before raising his eyes and setting his chin. “Cowardice is one way to look at his actions,” Brady stated, shaking atop two very unsteady legs. “Although it seems to me that it took a fair amount of courage to pay your price. Blood for blood, right – that’s the going rate for vengeance these days?”
Ellis’s eyes burned with rage. “What do you know of vengeance? Of the price one must pay to find it? Only a man who has lost everything looks to vengeance to fill that void.” A boney hand shot forward, grasping Brady by the wrist. “The time has come, my clever young friend, for you to learn of loss.”
Frank stumbled forward through the darkness, no sign of the good Reverend. Crazy old man is on his own. Frank concluded more than a little put off by the man’s disappearance.
The .38 in former lawman’s hand provided an illusory comfort; he knew that bullets would be of very little help given the current situation.
Frank’s worried attempts to reach Brady by phone had proven fruitless, the savage storm outside was surely not helping the situation. Frank did his best not to worry about Jeff’s chances of riding out the brutal storm unscathed in his lightning rod of a mobile tin can.
As he approached the hallway leading to the morgue, he finally heard voices, barely audible above the sound of the storm. Brady’s usual confident tone was shaken, but still easily recognizable. The other voice, although having just the slightest hint of familiarity, remained a mystery. Frank halted, dousing his light, and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. A few moments later he crept forward, gripping his useless .38, and softly humming the theme from Ghostbusters.
Brady’s world gave way to blackness as he drifted between consciousness and…something else. The closest his racing mind could come to quantify the experience was a frenzied sense of déjà vu; everything seemed foreign yet familiar at the same time.
My flashlight! Where’s my fucking flashlight. He panicked, urging his eyes to more quickly adjust to the darkness. Ellis’s chilling voice responded.
“No need for light, Tanner. It is through my eyes that we look and they are more than accustomed to the darkness.”
Brady tried unsuccessfully to close his eyes against the disturbing vision that was slowly coming into focus before him. It took a moment for his racing mind to settle, but when it did he knew that what lay before him was no hallucination, but more remarkably, a memory.
Cradling the squirming bundle of rags against his chest, Ellis knelt in the back of the ambulance. Emily’s cries for help, once intermingled so strangely with the raucous laughter of the men, had ceased. In its place an empty silence reigned.
The Packard roared to life, once again lurching toward what Ellis could only imagine was the asylum. The car’s previous stop revealed little, although the sound of a seagull impressed upon Ellis a proximity to the lake. Beyond that clue, the whereabouts of his beloved remained a mystery.
Ellis’s grip on reality was slipping; the events of the last several hours replaying on a continuous loop in his weary mind. His thoughts bounded from one memory t
o the next; Emily strapped to the table in the morgue, Clovis’ bloodied hands between her outspread thighs, their escape through the trees beneath the burning sun, the demeaning encounter with local law enforcement, and the final separation in the back of the bloodstained ambulance. These brutal images, although shared with the love of his life, would forever be burned into his soul; a wound beyond healing.
Brady watched in horror, a voiceless scream searing his throat. He was both angered and sickened by the confused images. As witnessed through Ellis’s memory, Brady felt an odd sympathy for the man he had singularly identified as a soulless, blood thirsty monster.
“That, Tanner is your first lesson on loss.” Ellis’s disembodied voice floated through the darkness. “Funny thing about loss,” Ellis continued, “is that once you truly embrace it – there is nothing you cannot achieve.” Brady’s eyes, although wide-open, remained sightless, his body shuddering beneath the burden of Ellis’s tragic memories. “Achieve? The shattered lives you’ve left in your unforgiving wake, the souls you’ve tormented and this is your grand achievement?”
Brady’s question was answered in silence. The darkness closed around him, squeezing the breath from his chest. His sightless eyes rolled back white as Ellis pulled him once again into his dark recollections.
The Packard’s thin tires came to a grinding halt, momentarily stirring Ellis from his sinister musings. The bundle of rags lay quietly in the corner. Always a man of thought over action, the timid boy who had grown into a taciturn man poised himself on the slick floor of the Packard and prepared for the doors to open.
His wait was brief. The doors swung outward on rusty hinges and Ellis leapt from the darkness into the sunshine beyond. Eyes closed to the painful rays of the sun, Ellis felt Bill’s thick hands close over his shoulders, wrestling him into a headlock.
“Dammit, boy,” Wyatt’s nasally voice intruded through the struggle, “why make things more difficult than they need to be?”
Ellis opened his eyes, casting his hate filled stare into the greasy man’s face. Bill’s beefy forearm was wedged beneath his chin, painfully squeezing the breath from his heaving chest. Ellis could feel the man’s erection stiffen into the small of his back. He was confident Wyatt was sporting similar lumber.
“Doctor wants you, but I’m sure we have time for a bit of fun, first.” Wyatt’s tongue danced behind a disgusting smile.
Ellis’s reaction was shocking in both its speed and brutality. The bulge in Wyatt’s white pants collapsed beneath Ellis’s perfectly placed kick, sending the small man to his knees with an agonized groan. With Bill’s grip around his neck momentarily distracted, Ellis buried his teeth into the orderly’s forearm, tearing free a mess of flesh.
Ellis ducked free from his captor, spinning the man to the ground. He glanced briefly at Wyatt, noting with satisfaction the man’s agony before turning his attention once again to the larger of the two goons. The sorry man clutched his bleeding arm and whimpered at Ellis’s approach.
“I never touched you,” he cried, “Never touched you, you fucking freak!”
Ellis hesitated, Bill’s blood running from the corners of his twisted smile. The switch flipped. The monster that everyone envisioned when first setting their sights on him had finally been unleashed. Spitting the flesh to the ground, Ellis savored the look of fear in the orderly’s teary eyes.
“William, William, William,” Ellis teased through bloodstained teeth. “No worries, there’s plenty of time for us to get acquainted.”
Ellis pounced. Although outweighed by more than one-hundred pounds, Ellis’s adrenaline-fueled attack overwhelmed the mountainous orderly. Blinded by fury, Ellis savagely pummeled the prone man; fists and fingers tearing into the man’s soft flesh. Quickly, Ellis’s arms were slick with fresh blood and his torn nails hung from tired fingers.
Elis was so caught in this frenzied state of cruelty that Ellis failed to notice the long shadow of Dr. Wesley Clovis fall across his shoulders. The last thing he heard before the shovel struck the back of his head was the whoosh of displaced air, and what he thought was the muffled cry of a baby.
The coppery taste of blood was heavy in Brady’s mouth as the nightmarish images slowly faded from his mind, leaving him once again in the pitch black of nothingness. He rolled his tongue along his teeth, convinced he would find bits of flesh clinging to his incisors. He was never so gladdened by disappointment.
“It’s an acquired taste,” Ellis’s ethereal voice taunted him through the darkness.
Brady’s patience, like his sanity, was wearing dangerously thin. Ellis’s loss, although brutal in its grizzly detail, was no less tragic than his own. Loss found its way into most people’s lives.
Karen’s untimely death with their unborn child, not to mention the passing of both parents, carved out deep chunks of the man, husband and father he had hoped to be; leaving a hollow void inside that nothing seemed able to fill.
Brady’s rambling thoughts stopped dead on that thought. Father he had hoped to be. Ellis’ loss wasn’t as deep as he believed.
“Your son, Ellis, the baby – he’s alive!”
Instantly, Ellis’s piercing red eyes flared to life in the darkness. Like a thunderclap Brady’s mind exploded into a torturous ache worse than he ever imagined possible. Brady could feel the specter’s boney fingers digging into his thoughts and searching for the truth within Brady’s clouded memories.
This unearthly connection with Ellis’s tormented soul provided Brady a window into the sinister depths of the monster’s thoughts, feelings and tragic recollections. Brady felt like a tourist in his own mind, watching over a skeletal shoulder as Ellis’s rotted fingers dug through Brady’s memories like the pages of a dust-covered scrapbook; the photographs in no specific order.
His ethereal companion probed deeper into Brady’s memory banks, uncovering the jumbled emotions about his grandfather’s suicide; a man he had never met yet seemingly shared so much with, the forgotten grief of a stillborn baby sister he knew only as Baby Kate, and then jumping forward to the last confusing conversation with Collins about the baby…and Lionel. Deeper still, Ellis lingered at the image of Brady resting at the bottom of Asylum Lake greeted by the ghostly specter of his lost love.
As the pain and shock ripped through Ellis and into Brady, the memory took a solid form, a sense of reality that Brady had for so long blocked from his fractured mind.
With the memories tumbling forth, Brady was crippled by Ellis’s agonizing revelation of the horrible birthright he has passed on to his only son; all in this twisted pursuit for vengeance. Brady could feel the searing rage within the tortured soul cool, icing over with horror at the wicked legacy he has left this world; the innocent lives he has stolen. It was the fate of his beloved Emily however, that finally extinguished the last spark of Ellis’s merciless wrath.
“There can be no more blood, Tanner, not from you. My vengeance is best placed elsewhere.” Ellis’s ghostly voice had softened in defeat. “He’s out there Tanner, Dr. Clovis, and he has my son.” Another long pause and then, “The veil will be parted. You must stop him. And you must free her, Tanner, my beloved and forgive…”
Brady’s precarious bond with the dark spirit shattered beneath Ellis’s final plea, shaking the morgue’s tile floors and walls, releasing the shackled skeletal remains from their iron bonds.
Oh shit, Brady worried, raising his aching body from the dirty floor. What have I done? Groping through the darkness for his lost flashlight, Brady’s eyes slowly adjusted to his grim surroundings. With a base drum of thunder booming ominously overhead, the shaken reporter, turned-archaeologist, turned medium stumbled from the morgue, fleeing through the darkness in search of his friends.
It took ten days to restore power to the area, with crews from across the state working night and day to set things right. Although comparable to the legendary storm of 1958, most agreed that Bedlam had definitely been spared from the worst.
Brady spent those days s
urrounded by his rag-tag group of adventurous in the refuge of Frank’s house licking his wounds; both of the physical and emotional variety. The Up North House had weathered the storm well, only suffering minor damage, but Brady was unenthusiastic about disturbing the scab that was just now forming over the secrets of his family. To dig through the yet undiscovered secrets of the home was a task waiting for him inside the log home.
The ladies, and Henry, had ridden out the storm quite nicely, tucked safely into the Griggs’s fortified basement. Abby’s emotional trauma, much like Brady’s, was healing with only an occasional nightmare as a reminder; her resiliency gave them all strength.
The good Reverend had simply disappeared. Brady was unsure what to make of the old man’s vanishing act, but instinctively knew that it somehow involved his continuing search for Lionel…and answers. He could not completely rule out one day crossing paths with Collins, but in no way was looking forward to the event.
Exactly two weeks from the night of their harried flight from the asylum, the Michigan State Police were dredging the bottom of Asylum Lake. Frank’s initial attempts to plead his case for their involvement in his tale of the supernatural were met with polite declinations. His reverent presentation of Bowling’s badge however, had changed their minds. Although many of the elder rank in file in Lansing remained convinced that Frank was just a dried-up old coot in search of attention, his service in locating a fallen brother earned him half a day of man power to put his delusional conspiracy theory to rest.
“Captain, we got something.” The voice crackled from the walkie-talkie in the trooper’s hand. Brady waited anxiously with Frank and April on the dock of the Up North House. Beside them stood Captain Graham Birdsong of the Michigan State Police, a serious-looking trooper leading the still unofficial investigation. The officer turned his attention from the dive team stationed in the lake to Frank. “Roger. What did you find?”
