A Night at the Asylum

by Jade McCahon

  The only thing strong enough to overcome my fear was anger. Tommy had been counting on that.

  “Come on out here you son of a bitch!” I was shouting now. There would be no more waiting. I scraped my sleeve against my mouth and raised the pipe over my head. I didn't recognize my own voice, ravaged by pain and horrors that couldn’t be manufactured by my imagination; they had to be shown to me. It was suicide to call out to Ead like this, but I couldn't stop. I couldn't keep quiet anymore.

  Fountains of tears blurred my vision, mixing with the water from overhead. I tore off my jacket, thinking of Tommy, how even in all his preparation his most vulnerable moment had been taken advantage of. I stalked down the hall out of the range of the water, trying to find some solid ground and guess which direction Ead would be coming from.

  My body was wracked with horrified tremors. I would never recover from knowing what really happened to Tommy. So many times I’d wished I knew, wondered what he’d thought of in his last moments, hoped and prayed he had gone quickly and without pain. Now the truth was like a scar on my brain that would never heal.

  At least not until I found Ead and killed that motherfucker.

  I was in a rage, flying through the building like a demon just loosed from hell. I was almost afraid that he had heeded the all-clear and stole away, doing God-knew-what to Emmett before he went. Then, just before I reached the stairs, the double doors opened. Could it really be him? Apparently, he’d been hiding from all his little cop friends.

  He sneered as he stepped in front of me. It seemed much too easy.

  But he was an arrogant prick, and arrogant pricks come when they’re called.

  He pointed the gun at me. Guess his buddy hadn’t found him and taken it away. I really expected him to shoot immediately. He didn’t. Instead he walked slowly toward me. I heard the click of the steel toes of his boots, stirring a memory that had been handpicked for me to watch and was now irrevocably imprinted on my psyche. Slowly I turned to confront him head-on. I hoped the hate in my eyes was apparent.

  Seeing him there in front of me, looking thin and insolent, should have caused me to melt into a puddle of fear. Since last laying eyes on him, my own anxiety and Jenny’s visions had transformed his scrawny frame into a superhuman monster. Being faced with the reality of him in the flesh was a welcome contrast to what my imagination could make out of him in the dark. However, I now had intimate knowledge of the fury that would explode behind his eyes, and the gun he held in his hand offered me no resolution but to stay where I was. In short, I was being stupid if I thought I could take him. He was looking quite smug in his police uniform, black and gray, with handcuffs hanging on his belt.

  “Nobody knows how to keep their mouth shut, do they?” he sneered.

  It was such an anticlimactic thing to say after such a buildup. I couldn't help it; a short bark of a laugh escaped my throat.

  “I guess you’re laughing about what I did to that whore, Jenny? Or…” he smiled. “Maybe about me bashing your brother’s brains in? Did that do it? I know you know, Sara. I tried to keep Emmett from telling you. But like I said, he can’t keep his mouth shut.” He snickered. Slowly he was moving closer to me, and I was backing away. “Personally I think it’s hilarious that you left a loaded gun on the floor and now I’m going to blow your head off with it. What do you call that?” He snapped his fingers. “Irony.”

  A tremor went through me at his disgusting words. He hadn’t mentioned hurting Emmett, so maybe he hadn’t found him yet. I couldn’t bear to think otherwise. Wet strands of hair hung in my face and my arms ached from holding the pipe in the air. “Actually I was just laughing about how psychos always talk about their crimes for ten minutes right before the hero takes them out,” I spat.

  “There’s no hero here, Sara. There’s only you and me. And I don’t think I want to talk anymore. There’s been too much of that already. In fact, if my brother hadn’t opened his big mouth, I wouldn’t be about to shut you up right now.” He looked dull and sleepy-eyed, almost bored with what he was about to do. “But he was insistent. He just couldn’t stop himself.”

  We were pacing around each other, me with my pipe, and him with that stupid gun. I never should have taken it from Emmett in the first place.

  “What I don’t get is how he even figured it out. He came here and found that helmet like it was on a goddamn GPS. I’m surprised he didn’t find Jenny. She’s part of the sheetrock now.” He seemed thoughtful for a moment, and then shrugged. “Not that it matters. He’s always got some reason to fuck me over. He was born spineless…” he sneered. “It makes me sick.”

  “I know how he found out,” I growled. “The spirit world. And they’re coming for you next, big guy.” I couldn’t believe I was laughing. My last stitch of sanity had finally unraveled.

  Ead chuckled, and I saw the bright flash of his straight teeth – his singular resemblance to Emmett. “You’re a crazy bitch, you know that?”

  “Yeah, it’s too bad your daddy couldn’t clean this one up for you,” I added. “Too bad you had to come back and take her away before they found her tearing this place down. You useless piece of shit.”

  I guess that did it for him. With incredible speed, Ead came toward me, his face suddenly contorting in rage. I swung the pipe but he knocked it away with his forearm like a piece of straw. He caught my jaw in one hand and with the other shoved the gun hard into my cheek, pinning me against the wall. “You could have lived if you’d just let it go.” His breath was hot and rancid. Lightning danced across his face. “What I’m going to do to you is going to make what I did to that whore look like a mercy killing,” he promised, breathing raggedly in my ear. My stomach roiled in disgust. His body vibrated with deep, menacing laughter. “I’m going to cut out your eyes and fuck your empty skull.”

  I stayed as still as I could. Ead grinned triumphantly, and while taking final stock of the horror in my eyes, he tilted the gun away from my face.

  It was only for an instant, but it was for as long as it needed to be.

  Quick as a flash, Emmett stepped up behind him with a length of electrical cord, squeezing it around his neck. In one swift movement he pounced on Ead, twisting the cord and pulling him to the ground. Ead tried to point the gun but instead it hit the floor with a clatter. He seemed so surprised by the attack that I realized he thought Emmett had left the asylum without me, fled like a coward. Emmett’s fist connected with Ead’s face, and all the while he was struggling to untangle himself from the cord.

  Ead wasn’t much taller or larger than Emmett, but he had police training and was insanely fast. And in the grand tradition of all maniacal killers, a superhuman strength did seem to suddenly manifest. He kicked his legs in the air and flipped himself around, taking Emmett to the ground, even as the cord stayed tight around his throat, choking the life out of him. Veins in his face were protruding and his eyes were turning red as blood vessels in them burst. It was horrifying to watch, and I was frozen to the spot. Once again my body would not move even as I pled with it, urged it, with all the mental strength I had. Ead finally wrenched the cord from around his neck, where a deep red welt began to form. Then he sank his fist into Emmett's cheek and pressed his thumbs into his eyes. Emmett cried out in pain, and Ead's frustrated growls echoed off the crumbling plaster walls.

  It seemed as if I were coming back into my body from a faraway place, where I'd been watching in detachment, completely overwhelmed with fear. When I realized I could move, I picked up the section of pipe and walked straight over to them. Emmett was on the ground and Ead was sitting on top of him, pummeling him with his fists. The pipe clutched tightly in my hands again, where it belonged, I swung without another thought. It was smooth, easy, and abrupt. I couldn’t believe he didn’t even try to dodge it. He had forgotten all about me, the girl who wasn’t the hero. The pipe echoed a loud crack as it connected with his skull. He fell in a heap to the floor.

  Emmett stared at me. I stared back. Neither of us said a
nything for what seemed like a long time. He was bleeding down one side of his face, but he was okay. I offered him my arm to help him off the floor, and he took it.

  The room was quiet except for the sounds of our ragged breathing. I didn’t dare put the pipe down. Like any archetypal horror movie psycho, Ead was sure to pop back up. The end of the pipe was smeared with his blood.

  I'd never seen Emmett raise a hand to harm anyone. I'd never seen the fury that had taken over his angelic face as he'd wrestled Ead to the ground, strangling him. So many hours ago I had wondered if a killer lurked inside him, beneath his gentle surface. Now I knew it was there, an inkling of a resemblance with his father and brother. It was the truth of his tormented soul. And I loved him for it.

  And then his face was calm again. His eyes searched mine, round and green and devastatingly bright. I used the sleeve of my sweater to wipe the blood from his face. We didn't speak, but our eyes locked in understanding. I was with him all the way, no matter what. The thing that swelled in my chest was more than love, more than desire. It was everything I'd ever waited for my whole life. And it was reflected in the emerald hue of his eyes.

  With a weary sigh I reached for him, buried my face in his shoulder. He put his arm around me and we stood there for another moment, just gazing down at Ead. He was on his back with his glassy eyes open, staring at nothing, his arms limp at his sides. Emmett reached down and picked up his gun.

  “Do you think he’s dead?” I asked, sick.

  Emmett pulled me closer to him. Turning my head toward his chest to shield my eyes, he cocked the gun and pulled the trigger. “Yes,” he answered solemnly.

  ****

  Twelve O’Clock

  The storm had calmed a bit. I didn’t know at the time, but Raymond had convinced the construction crew and the cops that I was still inside. I could sense the flurry of activity out on the sprawling lawn, the anxious waiting after hearing another gunshot break the still mid-morning air.

  Emmett and I started back downstairs in an exhausted trudge. In his “secret room” I grabbed my messenger bag. My phone remained silent, and so did we.

  We found the flashlight on the floor and picked it up. Emmett said he’d shoved the helmet out the morgue window before running back to find me. He seemed to have mostly overcome his shakiness. But for me, the ground was tilting. I knew we had to leave this place, but I didn’t want to forget about Jenny. She’d asked me and I was going to oblige.

  “Can we at least look?” I asked Emmett. His face blank, he nodded.

  In the laundry room, we decided the only place Jenny could be “part of the sheetrock” was behind the lockers, in the wall. That was where the helmet had been. Working together, we tried to push the lockers out of the way, but they didn’t want to budge.

  “Who can we trust with this?” I asked Emmett. “If we leave here right now, who can we trust to make sure she’s found?”

  “Roy Conroy,” Emmett answered, surprising me. “He’s about the only guy…who isn’t in my father’s pocket.”

  I nodded. Good ol’ Roy. “Okay. It’s a plan.” I grasped his hand and squeezed it. “Come on. Let’s go out that window. It’s the easiest way.”

  We hurried down the hallway and pushed open the double doors. A post-rain bluish hue bled through the broken glass, and on the left I could just make out the wooden frame where the freezers used to be.

  “Are you ready?” I asked him. I searched Emmett’s face. “Can you help me up?”

  His stare was glazed, far away. Both of his hands grasped my waist and he lifted me toward the window. His arms were shaking. He set me down on the ledge.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Yeah. I just thought…I thought I heard a cat meowing.” He had the strangest look on his face.

  I shivered, thinking of the story about his pet kitten, how his father had just wanted to kill something he loved. I half-turned and forced my upper-body through the window, my hands braced against the sill to push myself the rest of the way out. Strong hands grabbed me then, pulling me back down.

  “What the –?” What was Emmett doing?

  I was suddenly knocked to the floor so hard I didn’t even see what hit me. “You killed my son, you little bitch!” an angry voice shouted. My eyes lolled about in my head like marbles in a maze as I tried to reset my equilibrium. I wasn’t quick enough. A sharp, piercing pain shot through the side of my head and I realized I had been hit again, with something flat and hard. My left ear went silent.

  As I lay on the floor, I could barely make out the muffled and distorted sounds of a struggle nearby. I could see nothing but darkness and spinning bricks above me. I didn’t have the presence of mind to be scared. I only knew I had to try to get up, or the rotating floor would be the last thing I would ever see.

  Finally the room stopped its tilt-a-whirl. Yet my head felt so incredibly heavy that when I tried to lift it, my stomach heaved and I went back down to the floor. I was in trouble. This was bad. Instead of trying to carry my 500 pound head, I decided to drag it. My arms and legs were still cooperating. Though it was painful to do so, I concentrated on making them move in sync with each other, right then left. The pain in my head subsided enough to try to stand again, but then my body suddenly wouldn't follow my brain's commands. There were weird voices in my head. It was as if I was hearing conversations from the night being played over and over again, all at the same time, and somewhere in the middle of it was Emmett's voice calling out to me.

  “Emmett?” I called back. “Emmett! Help me! Please!” I could only see a couple of feet in front of me; everything was such a blur. Blood was pouring down into my eyes from the wound on the side of my head. I looked at the floor and saw that I had been hit with the business end of a shovel. It was now lying beside me, abandoned.

  I reached over to pick it up but my arm only flailed at the filthy cement. I was so dizzy. All I could hear was Emmett's voice and now Brad's, and two hulking shapes in the corner close to the ground seemed to confirm that they were struggling. I attempted to drag myself closer to them, closer to the door that led into the corridor. I was going to try to stand up again. I had to. Otherwise I would lie here and bleed to death…and I had to help Emmett.

  Gritting my teeth against the pain and nausea, the spinning walls and floor, I focused my energy on my arms. They moved to pull me into a sitting position. Little by little, my legs began to cooperate as well. I thought I could claw my way along the wall till I could stand. I made it to the framework of the old drawers, gripping the sturdy wood.

  A strange thing occurred then; perhaps it was someone jumping the gun, being impatient, perhaps it was fate, who knows? All I heard was a noise like a bomb going off in my good ear, and I was thrown once again, this time under the unyielding framework of the morgue freezers. A loud squeaking noise filled the air along with a cloud of dust. Bricks and stones from the walls and ceiling came down like rain, bruising me all over my body. The rubble barricaded the door to the corridor, but the rest of the room was gone. The framework braced the walls from collapsing on top of me and kept me from being crushed, but there was no way I was getting out any time soon. Because of the staggered design of the building, the three floors above us stayed still, but they were probably dangerously precarious now.

  After the dust had settled, I could barely breathe. I felt like my skeleton had caved in on itself. I coughed lightly and tried to open my eyes. Was I alive? It surprised me, but I was.

  “Stop!” I heard someone scream. It sounded like Raymond’s voice. At that moment I ceased hearing things and began to fade in and out of a dream-like state. It was nice; there were people I loved here. That’s all dreams are, I thought lazily, a place to go to see everyone you can’t see otherwise. I heard music playing as if from a great distance away and suddenly I was there. I no longer had a body. I’d stepped out. I was only wind, drifting away into the air without being seen.

  I was the breeze on my front porch at home, swirling the fra
grance of lilacs about the yard, tickling the feathers of the birds as they twittered in the trees above. Then I was myself, on the porch swing, a fan of red-backed Bicycle cards in my hand. The game was poker, and I had a royal flush, and this time I was going to take my brother down.

  “So?” came Tommy’s voice, and there he was, sitting on the swing beside me. His face was especially vivid, his eyes glowing like two golden rocks. There was no question this time that this was absolutely real, the same as being in my body, wide awake. But I knew I had left my broken body far behind. It was an amazing feeling. “What are you going to do?” he asked, and I had to distract myself from how free I was to focus on what he was saying.

  I looked down at my cards. “Well, I’ve got a pretty good hand,” I answered. I smiled at him, because he was smiling at me. “Do you know what it is?”

  “Of course I know what it is,” he replied. “But that’s not how you play the game.”

  “What do you mean?” I eyed him suspiciously.

  “I mean it isn’t about the part where you win. It’s about playing. I know your hand, but it’s your choice what cards to lay down.”

  “Tommy,” I said suddenly, folding my cards. I didn’t want to talk in metaphors anymore, and made a conscious decision not to. “Why did you come to me in the dreams? Didn’t you think I’d believe what you were telling me?”

  “Of course not. Did you believe it when I would open or shut the door to my room? Or when I’d flick the lights on and off? Or when I would call you? What about the magic marker on your red shirt?”

  I gasped. “That was you?” He'd totally let Jamie take the fall for that one.