Cherry Hill

by James A. Moore

  ***

  A few hours later, when both men had been given time to reflect, Phil settled down in his interview room to start his second session with John Doe.

  “So, tell me about your meditation, John. How long have you been able to do that?”

  “Long as I can remember. I got it fine tuned a bit when I was in the Himalayas.” His tone was completely casual.

  “What do you do when you meditate?”

  “It’s a method of calming myself. I’ve been a little stressed lately.”

  “Any special reason for the stress?” Phil shook his head even as he spoke. “I mean aside from the obvious?”

  “You mean aside from a dead family, being locked in an asylum and having to listen to the Screamer a few doors down the hall?” Doe smiled, his face taking on all the charm of a predatory animal getting ready to pounce. “Might have something to do with the ghosts in this place.”

  “You think we have ghosts here?”

  “Oh, yes.” Doe nodded his head up and down three times, very slowly. “You definitely have ghosts.”

  “What makes you say that, John?”

  Doe looked at him and shrugged. “Well, it would explain why the guy three doors down from me is screaming for them to leave him alone, now wouldn’t it?”

  “Well, John, you are in an asylum.” He couldn’t help letting out the barb.

  “Really? I thought this was a vacation resort. I was going to ask when all the campfire songs and the formal dances were supposed to start.”

  “So you really think this place is haunted?”

  It was Doe’s turn to be snide. “Will you think I’m crazy if I say yes?”

  Harrington cleared his throat. “Okay, John. Let’s talk about getting you better, shall we?”

  “What did you have in mind for that, Doctor?”

  “Well, first we have to understand why you acted the way you did and we have to figure out what your real identity is. Amnesia is a problem, John, especially in cases where you obviously have some of your memories intact. So I’m going to start you off with a series of questions about what you do and do not know.”

  “Wasn’t all of that covered in the transcripts you received from the determining psychologist in the case?”

  Harrington made a note on his papers about remembering that Doe was sharper than most, despite the heavy medications. “Well, yes, but psychology is largely subjective. His interpretations of what your answers to questions mean and my interpretations might not meet up too often.”

  “So, fine. Ask your questions, let’s see what we can get done today, shall we?”

  Doe slid around in his seat and got as comfortable as he could with the handcuffs that anchored him to the floor.

  “Okay, for starters, where were you born?”

  Doe looked at his hands, his face thoughtful, and shook his head. “No clue.”

  “What year were you born?”

  “No idea.”

  Harrington made notes next to each of the answers that came his way.

  “What did you do for a living?”

  “I’m pretty sure I was a teacher. I remember standing at a podium and talking to a classroom full of kids. Older, maybe high school, maybe college.”

  “Where did you teach?”

  “No idea.”

  “What’s your address?”

  “819 Sycamore Street, Irvine, California.” The man looked completely shocked as he got the answer. “Didn’t know I had that one in me.”

  Before the man could think about anything else to relax himself, Harrington continued. “What’s your name?”

  The brief victory faded from Doe’s face. “Nope. I got nothing.”

  “Your wife’s name?”

  “No clue.” He frowned, trying hard to get something useful from his brain. If Doe was faking the entire amnesia to get out of doing hard time, he was better at it than most.

  “When did you get married?”

  “July 12th, 1958.”

  “Where did you get married?”

  “I want to say New York, but I might be wrong.”

  “How old is your wife?”

  “She’d have been thirty-six.”

  He paused and looked at the old man in front of him. Somehow the geezer had managed to marry a woman easily half his age.

  “You can knock the smirk off your face, Doc.” Doe was looking at him, smiling again, his eyes half-lidded. “Or I can knock it off your face for you.”

  Harrington ignored the response and asked another question. “How old are you?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What was your mother’s name?”

  “No idea.”

  “Why did you attack the police officers?”

  “Because they wouldn’t leave me in peace.”

  “Why were they bothering you?”

  “I was half naked and talking to myself.”

  “What were you talking about?”

  “Dying.”

  “Did you think you were dying?”

  “No, I wanted to die.”

  “Why did you want to die?”

  “I had nothing to live for.”

  “Did you kill your wife?”

  “No.”

  “Did you kill your children?”

  “No.”

  “How many people have you killed in your life?”

  “Too many to count.”

  “Why did you kill them?”

  “They were bad people.”

  “How were they bad?”

  “I don’t want to do this any more, Doctor. My head hurts something fierce.”

  Phil nodded at the old man in front of him and made his final notations for the session.

  “I’ll have that soap and those carving tools in your room when we get you back there, John.”

  “Thanks.” The man managed a very weak smile. He looked like hell.

  ***

  Thirty minutes later, John Doe lay on his back in the room that had become his world and tried to sleep.

  It was a nice idea, but it wasn’t working. Every time he closed his eyes for more than a few seconds the emotions overcame him again. He could almost see his wife’s face. He could almost hear his children’s voices, but they were as hard to grasp as soap bubbles. Every time he had them within his reach they burst and escaped him again.

  His eyes felt hot and gritty from the tears he kept crying and he wanted them gone.

  “Meditating. What a crock of shit.” He rolled over and faced away from the cell door. He wanted no witnesses to his weakness. His left leg ached like mad below the knee, which was impossible, of course, because he had no leg down there. He made himself resist the urge to scratch at the insufferable itch that radiated from his stump. What had he told the doctor? That he’d stepped on a mine? Yes, and it sounded right, but as soon as he gave any of his answers they sounded like the truth. He didn’t know what he was making up and what was real. It seemed, for whatever reason, that part of his mind was working and part of it—

  He clutched the grips on his seat as the world went into an insane spin, tossing the sky and the earth below him around and around. His heart was beating hard enough to damn near paralyze him and his damned glasses had fallen away from his face. Not far away from him the single stewardess working the flight had given up telling everyone to be calm and was screaming at the top of her lungs. The fat man sitting in the seat in front of him was crying out for God to save him, and the engines on the plane were howling as they burst into flames. He never thought the damned things could get him from up here…

  —was trying to hide from some very painful truths.

  “Who am I?” That was the million-dollar question.

  John Doe curled himself into a tight ball and closed his eyes, willing the images and voices to leave him alone for a while. Eventually he slept.

  ***

  Did it have a proper name? No, not that it knew of. Its host, Alex Granger thought of it as a god that deman
ded sacrifices. It didn’t know if that was true or not, but the feasts Granger had delivered in the past had certainly left it sated for a time.

  Now it was growing hungry.

  Granger had managed to eat by himself today, chewing and swallowing while the nurse and two attendants watched. The nurse—Kimberly, with blue eyes and brown hair and a smile that made Granger feel gentle when he was around her—had smiled encouragements and then helped clean his face where he’d missed.

  It liked Kimberly, too, but not in the same way. Kimberly had a quality to her that it had found rare. She had compassion. The orderlies gave off waves of disgust and boredom, but the nurse seemed pleased by Alex Granger’s recovery from the surgery that had gone wrong. It couldn’t read their minds, but it could sense what they felt.

  Alex Granger’s body fell back in the mattress and seemed to slumber as it slipped away from him. While inside Granger’s body it felt safe and warm and blind. There were risks that came with leaving that warm safety, but there were also new experiences waiting away from Granger’s body. It had an insatiable curiosity.

  It slipped through the door with no concern for whether or not it was locked, and sought what it always sought: sustenance.

  The emotions that it sensed inside its host were diluted, watered down by Granger’s own warped mind. Here, freed of that particular burden, it could see/feel/taste so much more. The living beings around it seldom reacted to its presence—excluding only the old man with one leg, who had actually seen it and spoken to it. The dead, however, saw it with ease.

  What little it understood of theology it had gathered from Granger’s thoughts. There were concepts of good and evil, Heaven and Hell, and all of them made a certain amount of sense, but none of them seemed to complete the picture of a world in harmony. Ghosts should not exist according to Granger’s thoughts, but they were here and all around the place. Some of them saw it and moved in the other direction; some merely noticed that it was there and went about their own business, suffering a torment that left it wondering if Hell somehow occupied the same physical location as the world of the living.

  The dead suffered, most of them constantly, locked in their own mental prisons and unable to move from the asylum. Was it their madness that caused them to stay? Did they endure by choice? It didn’t know the answers, but found the questions infinitely fascinating.

  One of the dead came toward it, an angry thing that demanded satisfaction. This one was newly dead, the emotions still vibrant and pulsing, unlike the older dead that seemed to have lost most of their memories.

  The ghost came closer and roared, filled with fury and frustration. It did what it always did when one of the dead challenged it; it reached out to take what it needed. Too late the ghost realized the error of its ways and begged for mercy.

  It did not know what mercy was and did not care. Right now it was hungry and needed food. The ghost provided that sustenance without any choice in the matter.

  Nurse Kimberly walked through the both of them. She was talking to the man who had carved holes in Granger’s brain at the time. Quite unaware that they were doing it, both of the living beings shivered as they passed through the space it occupied. The sensation was interesting. Their emotions—he’s a strange man, kind of quiet, but cute in a goofy way and I’d pay money to get her out of that uniform and into my lap—flashed through its perceptions at the same time that they both unconsciously fought off the sudden chill.

  Later, when it had time, it would contemplate what the sensations meant. For now, it had two other tasks it wanted to finish before it had to rest again.

  What remained of the ghostly presence was struggling to survive. It crawled along the ground and tried to fully comprehend what had just happened.

  It looked at the wretched thing and felt the energies it had stolen coursing through its essence. Then it rose through the ceiling, pushing past levels of people and stone and furniture as it sought what it wanted to deal with next.

  Feeding was not a matter of physical satisfaction: it had no body. Instead the act of eating brought psychic impact, a myriad of memories broken and distorted, to sample. As a result, it was hard to concentrate after satisfying its hunger. It did what it could, pushing aside the rambling, screaming echoes of the psyche it had just devoured. There at last was the place it sought, the source of strange energies that it had felt earlier and that were now coalescing. The woman on the bed was incapacitated, her mind—what little there was of it—was locked into a stupor by the medications she was forced to consume.

  It settled down to wait, knowing that what it sought would come to this place as it did almost every night. It was patient. Granger had taught it that much. Sometimes, it knew, you had to wait for a while before you could get what you wanted. Why stalk the prey, when the prey will come to you?

  Chapter Four

  Night came to Cherry Hill as it always did, with a changing of the staff and a reduction in the lighting. For the most part the only noises heard were the sounds of medicated snores and an occasional scream just to keep everyone on their toes.

  Ernst Holbrook was doing his own thing again. He always changed his routine a bit, just to keep things from getting boring, so he started with the top floor for his rounds, and then planned to work his way down to the ground level.

  Leslie Anne Hampton was asleep when he got to her cell. He’d expected that. He was as cautious as always, and made sure to lock the door once he was inside her cell.

  He made it five steps toward her sleeping form, prepared to satisfy himself with her sleeping body, before the attack. Ernst staggered as he felt something cold slither into his skull, probing deeply not into the matter of his brain, but in his mind. There was no pain, merely an overwhelming sense of loss. Memories were shredded, ripped from him and devoured with all the savagery of a school of hungry piranha.

  The guard fell to the ground and moaned deeply as his body reacted to the violation. His pulse increased to the point where he no longer heard a steady beat but something more like a constant hum and his blood pressure soared to deadly levels. His face slammed into the tile floor and he soiled himself, as his motor functions failed him.

  Ernst, or at least what was left of him, lay there and twitched for almost five minutes.

  Then the thing in the room, unseen but most certainly not unfelt, tried something different. Looking at the body of the man before it, the thing decided to try physical gratification.

  Ernst was beyond screaming.

  So was Leslie. She did not witness the slow and methodical destruction of Ernst, and knew nothing of his death until the morning came and she awoke from her stupor.

  Then she screamed. She screamed herself senseless. What was left of the man wasn’t pretty to look at. Worst of all, perhaps, was that it was still alive.

  ***

  John Doe sat in his cell and listened to the chaos as it flowed past his little oasis. He didn’t know all the details, but he gathered that someone had been maimed, and very badly.

  His hands moved with careful precision, carving a heavy bar of Ivory soap into an image without any conscious thought on his part. Flakes fell away and revealed a face that he knew should have been familiar, but wasn’t.

  The amnesia thing was getting old. Something had happened to him that left him with scattered memories and he couldn’t stand it. How the hell could he know he was happily married and not remember the name of his wife?

  Before he could get completely lost in his darkening thoughts the door to his cell opened. The same two guards who’d taken him to his session the day before were standing there, looking particularly grim and even a little queasy.

  “Bad night, guys?”

  “You don’t want to know.” That was the older guard, the one in charge of security for the place. Doe liked him. He was straightforward and treated the inmates like human beings as long as they behaved.

  Being as he thought favorably of the man, John went with him and avoided causing a scene.
They waited patiently while he set down his carving and held out his hands for the cuffs he knew were coming. Then the ankle locks.

  Five minutes later they were on their way down the hallway and his session with the doctor. There was a slight delay while a medical team passed them by, pushing a gurney that had something strapped to it and covered with a thin white sheet. Whatever it was struggled and thrashed under the cover.

  Doe’s skin tingled as the lump moved on, and he stared at it for several seconds, joined by both of the guards who looked paler than they had before.

  Doe looked from the older guard to the younger, lanky man who was normally with him. “Friend of yours?”

  The younger guard sneered. The older guard grimly shook his head and said, “Let it go.”

  He dropped it. A part of him wanted very badly to know what was under that sheet, but these weren’t the right people to ask. They were in a foul mood and he was too frail and withered to antagonize them too much. And besides, there was something going on that he maybe didn’t really want to know about something that left him

  Afraid. Why am I afraid?

  nervous and edgy. So he let it go and shrugged. A few minutes later they were back at the interview room.

  Then it was back to the routine: the guards secured him in the room and locked his binding cuffs to the floor before stepping outside of the room where they would wait until his latest session was completed.

  This time he got a variance in his routine. This time it was the other doctor, Finney was the name, that came in to talk with him.

  “How are you feeling today, John?”

  “Like I’ve been locked in an asylum and left to rot. How about you, Doc?”

  Finney looked at him for a moment and then smiled. Nice man, not the brightest bulb on the Christmas tree, but nice.

  “I thought I’d take a little time and ask you a few questions, if you don’t mind, John.”

  “Harrington already that sick of me?”