Cherry Hill

by James A. Moore

“Let’s see what’s hiding in my head then, Doc. But I want to warn you, I’m not sure this is the best sort of thing to try.”

  “Why’s that, John?”

  “I think I’m hiding a lot inside of my head.”

  “Well, we’ll take a few precautions then. And don’t worry. Whatever you say is strictly confidential.”

  “Unless I tell you that I killed my family.”

  “Do you think you killed your family, John?”

  “No.” He shook his head as he stood up and the guards fell into formation around him. “I think I saw it happen. I don’t think I did it.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  Crowley smiled and looked at the doctor, unable to resist throwing a wink in the man’s direction. “Isn’t that what we’re going to try to find out?”

  ***

  They strapped Jonathan Crowley to a padded table, careful to make sure that his wrists and ankles were safely padded against damage. He watched the procedure without saying a word and waited patiently. For some reason, Phil had expected the man to put up a fight.

  Detective Montoya had handed him a list of questions that was preposterously long, and even as Harrington administered the drugs to his patient, Finney was going over the list, scratching through a few of them and making notes of his own.

  He knew when the drugs took effect. He could see the change come over Jonathan Crowley; his muscles relaxed and his eyes closed to the point where little could be seen but the pupils.

  “Are we ready?” Finney asked the question as he settled into a chair.

  Phil nodded and began. “Can you tell me your name?”

  “Jonathan Crowley.” His voice was steady, but dull: the inflections were missing and he spoke calmly.

  “Jonathan, do you know where you are?”

  He nodded.

  “Can you tell me?”

  “Cherry Hill Sanitarium, Pennsylvania.”

  “Excellent. Now, can you tell me what happened to your family?”

  Crowley’s face clouded for a second and then he nodded. “It killed them.”

  “What killed them?”

  “One that got away.”

  He paused for a moment to think of how to ask the questions. The last thing he wanted was a conversation that sounded like Abbott and Costello’s Who’s On First skit.

  “Go back a little for me, Jonathan. Tell me what it is, and who it got away from.”

  “Got away from me. Back when I was a hunter.”

  “Are you saying something you tried to hunt down killed your family?”

  Crowley nodded his head.

  “What were you hunting, Jonathan?”

  “Monsters.”

  Harrington looked at Roger Finney, who looked back at him with the same expression of curiosity and good-humored tolerance. They were dealing with a mental patient after all. You had to expect a few strange answers.

  “What sort of monsters did you hunt, Jonathan?”

  “Whatever needed hunting. Ghosts, demons, werewolves…just…just monsters.” The man’s head tilted a little. “You have ghosts here, too.”

  He resisted the urge to ask about the ghosts, partially because it was immaterial and partially because he was afraid the man might be right. The atmosphere in the asylum was exactly the sort that was conducive to believing in things that go bump in the night. “What sort of monster killed your family, Jonathan?”

  “Still not sure. It was hiding in human flesh.”

  That was, of course, exactly the sort of excuse that normally came out of the patients. Look at Granger. On the few occasions when he could get the man to say anything about why he committed his murders, the usual answer was because Dead God demanded it. Dead God, who was, according to the poor wretch, not the god worshipped by Christians, but another god, who had been created by the minds of men and left stillborn due to lack of worshippers. Nonsense, of course, but precisely the sort of reasoning most of the deluded patients used; if not a monster, a god or angels or Satan himself. Anything that could justify their actions and keep them safe from the guilt they should have been feeling.

  “Did it give you its name before it killed your family?”

  Crowley’s brow wrinkled. “No. Names have power.”

  “How did it kill them?” Again the temptation to ask questions had to be resisted. He had a list of questions he needed to cover before he could start actually examining the psychosis of his patient. The need to help the police in their investigation was frustrating.

  Crowley frowned and shook his head, uncomfortable with the question. “It’s okay, Jonathan, nothing can hurt you here.”

  The man laughed. “Liar. It made me watch. It broke their bodies and made me watch.” He uttered a deep, long sigh of misery. “And then it ate their souls.”

  “How did it make you watch?”

  “Nailed me to the wall. If I didn’t do what it said, it was going to make it worse for them.”

  “Make it worse than killing them? How?”

  Crowley’s voice grew deeper and caustic. “You’d be surprised how much can still hurt you when you’re dead.”

  “Why didn’t it kill you, Jonathan?”

  “It couldn’t kill me. It wasn’t strong enough.”

  Finney shook his head. He wanted Phil to follow the script for now.

  “What happened to your family’s bodies, when it was done, Jonathan?”

  “It ate them. It tortured them, and broke them.” Crowley’s eyes were closed, but he opened them now, the pupils still dilated from the drugs and his gaze focusing on nothing. “It tore them apart and ate them and made me watch and I don’t want to talk about this anymore. I don’t want to remember this anymore. You have to stop now, Doctor, because I think I don’t want to remember this part.”

  Finney frowned and Phil joined him. The sentences coming from Crowley’s mouth were growing tenser, more structured and that shouldn’t have been possible. He had enough Sodium Pentothal in his system to keep a man twice his size relaxed for half a day.

  “John, it’s okay. Nothing can hurt you here.”

  “Liar.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “‘They are given eyes to see and yet they act blind.’”

  “What?”

  “There are dead people all around you, Doctor.” Crowley’s eyes opened and he looked first at Phil and then at the areas around him. “Some of them are angry. Most of them are scared. Ever wonder what can scare something that’s already dead, Doc?”

  Phil felt his skin crawl and despite himself, he looked around to see if there were any signs of ghosts around him. There was nothing to see. He let out a small chuckle.

  “Where is your family now, Jonathan?”

  The man leaned back and closed his eyes completely. “Dead. Gone away. Taken and hidden and lost to me.”

  “What happened to the man who killed them?” He looked at Finney as he asked the question and received a nod of encouragement.

  “He died in flames. He won’t ever hurt them again.” The patient’s lip curled up into a sneer. “I couldn’t find his body now if my life depended on it.”

  “Why do you have trouble remembering anything, Jonathan? What caused your amnesia? Do you think it was watching your family die?”

  Crowley shook his head. “Got something in my skull. Got it in the plane crash. Hurts sometimes, but didn’t stop me.”

  Finney frowned and shook his head. “No record of that,” he whispered.

  “Did you ever see a doctor about that, Jonathan?”

  “I couldn’t. I’ve been…”

  “Been what, Jonathan?”

  “I think I’ve been dead.” Crowley frowned as he said it.

  ***

  They led Crowley back into his room without any semblance of a struggle. He was too dopey to do much of anything but smile. He’d never been one to use any sort of medication if he could avoid it.

  Now he lay back on his cot and stared at the ceiling, seeing li
ttle beyond the white of the paint and the shadows that slipped into the corners. He had said far too much, but in his own defense he hadn’t known there was anything to say.

  The most annoying part was that he didn’t really know much more than he had before. He’d hunted monsters? Okay, fine. There were ghosts and he could see them, but he couldn’t actually remember hunting anything, let alone the occasional werewolf or demon.

  There was that face, the smarmy salesman, and the deaths that followed. He knew from that experience that the man he’d hunted down was not normal, but there wasn’t much else to go on. He couldn’t think of any special weapons he had, or any spectacular abilities, either. Had he stopped hunting monsters because he lost his leg? He wasn’t sure, but he didn’t think so.

  “Moron. You stopped because you fell in love.” His words echoed through the room. Was that the reason? Maybe. He guessed there were a few cops out there who had either asked for transfers or left the force to avoid distressing their families. Would it be so hard to believe that a man who hunted monsters might want to retire to avoid getting torn into pieces?

  He started drifting: the thoughts alone weren’t enough to counteract the effects of the drugs they’d shot into his system and his eyes closed.

  A moment later he was sleeping far deeper than he had since his family was murdered.

  So he didn’t notice the shape that slipped through the wall and stared at him.

  ***

  It had rested and contemplated the things it had learned. Now it once again explored the buildings where it dwelled. Granger had given it a lot to think about, but not much of the man’s ramblings made sense.

  There was a lot to reinterpret.

  In the mean time there were things to learn from the people in the asylum and it wanted to dabble a little here and a little there in the process.

  The first thing it had taught itself as a result of moving around the place was that each of the entities in the large structure was unique. Dead or alive hardly mattered: they had different feelings and different flavors. Most importantly they had different memories.

  For example: Leslie Anne Hampton—who thought of herself only as Leslie—remembered every single visit by Ernst. The drugs that were meant to calm her down left her almost incapable of thought and almost paralyzed, but she knew that he came to her and did things to her. It had gathered that information from her mind when it settled itself into her body while trying to understand what the guard was doing to her. She was also aware when it entered her physical form and read her thoughts, but had convinced herself that it was just another strange dream caused by the medications.

  Its perception of the night guard had been altered by contact with Leslie. That was why it decided to touch him next, to experience him. What it learned from the experience was something new: hunger. Not the physical need for sustenance—or more accurately the psychic need in this case—but the hunger for more. Ernst had longed constantly for new physical desires: it had given them to the guard and in the process had discovered the beauty of actual sensations as opposed to merely the memories of interactions. And now, it knew, hunger was going to be an important part of its exercises.

  It had few needs to date, but suspected that would change in time. In the past it had merely done what it could for Alex Granger, but now? Well, now it would try new things for different reasons.

  Because of hunger.

  One of the many new experiences it was considering was building a body of its own, but in order for that to happen it would have to study more on what made bodies function.

  It paused in its journey through the building to look at the one living being so far that had actually seen it. The man was not himself: he was medicated and stared at the ceiling above him when his eyes were open, which was less and less of the time.

  It moved closer to him and felt the heat from the man’s body. The false leg he wore was a puzzle, but even without much by way of a proper education, it caught on to the need easily enough.

  The man opened his eyes and looked directly at it. Though he stared, his eyes did not see this time. They were focused elsewhere, lost in the medications and their side effects, perhaps, or merely lost. It had seen enough faces to know the expression worn by the one legged man was pain.

  Curious, it reached out and touched the man, sinking fingers through his flesh and into the mind behind the open, staring eyes. The old man’s body stiffened, and his lips twitched as it pushed forward, digging for the treasures hidden inside.

  A moment later it recoiled, and if it had a face to show expression or eyes within that face they would have widened in shock.

  It withdrew as quickly as it could, but not quite fast enough.

  The old man who could see it, also did something else no one had ever done before. He touched it. His hand lashed out and dug into it’s being, holding on tightly. The glazed over eyes were now clear and the previously slack mouth twisted into a violent sneer.

  It learned a new emotion in that moment, experiencing first hand what several of the ghosts had shown it previously. It learned fear.

  The man on the bed held it tightly, and it struggled to get away. His eyes rolled in his head and then, mercifully, the old man’s hand dropped free.

  It ran, the fear it tasted searing into it and burning through its entire shapeless form.

  Chapter Seven

  Kimberly Walker did not believe in ghosts and had no need for them in her life. What was important to her had more to do with helping those around her than with any sort of nonsense about specters, apparitions or things that go bump in the night.

  What she wanted out of life was simple: She wanted to be a psychiatrist. The human mind fascinated her. When she wasn’t at Cherry Hill, she was usually studying for one of her college courses and on those occasions when she wasn’t studying or working, she was at school. Though she’d kept quiet about her studies, there were several people who knew that she was getting closer and closer to finally getting her degree. She just had to be patient, which, fortunately, the job was teaching her.

  Her shift was over, finally, and it was time to head home for the night, which she was looking at as a definite blessing, because just lately the entire building was creeping her out.

  It wasn’t easy working with the patients down in what some of her co-workers called the dungeon: she often felt like she was working with dead people who hadn’t figured out yet that they were among the deceased.

  Everyone down in the dungeon had either come out of an attempted surgery with less of their faculties left than they should have or had just broken to the point where all the king’s horses and all the king’s men would never have a chance of putting them back together again. It saddened her on good days and made her absolutely heartsick on the days when she was already feeling blue. What could she do for them? Remarkably little, except try to put a little touch of happiness into their days. So she smiled for the patients, whether they had enough of a mind left to appreciate it or not, and she cleaned up their messes and she gave them their meds and in several cases she spoon-fed them their pureed meals.

  And she tried hard not to let it get to her, because when her shift was done, she still had work to do. There were classes she had to attend as soon as she was done driving the twenty-seven miles to the university and there was homework to take care of after that.

  And then there were the nightmares. They’d only just started, but they were usually intense enough to wake her from her sleep.

  None of the dreams were the kind she remembered. Instead, she had the pleasure of waking up with her heart pounding along at twice the normal speed and a scream caught somewhere in the back of her throat. What few images she could remember always revolved around patients in straightjackets or locked into the sort of cells that were left solely in the dungeon: old stone walled ten-by-ten rooms with little light and a barred slot in the door to allow any semblance of a view.

  But there were emotions involved in the dr
eams and she wasn’t one hundred percent sure they were her emotions. Mostly it was a feeling of despair and a lot of claustrophobia thrown in besides. A few times she woke up with the absolute conviction that she was being strangled to death, and on at least two occasions she came to knowing that she was drowning and had only seconds to live.

  Kimberly didn’t believe in ghosts. She was raised to believe in God and in the power of the human mind as a healing agent, but she was never raised in a house that gave time to the notion that the spirits of the dead could wander around in the living world, lost and alone. The very notion terrified her, and that was, she suspected, the root of her problems.

  Because the more she let herself think about it, the more she became convinced that her dreams were being delivered to her by the spirits that haunted Cherry Hill.

  Kimberly tried to push those thoughts out of her head as she waved a quick goodbye to Lionel Copper, the guard on duty at the reception area, and headed to her little Pinto out in the parking lot.

  Kimberly did the best she could to ignore the chill that lanced through her body just as she reached the driver’s side door. She did not allow herself to turn around and see if anyone was watching her, because she genuinely didn’t want to know.

  It wouldn’t have mattered anyway: human eyes could not see what was watching her.

  ***

  Adam Prescott had done bad things in his life, the sort that had resulted in him spending the last seven years of his existence inside the walls of Cherry Hill. The difference between him and a lot of the other patients was that he was actually beginning to understand that what he had done was wrong. Dr. Finney would surely take all the credit for that and Adam didn’t really mind because he knew the truth about his recovery.

  It was the people in the walls who were showing him the error of his ways. They didn’t show themselves all the time, but they were there and they let him know right from wrong every time he even considered doing something bad.