Because of the Narrative, they had found they could traverse at least one way through the abyss even though someone had dropped a structure on it on this world’s side; mass and solidity were concepts of logic, a reasoning that didn’t matter to them, nor to the powers contained in the pages of the Narrative. The abyss could be filled with all the structures of this world and just keep going on and on, limitless, bending around corners and taking up space where it pleased.
Tonight, the chaotic ones moved forth again from the Old Ward, trying on new faces. There were minds in the nearby structure that were like the inside of the Old Ward. Minds steeped in the essences of the abyss that had been spilling through. Minds to play with, let fester, then to taste.
Beneath the apartments, the black pool pulsed excitedly.
NINE
What Wayne eventually found at the library regarding the early days of the Bridgehaven Asylum was unusual, to say the least.
At first, he couldn’t find anything to add to his base of knowledge about the apartments or the asylum. There wasn’t very much on the Internet; he’d found an obscure reference on a website about abandoned asylums that linked to a 1992 article on the 100th anniversary of Bridgehaven. It mentioned a Dr. Eagan Fullbright, brilliant psychiatrist and firm supporter of the theories of mental healthcare purported by Dr. Thomas Story Kirkbride and his design-as-therapy buildings. Dr. Fullbright had been appointed Director of the new Bridgehaven Asylum, to oversee a staff of 70 and a patient body of about 450. By the mid 1900s when Fullbright retired, budget cuts had reduced the staff to 50, although the number of patients crammed into the asylum was closer to 520. Development of psychoactive drugs rendered some of Kirkbride’s (and thus, Fullbright’s) methods obsolete. But the staff didn’t quite bridge the gap between the method of treating patients as human beings by building them up body and soul and medicating them for their psychiatric disorders. In the chasm in between, a lot of patients fell prey to victimization, abuse, and neglect.
This wasn’t what really interested Wayne, though. He’d done extensive research for his article on both the apartment building and the asylum, so he knew all that already.
The only item of importance to him was the fact that despite the deteriorating conditions, the lack of funding and such, there was no record of significant tragedy or scandal to mar the reputation Fullbright had worked so hard to build until the massacre in the 1980s. That, Wayne knew, had been bad enough to encompass years’ worth of tragedy and scandal. However, little was reported on that particular event, either. Article after article on the asylum told the same story: the promising humanitarian start and subsequent fall of a mighty historical landmark, a briefly touched-upon tragic end, and the highways of progress that reclaimed valuable land to build apartments.
What Wayne was looking for, he supposed, was a connection to something possibly more...supernatural. Maybe some mention of the mangled girl he kept seeing—who she was in life, maybe how she died. He thought it easily possible, given the tragedies that happened on the grounds, how much blood and horror and violence had soaked into the place, that the apartments could be haunted. He felt pretty sure of it, actually, especially after what he’d seen the day before in the parking lot, when all the tenants had been gathered after the death of Mrs. Roesler. Wayne was pretty sure he was the only one who had seen the girl. In a way, the idea of a ghost was easier to accept than the idea of a brain tumor. So he went that route next.
After some digging and cross-clicking, he found an entry on HauntedAsylumsofAmerica.com. He scanned through it, looking for mention of the girl. There were no specific individuals mentioned, but in his mind, the whole entry supported the idea the apartments might be haunted. He printed an excerpt of the entry which read as follows:
Bridgewood Asylum
Official records indicate Bridgewood Asylum was closed due to funding cutbacks, asbestos, and the deinstitutionalizing of mental health care. However, evidence exists of higher rates of neglect and abuse, sexual assaults, and drug use among both patients and staff, and impending investigations into the alleged misconduct may have played a part.
Those official records, according to sources, claim that the real reasons for the facility closing are downplayed if not flat out denied or ignored. The rumors of the locals in the town below indicate a massacre involving both patients and staff in the early part of the decade caused such a scandal that town officials were compelled to bury the truth—literally—under brand new concrete and stone. The details of the massacre are wild and sometimes conflicting, but invariably report orgies, cannibalism, human sacrifice, and torture. The few survivors of the massacre, when interviewed, claimed that monsters “from the black puddle of space and nothing” drove them to kill. It is worth noting that this answer was given consistently by both patients and staff involved in the incident. Medical tests indicated no presence of chemical substances in their blood streams, and subsequent inspections of the building found nothing in the building material to cause auditory and visual hallucinations (high levels of asbestos were discovered, though asbestos is not known to cause hallucinations).
Nothing of the asylum’s residency wards, treatment areas, or isolation areas remain; the entire structure of the asylum has been torn down with the exception of the Old Ward (the central building of the asylum), where offices, registration, and patient files were kept. A majority of these files, particularly the patient medical files and the staff employee files, were removed by police after the massacre. Sightings of illuminated offices (although the Old Ward has stood without electricity since the ’80s) have been reported, as well as the occasional pretty nurses wandering the hallways. The most frequent sighting is of a balding man with a mustache and a briefcase entering and leaving the Old Ward. He is said to vanish through the chained front doors of the building on overcast mornings, and around sunset, has been seen to hurry down the stairs and disappear on the lawns between the Old Ward and what used to be its staff parking lot.
It is also interesting to note that the apartments were built on the site where the art therapy wing used to stand—the site where the worst of the massacre incidents took place, and where survivor reports claimed the “black puddle” was.
Bridgewood Estates Apartments
Evidently, the hotly debated construction of apartments on so notorious a landmark site was not without strangely coincidental portends. Unseasonably rough weather conditions, worker accidents on site (some fatal and some without determinable cause), manufacturing blunders, and permit snafus all delayed the original building plans. Further, upon completion of the building, a massive fire broke out less than a week after. Although no one was hurt, the building was completely leveled.
Reconstruction commenced late the following spring, and met with less of the original obstacles, although it is said the turnover in work staff was unprecedented, many workers citing “unacceptable conditions” and refusing to elaborate.
He read the printout again, paying closer attention to the noted details regarding patient and staff motives, and his gut lurched.
In all his previous research on the massacre at the asylum, he had never found any mention of motive for the killing. But here was an account of both patients and doctors claiming a “black puddle of space and nothing” drove them to kill. Wayne was used to trusting journalistic instincts, but there was something more than even that here, something he felt spoke to his own feelings of aggression and imbalance lately. A black puddle, or pool, a surge of darkness, adequately explained the feelings he’d been having, the sense of being drowned, washed over by a liquid hate whose surface he couldn’t quite break through.
Wayne didn’t feel like he was being haunted, exactly. He felt like he was being poisoned.
He poured through the excerpted entry again, highlighting every mention of the black puddle. He wasn’t quite sure yet how this new information might be able to help him, but it certainly seemed worth more research. Maybe there were toxic chemicals in the ground t
hat caused hallucinations. Maybe there was a cover-up here between the corporation that had built on the land and one that had dumped dangerous chemicals onto it. Maybe—
“Ahhh, Bridgehaven. One of La Claviére’s gates.”
Wayne jumped, turning in his chair. “Excuse me?”
Behind him, looking over his shoulder, was a short gray-haired man in a flannel shirt and slacks. Wayne recognized him as the head librarian, a jovial septuagenarian with a nearly eidetic memory for book titles and covers and a propensity to tell rambling stories related to books with often quite interesting diverging branches. They were nodding acquaintances, but the man’s warmth, the glow in his eyes when he talked about books, endeared him to Wayne.
The old man nodded a hello. His professor’s mustache billowed over an unlit pipe clenched (as an affectation, Wayne supposed) between the old man’s teeth. Deep laugh lines bracketed the man’s eyes behind thin-rimmed glasses.
“Sorry to have startled you,” the man said. “Couldn’t help but notice you’re highlighting the ‘black puddle’ references in that article.” He gestured at the computer screen. “That old asylum where all the massacres were. Those patients there and even the doctors and police all claimed a crazy sickness poisoned them and made them do those horrible things. Something that came out of a black puddle. Just reminded me of something.”
“About a gate?” Wayne asked.
“Ayup.” The man took the pipe from between his teeth and held it, his expression thoughtful. “That last Director before the place closed down, a man named Symmes, was a big bibliophile. Particularly interested in very old, very rare books. We’ve got a section here in this branch; you need a special library card and you can’t check them out or anything, but he had a card. Came in here asking for all kinds of things. Primers, old Bibles, travelogues. Oh, and of course, books on spirituality and the occult. ’Specially liked them.”
“I’m not sure I follow,” Wayne said.
“Well,” the old man said, gesturing again at the computer screen in front of Wayne, “we don’t have it here, but a few times he’d asked for this one book called Livre des Portes, or the Book of Gates, by an occultist and alchemist named La Claviére. It was written in the late 1500s in France. Probably worth a small fortune. From what I’ve heard, much of it was a translation of parchments brought out of Egypt by traders during the Renaissance. The parchments themselves weren’t Egyptian, though. They supposedly predated Egyptian hieroglyphics, were in some language the traders claimed was older than Sumerian, even. Lord knows how they were even translated; I’ve heard tell the characters of the language had...extra dimensions, aspects that made it unlike any language known to expert linguists. Anyway, supposedly, this Frenchman, La Claviére, got a hold of these parchments by murdering the trader carrying them. The translations then began to come to him in dreams and nightmares. In a fever, he wrote the Book of Gates. There were five—gates, that is—that La Claviére knew of, five he saw in dreams, though he thought there might be more. Gates to other universes, other dimensions, worlds beyond imagination, he said.”
Wayne nodded, confusion crinkling his brow, and waited for the old man to continue.
The old man put the pipe in his mouth as if smoking, removed it, then continued. “I guess it comes to mind now because Symmes died not too long ago. Around the time of the grand opening of those Bridgewood Estates apartments, where the Asylum used to be, actually. Suicide—sad affair. Left behind a family. Anyway, everyone here knew it was sort of a quest of his to find this book—this went all the way back to when he first took the job in ’79—and then one day, he just stopped. Stopped coming here altogether. Mid-eighties, I believe that was. Right before they closed the asylum down.” The old man shrugged. “I saw him once at the market and asked after his health and all. He told me he was great. Found that book he was looking for.”
“So, forgive me if I’m being dense,” Wayne said, fully turning in his chair to face the old man, “but what does this Book of Gates have to do with the massacre?”
“Nothing, if you believe sane folk,” the old man said, offering him a smile and a conspiratorial wink. “Coincidence, maybe. But this one nice fella on the police force—used to come in here to borrow children's books for his kids—told me Dr. Symmes claimed in interrogation that he had used the book to open up one of La Claviére’s gates to another dimension. That was right after the massacre up there, he said that.”
“And this gate—?”
The old man leaned in with a conspiratorial smile. “He said it looked like a ‘black puddle of space and nothing.’” He clamped the pipe in his mouth, and with a clap on Wayne’s shoulder, he moved on.
“Hey, uh—?” Wayne called after him.
The librarian turned around.
“Where is Symmes’s copy of the book now?”
The old man shrugged. “Don’t know. I don’t think anyone knows. Heck, maybe it’s still in the Old Ward.” He winked again and walked on.
Wayne sank in his chair and turned back to his papers. A gate to another dimension, one where something alien, something infectious and crazy had poisoned the minds of patients and staff alike. Where this black puddle had driven them to such frenzied heights of violence that even the shocker sites wouldn’t post pics or give out details. It was absolutely absurd. Insane, really. Wild and Weird-Tales-esque.
But then, it was no crazier than seeing the ghost of a handless, footless dead girl. It wasn’t so far a leap, if he kept with this chemical-dumping theory, that Symmes read from this book or performed some kind of gate-opening ritual and coincidentally, his patients took crazy to a whole new level shortly after because of exposure to toxins. If Symmes believed in all that occult mumbo-jumbo, it was possible he thought he’d caused the massacre. And that kind of guilt, combined with the belief that they were building apartments on a dangerous gate he had never managed to be able to close, might have driven him to suicide. It was certainly all possible.
Or...Symmes had opened a gaping maw in reality as he knew it, and what leaked through was a kind of toxin of its own.
Either way, Wayne felt pretty sure that his mind was not right when he was home. Away from the apartments, it was like a smog cleared from around his head, and he could put things in perspective again. But when he was home...there were the thoughts. The ones he didn’t really want to admit to his conscious mind he was having, the ones that followed sudden and uncharacteristic flashes of anger—violent anger.
The kind of thoughts that stuck in his head like a sinus infection, caught from some nasty exposure to craziness on the apartment grounds.
Either way...though even in the library, where knowledge abounded, only one of those two possibilities gripped him as being the truth.
“Don’t know,” the old man had said. “Maybe it’s still in the Old Ward.”
Wayne gathered up his print-outs and rushed out of the library.
***
In the crowd gathered outside after the death of Agatha Roesler, Larson saw the woman from 2C. It was only briefly, as she passed by a group of old-timers on the way to the lobby, but it was enough to move him. She had found his gaze, but her eyes, her whole facial expression, had been so hard to read. And there was something else off about her, something he couldn’t quite put a finger on.
Seeing her did confirm two things to his satisfaction, though. First, she had left him the notes to find. It had to be her. That distracted coolness he’d seen in her eyes had to be disappointment that he hadn’t yet acted on the suggestions so subtly interwoven in her curtains, certain steps to prove his feelings for her. Second, if he did, in fact, follow her love notes, whether on paper or in curtains, that he would finally know real, true, lasting love.
He’d all but convinced himself for decades that true love didn’t really exist. Experience had shown him that any number of things, big and small, could eat away at any kind of love, even the kinds that happened at first sight, that surpassed the loves that had come before�
��hell, even the kind that compelled people to label each other with the overwrought term of soul mate. Money and boredom were, in his view, the usual top two reasons. Both had destroyed his first marriage, back when he was just out of the academy and long hours for low pay had prevented him from bringing in enough of the former or providing a respite for the latter, in his wife Cici’s eyes. She’d had an affair, more emotional than physical, but evidently strong enough to send her packing and into Brett Whateverhisnamewas’s arms. The juxtaposition of “amicable” and “divorce” was a pitifully obvious oxymoron, even when there was no disagreement on terms, and the ugliness of theirs wore enough of love’s shine right off that it was possible to fall out of love with a woman he’d once promised before God, family, and friends to love forever. His second marriage had ended with an aneurism in his new wife Callie’s brain a mere three years into their wedded bliss. He’d loved her so, so much. Callie, with her beautiful white smile and green eyes and that lock of red hair that was always in her face. He thought he’d never love again, but time had blown enough dust over his memories of her to bury whatever romantic love he’d had. Nothing sustained love, whatever is was really, to make him believe it was forever.
But then he’d met Julia, and he finally understood. The only kind of real love—the only backbone that anything like true love could ever be supported by—was what others called obsession. It was intoxicating and all-consuming, but in Larson’s experience, it had a tenacity and immortality other kinds of love only grasped at.
He’d never really let the idea of Julia go. But this woman in 2C had brought it all around full circle. With her, he wouldn’t have to. It was fate, inexorable. It was one of the things the curtains had told him, that whatever was left of Julia, her spirit, the energy and essence of her, was in this woman. It sounded impossible, but he felt it and knew it to be true, knew it the way he knew air he couldn’t see was there, and there to sustain him.
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