by H G Lynch
Finally, I had to admit that the most likely place to find them would be my room. My room where I’d imagined writing scratched on the wall, where I’d seen the red-eyed demon in the window. It was the last place I wanted to go back to, but I had no choice. I needed to see Casey and Chester.
As I walked down the hall, every step toward my room became harder and harder, my chest growing tighter like an iron fist crushing my lungs, panic clutching at me. I had a sickening, ice-cold feeling in the pit of my stomach, a feeling of dread and horror, the feeling that something horrible was waiting for me in my room.
The door was closed when I reached my room. I stood outside, hesitating, my gut churning. My hands were cold, my neck sweating, my head swimming. I didn’t want to open the door. I really didn’t. There was something inside, I just knew it with every fiber of my being. It felt like there was an aura of menace and fear emanating from behind that door, and I couldn’t…I couldn’t breathe…I couldn’t…I had to leave, just turn around and walk away, wait for Casey in the Common Room…
But before I could move, the door swung open on its own with a low, eerie grinding of hinges.
My stomach dropped into my feet, and an icy shiver ran down my back like a sharp claw scraping the skin off my spine. A sibilant whisper blew out on a breath of cold air, and I stared into the sucking black darkness of my room. The whisper said: Casey.
Almost against my will, my feet moved forward, like there was something in that darkness drawing me in overpoweringly. The second I stepped into the pitch-black room, the door slammed shut behind me with a bone-rattling clang of metal. My heart lurched, and I spun around, grabbing for the handle and yanking, but the door didn’t budge. It was locked.
The cold in the room was intense, like a walk-in freezer, and the darkness was overwhelming. I put my back against the door, pressing myself into the metal, my harsh breathing the only sound in the room. I wished for light, any light, even just a glimmer. The darkness pressed in on me like a living thing, creeping and slithering, wrapping sticky fingers around my throat until I thought I might pass out.
And then, as if some brilliant god had heard my silent pleas, the light above flickered on, and for half a second, I was unbelievably relieved. I started to thank whatever god had responded to my prayer, and then my eyes adjusted, and I realised that god – or more likely the devil – had only been playing some sick joke on me, and I desperately wanted the darkness back. I wanted to be blind. I wanted to rip my eyes out and erase my memory, as though I’d never seen what was in my room right then.
Casey dangled from the broken light fixture, which had been somehow pulled out of the ceiling, leaving a gaping hole and a tangle of wires. He was strung up by his neck, a rope of white fabric looped around his throat. His skin was horribly pale, streaked with blood like red tears dripping from his empty eye-sockets, dribbling from his lax, open mouth. There was puddle of blood on the floor below him, pristine and obscene.
On the bed, amidst a sea of ripped sheets and red splashes, his perfect green eyes and a wedge of pink flesh that was his tongue were positioned carefully on my pillow. Above the bed, the wall was stained with a bloody message:
HEAR NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to cry. I wanted to throw up. But I couldn’t move. I couldn’t even blink. It felt like when I’d thought I’d lost Chester, but a hundred times worse, so much pain I didn’t understand how I was still alive. It felt like someone had reached inside me and crushed my organs till they burst, like they’d smashed an ice-pick into my skull and disconnected my brain from my body. All I could do was stand and stare at the mutilated corpse of the boy I loved.
I never even got the chance to tell him, I thought.
And then it all came crashing down on me like a collapsing building.
I fell to my knees, barely feeling the impact of my kneecaps on the hard floor, and threw up violently, my body wrenching and shoulders shaking. Tears streamed down my face in floods, and I choked on sobs that sounded more like screams, and I wished so badly I was dead. I wished I had died in that car crash instead of Chester. I wished the demon had killed me instead of Casey. I couldn’t take it. I couldn’t handle this pain.
“Callie.”
I looked up to see Chester floating in front of me, his semi-transparent form blurred by my tears and agony. I whimpered at the sight of him, and he knelt down, reaching out a hand and placing it on my shoulder. “Shh,” he whispered, rubbing his thumb over my shoulder. “I know it hurts, Callie. I hope it never stops hurting.”
I was so distraught that it took me a moment to realize what he’d said, and I blinked, staring at him – his angelic face, his brown curls, his pierced ear. “What? What did you just say?” I rasped.
Chester smiled, but it was all wrong – his teeth looked too sharp, his mouth stretched in a way that made bile rise in my throat. His eyes flashed red, and I gasped, jerking away from his touch – his touch, I thought, staring at his hand. I’d been able to feel him touching me.
“H-how…?” I breathed.
He stood up, still smiling, and held up his hands. And then he started to change. Right before my eyes, his body stretched and oily darkness spilled over his skin, his face twisting and teeth lengthening. His eyes burned red as hot coals, and the demon grinned down at me and said, “Hello again, Callie.”
I scrambled backward until my back hit the wall. “Wh-what have you done with Chester? Where is he?”
The demon tilted its head and made a clucking-hissing noise. “Chester is gone, Callie. Long gone.”
My heart stopped. Rage boiled inside me, so hot and violent I thought I would explode. “WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO HIM!?” I screamed.
“Nothing,” the demon whispered, its voice as dry as dead leaves blown across the ground. “Chester was never here, my dear. Only me.”
“No,” I breathed, my chest aching. “No, that’s not true. Chester…he died, but he came back, he was a ghost, he…” Terror gripped me, and I felt my sanity slipping, my head spinning.
Then I understood. I understood what the demon had done.
Chester had never come back. The demon had just been posing as him, getting close to me, toying with me. He – it had latched onto my grief over Chester, and used it. It had gotten me put in this place, in the asylum. It had made sure Casey could see and hear it as it pretended to be my dead best friend, so that we’d connect. For all I knew, it had created that telepathic link between us, just to make sure we’d form emotional bonds.
The demon had set it all up. It had been planning this. It had been playing with me for months, using my emotions against me. Against us both. And then it had laid down its final card, played its final note, taken its bow before the curtain fell…and it had killed Casey.
HEAR NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL. The message on the wall…it was a joke. Because Casey was deaf, and it had taken his eyes and his tongue. So he couldn’t see or speak. It was all a joke.
I laughed.
I started laughing, quietly at first, and then more loudly, and then I couldn’t stop. I laughed so hard I was crying, and my ribs ached, and I could hardly breathe. I laughed until it echoed in my ears, and I didn’t sound sane anymore. I laughed like I had lost every shred of sanity…because I felt like I had.
The demon smiled, as if it was happy I was laughing at its joke. And then the guards came, and they were shouting, and grabbing me, screaming at me to shut up, but I couldn’t. I just kept laughing, because it was so funny…it hurt so much, it was funny.
The last thing I saw before they dragged me out was Casey’s bloody face, and for a second, it looked like he was laughing too.
Epilogue
** RJ **
“Who’s in this one?” the new guy asked as we came to the final cell on the Fifth Floor. I’d already shown him the others, and explained what they were in here for: almost all of them were homicidal.
I stepped up to the door of the cell next
to him, and said quietly, “This is Callie.”
He slid open the metal hatch and peered in through the tiny barred glass window. I didn’t need to look to know what he’d see – I’d seen it a dozen times, and it never stopped hitting me like a punch in the gut.
Callie, curled in the corner of the empty cell, her white starched dress smeared with blood and dirt. The walls were red with scribbles done in the paint of her own blood, her torn fingertips used as the brush. The same words, written over and over, the same words that had been on the wall the day they found her laughing hysterically in her cell, sitting the blood of her dead boyfriend: HEAR NO EVIL, SEE NO EVIL, SPEAK NO EVIL.
Sometimes, late at night, when I was patrolling the halls, I could hear her crying – at least, I thought she was crying. Maybe she was still laughing, laughing at what she’d done to Casey.
I didn’t understand what had happened to her. Callie had seemed so nice, so normal. She’d seemed to really care about Casey. And then she’d gone and attacked Dr. Moore, and killed Casey horribly, and only then had anyone seen the real insanity that lurked inside her.
Dr. Moore said Callie hadn’t always been insane – maybe none of the patients here had been to start with. But something had happened to them that had damaged them mentally. She said we should feel sorry for them.
And I did. I felt sorry for Callie. I felt sorry for Casey, and their families, and every single patient in this nasty place. Some of them could be fixed, and some of them couldn’t, and I felt sorry for the ones who couldn’t most of all.
But I couldn’t help but think that life happened to everyone; everyone lost someone, or experienced something that changed them. So wasn’t it possible that we could all be a little bit insane?
Acknowledgements
I have to thank my best friend for putting up with me when I get all stressed about my writing and reassuring me before my head explodes. And a big thank you to my family, who still love me even when I forget to do the chores or wander around the house muttering to myself like a lunatic. Love you all!
