Highland Cove

by Dylan J. Morgan

  “How do we know where we’re going then?” Julian suggested.

  “Liam researched the building’s layout extensively online before we came here,” Codie said. “We made a few copies of the floor plans and we can mark off areas we’ve searched.”

  Kristen squeezed his hand. “Whatever you suggest, sweetheart.”

  He smiled at her, loved it when she called him that. Grabbing a couple of printed floor layouts from his bag, Codie unfolded them and handed one to Julian. “Kristen and I will go this way. There were female patients in this ward, and there’s a water treatment room at the end; we’ll head through there to get to the chapel. Julian, you and Alex head back along the corridor we went down last night, but go this way instead, past the recreation room.” Codie indicated a different route on the map he’d handed to Julian. “There were more than a few murders in there so it might be quite active. From the chapel we’ll all go to the operating theatre.”

  “A few murders, hey?” Julian said with a sarcastic laugh. “Thanks, Codie.”

  Kristen gave Codie’s hand a firm squeeze, and he wished more than ever that he’d suggested she stay at his house with his mum for the weekend. They could have gone shopping, or gotten their hair done. Kristen would certainly have enjoyed that more than wandering around an abandoned insane asylum on a remote island for two days, especially now that this storm had blown in.

  Lightning pulsed outside, as if to remind them it still had a firm grip over the isle.

  He glanced once more to the high windows and the broiling mass of thunderheads beyond. Liam wouldn’t have gone out there to explore the lawns, not in this weather; not while it was still dark, and not with only one shoe. He was here, inside the building, Codie knew it.

  “Just one thing,” Alex said. “There’s no phone coverage on this island, we can’t call each other. What do we do if we find him hurt?”

  It was a good question, and shocked Codie a little that it would be Alex who asked it. “Shout out, loud as you can. The other group is bound to hear and come to help.”

  “Sounds good,” Julian said. He turned to Alex. “Come on; let’s get some batteries in case we need them.” He shook the torch. “This light is already getting dim.”

  Alex didn’t answer, but turned away and headed towards his gear on the bench.

  Julian took a step to his sleeping bag, stopped, and glanced back at Codie. “Don’t worry, mate; we’ll find him.”

  Codie nodded.

  Giving his hand another squeeze, Kristen let go and turned to collect some gear from her bag. He retrieved the torch from his sleeping bag and slipped his jacket on. The rooms in the female ward would be damp and cold, and he was already freezing. Grabbing a small bottle of water from his rucksack, he pushed it into his jacket pocket. Checking his phone, he was relieved to see the battery life hovering just above fifty percent—not that he could make a call, but he could use the light application if the batteries died on his handheld flashlight. Stepping over to Kristen, he wrapped an arm around her waist and kissed her forehead.

  “You ready?”

  “Yeah,” she said, and smiled. “Let’s go find Liam.”

  He kissed her again, headed down the corridor towards the northern wing, and hoped they’d find him quickly.

  Hoped they’d find him alive.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Even with the door pushed securely into its frame Kristen still hurried past the ladies’ bathroom. She didn’t even look at the entrance, but kept her gaze on Codie’s back two paces ahead of her. A sound followed her in the corridor: probably small stones she’d inadvertently kicked through the debris, but it resembled skeletal fingers scratching at the toilet door.

  She quickened her pace and caught up with Codie.

  Illogical thoughts ran through her mind, giving macabre sounds to the world around her, adding a sense of foreboding she found hard to ignore. The feeling probably stemmed from the stories Liam had told about this place, about how the head doctor had conducted inhumane experiments on his patients. They’d been tortured, the old and the young, and she could not understand the reasons why. In the name of science, the professor had probably said, but she suspected it had a lot to do with him wishing to exert his power over those he thought lesser than him. She could never know for sure, of course, but many years ago, all treatment of the mentally ill was so callous and barbaric. The horrors that had taken place here were bound to leave a mark of immoral energy upon these walls.

  Away from the foyer, the constant sound of rain hammering on ancient glass faded into nothing. All of the doors stood open in the passage, allowing sporadic flashes of lightning to illuminate the surrounding corridor. The tempest had engulfed the island for many hours now, escalating from a rainstorm into a thunderstorm. Kristen wondered if it would ever move on. She guessed that the weather in Scotland at this time of year could be unpredictable but this storm had become predictable in its presence. A bizarre thought entered her head; that the lost spirits in this building were keeping the clouds here, their energy linked with the electricity surging overhead. They fed off the storm and grew bolder, more threatening. She almost laughed in disbelief at her own crazy thinking. What happened to the girl who’d set foot on the shore with a clear mind and a definite opinion that ghosts were not real?

  That girl hadn’t yet seen an apparition standing in the corner of the toilets, remember?

  Had she really seen someone there? Maybe the situation, thinking of Jenny and being in the toilets alone, had made her expect to see something supernatural, and therefore her mind had presented it to her. She’d probably only seen shadow contrasts on the wall.

  The corridor ended in a set of closed double doors. A plaque hung above the entrance, and although she could decipher the words Female Ward, the letters underneath were obscured either by dirt or shadow. Each door contained a rectangular glass window, but only darkness settled within the room beyond.

  Pausing at the entrance, Codie glanced back at her and smiled. “Are you okay?”

  “I’m fine,” she said. Having him with her helped ease the jackhammer rhythm of her heart and quieten the churning mass of apprehension in her gut. She couldn’t comprehend the violence that had taken place inside this building. Not just in this ward, with the women, but in the male ward, together with the operating theatre and treatment rooms. “This place is a little creepy though.”

  “It sure is. This storm doesn’t help either.”

  “I know, makes this place really look like a horror movie.”

  She laughed in the hope her comment would allay her fears but it only increased her tension. If this was a horror movie, and she was at home watching it in the safety of her sofa, she’d be telling these two jokers not to push through those doors. And of course, they were about to do the very thing her mind warned her not to do.

  If we find Liam alive and well after all this, I’ll kick his arse.

  Codie pressed his weight against one of the doors, and it opened easily, swinging wide as he entered. Directing her torch light towards the floor just inside the doorway, she noted the lack of footprints, a definite sign that Liam had not come this way. Would Codie listen to her if she showed him? She suspected he’d made up his mind to search this area, reassuring himself that his best friend wasn’t in here.

  Kristen said nothing, swallowed, and entered the darkness.

  ~~

  At the far end of the first-floor hallway, Julian turned right and headed down the south-western wing. He’d been looking forward to getting away from the building and shooting some outside footage, but changed his mind once the storm had settled in. Now, he decided he’d rather be out there, wet and freezing his arse off, than wandering these creepy halls once more. Having Alex at his back wouldn’t have been so bad if the guy wasn’t so goddamn miserable. He’d complained almost nonstop as they walked down the hallway; muttering about his sore back and lack of sleep. He wasn’t the only one to have had an uncomfortable night. Julian want
ed to tell him to shut the hell up but figured it wouldn’t be a wise thing do with the mood he was in. He didn’t feel threatened by Alex, could probably take the guy easily one-on-one, but having a fist fight with a friend in the corridor of an old mental asylum seemed beyond stupid.

  He checked the clock on his phone; dismayed to see the time had barely passed four a.m. Even more dismayed to see the battery life had dropped to nine percent. He cursed, wishing he hadn’t played that stupid game while crossing from the mainland. Usually, this early on a Saturday morning he’d be asleep, never got out of bed much before nine on a weekend. Even then Charlotte and he sometimes stayed in bed later, making love—not anymore, of course, in her condition. But the thought of her lying there, safe and warm without him, made him curse the situation he found himself in. She’d never stopped him from doing what he wanted; often he’d gone out to the pub with his mates for a ton of beer and some pool and she’d never complained, even now when pregnant. Long as he kept his dick in his pants she was fine with him going out to clubs and drinking with his friends. He’d always admired that about her, considered himself the luckiest guy in the world to have a girlfriend so relaxed about the time he so frequently spent in the bar instead of the sofa at home. So she certainly wasn’t about to create a fuss about him going away for the weekend to an abandoned asylum on a remote island; especially if he spent the time with Codie Jackson. If Julian didn’t know for a fact that Charlotte loved him more than anyone else, he’d think she had the hots for Codie—but then again, with Codie’s looks, almost every woman in London probably drooled over him. Still, just for once he wished Charlotte would have had a stubborn, unreasonable moment, and demand he stay home to look after her. She wasn’t due to drop the baby anytime soon, and he probably would have refused her demands to stay at home, but right now he wished she’d said no.

  Down the hall, Codie had said; take a right instead of the left they’d taken last night, and then through the double doors into the southernmost area of the wing. He’d done that, only to face another long corridor littered with dirt and dead leaves. Broken windows dotted the wall to his right, the storm screaming through open frames, splashing rain over the walls. The paint had lost its original colour from when the hospital thrived, the incessant weather having eroded any shading from the hallway. Now, under his torch light, a dark hue crept across the walls, as though evil crawled from the earth. Julian took a step forward, keeping close to the grime-covered wall, avoiding the rain driving into the hall.

  “You know this is bullshit, right?” Alex said at his back.

  Julian turned to look at him. “What is?”

  “Wandering around here looking for Liam, that’s what. He’s a grown man, probably knows this building better than all of us if his love of ghosts is anything to go by. I bet you he’s standing back in the lobby wondering where the fuck we’ve all gone.”

  “You might be right.” In fact, Julian hoped Alex was one hundred percent correct. “We not only found the camera but one of his shoes, so Codie reckoned we should look around and find him. It’s what we should do.”

  “You always do everything Codie commands?”

  “No, of course not. Shit, Alex, don’t be a dick, okay. We came here as a group and we’ll go home as a group and if Codie is worried enough to have us look for Liam then who am I to argue?” Julian shrugged. “Hell, he knows Liam better than us, anyway.”

  Alex uttered that annoying grunting sound he usually made when he had an opinion he couldn’t be bothered to voice. Julian ignored it, because at least the grunt meant that particular conversation had ended. Sometimes he wondered if Alex said stupid things because he was bored and wanted the entertainment of a discussion.

  Wind buffeted him and rain splattered across his face. This place was miserable; a depressing building on a dreary island, cloaked in an angry storm. It probably couldn’t get any worse.

  At the nearest doorway, Julian ducked into the room to escape the storm’s clutches. Leaves and thin branches from the lawn’s shrubbery littered the floor but the large room was devoid of furniture. He’d expected to see sofas and chairs, a table at least, but the room had been cleared out. The high ceiling contained three light fittings, all without bulbs, the plaster around them cracked and flaking. Graffiti etched the weather-beaten walls, but he couldn’t read the scribbles from the doorway, not even with his torch’s glare. He stepped further into the room, glancing around the door, hearing the wind echoing through the open space.

  The room stank with the pungent odour of ammonia and dried-out plumbing.

  “The fuck is this place,” Alex said from the entrance. “Doesn’t look like the recreation room to me.”

  “Hang on,” Julian said and pushed a hand into his pocket to retrieve the paper Codie had given him. Dragging it out, he unfolded it, and turned it to the correct orientation. Retracing his steps on the page, he found the room he stood in and glanced over the side notes scrawled in Liam’s unmistakable handwriting. “Shit, this is the Incontinent Room.”

  “The what?”

  Julian looked up to where Alex stood silhouetted in the doorway. “No wonder there’s no furniture in here. According to Liam’s notes patients with incontinence were put in here all day, naked. They’d piss and shit all over the floor.”

  “Fuck that; I ain’t going in there.”

  Julian looked at his feet, boots wet from the driving rain in the hallway, a damp leaf glued to the toe. Moisture lay in pools across the bare concrete floor, and although he knew it came from the storm screaming through the windows his mind gave him a different scenario. It made him nauseous, and the more he considered it the stronger the room’s stench became. He looked up, swept the light around the room; imagined men of all ages huddled against the bare walls, naked with their hands covering their genitals while piss trickled down their legs. He turned, in a hurry to leave, and his boot splashed through a puddle. Sixty-year-old urine wouldn’t still be here but he’d already convinced himself otherwise.

  Outside in the hall he continued down the passage, a shiver rippling in him as wind howled through broken windows. Further along the corridor the glass remained in their frames, the walls and floor dry but decked with dirt. He hurried out of the wind, his skin damp and cold, and directed his light towards a sign above the next doorway.

  Recreation Room.

  He stepped into a room destroyed by time. It was larger than he’d imagined it would be, but logically it had to house most of the male patients from this ward. Most of the ceiling had collapsed; a pool table stood in the room’s centre, its green cloth obscured by ceiling tiles and torn insulation. An ornate fireplace graced the far wall, its hearth belching forth leaves and foliage dumped into the chimney by decades of bad weather. Square blocks of lighter wall marked where paintings once hung, but the remaining walls in the room had lost their colour and vibrancy. Much like the life of those men forced to live in a place like this. At least two sofas remained in the room, upholstery torn and colour lost under a dense layer of dirt. A lot of the armchairs were covered with portions of the damaged ceiling, and Alex sat in the one nearest the extinct fireplace.

  “Well,” he said, “as you can see he’s not here.”

  Julian swept the torch light around the room, and although Liam could be hidden behind sofas or maybe one of the bookshelves, he guessed Alex was right. He stepped further into the room regardless, letting the beam of light lead him. Areas of the walls were engraved with scrawls; sections of the bible he guessed by the saintly names and Roman numerals used to sign off each quote.

  “I wonder how many murders were committed in here,” Alex muttered.

  He didn’t answer, focusing instead on checking behind each sofa and into the room’s darkest corners. Shadows moved around him, bending away from the torch’s beam as if they were spectral incarnations keeping to the sanctuary of obscurity.

  “How do you think people were killed in here?”

  Pausing in the corner of the roo
m—near a dark stain on the wall that could have been a poorly cleansed splatter of blood—Julian looked over at Alex and shrugged. He doubted the man saw the movement in the dark and continued forward, checking the room.

  “I mean,” Alex said, “they wouldn’t have been in possession of weapons, like knives or guns. Maybe they strangled someone after a disagreement. Smashed their head open on the edge of the coffee table over there.”

  Julian looked at the table, highlighted it with the torch; noticed a sliver of damage on one corner. Could have been the point where someone’s skull got cracked open. He shrugged again.

  “I don’t really want to think about it. Kind of freaks me out.”

  With a loud sigh, Alex placed his hands on the armrests and raised himself from the chair. “Well, you’re not much fun. Look, he’s obviously not here. I’ll go to the chapel; you can catch me up. Maybe he was looking for his shoe and twisted his ankle on a stone. He’s probably sitting there nursing his baddy like a total girl.”

  Looking at him with a sigh, Julian chose not to comment on the man’s obvious sarcasm. He wondered how many times he’d bullied Liam when they’d been in school. It wasn’t that long ago, only a couple of years, so he suspected the wounds in Liam’s physique were still pretty fresh. It was no wonder the guy’s patience snapped earlier in the lobby. Julian would probably have landed a punch, or at least tried to. Only now, as Alex wandered towards the room’s open doorway, all he wanted to do was ask not to be left on his own.

  He held his tongue, not wanting to appear weak and afraid, and watched the man go.

  Alex paused in the doorway. “That is, if it’s all right for you to be left alone in this part of a haunted asylum?”

  Julian feigned a smile. “I’ll be fine, this place don’t scare me.”

  “Good to hear.”