“I don’t see a boat.”
“Ye won’t,” the old man whispered. “O’Connell knew those waters better than anyone, but everyone surrenders to them eventually.”
Paul swallowed, saliva caught in his throat by unease tying knots in his gut. “I beg your pardon.”
“His boat sank in less than five minutes and O’Connell ne’er wore a lifejacket. He’s out there, battling the current with all the other damned souls who try to cross that stretch o’ water.” His pause was a deep breath rattling loosely in his throat. “He’s been dead two years, son.”
The old man turned from the window and shuffled back to his card game, leaving Paul to gaze across a sea more hungry than any monster, staring at an island darker than death.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
The heels of his freshly polished dress shoes clicked loudly on the clean tile floor, his steps echoing along the corridor. There were no windows in this passage, which was perfectly fine. Doctor Anthony Collins wondered why anyone would want a view of the outside world when it only revealed another dismal Scottish night. Only a few fluorescent tubes were spaced along the ceiling, each lamp’s glow reflecting in the disinfected flooring. Heavy darkness hung at the light’s periphery, echoing the solitary confinement ward’s sombre mood. A few doors down, the doctor paused and stood silent outside a closed entrance. The windows were painted black—not to prevent him from observing his patient, but to avoid his patient seeing him. Collins heard nothing from within but the man was there, lurking on the other side of the door.
He leaned forward, edging closer to the frame, his ear only an inch from the slender gap of the jamb. The sniffing sounds were clear in the silent passage: swift inhalations as the room’s inhabitant tasted the air. And then the barking started; rabid and crazy, nails scratching on the inside surface of the door.
What kind of a man behaves like a dog?
Collins cleared his throat and tightened his tie even though it wasn’t loose. He’d made helping the mentally sick his life’s work, but sometimes this place freaked him out. Ignoring the barking, he walked further along the passage.
At the last door, a policeman sat in the gloom, one leg crossed over the other, a magazine balanced on his thigh. As he approached, the cop looked up and nodded a greeting. Collins said hi, and the officer gestured towards the room down the passage.
“What did he do?”
Collins smiled. His patient’s secrets were his own. “Do you really want to know?”
“Nae … I guess I don’t.”
Collins turned towards the room guarded by the policeman and listened to the silence, smelled the tang of disinfection. The blinds were drawn down and closed over the small window but darkness lay deep in there. It offered no comfort as most of the world’s horrors lurked in the dark. The door was locked at the request of the local law enforcement, its key secured in a drawer at the nurse’s station. Forbidden to enter without a senior officer being present, Collins regretted not being able to talk to the patient freely. All he wanted to do was help—all she needed was a friend.
The policeman glanced up from his magazine. “You okay there, doc?”
Collins nodded. “I’m fine, officer. Can I just take a wee peek at my patient?”
“Long as we don’t go in there, that’s fine with me.”
With a deep breath he opened a small gap in the blinds.
She refused to have the lights turned off but they were dimmed. She sat upon a solitary chair in the middle of the room, not in the bed as he’d hoped. Her arms lay limp across her lap, hands trembling against her legs. The girl kept her knees and feet together, head bowed forward with her long hair in a tangle over her shoulders. She appeared broken but Collins couldn’t be certain. Sometimes maniacs could hide their radiating madness.
What she’d done he could barely fathom. The callous nature of her murderous spree was nothing like he’d ever known before. She would have been in a cell if he hadn’t insisted on evaluating her first.
Authorities had found the first victim upon arrival, in the old chapel; a young man knifed in the neck and left to bleed out. They were all young men—such a waste. Two bodies were discovered in the surgery room: one man sitting against a wall, coated in coagulated blood, his intestines in a tangled mess across his lap. Another was purposely tied to one of the operating tables with an orbitoclast slammed into his skull—the victim of a botched lobotomy. Collins shuddered; glad they didn’t carry out such cruel procedures anymore. He checked to make sure the cop hadn’t seen his tremor, but the man had returned his focus to the magazine. They’d found a mutilated body in the observation room of the tower: a man pulled apart and spread throughout the room like a ghoulish mural. The girl must have done that with her bare hands, and it left Collins shocked at her level of insanity. The police wanted her declared sane but even now, before his evaluation, Collins couldn’t see how he could possibly come to such a conclusion.
To top it all, she’d carried out the killings in that asylum—so much history, so many rumours.
She glanced up through the tangled mess of her hair and stared into his eyes. He smiled, not sure she’d noticed it. Even from this distance he saw insanity sparkle in her stare.
They’d found her two miles south of the island, along the mainland coast. The ambulance crew lost her on the journey here; had to restart her heart on the side of the road. How she’d survived was beyond them, how she’d even managed to swim across the strait’s freezing waters remained a mystery. The girl hadn’t spoken since regaining consciousness, but Collins hadn’t expected her to. Hopefully some one on one counselling would help her open up. She had to plead insanity, it was her only chance.
“When will her mother be allowed to visit?” Collins asked.
The cop laid the magazine upon his lap. “I don’t know, doctor.”
“She can’t be denied visitation rights.”
“The lass brutally murdered four people. She’ll get supervised visits when the detective says she can.”
Collins said nothing more, cleared his throat with a disapproving grunt. The sooner he got inside to sit with the girl and talk the better understanding he’d have of what drove her to murder. He was desperate to help, but police bureaucracy stood in the way.
Doctor Collins returned his attention to the girl.
She continued to stare at him, tremors now wracking her body, shaking the hair hanging loose about her face. A shadow swept over the floor, brushing through the circle of dim lighting. The girl didn’t move, maybe she hadn’t noticed it, but Collins leaned in closer to the window. His gaze searched the room’s corners looking for an intruder. The shadow had come from someone, yet she was alone. The bulb must have flickered; tricked his senses.
It’d been a long shift, more overtime, and fatigue seeped into his mind. Collins ignored the chill crawling down his spine. He held the girl’s stare for a short while longer, wondering if she’d look away. She didn’t oblige. He wasn’t entirely sure she’d even blinked in all the time he’d been there. With a sigh of sympathy, Collins let the blinds fall shut.
~~
When the face disappeared from sight, she closed her eyes to the dim light and Codie’s intestines unravelled from his belly once more. They tumbled free in a steaming hot flood, blood and viscous fluids splattering the floor around his feet. Each time her mind showed his death, it was more graphic than the last.
She missed Codie more for each passing second. She wanted to reach into her chest and rip out her heart, if only to stop it from breaking. Darkness held so much heartache.
Kristen opened her eyelids and looked at the young girl hunkered in the gloom. The teenager stared with cold, dead eyes and tilted her head with curiosity, making the broken bones in her neck grate together like pebbles. She’d become bolder, lingering near the light.
Pain wouldn’t leave, it only dug deeper into Kristen’s core and scratched agonizing strips from her soul. She had no idea how long she’d been here,
or where she was, but none of it mattered because wherever she’d be, Codie wouldn’t join her. And each time she closed her eyes she lost him over and over again.
A new shape lurked in the shadows, just beyond the reach of the ceiling’s low wattage blub. It wasn’t the girl; this silhouette dragged something behind it—perhaps the tangled ropes of intestines sloshing over the concrete floor. The sound of breathing whispered in the gloom, a wheeze of air bubbling through lungs filled with blood.
“Codie,” she said, her voice barely a murmur. “Is that you?”
Something clattered behind her, the sound of metal against metal. Terror spiked in her, coiling into a hot ball inside her gut. In an instant the teenage girl scuttled backwards into the darkness and became a shadow in the corner.
The air grew colder, a dense chill slipping easily through Kristen’s thin clothing. An aroma she’d smelled before enveloped her, and she gagged on her rising fear. Hands curled over her shoulders, the fingers nothing more than sinew and torn flesh.
A face pressed against her cheek; cold and ripped, sticky with coagulated blood.
The hands squeezed tight, and Alex’s dead voice rasped her name.
A WORD FROM THE AUTHOR
Thank you for buying this book and taking the time to read it until its conclusion. Whether you liked it, or disliked it, I would greatly appreciate a review—however big or small—to let the world know what you thought about it.
If you would like to know more about me, my stories, or to purchase any of my other books, please take a moment to have a look at my website: www.dylanjmorgan.net
Alternatively, you can reach out to me on Twitter. @dylanjmorgan
And remember: If you’re searching for that light at the end of the tunnel then stop looking—you won’t find it here.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Now living and working in Norway, Dylan J. Morgan was born in New Zealand and raised in the United Kingdom. He writes during those rare quiet moments amid a hectic family life: after dark, with limited sustenance, and when his creative essence is plagued the most by tormented visions.
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