Asylum

by Madeleine Roux

  Dan hadn’t gone two steps on the path toward Brookline when he saw Professor Reyes pacing next to an ash bin. She waved, cigarette in hand, beckoning him over.

  “Not in cuffs, I see,” she said by way of greeting. Her brown eyes twinkled behind the thin veil of smoke that drifted up from her lips. “That’s a good sign. Looked like your parents were pretty worried about you.”

  “Oh, they’re fine, it was just a little tense in there.”

  Her necklace was made of opals today, as fine and white as bone. “I don’t know the particulars, but you seem like a good kid.” She shook her head, pursing her lips to blow a jet of smoke up and away from them. “Brookline just has a way of taking a hold on people—always has. It’s the self-fulfilling prophecy of madness. If someone tells you you’re crazy enough times, eventually it becomes true. It’s that old psychiatrist’s joke: insanity’s all in your head.”

  Dan looked at his shoes, tempted to tell her that no, some conditions were in fact very real. “I’m not sure I know what you mean.”

  “All I’m saying is, people in town don’t want Brookline gone just because of what happened there fifty years ago.” Professor Reyes dropped her cigarette and stamped it out. The wind picked up her short dark hair, tossing it in front of her eyes. “Good luck, Dan. I hope you don’t need it.”

  Abby and Jordan waited outside his door for him. They had even snuck out a pie from the cafeteria, hiding it under a Windbreaker. Rhubarb with extra whipped cream. His favorite.

  They piled into his room. Abby pointed to Dan’s bed while Jordan sorted out the dessert for everyone. “Come and sit,” Abby said. “I have news and we want to hear all about your date with the cops.”

  “Thanks,” Dan said, taking a bite out of his pie. “It’s been a hellish day.”

  “The cops work you over?” Jordan asked.

  “They were pretty decent, actually. My parents were there, which helped.”

  “Seriously?” Abby said anxiously. “They’re not making you leave, are they?”

  “No, I can finish the program. So at least there’s that. And Felix saved my ass, too. I guess he told the cops he ߢdidn’t think I was a threat.’”

  Dan decided not to tell them about the rest of it. Right now he needed them on his side.

  “Dan, I’m so sorry,” Abby murmured, shifting her chair closer. “But at least you’re not in trouble. That’s good, right?”

  “It is, yeah. So what was your news?” Abby lit up. Dan was grateful for a reason to stop talking about himself and she looked ready to pop with excitement.

  “The news is that I’ve decided to come clean about Lucy to my father,” she said, bouncing in her chair. “It’s time he knew about her, that I’ve picked up the trail. He deserves to know the truth. I mean, I would want to, wouldn’t you?”

  “Wow,” said Dan. He couldn’t tell if it was the exhaustion or something else keeping him from matching Abby’s excitement. “Are you sure that’s a good idea right now?”

  “What?” Abby asked slowly. “Why would it not be a good idea? She’s his sister! I’m hoping he might even want to help me find her.”

  “You don’t think it’s sort of coming out of nowhere? I mean, the shock and all … What if he doesn’t believe you?”

  “I’d freak if it were me. I mean, it’s been so many years.…” Jordan added.

  “No, it has to be this way,” Abby replied with a little nod of finality. “I’m not going to keep this from him, I just can’t. It wouldn’t be right.”

  “Maybe this is harsh,” Jordan responded. “But as your friend, I feel it’s my duty to state for the record that I think your idea is pants-on-head crazy.”

  “And as your … other friend … I’m sorry to say I second that motion.” Dan raised his hand in the air.

  “Well, neither of you gets a say!” she shot back, shoving her pie aside. “It’s my decision, and it’s my father. I just thought you guys would be happy for me. With everything that’s happened at this horrible place, I thought this could be something good to come out of it.” She stood, dusting off her hands. “I’m calling him,” she said, adjusting the zipper on her paint-splattered sweatshirt. “He’s going to know the truth about Aunt Lucy. Tonight.”

  Abby turned and swept out of his room in a huff. Jordan cocked an eyebrow at him, as if to say, what, you’re not going after her?

  But Dan was exhausted, and after his long day of questioning, he was dying for a moment alone. Plus, there was something he desperately needed to check. Something he’d been trying not to think about since class that morning. Jordan seemed to get the hint.

  “Well, you know where to find me, I guess,” he said, letting himself out and closing the door behind him.

  Immediately, as if he were ripping off a Band-Aid, Dan reached into his backpack and pulled out his class notebooks. He flipped to the page of notes he’d taken today, when he’d caught himself writing in the looping script of the warden. On the bottom of the page he’d written:

  Insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.—Albert Einstein

  Fighting the urge to throw up, Dan tore through the rest of his notebooks, scanning the pages for any more disturbing asides. Sure enough, he found a sentence in his History of Psychiatry notes attributed to Aristotle. It was possible Professor Reyes had put this quote up on the board for them to copy down, but he definitely didn’t remember writing it, and the script wasn’t his:

  No great mind has ever existed without a touch of madness.

  Dan leapt to his feet, tossing the notebooks off him as if they carried a disease. All these notes … on his desk … under his bed … No wonder it had seemed like he had a stalker everywhere he went. He’d written these notes—“delivered” them himself.

  “Mild dissociative order,” Dr. Oberst had said. “Harmless lapses in memory,” she’d said. What did she know? She was no better than the doctors who’d been at Brookline fifty years ago. At least their treatments had gotten results.

  Now Dan was faced with the fact that he was blacking out for long stretches of time, forgetting text messages, notes, even pictures with his best friends. And, oh yeah, who could forget the little fact that every time someone had been attacked, there’d been a mental gap he couldn’t account for—unconscious in the basement when Joe had been killed, napping in his room when Yi was knocked out, and sending ominous text messages when Felix was nearly bludgeoned with a crowbar.

  These lapses in memory seemed far from harmless to him.

  But Dan wasn’t ready to believe that he was a cold-blooded killer. He was channeling the warden, not the Sculptor, and as strange as it was to find comfort in that fact, Dan had to admit he’d rather find creepy notes in his possession than a garrote any day.

  But what about the birth parents?

  Officer Teague’s questions still reverberated in his ears. He’d been so sure that Dan was related to the cruel warden, that it had something to do with why Dan was here. Dan had let his mother cast it off as a coincidence, but he knew that nothing about this summer had been coincidental. Being here was his destiny. It was his destiny to solve the mystery of what happened to the warden, and the Sculptor, and Lucy.

  Dan remembered that Abby had visited the old church and found Lucy in the records. Maybe the records could work the same magic for him. Occam’s razor or whatever the hell you wanted to call it.

  It couldn’t wait another minute. He refused to accept another restless night, another nightmare-riddled sleep.

  Grabbing his flashlight and the closest thing to a weapon he had—a pair of scissors—Dan stepped outside and into the night.

  UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

  HarperCollins Publishers

  .....................................................................

  CHAPTER

  No 32

  Not only was it beyond dark outside, the perpetual mist had turned into an oppressive drizzle. Dan felt the dampne
ss soaking through the cuffs of his jeans. That, combined with the ever-refreshing clarity that came with distance from Brookline, made Dan pause. Would the church even be open at eight o’clock on a Thursday?

  But he felt like he had to try. He needed to know if he was crazy, possessed, or the victim of an elaborate framing job, and right now his only lead was his possible connection to Warden Crawford.

  Rounding a curve in the path, Dan was relieved to see there were lights on in the church. Off to the right was the dense tunnel of trees through which Dan’s cab had driven on that very first day.

  Dan broke into a jog as the drizzle became a steady rain. There was a tiny awning over the front doors of the church, and Dan huddled under it as best he could, first trying the door handles, and then, when they were locked, pounding loudly with his fists.

  “Coming! Coming!” came a faint voice.

  The doors swung inward to reveal a kindly-looking old man in a suit and tie. He came up to about Dan’s shoulders, and he smiled warmly even though Dan had clearly just interrupted him.

  “Well come in, come in, I can’t have you catching your death on the church doorstep.”

  Dan stepped into a small vestibule with just enough room for a few long tables. He could see the open sanctuary through the arched doors beyond.

  “Now what brings you to Camford Baptist on this rainy Thursday, young man? I don’t think I’ve seen your face in Sunday service.”

  “No, I—I’m a summer student up at the college. I mean, I’m still in high school. I’m in the college prep program.”

  “Ah, NHCP,” he said, enunciating each letter to show he was in with the lingo. “I know it well. My granddaughter just attended the program a few years ago now.”

  “Oh, cool,” Dan said. He felt sort of awkward barging ahead with his questions, but the man seemed content to stand here in the entrance and talk. “Well, sir, I’m sorry to bother you so late, but a friend of mine was here a couple days ago, and she said you helped her find some stuff about her aunt?”

  “Ah, you must mean Abby. Yes, lovely girl. Reminded me of my granddaughter, actually.”

  “Well, I was sort of hoping you could help me with the same thing, I guess. I used to have family in Camford, too.”

  “Is that so?” The pastor eyed Dan strangely, like maybe he didn’t believe him. Dan decided he should take a page from Abby’s book and just put everything out in the open.

  “The thing is, I’m not sure, to be totally honest. I was a foster kid for a while and then I was adopted by my current parents, but there have been some weird things this summer that make me think I might have stumbled on my birth relatives here in Camford.”

  “Let me guess—Daniel Crawford?” The pastor’s demeanor had turned solemn, almost icy.

  “Dan,” he said defensively. “How did you know?”

  “It’s a small town, Mr. Crawford.” And then, when Dan simply continued to look at him, he added, “Mr. Weathers is in my parish.”

  It took Dan a second to realize he meant Sal Weathers.

  “Oh, that. Yeah, my trip to his house didn’t go very well. But Sal—Mr. Weathers—thought I was playing a joke on him or something, and I wasn’t, I swear. My name really is Dan Crawford, and I really did want to know about Brookline.”

  “I believe you,” the pastor said placatingly, his mouth a grim line. “But I think to Mr. Weathers, the idea that you might not have been joking would be even more frightening.”

  “Oh. I see.”

  “Do you? How much do you know about what really went on up at Brookline?”

  “I know a lot more than they’re telling us,” Dan said defiantly.

  “Indeed.”

  It was almost like they were in a poker game, each of them trying to guess at what the other already knew. Finally, the man sighed; if their talk was a game, he was folding.

  “Well, I admit I was just a boy myself when Warden Crawford took over the asylum, but the rumors of what happened under his regime are legend. Inhuman conditions at the best of times, tortuous experiments at the worst. Not exactly memories we townsfolk are eager to relive.”

  Dan slumped, feeling chastised.

  “I do remember the warden’s family, though,” the pastor continued, and Dan snapped to attention. “Oh yes, he had a family. No wife or kids of his own, but the Crawford boys were Camford natives, and Daniel was the oldest of the three. By the time he returned from medical school to take on the role of warden at Brookline, his younger brothers were set up here as an auto mechanic and a clothing salesman. Daniel always was the smartest child.”

  The pastor was staring off into the middle distance, recalling these details from a long-forgotten place.

  “The mechanic, Bill, had a wife who’d just had a baby boy when the asylum was closed. That would have been in, let’s see, ’72? Wasn’t long after that before all the Crawfords left Camford, run out of town in shame.”

  “Why?”

  “Oh, it was a regular witch hunt. Daniel was put on trial, of course, and the more details that came out during the case, the more people were calling for all the Crawfords to leave. Like they had bad blood or something.”

  “And what happened to—to Daniel?”

  “Well, he tried to plead insanity there for a while. And he had a compelling case, too—some of the things he did in that dungeon, some of the reasons he gave … People were outraged, of course. But in the end it never came to a verdict. One of the other inmates got into his cell and killed him. Sounded like the locks on those cells weren’t as tight as they could have been.”

  Dan was stunned. “Wow” was all he managed to say.

  “Terrible thing,” the pastor said. He still stood barring the entrance to the sanctuary, until Dan started to get the feeling that the preacher wanted him to leave. “Anyway, I can tell you right now you’re not going to find any of the Crawfords on our baptism registry. They were crossed off our records long before I became pastor here.”

  “I guess I can see why,” Dan said, though he found it curious that the pastor already knew that information. “Well, I guess I’d better go, but do you mind if I ask you one more question first?”

  “Not at all.”

  “It’s about Dennis Heimline. The Sc-the Sculptor,” Dan stammered. “I’ve heard some people say that he died the year Brookline shut down, but Mr. Weathers said that no one knows for sure what happened to him.”

  “I’m afraid Mr. Weathers is technically correct there. We all assume Dennis Heimline died, of course, given the nature of the things he must have endured at the asylum. But while all the other patients were eventually accounted for, Heimline’s body was never found.”

  Dan shuddered. Then, with a mutter of thanks, he turned to leave.

  “Oh, and Mr. Crawford?” the pastor said, catching Dan by the elbow. “I hope you won’t blame Sal for any grief he caused you. I think you can see why he would’ve gotten upset talking about all this.”

  “I definitely can. Thank you for all your help, Mr.… ?”

  “It’s Bittle,” the pastor said, and his eyes looked grim. “Ted Bittle.”

  Dan left the church feeling more distraught than when he’d arrived. He’d gone there for proof, a confirmation, but all he had now were more possibilities. His grandfather had possibly been an auto mechanic. Warden Crawford, who was possibly his great-uncle, had died in prison, while the Sculptor was possibly still alive. And if Dan wasn’t totally imagining the patient card Jordan had found in the basement, the Camford Baptist pastor was possibly related to another of Brookline’s homicidal patients.

  He was only too happy to leave the church behind.

  But if it was raining before, it was absolutely pouring now. The gravel road outside the church was slushy and treacherous. Dan tried to point his flashlight ahead of him and run at the same time, but he kept twisting and slipping on loose rocks. He’d barely made it to the main path when he decided it was foolish trying to get all the way back in this weather.
He ran off the side of the road to the dense protection of the forest. Two steps in, and already the deluge was reduced to a few scattered drops that found their way through the limbs overhead, which crowded together like a tangle of fingers. Now Dan just had to wait for a break in the downpour.

  A branch snapped behind him, loud even over the sound of heavy rain.

  Dan turned just in time to see a deer darting through the maze of trees not ten feet away. He let out a heavy sigh.

  Just a deer, Dan. Calm down.

  But when he aimed his flashlight at where the deer had been, Dan saw a glint in the darkness, like a reflection on steel. At first he thought it could be some kind of animal trap or a path marker … until he saw the rope tied around it, pulled taut and stretching into the shadows, and realized that it was a metal stake driven into the tree.

  “Hello?” Dan called, imagining a hunter who’d been stranded in the rain. But that was ridiculous—who would be hunting this close to the school?

  “Anyone there?”

  Dan pulled out the pair of scissors from his pocket. They hardly made him feel any safer. Carefully, he stepped over fallen limbs and riots of underbrush. He reached the tree with the stake in it, then shined his flashlight down the length of the rope.

  He still expected to find a net at the end, waiting to catch an unsuspecting animal.

  Instead, he found a human hand.

  “Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God,” he jabbered, shaking uncontrollably as he tried to take in what he was seeing in the careening beam of his flashlight.

  It was a man, his hands connected by ropes to two neighboring trees, pulled slightly behind him so that he was forced into a forward bow at the waist.

  “Are you all right?” Dan called, though he was already sure of the answer.

  He got up as close to the man as he dared. He was afraid to touch him, so sure that he would spring up and grab him or bite him like some zombie. But he forced two shivering fingers onto the man’s neck. He waited for a pulse. Nothing.