The Asylum

by Nathan Dylan Goodwin

  He parked in exactly the same spot, directly outside the main entrance to the asylum. Throwing his bag over his shoulder, Morton locked his car and made his way around the building, following the same path, which he and Juliette had taken two nights previous. He walked over to the doorway through which they had entered and stepped inside. He stood still for a moment, questioning whether or not he really wanted to do this. For some reason, the place was just as eerie in daylight as it had been in the dark. Perhaps his lack of courage, now, was because he was alone. He pulled out his mobile, took a photograph of himself, pulling a hammy, mock-spooked face, with the long corridor behind him and texted it to Juliette.

  With a long intake of breath, Morton slowly walked down the corridor to the hall.

  His phone pinged with a loud echo around him. He smiled as he looked down, thinking that it was from Juliette. It was. Er… who’s that with you? I’m your breaking and entering buddy! J xx.

  Morton laughed and replied, Ha ha! One of the former inmates’ ghosts? xx.

  Her response was immediate: No, but seriously, there’s someone behind you.

  Morton flipped around, as a cold tingle ran down his spine. Nothing. Nobody. Believing that she was deliberately trying to frighten him, he double-checked the photo, which he had sent her…and shuddered.

  In the picture, at the end of the corridor was the unmistakable outline of a person.

  Taking a step back to the wall, Morton whipped his head around to check that nobody was within his immediate vicinity.

  An unnerving silence was suddenly shattered. He ducked down, as, just above him, a fat wood pigeon took flight past his head, swooping low along the corridor and into the hall.

  Another text message arrived: You okay??

  Think so… Don’t know who I’m sharing the asylum with yet… xx.

  A grimacing yellow emoji was Juliette’s response.

  As much as he wished to get the hell out of this place, he just couldn’t do it, especially now that Juliette knew all about it. What would his answer be when she asked him about it on their date tomorrow night? ‘Oh, I ran away scared and didn’t do what I had actually gone there to do.’

  It was probably just some homeless person, seeking shelter after yesterday’s heavy rain. He managed to convince himself that whoever was here was also here for benign reasons, the same as he was. ‘Hello?’ Morton yelled down the corridor. His voice continued to rattle around the old walls for a good couple of seconds, but no reply was forthcoming. ‘Right,’ he mumbled, trying to recall whether any of the contents of his bag could be used as a weapon, if required. A pen was the best that he could come up with.

  He took the bag from his shoulder, holding it defensively in front of him and began to slowly step down the corridor towards the hall. He was just a few feet away and he paused to listen. Should he call out, again? He decided not to and instead sprinted inside the room, where he whirled around clutching his bag in front of him, ready to protect himself. But the room was empty.

  ‘Jesus,’ he muttered, his heart thundering in his chest.

  Maybe it was a trick of the light, he thought, checking the photo again. But no, it was clearly a person. A man, to be specific.

  Well, whoever he was, he had gone now. Maybe he had been here for some nefarious reason—vandalism, perhaps, and Morton had scared him off. Whatever; he needed to get on. He opened the image of the map on his mobile and found the hall, which was pretty well central to the whole complex. If the fabric of the building had not changed in the last ninety-seven years, then it looked as though he just needed to cut through the kitchens, go along a corridor, up a flight of stairs, then he would be at the far end of the female wing.

  Slowly and cautiously, Morton headed out of the relative safety which he had felt by being in the centre of the hall and headed down a short corridor, with excessively peeling cream paint, into what the map described as the kitchens, though he would likely not have discerned its previous incarnation from the state of the room, now. The large long space was devoid of anything but glass from the broken windows and other assorted debris, which had been pulled, or had fallen from the vaulted ceiling above. Excessive graffiti adorned almost every section of the white tiled walls.

  Morton couldn’t help but emit a nervous laugh at what had been written on a blackboard pinned to one wall.

  TODAYS SPECIAL

  SOUP

  HOT DOG

  BURGER (VEGGIE)

  AND DEAD MAD PEOPLE

  Morton photographed the menu and sent it to Juliette, wondering if the author had meant ‘dead mad people’, ‘dead-mad people’ or ‘mad dead people.’

  He crossed the room to a smashed door on the opposite side and guardedly began to walk the corridor towards the staircase at the far end. The passageway fed five door-less rooms, inside of which, given that he was sharing the asylum with a strange man, he felt obliged to stick his head. The rooms appeared to have been dormitories once and were in the same sorry state as the rest of the hospital.

  At last, he reached the wooden staircase. Some past attempts at arson had bored large charcoaled holes in the treads, and Morton was forced to do an odd crab-like movement to climb to the first floor. At the top, he found another grim corridor with paint flaking from the walls and ceilings, and every window’s glass shattered onto the burned, lacerated flooring.

  Morton brought up the map of the female wing. Typically, the dormitory in which Louisa had resided was at the far end of the corridor. His pace down the passage was painfully slow but his breathing was fast and noisy. If anyone was still here, who meant him harm, then they would hear his snuffling breath long before he actually arrived.

  He reached the doorway to the dormitory and entered, quickly scanning the room for anything or anyone untoward. Empty. Keeping with the theme of the hospital, the room was a vandalised ruin. Morton looked around, then took a series of photographs, which he would include in the casefile, and all of which he would hand to Gerald when the job was completed. Standing in front of the window, Morton peered out over the grounds. A long-neglected garden led onto a long stretch of overgrown lawn, which terminated in a dilapidated fence. Beyond the fence was Park Wood, the location of Louisa Peacock’s suicide.

  Morton spent a moment memorising a section of the map, then closed it and opened his phone’s stopwatch. Clicking START he hurried from the room at the fastest pace that he could muster, given the poor state of the floors, retracing his steps along the corridor, down the stairs, where he then took a different passageway, running behind the staircase. He kept walking quickly, recalling the route from the map to guide him. As expected, the corridor terminated at a narrow passageway, which ran perpendicular to the one in which he was now standing. He turned left and soon came to what had once been a rear entrance but was now just a gaping hole. Outside, was a large paved patio area.

  Dashing across it, Morton descended five stone steps, arriving in what would once have been the formal garden. He passed through it to the unkempt lawn and made a direct line for the woods beyond.

  When he reached the first tree of the woods, out of breath, he paused the stopwatch: seven minutes and forty-five seconds.

  Louisa had been present in her dormitory at the 11.30am ward-check and had been found lifeless somewhere in these woods at 11.45am. In the maximum space of fifteen minutes, she had made the journey that Morton had just made, removed her stockings, found a suitable tree, put her shoes back on and then hanged herself. And all of that came with the assumption that she had had an overall good level of fitness, had not been challenged at any step of the way, had found every door open and had chosen a tree on this extreme fringe edge of the wood. Was it possible? Just about, yes. Was it likely? In his opinion, no, it was not.

  He looked around the woodland behind him and spotted an oak tree with a branch roughly two feet from the ground. He walked over to it, placed his bag down on the ground and knelt beside the branch, positioning h
is body such that his head might also be as Louisa’s had been, when she had been found. He failed to see how on earth Louisa had achieved what she had. Reading between the lines of Doctor Taylor’s witness statement, he too had questioned how she had managed to kill herself in this manner.

  Morton blew a puff of air from his mouth and strolled out of the woods onto the lawn, looking up at the wrecked hospital buildings, all the while wondering.

  His eyes lingered on the run of windows of Dormitory B, when he shuddered, as a figure walked in front of the windows, clear as day. He couldn’t contain a gasp, as the same figure passed the next window, then the next, then vanished.

  Morton was transfixed, not daring to blink, his pulse racing, as he waited to see the person appear again.

  But he had gone.

  Despite once fancying himself as a ghost-hunter, Morton didn’t actually believe in the paranormal, yet, here he found himself wondering if the old asylum really could be haunted.

  Whatever, he’d made up his mind that he definitely was not going to go back inside and trudged his way across the lawn, taking the longer route around the complex towards his car, rather than re-entering the buildings.

  As he walked, he mulled over all that he had learned today, when he suddenly heard a man’s voice nearby, making him jump with fright and drop his bag to the floor. He whirled around to see a tall blond man in his early twenties with a professional-looking camera in his hands. ‘Sorry, mate!’ the man said, with an Australian accent. ‘Didn’t mean to frighten you, like.’

  Morton picked up his bag and scowled: ‘What are you doing here?’ He realised as soon as the words were out of his mouth that he sounded very much like the disgruntled landowner, not the fellow trespasser that he was.

  ‘Taking pictures,’ he answered. ‘Urban exploration.’

  What did that mean? Could Hellingly even be termed as urban?

  ‘What about you?’ he asked. ‘You look like you’re up to no good.’

  ‘Rural trespassing,’ Morton answered, marching to his car.

  ‘See ya, then,’ the man called after him.

  Morton ignored him, climbed into his car, locked the doors and started the engine, hoping that he never had call to return to the asylum again.

  He sped away from the carcass of the hospital, planning one last stop before he would go home for a well-deserved glass or two of wine and a take-away.

  Morton bounded up the two concrete steps into the ugly building, which housed Eastbourne Library. He was headed for the small but adequate local history section, when he spotted a rack of leaflets, which were pretty-well-identical to those, in which he had feigned interest at Hailsham Library. One in particular had caught his attention. He pulled it from the wire rack and folded it into his back pocket.

  He headed up a short flight of stairs and turned into the open reference library, one corner of which had been given over to local history. As he walked to the help desk, he noticed that both the microfilm and microfiche readers were vacant.

  ‘Good afternoon,’ he said brightly.

  ‘Hello,’ a middle-aged woman replied from behind the counter. She smiled broadly and asked, ‘What can I do for you, my love?’

  ‘Would it be possible to use the microfilm reader, please?’

  ‘Oh, absolutely, go ahead. Have you used one before?’

  ‘Yes, a few times,’ he said with a grin, wishing that Miss Latimer would display even a tenth of this lady’s obvious customer service skills.

  ‘I’ll just pop over and open up the filing cabinet for you.’

  Morton followed her over to the machine. She placed a small key in the top of the metal cabinet adjacent to the reader and said, ‘There you go, my love. Help yourself and shout if you need me.’

  Morton thanked her, then opened the first drawer labelled PARISH REGISTERS, seeing boxes of film pertaining to many more parishes within the town of Eastbourne than the number of which he had previously been aware. He didn’t have the time to go through each and every parish, so he removed his mobile phone and ran a search for the location of St Mary’s Hospital, knowing that Gerald Peacock had lived close-by growing up. The results told him that the hospital had been demolished in 1990, but that its location at the time had been in the Old Town of Eastbourne. A housing development had been built on the site with the present address of Letheren Place, which he tapped into Google Maps, adding the search criteria of churches nearby. The closest church by far was St Mary the Virgin Church.

  Morton set his phone to one side and returned to the drawer of the filing cabinet for Eastbourne parish registers. He found four rolls of film for St Mary’s Church and lifted out each to check the contents, which were handwritten on the side of the boxes. On the second film he found that which he was looking for—PAR 309/1/2/7 Baptism Register (Oct 1921-March 1929)—and took it from the drawer.

  He wound the film onto the digital reader and buzzed through the earlier registers until he reached baptisms for 1925, the year of Gerald Peacock’s birth.

  Within ten minutes of searching every baptism, Morton found it: Gerald had been baptised on the 3rd December 1925. Morton smiled and clicked print on the entry. As he did so, he noticed something written at the edge of the page, which made him sit up with surprise.

  Chapter Six

  The job was over. Morton entered Gerald Peacock’s house with a knot of anxiety, wondering exactly where he should begin his explanation of the unexpected route, which his research had taken in the last few days.

  ‘Take a seat,’ Gerald said, sitting on the red sofa in front of the window.

  Morton sat down, pulled a card wallet from his bag, which he placed on his knees, and drew in a long breath, still not sure of how he was going to say what he had to.

  ‘Anything juicy in there about Loopy Lou?’ Gerald asked with a laugh, jabbing a finger at the wallet.

  ‘Well, yes, you could say that,’ he answered.

  ‘You’d better get on with it, then,’ Gerald remarked. ‘I haven’t got all day.’

  Even though he hadn’t known quite how he might begin to explain his findings, Morton had thought that he might start with a cautionary preamble about the difficulties involved in drawing conclusions from the past based on scant historical and genealogical records, but now abandoned that and decided just to get on with it.

  ‘So,’ Morton began, opening the wallet and looking at the first piece of evidence, ‘your father married Louisa Pengelly on the 17th June 1922 in Hailsham Parish Church—’

  ‘Yes, I know that already,’ Gerald interrupted. ‘You gave me their marriage certificate, remember?’

  Morton swallowed down his annoyance at the interjection. ‘I’m just presenting you with the full chronology of events,’ he explained.

  ‘Well, just speed up a bit. My daughter will be here shortly to take me out.’

  Morton ignored the comment and continued at his own pace, flicking past the announcement of Stephen and Louisa’s marriage. ‘They married by banns and it was declared in the local paper, so everyone got to hear about it. Louisa apparently suffered one or several miscarriages, which led to a breakdown in her mental health, and she was admitted into the asylum at Hellingly in—’ he checked the date on the next piece of paper ‘—June 1924. She died there five months later by hanging herself from a tree. Three weeks later, with no public fanfare and no banns for anyone to see or comment on, your father married Emma Carey.’

  ‘What are you trying to say?’ Gerald asked. ‘That they had something to hide? Why shouldn’t he have married again?’

  ‘There’s absolutely no reason why he shouldn’t have married again, no,’ Morton agreed. ‘It’s just the manner of the second marriage was somewhat different to the first, is all.’

  ‘I don’t much care,’ Gerald retorted. ‘Is that it? All you found?’

  Morton glanced down at the next document in the wallet and embarked on the next part of the story: ‘Were you
aware that Emma had worked at Hellingly?’

  ‘What? My mother? No, I didn’t know that. Are you sure?’

  Morton nodded. ‘She was working at Hellingly at the same time as Louisa was resident there.’

  ‘Well, that’s obviously how my parents met, then,’ Gerald said. ‘And how they came to marry a short while later—they knew each other. So, not at all strange, then.’

  ‘Yes, I’m sure that’s how they met, too. What’s interesting, though, is that Emma stopped working there on the 23rd November 1924; three days after Louisa’s death.’ Morton paused, anticipating some interjection from Gerald but none was forthcoming. ‘Stephen and Emma married and moved out of the area… Now, this is where my job becomes a little difficult. Everything that I’ve just told you is documented, historical fact; I also have another pair of facts, which could lead to an undocumented conclusion.’

  ‘For heaven’s sake, just spit it out,’ Gerald said, exhaling loudly.

  ‘Okay. So, Louisa’s death: in the space of a maximum of fifteen minutes, she had apparently left her dormitory and made her way through a complex run of buildings, across the gardens to Park Wood, at the bottom of a long stretch of lawn, where she removed her stockings, put her shoes back on and then managed to hang herself from a branch two feet from the ground.’ Morton paused, largely for effect. ‘That same journey took me seven minutes and forty-five seconds and that was at a fast pace…’

  ‘You’ve been to Hellingly?’ Gerald asked. ‘Isn’t it closed down?’

  ‘Yes, but the buildings are still there, and I was able to find the precise room in which Louisa had been incarcerated.’

  Gerald raised his eyebrows: ‘Is that the first fact?’

  ‘It’s most of the first fact,’ Morton replied. ‘The remainder of the first fact is this: Emma Carey was the nurse at the asylum who found Louisa’s body.’