Hell

by Tom Lewis

  “He never stops,” came a boy’s voice, and the gray corpse of a teenage boy now stood beside the girl.

  “He’ll keep coming...” said the girl. “He’s always watching...”

  “Always there,” said the boy.

  “Till you die,” croaked the rocker as he stepped from the shower and slid toward Cassie. “And then he has you.”

  “Like he has us...” said the girl, taking a step toward Cassie.

  Cassie backed out the doorway and into her room. She kept her eyes on those figures as they slowly dissolved into darkness.

  Then only silence remained... but she wasn’t alone.

  As she looked toward the window, a dozen dark figures stood there in the gloom.

  Cassie awakened with a startled gasp. She felt herself in bed, just as she’d been several hours earlier when she’d fallen asleep, but it still took a moment to sink in that it had been a dream.

  She finally sat up and wiped the sleep from her eyes. There was no way she was going back to sleep. Not in this place. It freaked her the hell out. And she had already noticed on her third night there that the building settled late at night with deep groans and creaks of its stone foundation. It wasn’t doing it now, but she knew it could at any moment. And it gave this place a whole new layer of creepiness.

  She grabbed the remote from her nightstand and clicked on the TV. Hillview only received a dozen TV channels, and they were all showing infomercials at the moment.

  Freaking great.

  She clicked off the TV and grabbed her laptop. It took a few seconds to boot, then she pulled up Kyle’s blog, “Evil Hides in the Periphery.” She looked over at the blog entries and saw a new one from earlier that night. She clicked the link, and her heart sank as she read the entry: “No sleep for 72 hours. It’s getting worse. But I’ll still stop it.”

  Cassie quickly scrolled down to the “Contact” button and clicked on it. A messenger window popped up, and she typed: “Kyle. It’s Cassie. Are you online?”

  His reply came in less than a minute: “How R U?”

  “I’m in the hospital,” she typed back. “It’s close now.”

  “R U OK?” he replied back.

  “Most of the time. But it’s getting worse. I felt the Shrill.”

  “Shit!” came his response. “We need to meet. I think I know how to stop it.”

  Cassie reread this several times, making sure it said what she thought it said. She then messaged back: “I’ll text you when I get out.”

  “When will that be?”

  “Soon. I hope.”

  “Good. Just don’t wait too long.”

  Shit. Shit, shit, shit. Now she really needed to get out of this place.

  She had just started to type another message when a sound caused her to freeze —

  Her door was creaking open.

  Her eyes shot across the room to her door, which was now cracked open several inches. The doors in Hillview bolted on the outside “for patient protection,” so someone would have needed to come by and physically unlock and open it.

  “Hello?” she called in a hushed voice, then waited for a response...

  A faint sound came from the hallway outside, so quiet she wasn’t even sure if she had heard it. But it was enough to make her heart race.

  It had sounded like a child’s cry.

  Then it came again. It was barely audible, but she was certain it was a child’s cry.

  She closed her laptop and walked over to the door.

  It opened into a long hallway lined with doors to patients’ rooms on each side. Its walls were built of cold gray stone and its floor of tiles. There were no lights, but windows at each end allowed in enough moonlight to see by.

  There were three connecting hallways that ran perpendicular to Cassie’s hallway, with one at each end and one in the center. The hallway at the end to Cassie’s right ran to the hospital’s containment wing, where they housed the more dangerous patients.

  Someone was in the hallway.

  She stood at the far end on Cassie’s left, just a dark silhouette against the window. From the outline, she could see it was a woman in a long hospital gown.

  “Cassie...” came a faint voice echoed along the walls. Cassie couldn’t tell if the woman had said it but assumed she had.

  “Yeah?” Cassie called back quietly. She didn’t want to wake up the other patients.

  “Come, Cassie...” came the hushed voice. “Come... come with me... I have something to show you...” The voice spoke slowly, and again it was hard to tell if the woman had said it. It was something about the way it carried through the air...

  And how did she know my name?

  “What is it?” Cassie called back to the woman.

  The woman turned from the window and walked off down the connecting hallway. “Come, Cassie... come...”

  Cassie hesitated a moment... this was stupid... she should just go back inside her room.

  “Come, Cassie...”

  Shit. Cassie took off after her. She jogged down to the connecting hallway, just as the steel fire door to the stairwell clanged shut. She went over to the door and opened it. Inside was a steel staircase that zigzagged down from the third floor she was on, all the way to the basement. Narrow windows along the outer wall gave enough moonlight to see by.

  “Come, Cassie...” the hushed voice floated up the stairwell.

  “Who are you?” Cassie called back, then heard the door clang shut one floor below her.

  Cassie took a tentative step inside the stairwell... then another... She decided to just go down to the second floor and peek out the door. If anything looked suspicious, she was out of there.

  She reached the second floor and cracked the door open just wide enough to see out. Nobody was there waiting to jump her, so she took a chance and stepped into the hallway. This was the floor Switzer’s office was on, so she was already fairly familiar with it.

  She eased the door closed behind her but kept it cracked in case she needed to get out of there fast. She was in one of the connecting hallways which had no windows at their ends, but enough ambient moonlight came from the main hallway to see by.

  Something moved in the darkness down the hallway.

  It had been standing there the whole time, but Cassie hadn’t seen it until it moved.

  “Come, Cassie... come and see...” came that strange hushed voice again, and this time it seemed to come from all around her.

  “Who are you?” Cassie asked.

  A door creaked open, and the figure stepped into a room on the left. “Come and see, Cassie... come and see...”

  Cassie took a deep breath. This was stupid, following this woman, but she was confidant she could outrun her if something happened. And she had to know who this woman was and what she knew.

  Cassie walked down the hallway to the door. The room number was 226. Cassie knocked quietly, then stepped back as the doorknob turned on its own. The door creaked open... and Cassie felt the cold air inside.

  Nobody was behind the door.

  The hairs on her arms rose. She backed away from the door and caught something from the corner of her right eye...

  The woman stood beside her.

  Cassie nearly tripped as she stumbled back from the woman. Up close, she could see clearly now the unnaturally pale skin and the veins that coursed through her arms. The woman’s head hung slightly, as if looking at the floor, then began to tilt up. First came the dark sunken eyes as the matted hair fell from around her face. Then the dark, drawn-in cheeks... and then the jagged gash that sliced her throat from one ear to the other.

  The woman titled her head back till she was staring at the ceiling, and the gash on her throat split wide open. Thick blood poured from the gash and down her gown.

  Cassie screamed and snapped from the shock that had held her frozen. She raced back to the stairwell and up the stairs, and didn’t stop running till she reached her room. She ducked inside and quickly jammed a chair beneath the door
knob to hold it closed.

  She leaned over to catch her breath.

  Fuck! Shit! She needed to get out of here!

  Then she felt a sudden tingling...

  Something was in the room.

  She spun around, and three figures stood in silhouette against the window. She screamed before realizing it was her goth friends. Then she was ready to kill them.

  “The fuck, you guys? What’re you doing here?”

  “Liberating you, girl,” said Trish, clearly amused at Cassie’s reaction. “We haven’t seen you since they locked you up.”

  “I’m not locked up,” Cassie grumbled, still annoyed at the scare. “They’re helping me.”

  “You should ask for a refund,” cracked Seth, nodding to the chair jammed beneath the doorknob. “I don’t think that help is working out so well.”

  “What spooked you out there, girl,” Silvia asked. “Are you still seeing ghosts?”

  Cassie nodded. “Yeah. And other things too.”

  “Like your dog,” said Seth.

  Cassie did a double take. “How did you know about Rex?”

  Seth shrugged. “Didn’t you tell us?”

  Cassie shook her head. “I haven’t seen you guys since you bailed on me after that séance.”

  “Just a lucky guess then.”

  “What does it matter, Cass?” said Trish. “So, we know. Big deal.”

  “It matters because I never told anyone. So how’d you guys know?”

  “Someone needs to seriously chill out,” said Seth. He dug into his pocket and pulled out a small bag of ecstasy pills. “Why don’t you try this, instead of the meds they’ve got you on?”

  He took a step toward her...

  Cassie shook her head. “I’m not doing that stuff anymore.”

  “Why not, Cass?” said Silvia, and she and Trish also took a step towards Cassie.

  “’Cause I don’t want to,” said Cassie, taking an uneasy step backward.

  “Is that your shrink talking, or your mom?” said Seth, taking another step toward her.

  Silvia and Trish also took another step toward her...

  And the temperature in the room dropped.

  Cassie took another uneasy step back and bumped against the wall. The goths watched.

  “You’re scared of us,” said Silvia, taking another step closer. It was an acknowledgment — she knew, that Cassie now knew...

  “No, I’m not,” said Cassie. She was scared out of her mind, but couldn’t let it show. She couldn’t let them know that she knew. But they already did.

  “Then prove it,” said Trish. “Take a pill with us.” She fished a pill from Seth’s baggie and slid it under her tongue.

  Cassie shook her head. “I don’t want to.” The fear was showing in her voice now.

  “Since when?” asked Trish, as they took another step closer...

  Cassie hesitated. “Since I died.”

  “We all died,” said Trish, taking another step closer. “But you got to come back...”

  “And we’re still dead,” said Silvia.

  As Cassie watched, their faces rotted and decayed into the spectral corpses they were. Cracked gray skin clung like shriveled paper to their skulls, and dark empty eye sockets sneered at her with seething hatred.

  Cassie screamed. She felt faint, and her legs went weak. She tugged the chair out from under the doorknob and flung open the door. She collapsed onto the floor and dragged herself out the door. She screamed into the hallway! And screamed!

  From down the hallway came the pounding of feet. Two orderlies rounded the corner at the end of the hallway and sprinted her way.

  Cassie glanced back into the room, where Seth, Trish, and Silvia slowly faded into the darkness.

  “We’ll see you soon, Cass,” Seth sneered. And then they were gone.

  And everything went dark as Cassie fainted.

  ****

  Details from the night of her crash exploded back into Cassie’s memory, and she could now recall everything.

  She saw ambulance lights flashing in the night outside the shattered windshield.

  Seth’s car lay on its right side. She had sat behind Silvia and was now pinned against the back door. She couldn’t move or breathe. She felt rain pelt down on her through the shattered side window above her.

  Trish lay across her and crushed the breath from her lungs. She could see Trish was dead, with her neck twisted grotesquely and mouth forever frozen in its death scream.

  Silvia lay twisted on the console between the two front seats. Her head had smashed into the windshield, and her skull was crushed like a melon.

  Seth’s head lay twisted on top of Silvia’s. His head had shattered the windshield, and the jagged glass had torn the flesh from his face. Only one eye remained, staring lifelessly from his skull.

  They were all dead and gone to wherever it is the dead go, and she would soon join them...

  And then It was there. And she felt herself sink into darkness...

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  The Death of Hope

  “You don’t need to worry about me anymore,” Cassie assured Switzer as she sat on his couch the day after her encounter with the goths. “I remember everything now.”

  Cassie had awakened shortly after the orderlies found her lying in her doorway. Her memories of the accident were back, and vivid, and she remembered it all now. And with it came the terrifying realization that the goths’ appearances had been hauntings; and she knew they would return. But none of this was anything she could tell Switzer. More than ever, she needed to get out of this place, and to do that, she needed to convince Switzer that she was on her way to recovery and no longer posed a threat to herself. So she was going to tell him whatever it was he needed to hear.

  “Is that what was happening when the attendants found you?” Switzer asked. “They said you were screaming.”

  Cassie nodded. “I was. I had a dream, and that’s when it all came back to me. Seeing my friends dead like that, I guess I just freaked out.”

  “Quite understandable,” Switzer nodded.

  “So, yeah, I think I was having that thing you mentioned. Was it survivor’s guilt?”

  “Yes. That was one of my theories.”

  “And all the other stuff. You know, seeing ghosts and things. I think that was just the drugs leaving my system. It can do that, right? Cause hallucinations and stuff like that.”

  Switzer nodded. “It can.”

  “So, yeah. I think just knowing that will make me not freak out so much if it happens again. But I don’t think it will, especially now that I know the truth.”

  She watched Switzer’s reactions as he nodded along. Was he buying it — that she was getting better? Or did he think he was being played?

  “So, now that I’m better, would it be okay if I went home?”

  He sat back in his chair, and gave her a sympathetic smile. “Cassie, I know you’re anxious to return home, and I do believe we’ve made a considerable amount of progress, but we need to be careful that we don’t do it too soon.”

  Shit!

  “But I’m better now. I know my friends are dead, and I think that was the big breakthrough for me.”

  “It was a considerable one, yes.”

  “Then can’t we just go back to the way we used to do this, where I come in for appointments?”

  Cassie saw that he looked hesitant. “Please. I think I would make better progress if I could adjust to normal life again while we still keep doing these sessions.”

  He considered this a moment. “I’m still concerned over these suicidal idealizations.”

  Cassie quickly cut in. “But that was never me. That was what I thought that thing wanted me to do. But now I know it was all tied to that guilt I was having over surviving when my friends and that girl were killed.”

  “And you no longer have those feelings of guilt?”

  She sensed a trap.

  “I still feel bad it happened, but I know it w
asn’t my fault. And it’s all in the open now, where I can see it, and deal with it. My problem before was I didn’t understand what was happening.”

  She could see him thinking.

  “Please. I know I’ll get better a lot faster if I’m back in my normal surroundings.”

  “And if we do this,” he finally said, “do you promise you’ll contact me if you feel any relapse?”

  She gave him a big nod. “Oh yeah. Definitely. And I’ll even keep your card with me in case it happens at school.”

  He thought for another moment, then finally nodded. “Very well then. I’ll sign the paperwork for your discharge. But I want you to remember your promise.”

  “I will. Thank you!”

  ****

  Cassie glanced out the passenger window at the passing countryside. Over the course of the afternoon, she had seen the terrain pass from the forested hills on her peninsula, to farmlands, and finally back to the rolling hills on the eastern side of the state.

  It was the day after her discharge from Hillview, and she had asked Justin if he would come with her to see Kyle. She and Kyle shared a common foe, and she hoped he was right about knowing how to beat it, but, honestly, the guy still creeped her out. So she was grateful when Justin agreed to come with her. If anything positive had come from that night of the Shrill, and her second brush with death, it was having her old friend back in her life. It made her feel a little less alone.

  “So, none of that stuff you told your doctor was true,” Justin said.

  “The part about Seth, Trish, and Silvia being dead was true.”

  “So, you lied about the rest of it.”

  “I just had to get out of there.”

  He grinned. “So, you lied.”

  She rolled her eyes. “I told him what he wanted to hear. And he didn’t want to hear the truth.”

  “That you saw dead people in your room?”

  “He’d have me in a straitjacket right now.”

  Justin laughed. And she did too. And it felt good to laugh again.