Up All Night

by Laura Silverman

  Dorsey frowned. “1918. That’s . . . not a lot of gravestones, for the amount of women that were here.”

  “Maybe their families came to get them, after they died? Buried them at home or something?” Kate had a weird feeling in her chest. She’d seen the bill for her mother’s funeral and burials weren’t cheap.

  Dorsey said, “Maybe they buried them somewhere else?” But her voice was unsure.

  The girls were quiet.

  “Onward,” Dorsey finally said. “We’re on a mission.”

  They were at the front doors when Kate looked around. “Lissy,” she hissed.

  Lissy jumped. She’d walked to the edge of the lake without realizing it. Her shoes were inches from the water.

  “Come on, or we’re leaving you outside,” Kate said.

  Lissy ran toward the girls. Dorsey took a breath, reached her hand out, and grasped a handle on one of the immense double doors. The door stuck and she grunted, pulling harder. It finally opened with a musty creak. Something skittered up the door and disappeared inside a crack.

  “Holy . . .” said Angie.

  As they slowly walked inside, Lissy looked back at the shimmering, dark lake.

  Ever so slightly, in the middle, the water surged, as though something had pushed it from beneath.

  Lissy ran inside.

  Inside it smelled like dust, wood, and urine. Above them, the ceiling rose to a tall, octagon-shaped tower of windows, moonlight beating down through the cracked and dirty glass.

  Kate was glad for the windows, because the room wasn’t completely dark. Dorsey dug in her backpack, handing each of them flashlights. “You can use your phones, too,” she said. “These are just for an emergency.” She handed Angie a camcorder.

  “You’re the cinematographer,” she said.

  “Why me and why can’t we just use our phones?” Angie asked.

  Dorsey shrugged. “This makes it more old school. Like we’re making a real film. And you have the steadiest hands.”

  Angie was an artist, creating amazing pots out of mounds of clay on a spinning wheel. Angie would go to art school in a big city someday, and live in a cute loft, and make her pots, and fall in love with people in disheveled clothes who could recite poetry from memory and sleep on bare mattresses and spend all their money seeing drowsy-eyed bands in tiny clubs. All of the girls would envy her for it, even Dorsey.

  Angie took the camcorder.

  Lissy looked around. The room was cavernous, splintering off into hallways that went in different directions. It was like being inside a spider, like each hallway was a leg. Her fingers crept for Kate’s.

  Kate jerked away. “Stop it,” she said. “You know I don’t like that.”

  Lissy folded her hands together. The thing she missed about their mother most was the warmth of her mother’s hand in hers, leading her into school every morning, straight to her classroom door, her head held high. The rest of the day, without her mother, was filled with whispers of Mouse and spitballs in her hair.

  Her father didn’t walk Lissy into school, after her mother died. He said he had to get to work and she needed to be brave.

  “Time to grow up,” he’d said.

  Lissy’s body suddenly felt very small and empty.

  Dorsey glanced around. “We need to find a good spot farther in,” she said, turning on her flashlight. The long beams swept the entries to the hallways. “Somewhere deeper, where they lived more. This is just the lobby. Or waiting room? What do they call it in a psych hospital, anyway?” She turned the beam on Kate. “Kate, you should know.”

  The girls looked everywhere but at Kate.

  Kate glared at Dorsey.

  “Just a little loony bin humor,” Dorsey said. “Don’t be so sensitive.”

  Kate wondered what would happen if she cracked her flashlight against the side of Dorsey’s beautiful head. What then? Would she get put away again for excessive grief? Sometimes she was so angry she felt her whole body might split apart.

  Dorsey angled her flashlight around the room, catching the gleam of broken glass, shards of wood, a lopsided couch with stuffing spilling out like white guts.

  She started walking and they followed.

  Kim whispered, “I’m not sure I’m feeling this, anymore.” But she didn’t turn back.

  The hallway Dorsey had chosen was long and there were benches against the whole length of wall.

  “Seems like a pretty big waiting area,” Angie said, turning in a circle, panning the hallway with the camcorder.

  Dorsey said, “Not many people came to visit. If you were put here, it was because your family didn’t want anything more to do with you. I read somewhere that they brought the patients out at six o’clock in the morning and put them on the benches and kept them there until six at night.”

  “Wait,” Kate said. “They just sat here, all day?”

  Kate thought back to last year, when she’d had to go to a hospital for a few weeks. Her mother’s death had been slow and agonizing and it seemed when she finally died, she took most of Kate’s heart with her. All Kate did was stay in bed, wordless. Her boyfriend Mick had come by and sat on the edge of the bed, texting and watching YouTube videos.

  She’d watched him not watching her, all the words she wanted to say piling up inside her like nails, needful and sharp.

  Finally, he’d looked up and said, “How much longer is this going to go on?” and the pain that rose up in her sent her hands to Mick’s face, the face she’d once loved so deeply she could imagine it, perfectly, with her eyes closed. Her fingers were claws on his skin.

  After that, her father drove her to a hospital in another town, where she stayed with other sad-eyed kids and painted and wrote in a journal and sat in a circle and listened to everyone’s sadness. It wasn’t bad, and she felt better when it was done, but she still had darkness inside, and she knew it would never go away.

  Kate looked at the benches. The hospital she went to wasn’t fancy, but it wasn’t horrible, and there were rules, but at least they never made you sit on benches all day, just staring into nothingness. Imagine, having to wake up only to be told to sit for twelve hours until it was time to go to bed again? Were the women here even allowed to talk to each other? Kate had liked most of the other kids at the hospital. After a while, it seemed like they all belonged to the same club, one made of sadness and hurt, and she could tell them things she could never tell these girls.

  Dorsey held the flashlight under her chin. She was so pretty, all round cheeks and snub nose and dark eyes.

  “It was supposed to be therapeutic.” She pointed to the windows opposite the benches. “See, they could look outside all day and ruminate on why they excessively masturbated or read novels all day. Really, it was just a way to keep them in line. If they fell asleep or talked, they got hit with a baton.”

  Kate frowned. It sounded more like a prison than a hospital.

  “That would drive anyone loopy,” Kim said.

  “Exactamundo,” Dorsey said. “If you weren’t loopy when you came in, you were by the time you died here.”

  They came to an area where it was darker, and colder, and they could no longer see the octagon-shaped room they’d walked from, or the moonlight from any windows. Something scuttled in the corner and Kim jumped. “Jesus,” she muttered.

  “Mice,” Dorsey said. “Always underfoot.”

  Lissy frowned.

  “Well,” Dorsey said, “we might as well get the GhostConnector up and running.” She fished in her backpack.

  Kim said, “I just lost service. Anybody else?” She tapped her phone.

  “Yep,” Angie said, holding the camcorder in one hand and peering at her phone in the other.

  Kate beamed her flashlight down the corridor. There were some framed photographs hanging on the walls and she walked closer to look at the
m. One was of an unsmiling old man with comically bushy eyebrows, but his eyes weren’t happy, or kind. They simply stared out of the frame, as though at something only he could see. “Dr. Irving Braithwaite,” she read out loud. “Well, you are a creepster, Dr. Braithwaite, that’s for sure.”

  Kate walked to a doorway and shined her flashlight in.

  There were sinks along the back wall and, in the middle of the room, what looked like a dentist’s chair attached to a machine by a series of plastic-looking tubes. She shined the flashlight on the floor. Scattered among papers and rectangular trays, like the kind they give you at the doctor’s office to vomit in, were odd metal objects, things that looked like pliers or wire-cutters.

  “Dorsey,” she called. “What else did they do here? What is this room?”

  Dorsey walked in. Her flashlight picked up the dull, faded green color of the walls, the paint peeling like sunburned skin.

  “Some places did experiments, like lobotomies. You know, the old icepick in the eyeball to calm your brain down. Other things, probably, too. Who would know unless they kept records? You had all these women basically at the mercy of a bunch of male doctors who didn’t have degrees in psychiatry.”

  “This is getting creepy,” Angie said, sweeping the camera around the room, the little red light like an eye. She stepped gingerly over pieces of broken glass.

  Dorsey smiled. “Voilà,” she said, holding something up.

  The GhostConnector was hardly bigger than a game console, and looked like one, with a screen, dials, and buttons. It looked like a toy and Kim said so, a hand on her hip.

  Dorsey said, “A thousand-dollar toy, then, I guess, complete with an electromagnetic frequency reader, data storage, a thermal flashlight that changes color when the temperature dips or rises, and an application that turns environmental readings into real words, also known as making sense of phonetic activity.”

  She sounded like she’d memorized the pamphlet.

  The girls stared at her.

  Dorsey sighed. “In dipshit language, that means if a ghost is near, the temperature will change and this thing will alert us. If the ghost makes a sound—ooohhh!—this machine has a mechanism to recognize the speech pattern and turn it into a word we can understand.”

  Kate looked at the GhostConnector. “Do you honestly think that thing is legitimate?”

  Dorsey’s face closed in a way Kate didn’t like. “Why, Kate? What are you afraid of? A bunch of dead lady ghosts? Afraid this might work better than your Ouija board?”

  She chucked Kate under the chin with a finger. Kate ducked away, sorry she’d ever told Dorsey about the Ouija board. She didn’t like Dorsey all that much, truthfully. She wasn’t planning to keep in touch when Dorsey went away in a year to whatever pretty college she chose and Kate had to stay home, working at a call center or something. That would be her life: sitting in a cubicle listening to strangers complain about dishwashers not washing and recliners not reclining.

  Dorsey and the other girls left the room. When Kate went to follow, her shoe crunched on something. She shined her flashlight down. Tiny, yellowy-white stones were strewn across the floor. She bent down to get a closer look, but Lissy scooped them up and held them close to Kate’s face.

  “Teeth,” Lissy said. “Like me.” She opened her mouth, exposing the gaps. She was nine, and the teeth she did have hung like mini-stalactites.

  Kate’s stomach heaved and she pushed Lissy’s hand away, hurrying after the others.

  Dorsey stopped at another room. “Hold on,” she said. She held the GhostConnector up. A faint blue, blinking line.

  “The temperature is dropping.” Dorsey sounded excited.

  Kate rubbed her arms. “It’s getting cold.”

  “Yes,” Dorsey said. “Spirits suck the energy, as in heat, from an area, when they’re close.”

  She held the GhostConnector up to the doorway. It pinged faintly and the blue line got bluer.

  Angie said, “If you’re pranking us, I will kill you. No joke.”

  Dorsey licked her lips and stepped into the room. The GhostConnector whirred.

  Kate followed nervously. She thought of Dorsey’s grandmother visiting her. If ghosts could return to a place, then surely it was possible they were here. Or maybe Dorsey had been lying about her grandmother. Dorsey lied about a lot of things.

  There were metal tables and file cabinets, sinks and a strange chair mounted to a pole with a lever in the middle of the room. The chair had straps and metal cuffs.

  Dorsey whistled.

  “I didn’t think I’d see one of these,” she said. “So, one thing they did was put patients in this chair and strap them in and then raise them up,” Dorsey said, pointing to the lever. “And then spin it.” She walked around the chair to a machine with knobs and buttons. She pressed some of the buttons. Nothing happened.

  “Spin it?” Kate asked.

  “Yes, really fast. It was supposed to clear the bad thoughts from your head.”

  Angie circled the chair with the camera. “Someone should get in,” she said, grinning. “I mean, it’s for posterity.”

  Lissy said, “It’s freezing,” but no one heard her. She had slipped the teeth into the pocket of her pants and she felt for them now, jiggling them in her fingers to comfort herself.

  Dorsey said, “Kim. Get in.”

  “No way.” Kim backed away. “I have a meet next week and I’m not getting hurt for this crap.”

  “It doesn’t work. There’s no electricity here. See?” Dorsey made a big show of pressing buttons, turning knobs.

  Kim shook her head.

  “I’ll give you fifty bucks. Here.” Dorsey dug in her backpack and handed Kim the cash.

  Kim held the money in her hand. She hated that Dorsey bribed them all the time. Kim once accepted twenty bucks from Dorsey to walk up to Dean Cooper at a party and kiss him and sure, she did it, she’d had a beer or two, and Dean was extremely cute, but the kiss made him think they’d be doing more, and it took her some time to get out of that. That’s why boys sucked. Nothing could ever be fun. It always had to be more.

  Kim handed Dorsey the money. “Nope.”

  Dorsey turned to Angie. “You do it.”

  Angie hesitated. She could always use money for art supplies. It could be interesting, being in the chair. Artists were always testing limits, after all. She watched a video once of an artist who sat in a store window for twelve days straight, naked in a chair, staring at the strangers gathered on the sidewalk to watch. Her expression never changed. She didn’t eat, she didn’t sleep. “I’m on display,” the artist had said in a statement. “Women are always on display.”

  Angie had watched as much of the video as she could, keeping it on real time on her laptop, looking away for homework or to go to school or to sleep and always, when she came back, there was the woman, looking at her. In time, her body stopped being naked, stopped being boobs and bush, and more of a thing, a rooted, strange, immovable object. Kind of like the women on the benches must have felt, Angie thought suddenly.

  “Fifty more when we get out of here and I’ll do it,” Angie told Dorsey.

  Dorsey nodded. Angie handed Kim the camcorder and climbed onto the chair. Puffs of dust erupted around her, creamy in the beam of Dorsey’s flashlight. Kate strapped Angie in.

  “Don’t put the cuffs on,” Angie warned. She tried to steel herself. This was for art, after all.

  Lissy’s teeth began to chatter.

  “Happy now?” Angie asked, as Kim filmed her. She tugged at the straps. “Okay, I’m getting off. Help me. Are these tangled or something?”

  “Your machine’s making a noise,” Kate said to Dorsey.

  Dorsey held the GhostConnector to her ear. “No, quiet as a kitten.”

  But they all heard the whirring. The chair began to rise.

  Do
rsey’s mouth opened in a perfect O, but it was Angie who began to scream as she was lifted in the air. Stop it, let me down, you said it didn’t work, this isn’t funny.

  We didn’t touch it.

  Kate and Dorsey tried the buttons and knobs but nothing worked. They jumped for the chair, but it kept rising, Angie struggling in the straps that criss-crossed her body.

  And then, with a violent bump that shook Angie’s body, it stopped.

  “Get me down!” Angie cried.

  The chair began to spin, slowly at first, with a great, creaking groan, throwing Angie’s cries around the room, and then faster, garbling her words. She spun like a top.

  Dorsey’s GhostConnector gurgled, but only Lissy noticed. She stepped closer to Dorsey as Angie’s cries intensified. Kim finally threw down the camera and ran under the chair, trying to find something to stop it.

  Angie vomited from up high, spraying chicken noodle soup around the room.

  Make it stop, thought Lissy, pressing her hands to her ears. Make it stop.

  The chair stilled.

  Angie slumped forward. Kate and Kim got hold of the bottom of the chair and wrenched it to the ground. Angie’s face was bloated. Tiny chicken pieces clung to her cheeks.

  Kate undid the straps. They weren’t tangled at all, like Angie had said.

  “I’m so sorry,” Dorsey whispered. She tried to wipe off Angie’s face, but Angie shoved her, hard, knocking Dorsey to the ground, and got out of the chair. She wobbled, her legs buckling for a second before she straightened herself.

  “I hate you so much right now,” she whispered to Dorsey. She reached into her pocket and threw the money on the glass-littered ground.

  And then she ran.

  The girls stood, stunned, until Kim finally spoke. “I think we should go,” she said. “This is too weird.”

  “No,” Dorsey said. “This is exactly what we came for. I mean, what was that? What did that? She’ll be fine. She’ll wait in the car.”

  Lissy pulled on the sleeve of Dorsey’s pink hoodie. “What is it, Mouse? You scared? This is an adventure.”