by Lisa Jackson
Too late, she thought, her shoulder screaming in agony as she hoisted herself upward then shimmied along the branch. Once she’d cleared the fence with its jagged, vicious wire, she dropped to the other side and felt a splinter of pain in her legs and spine from the impact.
Fortunately the pain dissipated, and she found the old trail that led through the thickets of pine and cypress and around a hedge of arborvitae to the rear of the hospital and a parking lot that had been reserved for employees and deliveries. Her father had been assigned a designated spot for his sporty little Carmengia, and if she looked hard, she could almost see the lines that had been painted on the asphalt.
It had been so long ago, she thought as she viewed the asylum for the first time in over ten years. Built of red brick, the main building rose three full stories. Its roof was steeply pitched, and on either end old fire escapes zigzagged to the highest window. The gutters were rusted and bent, some completely detached, though gargoyles still perched near the eaves. Some of the roof’s shingles, torn by wind and rain, had tumbled into the yard of crabgrass and weeds. Once there had been manicured grounds and pools where brightly colored koi swam beneath lily pads. Now overgrowth and brambles prevailed near stained, cracked basins that only held rainwater before it drained away or evaporated.
On the other side of the parking lot, the garages and sheds still existed, though roofs sagged, walls had started to lean, and the few windows that had escaped being boarded over were cracked and broken.
The place was a mess.
And more than that, there was not just a feeling of disrepair that was visible, but something else, something darker, a sense of despair that seemed to cling to the vine-clad walls.
Oh for God’s sake, don’t get all melodramatic! Just do what it is you have to do.
Nonetheless, Eve fought a sense of foreboding. Not only was she trespassing, but she felt as if whatever it was she would find here might be better left undisturbed.
“Oh get over yourself,” she said. It was broad daylight, and she planned to go inside, search around, see if she could find any locked files, then leave. She figured she’d be in and out in less than an hour, long before evening even thought about stretching lavender shadows over this part of the world.
She started with the back door, one that led into the kitchen, but none of the keys worked the lock. “Great.” When she couldn’t open that door, she headed around the building to the side door, at the bottom of one of the fire escapes.
Once again, none of her father’s keys would turn the dead bolt.
“Strike two,” she told herself, feeling the heat from the late afternoon sun beat against the back of her neck. She realized she was standing upon a wide veranda once filled with tables and umbrellas, where some of the more infirm patients had been rolled in wheelchairs outside. There had been planters filled with a dazzling display of flowers, and chaise longues for those who wanted to lie in the sunshine. Now there was just cement spiderwebbed with crevices, weeds, and one rusted lawn chair crumpled beneath a tall magnolia.
If she closed her eyes, she could still see the patients in wheelchairs, the nuns hurrying by, the nurses eyeing a group of younger, silent patients whose gaze followed Eve as she and Roy crossed the lawn. What had that boy’s name been? Rick or Ralph or Ron…God, she couldn’t remember, though she would never forget his silent, angry face and the fiery blue eyes that burned a hole in her every time she passed.
The hairs on the back of her neck raised, and she turned back to her task, pushing aside all the disturbing memories this place was certain to evoke.
The wind had kicked up. Hot as Satan’s breath, it did little to calm her nerves or cool her skin. She hurried to the front of the hospital, past overgrown crepe myrtles and along a nearly submerged path of flagstones through the tall, uneven grass.
She remembered taking this very walkway with her father, hurrying to keep up with his steady, long strides, trying like crazy to get his attention. To no avail. Not when he was stopping to talk to nurses or the nuns or, now and then, a patient.
Nurses in white,
Sisters in black
All in all
They don’t know Jack…
Roy’s voice rang so clearly in her head, she nearly stumbled. How often had he whispered those very words to her? One of his clever little poems about the place. Then there was the “Ode to an Asylum.”
Made of mortar, stones, and bricks
Housing retards, nuns, and pricks
Our Lady of Virtues is really of sins
God turns His back while Lucifer grins.
Roy’s attempts at poetry had been amateurish and cruel, but even now the crude rhymes ran through her head and she walked faster, rounding the corner of the building leading to the front entrance with its sweeping drive and elaborate fountain, all now in ruin.
She walked up the marble steps to the broad front door.
So, what if all the locks have been changed?
What then?
Are you going to literally break in?
She tried to insert the first key.
No good.
The second didn’t work either.
“Third time’s a charm,” she whispered and slid the key into the lock. But it wouldn’t turn.
“Great.” She pulled the key out of the dead bolt and felt sweat drizzling down her face and back. What had she expected? She should just give up. The interior of the hospital was probably long gutted, and then there had been the police and crime-scene technicians…. What could possibly be left?
Nothing. Go home. Forget this. Really, what are you doing? This is just a bad trip down memory lane.
And yet she walked around the building, careful not to disturb a papery wasp’s nest as she turned the corner of the far end and stopped dead in her tracks.
The last section of the fire escape had been lowered.
How odd.
Had someone forgotten and left it hanging?
She noticed a piece of yellow plastic on the last rung and realized it was a torn section of crime-scene tape. Slowly she raised her gaze upward. The metal staircase had a landing at each window. The first floor was boarded, but the second was intact.
A possible entry?
Only one way to find out.
Adjusting her pack on her shoulders, she grabbed hold of the lowest rung and swung upward. Pain rippled down her shoulder, but she knew that if she let go, she’d never be able to find the strength to try again. Gritting her teeth, ignoring her weakened muscles, she started climbing, pulling herself up rung by rung until her foot found the lowest bar.
Her heart pounded, and sweat trickled down her back. More than once she asked herself if she was as certifiable as the police had intimated, but she kept at it, one rung at a time. Gritting her teeth, she finally managed to reach the lowest platform on the second floor and pull herself to her feet. She stood gasping for a second.
Glancing around, she half expected someone, a caretaker or one of the nuns, to appear and insist she climb down. Instead, she saw only a whippoorwill flying low to land in the branches of a pine tree.
Aside from the gentle rush of a summer breeze, the grounds were quiet.
Undisturbed.
Almost too silent.
She refused to think about the troubling quietude. She tried the window on the second floor, but it didn’t budge.
Undaunted, she climbed up the clanging, rickety steps to the third floor.
The window, though splintered, was half open.
Almost in invitation.
Eve swallowed hard. It was probably just an oversight. Nothing more. She pushed on the casing, expecting it to stick or screech, but instead it slid easily upward, as if the tracks had been oiled.
Don’t even think it, she told herself as she crept into the dark, noiseless interior.
Despite the open window, the building smelled musty and dank, the floors dusty and scratched, wallpaper and paint peeling from the walls.
; Eve made her way downstairs, past the landing with the stained-glass window of the Madonna still intact, all the while letting her fingers run along the worn banister just as she had as a child. She decided to start her search on the first floor, though she was certain this part of the hospital had been torn apart by the police last autumn when a deranged killer had ended up here.
Because of Faith Chastain, the woman who could very well be your birth mother.
The lower floor was nearly empty and dark. Very little sunlight seeped in through the boarded-over windows and broken shutters. The grandfather clock that had chimed off the hours at the base of the stairs was no longer there. The reception area still possessed its long counter/desk that separated the foyer from the offices behind.
She imagined how it used to be, filled with briskly walking nurses, worried visitors, an office staff that was cheery but firm, and patients whose lives were fraying. Always and ever present were the nuns. Now the foyer was shadowy and gloomy, smelling of dust and disuse. Eve felt nervous, as if she were stepping onto someone’s grave.
Stop it. This is just an old building. Nothing sinister about it. Outside, the day is bright. Warm. Get on with it.
Using her flashlight, she walked through the linked offices and short, mazelike hallways, noting the rooms that the hospital secretary, two nurses, the Mother Superior, and the priest had once occupied. Though the names on the doorways had disappeared, a few faded numbers remained, and Eve remembered the whispers that seemed to seep from half-open doors, the discussions and concerns, the odors of antiseptic and pine cleaner that were ever present. The floor creaked as she shined her fragile beam ahead of her. She ended up at room number 1, her father’s office, a small interior cubicle without windows, only a transom over the doorway that allowed in natural light from a window in the corridor.
The room was empty, the wooden floor discolored where a desk, file cabinet, and bookcase had once stood. The walls were dark with dirt, showing lighter patches where once pictures and degrees had hung.
Aside from spiders watching from their corner webs near the ceiling, the room was unoccupied.
What had she expected?
She could visualize her father as she’d often seen him, seated at his wide desk, his head bent over some medical journal or patient chart. A banker’s light had created a pool of illumination. Upon the smooth plaster walls, his degrees had hung proudly. On the bookcase, a bifold frame held two pictures: one of Eve, one of her mother. Aside from one family portrait, there had been no pictures of Eve’s brothers.
And now her father was dead.
Murdered.
Like Faith Chastain.
Like Roy Kajak.
Disfigured with a tattoo.
Goose bumps crawled along her skin as she explored the rest of the main floor quickly, shining her light in the corners of the parlor, dining room, and kitchen, then trying the basement door.
It was locked.
None of her keys worked there either, and she felt a bit of relief. She could do without dark, dank rooms belowground. Ever since her brothers, in an inspired and cruel prank, had locked her in the cellar at their aunt’s house in the country and left her there for hours, she’d become slightly claustrophobic. She’d been five at the time, traumatized, and never again felt safe in dark, dank places underground. She’d slept for months afterward with the light on in her room and had often woken up to horrible dreams of trickling water, tiny beady eyes staring at her from dark corners, and spiders with dripping fangs. She’d woken up screaming, and her mother had usually crawled in bed with her, whispering softly and holding her close until she’d finally fallen asleep again.
Yeah, real sweethearts, her brothers, she thought as she returned to the staircase and climbed to the second floor, where she found empty bedrooms, baths, and closets. Like those of the lower level, the floors and walls here were scarred and shaded where artifacts and pictures had hung.
On the third floor, she walked unerringly to room 307, having remembered it had belonged to Faith Chastain. It was different from most of the other rooms in that it had a higher ceiling, fireplace, and a tall, arched window…the window through which she’d fallen. On the walls were outlines of pictures and, it seemed, a crucifix.
Was this the home of her mother?
Eve bit her lip and tried to remember Faith Chastain. She only had fleeting images of a haunted, petite woman who in moments of clarity could smile, her amber eyes intriguing and intelligent.
A dark stain discolored the center of the floor, and Eve backed away from what appeared to have once been blood.
You’re imagining things, she thought. You’re letting this gloomy, dark place with its history of evil get to you.
In the hallway, she walked past the other rooms, shining her flashlight into each doorway and seeing nothing other than emptiness. The bathrooms and showers were grimy and forgotten, infested by insects.
At the end of the hall, there was an empty linen closet and across from that doorway another closet with a second door at its back that led upward to the attic. It was locked, but this time one of her father’s keys slid easily into the dead bolt and turned. The lock clicked, and the door opened to a steep set of stairs that wound upward around a chimney to a long, narrow garret with exposed rafters and unfinished plank floors.
This had been her hideaway as a child. She and Roy had snuck up these twisting steps and spent hours playing make-believe games or spying on some of the patients and doctors. She cringed now as she thought about the peepholes they’d discovered that allowed them to view into the rooms below.
Including Faith Chastain’s bedroom.
Roy had spent hours numbering the tiny slits in the flooring with the appropriate rooms. Now Eve walked along the floorboards, ducking the cobwebby rafters and crossbeams, shining her weak light until she saw the number 307 written in a felt-tip pen and covered with dust and grime.
The wind whistled through the old rafters, sweeping through this oven of a chamber but not bringing any relief from the heat.
The place was creepier than she remembered it, and, she thought, if she closed her eyes, she could still hear the soft cries, the whimpers, the desperate whispers of some of the most tormented patients.
How many times had she and Roy looked down this very peephole into Faith Chastain’s room? Now, of course, she was embarrassed. How could she have been so uncaring, so callous, so ultimately curious?
“Forgive me,” she whispered but couldn’t resist the opportunity to look down that dime-sized hole once more, one created by the wiring for the overhead lamp in Faith’s room. As she did, she found herself staring at that damning crimson stain.
A shadow passed over the discoloration.
She gasped.
Her lungs constricted.
No one was in this decrepit hospital but her.
Right?
Fear splintered through her body. It’s just a shadow, a trick of light. It doesn’t mean anyone’s inside.
But she swallowed hard, and the back of her skull tightened as she strained to listen, not moving a muscle.
She blinked.
The shadow vanished.
As if it had never existed.
Light from the window…that was it…. There was still some glass in the higher panes, and a tree branch could have swayed in the wind, blocking the sun…. She had heard the wind up here, how its wept through the rafters. But there was no wind now. Not a whisper of a breeze skimming over the roof.
She waited.
The shadow didn’t appear again.
Nor did she hear the sounds of breathing, or footsteps, or a voice…. Perhaps she’d imagined the dark umbra that had been cast for a few seconds over Faith’s room.
But the skin on the back of her arms prickled in warning, and her insides had turned to jelly.
Just do what you have to do and get the hell out of here!
Moving more quickly now, she walked past a junkyard of old hospital bed parts and dr
esser drawers and medicine trays and God knew what else until she found a stack of cabinets. Old files. Long forgotten. She withdrew her keys again, found the smallest, and unlocked a tall cabinet.
Inside were old charts and records, dusty, some covered in mildew, all smelling like they were a hundred years old. Not quite a century, she realized, but old enough that the information was all handwritten or typed, no computer printouts.
She wondered if Roy’s records were here. He had eventually wound up here as a patient, at least for a few months before the facility closed forever. She’d always thought it was pure irony that perhaps Roy had been spied on himself once he’d had his own breakdown.
These files, though, were older, and she found a folder marked Chastain, Faith. “Oh God,” she whispered and opened the dusty manila file. It was thick, filled with notes and charts and evaluations, too much information to sift through here. She tucked the file inside her backpack and tamped down the feeling that she was not only trespassing but stealing as well.
Too bad.
This was information that she, if she were Faith’s daughter, deserved to know. If it turned out she wasn’t related to Faith Chastain, then at least she might have some insight as to why someone was linking her to the woman and this hospital, why her father and Roy might have been murdered.
She flipped quickly through the other tabs and saw a few names that conjured up faces. Rich Carver…Oh, he was the odd boy who was so silent…always watching, a tiny smile playing upon his lips until he looked away; then his expression turned demonic.…The next name was Enid Walcott, a thin, birdlike woman with wild hair and wide eyes. Merwin Anderson, a big man who had sat and stared for hours at the birdhouse near his window. John Stokes, a sly boy who was always sedated, rumored to have murdered his cousin. Ronnie Le Mars…She stopped at the name. That was the name of the boy who’d stared at her with such intensity. Ronnie Le Mars. She shivered as she thought about his hot blue eyes. What had he been in for? Self-mutilation? Or…did she have him and John Stokes mixed up? Had Ronnie been the one who had killed a member of his family? She glanced back to the files. The last name she recognized was Neva St. James, a bright, crafty girl whose aunt had committed her because of some form of autism.