Aquarius: Haunted Heart

by Sèphera Girón

  “Don’t I know it,” Madeline said.

  “I can see it in your aura,” Adele said, walking back to the easel. She picked up a few of Madeline’s pencils and quickly drew a sketch of Madeline’s body and the colors emitting from it.

  “See? You just paint what you see, and as you see, I hope you learn to feel. Each color should make you feel a certain way when you work with it. There’s no right or wrong, but you should be able to get to the point where you don’t even have to look at the pencils. Your hand just knows the vibration of the color you need to match the emotion you feel.”

  Madeline furrowed her brow. “That sounds so complicated.”

  “So easy and yet so complicated.” Adele smiled. “Give it a shot and see what happens.”

  Adele wandered off as Madeline organized a fresh sheet of paper. She looked at the rest of the class furiously coloring their papers around her. The room with filled with the scratching of pencil on paper and the excited breathing of budding artists.

  She stared at the paper, holding orange, pink, yellow and black pencils. She thought about Adele and drew her outline on the paper very quickly. The pencils began to hum in her fingers, and she picked out the yellow one first. She pressed the pencil against the paper, and within seconds, her hands were working rapidly to create whirls of colors. Her fingers eagerly sought out the pink, then orange. She was just adding the gray swirls when Adele’s voice startled her back into the classroom.

  “That’s an hour, everyone. Let’s see what we have.”

  Adele walked around the room, looking at everyone’s renderings. All the papers had slashes and gashes of color. Madeline could almost feel each person’s emotions rising from the page. She grinned.

  Maybe the art was beginning to speak to her after all.

  * * *

  When Madeline arrived home, she took out her aura picture of Adele and studied it. She wanted to add more colors, more swirls, but she figured she should leave her first work of art alone.

  After she leaned it against the bookcase, she went over to her computer and moved the mouse to activate it.

  She sat down in her large leather executive chair and idly clicked through websites. She found her email and ran through it. Jake had emailed.

  As she clicked open the message and turned on her instant messenger. Before she had a chance to even read the email, Jake was trying to talk to her.

  Jake75: Are you there?

  Maddy666: Yes, now I am. Been gone all night.

  Jake75: Where were you?

  Madeline smiled. Was Jake just making conversation or did he care?

  Maddy666: I started an art class. Today was the first day.

  She clicked on the email to scan it before she said anything more to him.

  Jake75: So what do you think?

  Maddy666: About my class?

  Jake75: Sure, about your class. But about the email. I need your answer right away.

  Madeline read the email and grinned. He was asking her, oh so politely, if she wanted to be part of reality TV show about paranormal investigators. The show wanted Jake to assemble a crew to examine an abandoned old insane asylum in Southern California, near the ocean.

  Maddy666: Just a minute. I’m just reading it now.

  The trip was that weekend. Over Valentine’s Day. Madeline gasped. She had only a day to get ready if she wanted to go.

  The show would be taped as they conducted routine paranormal investigations about the mystery of the building.

  Maddy666: I’d love to go. Tell me more about that place.

  Jake75: You can check out some pictures on the website link. It’s very old and used to house the criminally insane as well as people whose families just didn’t want to deal with them. Of course, tactics were harsh back then, and there were a few deaths. Some unexplained.

  Maddy666: That’s fairly typical in those old places.

  Jake75: Yes, in some ways. Then as the years went by, funding collapsed, In the sixties, it became like a rehab and then fell into disarray again after more unexplained deaths. Those are creepier because some of those people were from very wealthy families. Some contractor bought it a few years ago and was going to turn it into condos. But the recession hit and he had barely started renovating when he went bankrupt.

  Maddy666: So it’s empty now.

  Jake75: Yes, except for squatters and such. But the show went in a week or so ago to get rid of the riffraff.

  Madeline frowned. Those poor homeless people had to find new digs.

  Jake75: The place reeks of bums on top of the usual old desolate building smells.

  Maddy666: Can’t they burn incense or something?

  Jake75: I’m sure no one thinks of those witchy things in the film business.

  Maddy666: Not for spirits, just for the smell. It can work great sometimes.

  Jake75: When you get here, you can do your hocus pocus.

  Maddy666: LOL.

  Madeline grinned. Jake assumed she was coming.

  Maddy666: What if I already have plans for Valentine’s Day weekend?

  Jake75: I don’t think you do.

  A wave of indignation flooded through her. Who was he to assume she would be dateless on the most romantic weekend of the year? Valentine’s Day fell on a Saturday. It was the perfect date night.

  Do you? he asked after she didn’t respond.

  Maddy666: No, I have no plans but to go to California.

  Jake75: Good.

  Maddy666: Even if I did have plans, I wouldn’t pass up the chance to be on TV.

  Jake75: LOL. A media whore after my own heart.

  Maddy666: So what do I do?

  Jake75: I’ll call the show right now and tell them you’re coming. You’d fly out of Boston, right?

  Maddy666: Yes.

  Jake75: And are there any pressing engagements you need to be back for by Sunday night?

  Maddy666: No. I’m flexible. I’m a writer, I have a laptop.

  Jake75: Good. That will make it easier for them. I’ll get them to send you on a bus to Boston if you like.

  Maddy666: No, I’d rather drive. All my equipment...

  Jake75: Yes, I’ll get them to arrange parking on that end and a rental car when you get to LA.

  Madeline smiled. Los Angeles. She’d never been there. She looked at the snow swirling outside her window.

  Maddy666: Is the sun shining there?

  Jake75: No snow here. : ) But you should bring warm clothes. That building is very cold.

  Maddy666: Okay.

  Jake75: I’m going to make the calls now. Expect emails shortly with itinerary.

  Maddy666: Good-bye.

  She signed off her messenger and clicked over to a porn site. She was warm and tingly all over, and she needed to get a bit of release.

  The idea of California filled her with a warm glow, and she thought of seeing Jake’s handsome face again.

  She enjoyed how porn on the Internet had evolved over the years. She remembered when it first came out, there were only pictures. She had to be careful what she clicked on or she could be knocked out with a virus. In the early years, she had lost her work twice to viruses from corrupted porn sites.

  As the virus protectors got better, the porn-site owners were smarter too. They learned how to keep their customers from being infected, although spam and adware was rampant.

  Her favorites were videos. She was so grateful when finally she was able to get her porn fix for more than six- to twenty-second intervals. She loved the new sites where she could scan her mouse over the thumbnail and see what the free video contained with regard to positions. She wondered how anyone made money anymore as she had been surfing porn for years and had never once paid a dime.

  A site caught her attention, and she clicked on the movie.

  The scene was a woman lying on a bed in a jail cell. Two tall, handsome guards were catcalling her from the other side of the bars. Madeline turned off the sound. She hated the fake noises dubbed into sex sce
nes and preferred to imagine her own.

  The woman rolled around on the bed, exposing herself first to the ruddy white man and then to the glistening black man who both wore guard uniforms. Madeline fast-forwarded until the men were poking their penises through the bars. The woman knelt, deep-throating first one and then the other.

  Madeline reached for her vibrator and turned it on. She sighed as the familiar buzzing tickled her clit, and she clicked on another scene.

  The woman was fucking the black man through the bars. She was leaning over, her hands on her thighs as the man plunged in and out of her rapidly. His big, meaty hands clutched the bars, and the woman’s mouth opened wide as she experienced his enormity.

  Clicking the video again, Madeline fast-forwarded to the men finally inside the jail cell. They had stripped, and Madeline thought they were the finest couple of guards she’d ever seen.

  The woman played with her tits, sucking first one and then the other nipple while the white man shoved his cock into her. He thrust into her for a while as the black man toyed with his cock by her face. She licked her lips and then took his cock deep into her mouth. The man held her face as he pumped into her mouth. She squirmed with delight as the other man continued to thrust into her, holding her legs high in the air.

  Madeline clicked the movie further until the woman was lying on her back on the black man while he fucked her ass. The other man lay on top of her, thrusting into her pussy. The camera zoomed in on her holes being filled by the pulsing hardnesses.

  As Madeline’s vibrator slipped inside her pussy, her fingers danced along her clit. She lay back in her chair, raising her legs as she imagined the sensation of two cocks fucking her at once.

  She pumped her vibrator in time to the woman’s bucking hips, and long before the movie was over, Madeline came.

  She cried out in surprise, her pussy clamping around the vibrator. When the throbbing subsided, she pulled her toy out and went into the bathroom to wash it.

  As she ran warm water over it, she thought about the weekend again. She had so much to do and so little time to do it. She’d better get ready right away.

  Chapter Nine

  Pay attention to details.

  Jake had been right. The building was old and falling apart. She imagined Alcatraz looking somewhat similar. Or maybe worse.

  “No, Alcatraz actually looks pretty good next to this place,” Jake said as he led her and several others around on a tour.

  The paranormal investigative team consisted of Madeline, Jake, Diana, Eric, Tom and Doug. The TV crew had many people coming and going, but the main one Madeline worried about was the director, Sam. Jake had known him for years, and it was obvious to Madeline in just the brief few moments she was around the two men that the director was familiar with Jake’s manipulative games.

  “Don’t worry about it, Jake,” Sam said. “I have a great crew, and they’ve done many of these paranormal shows. They know how to set the mics and stay back.”

  “I don’t want anyone extra around making noise. We need to hear what we hear. We’ve got people from all over North America. Some of the best,” he stressed.

  “Yes, I know, Jake. That’s why we came to you. We trusted you would build a good team. So let’s see what you’ve got.”

  After brief introductions, the tour of the building began. Just staring at it before entering its massive stone walls, Madeline felt a sense of despair and isolation. She expected it was normal; the place was an asylum, after all, and likely everyone who was ever in there experienced despair and isolation.

  As she toured the wings, she stared into the abandoned, cold rooms.

  “They’re more like cells than hospital rooms,” she lamented as she lit incense sticks along the way.

  “They treated mentally ill people worse than criminals back in the day,” Sam said.

  “I know, but to see it with my own eyes, it’s awful. I mean, I’ve been to a few asylums out in New England, but this is like a super asylum. Huge and cold and inhumane.”

  “Oh, they were inhumane here, all right,” Sam said. “So ironic. Mount Virtue, where the sickest tortures took place.”

  “When did it all finally end?”

  “Some say it never ended,” Jake said. “But the basic history shows us that the hospital was overcrowded for at least ten years. Suddenly there was a move toward privatization and budget cutbacks. Mount Virtue was almost like what we would consider a celebrity rehab by today’s standards for another twenty years. Starlets, politicians, even POWs might hang out at Virtue for a month or twenty to cope with their inner demons, real or imagined.”

  “Is there an exact number for the suicides?” Madeline asked, remembering she had written the question in her notes somewhere.

  “No one is sure. There were so many deaths that could have been suicide, could have been murder, could have been something mundane.”

  “What about deaths? How many of those?” Madeline asked.

  “Well,” Jake said, “there were about seventeen very suspicious deaths and nearly twenty other mysterious deaths. There could be more deaths we don’t know about—and won’t, unless we go digging. For instance, there could have been people visiting who died with no one knowing they were here, and now they’re gone, and maybe they’ve been presumed missing for decades,” Sam said.

  “Where do you come up with this stuff?” Diana asked, throwing up her hands.

  “It’s important to know history,” Jake said.

  “Of course it is. That’s why I’m asking about it. I want to know the specifics. I get that this is an insane asylum, but what else is there I need to know so that I can do my job better?”

  “You need to know that it’s fucking creepy here and things will happen,” Jake said. “There are sad people here, but there are angry people too. And it’s almost always the angry people you gotta watch out for, although the sad people can turn on you too. Just be careful is all.”

  They walked through long stretches of chilly, dark corridors, peering into various rooms. Madeline found it surprising that a number of beds and even dusty pieces of equipment were still lying around. Piles of yellowed, moth-eaten linens were still stored in various closets.

  On the second floor, what was once a games room had obviously been used for many years as a squatters’ den. The stench of urine and body odor alone was enough to make one gag.

  “I wonder why this room was the preferred room to live in. There’s an entire hospital to use,” Madeline said.

  “I think it had to do with all the haunting,” Sam said. “Some of the corridors are more haunted then others. Some of the stories are very specific about what happened.”

  Madeline breathed through her mouth, trying not to inhale the foul smells. She held her hands up to sense if there was any energy flowing through the room and through her.

  A lot of discordant vibrations slammed through her. Her hands burned, her stomach knotted. She looked over and saw Diana experiencing the same thing.

  “Be careful,” Sam said. “A lot of mediums have burned themselves out before they’ve even begun their investigations.”

  “Murders happened in this room too,” Madeline said. “So why was it considered safer?”

  “Who knows?” Sam said. “Could be any number of reasons. It’s a brighter room in the daylight, though you’d never know it with all the overgrown trees out front and the ivy on the windows.”

  They continued on the quick tour of the facility. Climbing the stairs to the third floor, they were able to peek out barred windows at the overgrown gardens below.

  “It would have made nice condos,” Diana said. “Can you imagine looking out at these grounds and the ocean beyond that? Heck, I would live here.”

  “Too bad they ran out of money, or whatever the problem was,” Madeline said.

  “You can see where they were redesigning some of the areas,” Jake pointed out.

  The little group entered the east wing, where there had been attempts
at renovations. Walls had been knocked out and braces put in. Piles of stones and bricks showed the results of demotions.

  “This would have been a great loft,” Diana said in one of the rooms.

  “If you like it so much, why don’t you stay in here tonight? See what you get?” Jake suggested.

  Diana shuddered. “By myself?”

  “Well, we’ll all be around here. I figured if we were all stationed on different levels, we might get more activity than if we’re all grouped together in one room.”

  “It’s logical, but man, I’m sure not looking forward to it,” Madeline said.

  After the brief tour of the building, the group rejoined the others in the abandoned cafeteria. There were still old, rickety tables and chairs that looked as though they were from the fifties. The television crew had been piling in equipment for the past three days. Mountains of coiled cables and piles of clamps lay around the massive room. Heavy lights and rods with microphones were only some of the equipment Madeline recognized.

  She brushed the dust from a chair and sat down, surveying the room, the people, the equipment. More of the film crew had arrived and were busy laying the cable. She noticed how they worked effortlessly as a team: clipboards and walkie-talkies, perfect gears clicking together like a well-timed watch.

  The biggest pieces of equipment were the four large generators the camera crews would use. Madeline wondered if the miles of cable would be enough to stretch along the corridors of the asylum to the various wings.

  “Do you want to try the tunnels with me tonight?” Jake asked her. She looked over at the others and back at him.

  “Me? Why me?” she asked.

  Jake handed her a bottle of water he had taken from one of the coolers. As she turned the cap, he drank deeply from his own. “Well, the tunnels are the most creepy, I think. And maybe we’ll capture some good activity. The stories of what people have found down there are legendary. Almost fifty percent of the bodies have been found in those tunnels.”

  “Is it safe now?” Madeline asked. “I mean, just in the general areas of this place, there’s evidence of squatters and such. How do we know if everything is going to be fine?”