“Yeah. Help us!!! We’re out of mixer!!!” Sam waved her arms
They both laughed at the idea.
“What time is it anyway?” Chloe wondered.
Sam glanced at her watch.
“Ten to two. Two more hours of this. Just sitting here,” Sam let out a frustrated sigh and fell over on top of her blankets. Her shoulder crushed the Ouija board game box. She pulled it out from under her and held it out to Chloe. “Let’s at least do this Ouija thing. I’m bored.”
“I don’t know, I think Ouija is kind of-”
“Bawk! Ba-a-a-wk!” Sam clucked like a chicken.
“You must not watch a lot of scary movies,” Chloe talked over Sam’s taunts, “because that’s always what happens. Someone says ‘Hey, let’s do this Ouija thing’ and the other character goes ‘no, I’d rather not,” then the first one taunts them until they give in and then BAM! Time to call the exorcist.”
Sam laughed again, but sat up and opened the box anyway.
“Sam…” Chloe complained.
“Oh, stop! It’ll be fun. If you get scared and hear voices or anything I’ll smack you around a bit and remind you that you’re crazy.”
“Thanks,” Chloe snapped, but all the same she scooted closer and sat cross-legged as Sam moved the instructions from side to side, trying to find enough light to read by. “Use the flashlight, genius!” Chloe reminded her.
“Oh I almost forgot,” Sam grabbed the flashlight and snapped it on. “Okay, so this thing-” Sam held up a white triangular piece with a clear plastic window embedded in it, “is called the pla... planchette. We both put our fingers on it and ask it questions, blah, blah, blah.”
Sam laid the board down on the cement between herself and Chloe and placed the planchette at the center of the board. Chloe let out a frustrated breath, hesitated for a moment, and then reached out and placed two fingers on the piece.
“Alright, I will be the mystical séance type person,” Sam announced. She closed her eyes and cleared her throat, Chloe giggled. “Quiet, please, you’re interrupting my communion with the spirits,” Sam warned in her most serious voice.
“Okay, okay Miss Cleo,” Chloe laughed.
“Call me now! Call fer your free readin’” Sam mimicked a Jamaican accent. Both girls laughed.
“Alright, let’s do this thing,” Sam said clearing her throat. Chloe stifled her laughter behind a smirk, as Sam closed her eyes and again placed her fingers on the triangle.
“Are there any spirits that wish to speak with us tonight?” Sam asked.
They waited, fingers laid lightly upon the planchette, watching intently. The piece did not move. Sam squeezed her eyes tightly shut as though she were concentrating hard, but all the same her lips seemed to be fighting off a smirk.
“Guess they’re not feeling talkative tonight. That’s too bad,” Chloe said.
“Any spirits out there, any spirits at all?” Sam asked again. They both watched as the white planchette moved ever so slowly, just a hair, and then stopped.
“You moved it!” Chloe accused.
“I did not,” Sam said, but her grin looked guilty.
“Why are you smiling then? You moved it!”
“It was the spirits,” Sam vowed solemnly.
“Spirits, my ass,” Chloe muttered.
“Okay, we have established contact,” Sam explained, “Now we can question it. What do you want to ask it?”
“I don’t wanna ask it anything,” Chloe snorted.
“Okay, I’ll ask it something then,” Sam closed her eyes again and pressed her lips together in imitation of total concentration. “Does Seth want to get his funky on with Chloe?”
Sam dragged the planchette over to the yes. Chloe squealed and punched Sam playfully on the arm.
“Does Sam secretly think Dr. Willard is hot?” Chloe demanded and then moved the planchette furiously back and forth over the yes.
“What?!” Sam screeched. She shoved Chloe and the two girls laughed until their sides hurt.
“Chloe! You’re such an-” Sam broke off mid-sentence, her mouth hanging open. Her eyes grew wide. “Clo, look!” she hissed.
Chloe followed Sam’s line of sight to the planchette. For a second, she suspected Sam was still kidding her, but she quickly realized, with a horrified clench of the stomach, that the planchette was moving. It was moving so slowly it was almost unnoticeable, but it was definitely edging at a snail’s pace towards the letters…all by itself.
“It’s the wind, it’s the wind or the board’s uneven, it’s the wind,” Chloe mumbled. She slammed closed the part of her brain that tried to remind her that there wasn’t a single breath of wind just then.
Sam reached tentatively towards the planchette and placed a finger on it. The piece immediately stopped.
“Weird,” Sam whispered, “Chloe, put your finger on it, come on, let’s ask it something.”
“No,” Chloe whispered back, crossing her arms and stuffing her hands into her armpits.
“Chloe…” Sam pleaded.
“No!”
“Please? Just one question, alright? Let’s just ask it one question and I’ll put it away, right back in the box,” Sam argued.
“You swear? Just one question and you’ll really put it away?”
“Yes, yes! Come on, your finger!”
Chloe reached out and placed one finger directly across from Sam’s. The planchette felt warm to the touch. Chloe hoped she was imagining it.
“Who are you?” Sam asked.
The white triangle moved slowly at first and then quicker and with greater confidence towards the first letter.
“H!” Sam said aloud. The planchette paused briefly and changed direction.
“E,” the girls said together, “L… P.”
The planchette stopped over the P.
“Help?” Sam wondered. “What do you mean help? How do we help?”
The planchette moved forcefully across the board.
“T..” Sam repeated, “R… A… P… P… E-”
A sudden and intense gust of wind shrieked through the bell tower, whipping Chloe’s hair to the side. She yanked her hand away and leapt to her feet.
“That’s enough, Sam! Put it away, put it away, PUT IT AWAY!” she screamed.
Sam held up her hands in a gesture of surrender. Unaided, the planchette lurched suddenly to the left, framing the letter D with its window.
“Trapped,” whispered Sam.
“I don’t care! Put it away, now! You said one question, just one question!” Chloe said as her voice grew higher and closer to a true hysterical pitch. The wind carried the moan of the old pines bending in the nearby forest as it whipped around her. Chloe covered her ears and watched Sam with pleading eyes.
“You’re right, I’m sorry. I’ll put it away,” Sam admitted loudly, the wind seemed to have brought back her caution. She made to grab the planchette, but in one impossibly quick act, the corner of the board lifted against the wind, and the entire board flew forcefully against Sam’s hand, flipped up, and smashed into one of the tower posts. The planchette skittered away and then followed the board tumbling down the slate roof and into the dark below.
The wind stilled almost instantly. Chloe felt her heart thumping so hard it seemed it would break a rib.
“Oh my God, Sam, Oh my God!” she whispered. The girls’ expressions were mirror images of terror. Sam reached out and grabbed Chloe’s hand.
“Sssshhhh!” she demanded.
“What is it? What?” Chloe’s voice was barely audible.
“I don’t know. Something. A little noise, I can’t tell wha-” They both froze and listened. Sam was squeezing Chloe’s hand so hard, her fingers were turning purple.
“That!” Sam whispered, “Did you hear that?”
“Like a jingling, like a really faint jingling,” Chloe confirmed.
The faint metallic sound became a muffled thud, and then another, and then another… beneath them, coming closer.
The girls backed away from the trap door. Chloe pressed herself against the metal railing in a futile effort to get as far as she could from it. The footsteps were quicker and heavier, like someone was running the final few steps. The trapdoor burst open, hinges squealing, and fell with a bang against the cement. Chloe and Sam wrapped their arms around each other and screamed in unison.
Seth shot out of the ominous dark hole like a bullet, his face a ghastly shade of white.
“What?” he demanded, “What is it? What happened?”
Chloe felt Sam’s grip on her back slacken. She let out a long shuddery breath and realized that she was still holding Sam’s shoulders tightly. The girls locked eyes for a long moment and then Sam let out something that sounded like a cross between a sob and a giggle. Chloe felt an overpowering desire to laugh, but didn’t dare. It wasn’t the kind of laughing that would be easy to stop. It wasn’t the kind of laugh that came from a sane mind. Instead she shoved her hand into her mouth and bit down, turning her back to Sam and Seth until she felt somewhat composed.
“What happened?” Seth repeated, taking a step closer.
“I don’t know! I don’t know what the hell just happened. Everything was fine and then all of a sudden the Ouija thing just started moving by itself and the wind started blowing all crazy and the board flew up and almost took my head off and then it went over the railing and it spelled out “help” and…and…”trapped” and we heard noises and oh my God, oh my God, we were so scared!” Sam rambled without stopping for air. Chloe rocked back and forth continuously, nodding her agreement.
“Get your stuff! You are going back to your room, right now!” Seth ordered.
“We made this bet-” Sam began.
“I know all about your bet, I’m your R.A., and I say bets off. Now get your stuff…Move!” Seth was furious.
He snatched up the pile of blankets and gave Sam a push towards the trapdoor. The girls gathered up the empty two liter, flashlight, and vodka and cautiously began descending the narrow stairway. Seth followed behind, swinging the trapdoor shut. The three of them were engulfed in total dark. Chloe stopped and reached out to touch the wall when it occurred to her that she might not feel the wall. If she felt something warm or fleshy or…
Immediately she felt Seth’s hand press lightly against her back, a surprisingly gentle touch for how angry his voice had sounded. She started down again, comforted that his hand stayed there.
They came to the bottom of the stairwell and waited while Sam fumbled to find the doorknob. A few seconds later they were back on the brightly lit hallway of the fourth floor. Seth herded them toward the main stairs. The dormitory felt abandoned. All Chloe could hear was the hum of florescent lights above them. Not a word was spoken until they were safely back at their own door.
“I can’t believe that you would both do something so stupid,” Seth accused quietly as Sam unlocked the door. He followed them into the room and tossed the pile of blankets onto Sam’s bed.
“How did you know we were up there?” Sam wondered.
“Your little friends down at the end of the hall. I had three or four complaints tonight about them being loud and annoying and I had to go down there and break up playtime. The one with the curly hair told me they were waiting up for you guys to get back. Told me she had made a bet that you guys wouldn’t spend the night in the bell tower. I figured that if you were half as drunk as the rest of them, you’d be lucky if you hadn’t already fallen off the roof. I heard you screaming for help before I was even in the stairwell. I thought one of you had fallen!” he accused.
Something didn’t seem right to Chloe. She tried to put her finger on it.
“Wait, you heard us yelling help?” Chloe repeated.
“One of you,” Seth agreed.
“The word help, you heard someone yell that?” Chloe asked again.
“Yes. I heard someone distinctly call out help, why?” Seth watched her warily. Sam and Chloe turned worried eyes towards each other and then back towards Seth.
“Because neither of us yelled help, not once,” Sam mumbled
CHAPTER FIVE
“Okay, so maybe I didn’t actually hear the word help, I just heard you guys screaming and thought help. That would be the logical assumption,” Seth argued yet again.
He sat in the desk chair, leaning it back on its rear legs across the room from where Chloe sat on her bed, back against the wall. Sam lounged against her pillows, thoughtfully peeling the label off a pop bottle.
“That still doesn’t explain the other stuff, the Ouija board, the wind…” Sam contested.
Over the last hour Sam had given Seth a much calmer and lengthier retelling of the night‘s events. Chloe sat quietly through it, murmuring assent when Sam asked her to back up specific happenings, not daring to look at Seth.
“You were pretty high up, above the trees, and you’re more exposed to wind,” Seth explained.
“The pointer on the Ouija thing moved by itself!” Sam snapped. He sighed. Chloe glanced at him. He looked tired. His jaw was shaded with the dark growth of early morning stubble and his eyes looked bloodshot. As she watched, he put his hands on his face and rubbed it as though he could wash off the sleeplessness. He opened the drawer of Chloe’s desk and rummaged around until he found a pencil. As both the girls watched, he leaned forward and dropped it on the ground. For a second, it didn’t move. Then, slowly at first, it began to roll towards the door, picking up greater speed the closer it got. Almost to the door it slowed, stopped, and then rolled backwards. The three watched as the pencil rolled back and forth in ever shorter arcs, finally coming to a stop a foot from the door.
“This building is very old,” Seth began, “it’s been settling for a long time. Thousands of kids have lived here, walking the same path to the same rooms, wearing patterns into the floors. The University doesn’t put the amount of upkeep into it that it should. Sometimes in the spring, when the ice thaws, we lose a roof tile or two. Sometimes a chunk of plaster will fall right off a wall. These old radiators-” he nodded towards the cast iron loops under the window, “make so much noise when they kick on in the winter that they scare people. So the floors are uneven. You just watched a pencil roll six feet. Now, do you still think that the planchette moving an inch on its own is proof that this place is haunted?”
Sam frowned and began shredding the label she had worked carefully to pull off in one piece.
“Well, a bunch of the girls were saying that this place used to be an insane asylum, and I can see why. Anyone would think so, it’s creepy!” Sam snapped.
Seth groaned. Chloe glanced at him again. He was at the end of whatever patience he had. He was tired. He had explained away everything that had happened to the realm of natural occurrences. He was less than a minute away from giving up and going back to his bed. When he did that, there would be nothing for them to do but to go to bed themselves, and then she would lay in the dark cringing at every little sound she heard…or thought she heard.
“It looks like one,” Chloe blurted out, speaking for the first time since they had returned to the room, “The dorm does. It looks like one of those old time asylum places, kind of.”
Seth was watching her now, he gave her a smile that made her think he had more patience than she had guessed.
“What do you mean, it looks like one?” he asked in his kindly, tired voice.
“Well, it’s just that…this building…I’m sure I’ve seen pictures or something of old asylums, and this building it-it kind of looks like that. It makes me think of those places. I can see why people say it,” Chloe stuttered.
He nodded thoughtfully. Then with a crash, he let his chair fall forward so that it rested again on four legs. He looked slowly from Chloe to Sam.
“If I tell you guys something, you have to promise me you won’t repeat it. You’re not going to tell your little friends down at the end of the hall, r
ight?”
Sam dropped the shreds of label and sat up straighter, she nodded eagerly. Chloe swallowed and tried her best to smile encouragingly.
“Chloe’s right. It does look like one of those places, and that’s because it was built to be an asylum. It just never happened. There was this guy, and I don’t remember what his name was- it was way back in the 1800’s, he, the way the story tells it, was the richest guy in Birch Harbor.
“Now at the time, there wasn’t a lot here. The college hadn’t been built yet, and there’s never been any mining in the area. I don’t think there was even a lot of logging going on so the town was like a church, a post office, a store, and a bar and that was pretty much it. Back then, every state was building asylums. They thought it was the best way to deal with people that they didn’t know what else to do with. Before there were asylums they just put people who had psych problems into jails or poor houses. So they started building these places, and all kinds of people wound up in them. It wasn’t just the crazies either. They sent people that had seizures, or who were sick with consumption, or who were just old and cranky, people that were depressed, or alcoholics…they sent them all. So there were a couple of asylums in Michigan, and they were all pretty full. They needed to build a new one. Since all of them, at the time, were below the bridge, this rich guy decides that they should build one here in Birch Harbor. He thought it would bring jobs to the area, and help to put the place on the map. He had a friend in the government, down in Lansing, who told him that the state would definitely help with funding, so he started to build the place. And he hired an architect who designed it on something called the Kirkbride plan.”
“Kirkbride? Like the name of the hall?” Sam prodded.
“Exactly. There was a doctor, whose name was Thomas Story Kirkbride, he was really well-known for the way he treated mentally ill patients. He had this belief that they should be treated with kindness and concern, and that was really different from how the system was dealing with them. He wrote this book about how to design buildings to house these people. It was all about how the building should be beautiful, and surrounded by gardens, with lots of fresh air and stuff. So his design was basically a large central part of the building, which was for administration, and doctors’ offices and things like that, and then on either side there was supposed to be an L-shaped wing that housed patients. And the wings were kind of staggered, so that each patient would have a room with windows that looked out onto gardens, or trees, or ponds, and that they could open to get a breeze. And most of the asylums built from then on, were built on this Kirkbride Plan. That’s why they kind of all look similar.”
Asylum Page 6