“I don’t know…I don’t. It’s just…I can feel it. The building defines me, it contains me. I know the boundaries, I know when I come to one, I feel repelled. Now listen, listen quick. I can’t explain this how I would like but there are a few things you need to know. The bad ones are still around. Some of them living, some of them…aren‘t. And believe me when I say it is of utmost importance that we stop them. We have to-”
George’s arms flew upwards, two metal objects attracted to an invisible magnet. Something was pulling him. He fought to lower his arms, and wrapped them tightly around the rock. His legs shot out from under him. Somehow he managed to hold on while being sucked towards the brilliant night sky.
“Don’t go George!” Chloe yelled, throwing herself against his back trying to hold him down. “Don’t leave me here by myself!”
“Don’t think I’m going to have much of a choice,” George thought at her, keeping hold with his teeth firmly clamped.
“This is my head,” she thought, “My head, I can…” Quickly, Chloe imagined an iron cage. One with bars as thick as a man’s arms. Something that weighed too much to guess. She jumped clear of George and slammed the contraption down on top of him. The rock disappeared at once. George, plastered to the ceiling of the cage stared out at her from behind the bars.
“Well done,” he said. “I don’t know how long you’ll be able to keep me here, but well done still. That was fast thinking. I think we might be outside already. I can feel it. It’s just like how cold used to feel. I feel cold.”
“What do Ouija boards have to do with the asylum?” Chloe demanded.
“More than one would guess,” George said. “The spiritualism movement in America started with a group of radical Quakers. It attracted many scientists and even many doctors who studied psychology, the workings of the human mind. And guess who was both a Quaker and a doctor of the mentally ill?” George asked.
“Kirkbride,” Chloe guessed.
“Kirkbride,” George agreed. “Though we can’t tie him to the movement, we can say that the building of the first asylum based on his plan coincided almost exactly with the beginnings of the spiritualism movement. His building plan suggests an awfully good guess at how to contain a spirit. Plenty of glass, right angles, the symmetry, the triangular shape of it, with the way the wings spread out, angling away from the center, rough true, but there.”
“We talked to someone, a person who used to live in an asylum. He claimed to be one of you…one of Abraham’s men. He said he destroyed the cornerstone, and it let the ghosts out,” Chloe watched George through the wide black bars, she spoke as though asking a question.
“Oh I don’t believe it’s anything so simple as that,” he disagreed. “The building itself is only a part of the prison. And understand, it wasn’t a pen built around spirits that were already there. Ghost were created to be housed there, to be studied.”
“I don‘t understand” Chloe said.
“Not everyone becomes a ghost. Ask any spiritualist of the last century. Souls move onward, upward…unless they can’t. Unless they suffered afflictions in life that they can’t let go of in death. What keeps a soul earthbound? Most of the spiritualists believed it was conditions like alcoholism or drug addiction, regrets and rage…often times from people who were murderers or murdered themselves, and of course, those who were mentally sick. They seemed to be bound mainly to places where bad things had happened to them in life. They can’t let go of the experiences of the body. There have even been famous medium and clairvoyants who have claimed that such souls are attracted to like-minded people that are still living. The spirit of an alcoholic, may attach itself to a living alcoholic, watching with a dry mouth, hoping to possess the body if the living one has too much to drink and passes out. The spirit of a former mental patient may attach itself to a living mental patient who’s experiences and sickness mirrored their own. The asylum was the perfect laboratory for their experiments,” George explained while simultaneously trying to push himself down from the ceiling of the cage.
Quickly, Chloe imagined his feet encased in heavy cement blocks. George dropped to the bottom of the cage like a rock.
“They wanted to experiment with ghosts? I don’t see the point. What is their purpose, what were they hoping to do? This is supposed to be for science? Just to increase knowledge?” Chloe asked.
“Think about it, child. Now think about it truly. They could force a body to live when it had already died. What do you think they were hoping to achieve?” George asked her in a low voice.
“Longer lives?” Chloe guessed.
“Eternal physical life,” George answered.
“Not possible,” Chloe shook her head. “It’s just not possible. Bodies get old. You can hook it to a battery and make it keep going, but bodies wear out. Tissues will die, things in the body decay, the connections you would need to keep the electric current going through the whole body would eventually wither away, wouldn’t they? I mean, we have people with pacemakers, that give their heart an electric jump start whenever the heart can’t do it, and they don’t live forever, a physical body just can’t live forever…right?”
George smiled weakly at her from behind his bars.
“I don’t know. I don’t know how long they can keep a body going for. They started experimenting with reanimation and galvanism in the early 1700’s and then a hundred years later…they stopped. Why did they stop? Why did the focus suddenly become the human soul instead of the body? Was it because they could keep a body going, but not keep the soul inside? Or was it because bodies were wearing out, and they needed new ways to contain the human spirit? We don’t know. We only have a theory,” George said gravely.
“Which is?” Chloe prompted.
“This is going to sound like the ramblings of a lunatic,” George warned.
“Wow…I’m sitting on an imaginary beach, inside my own head, talking to a man who’s been dead for a hundred years, who’s explaining about an evil group of scientists with a plot to live forever and you’re worried that now…something’s going to sound insane?” Chloe laughed.
“If you can bring back a body, one that’s been dead, one that has a soul that already evacuated it…could another soul inhabit the body? A soul that’s been penned close by, ready to try?” George asked seriously.
“Yeah, that is just a little nuts, I guess,” Chloe admitted. “That’s what you think they’re trying to do?”
“We think it’s likely,” George admitted.
“George, the asylums are empty now, abandoned. They don’t send crazy people to big isolated mansions anymore. Things have changed, the world is different now. You’ve been dead a long time, there’s no way of knowing if the bad ones even still exist,” Chloe reasoned with him.
“That is why it’s imperative we move quickly. Don’t you see, Chloe? The asylums are abandoned, I know this. It took me so long to figure that much out. It’s just like what happened with the body experiments. Don’t you see? The testing phase is done, they’ve got the information they need! They’ve moved on, they’ve gained another step!” he insisted.
“No!” Chloe cut in, “No, it’s not like that at all. I read about it. There was this huge swell of public opinion against the asylums. They weren’t helping people. There were books and movies that came out, like thirty or forty years ago all about how awful those places were. How they were abusing people and torturing them, shocking them, lobotomizing them. That’s why they closed!”
“Shocking live bodies, performing electrical current experiments on living minds? Creating physical memories that could be attachment points for another state of being?” George asked seriously.
“No, that’s nuts,” Chloe argued. “They were mistakes, experiments to try to force a brain to be healthy.”
“And did it ever return anyone to mental health? Is that why the experiments continued?” George pressed.
“Aww, geez, this really is making me nuts. You still haven’t told me a
bout Abraham’s Men. Where do they come in with all of this?” she asked.
“A hundred years ago, you could take a group of people, isolate them from the rest of society, and in that place do what experiments you liked. If any one of those patients caught on, who would give credit to their stories? Who would believe them? Only others in their same situation. Abraham’s Men started with one man. Williams, they called him. He lived in one of the first asylums built, one that instituted Kirkbride as their head. Williams suffered from certain delusions. Among them, was the affliction that he claimed to hear voices, voices of the dead. Shortly after being assigned to Kirkbride’s asylum he developed a monomania, the fixed idea that Kirkbride was evil, that he had to be killed before he could confine others to the asylum. Williams escaped, though he still harbored the idea that Kirkbride needed to be stopped somehow. Williams returned to the asylum, climbed a tree and waited for the doctor to pass that way. When he did, Williams took his gun and shot Kirkbride in the head,” George said.
“But he lived,” she continued. “this is something I read about, an escaped mental patient returned and shot Kirkbride in the head, but he lived.”
“Oh yes. He LIVED,” George repeated. “How many people do you know to be shot in the head and survive with no complications whatsoever?”
“It was said that his hat stopped the bullet,” Chloe informed him.
“His hat…perhaps it was the fashion in those days to carve hats from stone, or perhaps back then bullets were made of cloth,” George suggested. “Or perhaps they had already learned enough about the body by then to keep it going. Whatever the case, William’s act was enough to convince others that had been in the asylum, and seen things they couldn’t explain, that something wasn’t right. This is when Abraham’s Men began. It has always been poorly organized. Understand that most asylums, most doctors and nurses, did operate with the idea that they were helping…healing. The bad ones mostly stayed behind the scenes, away from where anyone could get at them. They learned their lesson from Kirkbride.”
“So if you couldn’t even fight them directly, how did you think you were going to stop them?” Chloe wondered.
“We tried many different things,” George said. “There were those who favored direct action. Attacking care givers and the like.”
“Mental patients trying to attack their doctors for being part of an evil conspiracy to reanimate the dead…and how did that work out?,” Chloe smirked.
“Exactly as someone with hindsight would assume,” George snapped. “We tried other things. We tried appealing to the public, based on humanitarian issues, we tried the government route, lobbying to get rules in place that affected the treatment of the insane. We tried…more desperate measures…”
“Burning them down,” Chloe thought, not remembering her thoughts were audible in this place. George winced.
“Burning them down,” he agreed. “But that was all long ago. We can no longer stop them by stopping their experiments, it’s a new sort of war we face. We have find them, to confront them head on.”
“You keep saying ‘we’…” Chloe informed him. “Are you planning on finding a body yourself or…?”
“There are still others…Abraham’s Men still exist, I know that they do. I have felt them before, they’ve come close, and so…have others.”
“The dorm has other ghosts besides you?”
“No. Not confined to the dorm. The building is just one way to stay connected. It is a form. A way I can limit myself, orient myself, but as I’m starting to realize, a living body can also be a point of attachment. Do you remember how I said it was possible for a spirit to attach itself to a living body? For a soul to find another, one with the same addictions, the same flaws? The bad ones are on both sides of the border of life, and since you’ve come here, I’ve felt one. Not attached to you…no, but attached to someone close to you…and it’s bad. It has knowledge. It thinks…it plots. You need to get away. You need to leave here, and find the Men”
“I can’t…I’m in school…my friends are here…Seth-” Chloe stopped herself. Almost instantly she remembered Seth, standing against the wall with Sam’s arms wrapped around his neck. Sam and Seth kissing. The ground shook underneath her feet.
“Focus!” George charged her, gripping the bars of his cage with white knuckles.
“How would I even begin to find Abraham’s Men now? There are hardly any Asylums left, and if you’re right, they’ve probably moved on anyways. Where would I go? Who would I look for?” she demanded.
“Start with the man you found at Traverse City. He learned from someone. He must know something, and keep your eyes open. There are always signs. There are always ways to find our own. What we’re fighting is more than human. Believe this much. Good and evil battle on every plane of existence there is. If you stand against what’s bad, trust that you will have help…from somewhere. And don’t linger here long when I’m gone. You’re vulnerable here. In this place, you don’t need a body. The bad ones will find out about you eventually, if they haven’t already,” George cautioned.
“You keep saying that. You keep saying they’ll find me. Why me? Why would they even look for me? I’m not hurting them any!”
“Because I found you! I could see you and I wasn’t even looking. You are like a fire in the dark, a light for a moth. You are a threat. You can see them, feel them. Have you never heard anyone say that the greatest feat the Devil achieved was to convince the world he didn’t exist?”
“Yes. Yes, I have. What’s going to happen to you now? Is there some way we can free you? Something I can do?” she asked.
“I don’t know…what now?” George smiled. “I think…I feel that when I leave here, I might just go free.”
“Free? Like disappear into the atmosphere…like dissolve?” Chloe thought nervously.
“I really don’t know,” George grinned even larger. “I don’t, but I hope to find out. Maybe there will be a heaven. Maybe I’ll find my Elizabeth there. I died trying to stop them, trying to make a difference, and I was stuck because I couldn’t leave knowing I failed. And now…I’ve handed it off. I think that makes me free. I don’t need the building to hold me here any longer, my purpose is served. I think-”
George stopped and leaned forward, pressing his face against the bars of his cage. He was listening again.
“Chloe?” his thought barely a whisper. “Do you feel something?”
She stopped, cocking her head to the side, listening as she had seen him do. Did she hear something? The sound of the water barely lapping against the icy rocks. Looking up, the sky was unbearably bright. The stars were growing larger and brighter…and then they began to fall. At first, very slowly, one here or there, and then more and more, dropping away, streaking towards earth, white spears across the sky. It was raining stars. A meteor shower…in her head? That’s when a thought hit her.
“George?” her words very quiet, “I’m not doing that. I’m not making that happen, why is it doing that?”
“GO!” he demanded. “Get out! Go back, quickly, now!”
“How?” she screamed. The stars were hitting the water, hitting the inky cold water and fizzing all around her…cannonballs…fiery cannonballs. Hitting the beach. Chloe screamed and covered her head.
“UP!” he shouted. “Up and out! GO!!”
And then, the night sky ripped down the center, stars falling away on either side. A blinding white streak down the middle of the ceiling of her strange inner world, yawning wider and wider.
“Oh God, please…” she cried.
The ground was shaking. The beach was rocked by earthquake. George’s cage melted away. Chloe had enough time to make eye contact with him, and he was torn away…upwards, flying at an incredible speed. He was a speck against the white rip in the sky and then he was gone.
“GEORGE!” she screamed.
Her world was going to shake itself to pieces. The stars were gone. The blinding light from above, made all else around her
black. There was no longer any beach, no longer any lake or sky or trees. She had to get out…had to follow George.
“Up!” she willed herself. “Go up, damnit!”
But there was no ground to orient herself to, no way to move. She was back to floating, bobbing aimlessly in the blackness around her. And overhead…overhead the crack had widened into a gaping expanse of light. Squinting, she tried to look into it, tried to understand it. It was like seeing a picture through the wrong end of a telescope. A ceiling…a lamp…a person, it was a room of some sort, one she didn’t recognize, but it had to be better than the dark, better than alone and floating in the black nothing.
Chloe struggled, flailing her arms, trying to swim.
“Up!” she commanded herself again.
And then movement, upward movement. She wouldn’t have been able to say for sure except that the distant white room seemed to become larger.
“UP!” she screamed again.
Faster now, she could see more of the room, a wall of books…her own hands folded across her stomach. Desperately she reached towards it, just as she felt something down by her ankles. Something that slithered. Something cold and smooth, that wrapped round and round her calves and slid up her legs to dig in like fingernails at her waist. Her body jerked…downward. She was being dragged down again, back into the void, circled round and round by something she couldn’t see or hear, something awful, something…evil.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“By the intercession of St. Michael and the celestial Choir of Dominions, may the Lord give us grace to govern our senses and overcome any unruly passions. Amen,” Father Andrew continued. “Our Father, who art in heaven-”
The young man, Seth his name was, mumbled the well known words along with him. He watched the poor girl laid across the couch intently, waiting for a sign of some sort that the prayer was working. The other girl, Sam, sat with her eyes closed and both hands pressed against her forehead. She was sweating, and her brow wrinkled in what Father Andrew thought was pain. He paused before beginning the Hail Mary and cleared his throat.
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