Insanity

by Susan Vaught

  Did I care?

  “For your part, you’ll spend a little time with Imogene and do some learning,” he said, “and we’ll see if we can figure out what kind of power you have—because you definitely have some.”

  Once more, I thought about his words. Deals like this always had hidden meanings, didn’t they? Traps to snare the idiot who made them, sure that they knew what they were doing.

  I didn’t have any clue what I was doing. I freely admitted that. But it didn’t sound like Levi was asking for too much.

  “You think I can do whatever Imogene does?” I said. “You think I’m whatever she is?”

  Levi nodded. “Somebody knew about that, and tried to hide you. They must have had reasons. Whether they meant you good or evil, we have to figure that out.”

  “All right,” I said. “One more condition, and I’ll make your bargain.”

  Levi’s brows lifted. He obviously wasn’t used to people negotiating with him, but if I was handing over any part of my will or freedom, it would be on my own terms.

  “Get rid of the dogs and the geese,” I said. “I don’t want Miss Sally’s spirit scared out of its wits.”

  “Forest—”

  I cut him off. “My way, or no deal. You can cross them over without all this.” I waved at the stardust. “Low drama. Got me?”

  Levi hesitated. I could tell he was truly worried about something. My safety? His own? But a few seconds later, he lowered his head and yielded with a quiet, “Okay.”

  “Then you have a bargain. Do we have to seal it in blood or something?”

  He raised his head, his face only an inch from mine, his black eyes bright with amusement. “No. Anybody who breaks a promise to me crumbles to dust on the spot.”

  He was kidding.

  I knew he was.

  Right?

  “What did you do, Forest?” Decker Greenway sounded desperate and sad. “You shouldn’t have—”

  He stopped talking, turning toward the hall that led to the geriatric ward. He walked forward a step, heedless of the growling hounds.

  My heart stuttered, and tears blurred my vision. There was only one thing that would get Decker’s attention like that, and it was sad and magnificent, wonderful wrapped in awful. I didn’t know whether to cry or shout with joy.

  As I stood, the tears won out, followed by fear and shivers and a few hard seconds of talking to myself about being a grown-up and not freaking out.

  Levi got to his feet in front of me and held out his hands, and the dogs and geese and stardust went away. The hallway returned to its normal tile and stone, the night lighting offering nothing but a dim yellow glow.

  “Doing this your way,” he said without looking at me.

  From far above Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital, the bells of Tower Cottage started to ring.

  Miss Sally Greenway was coming to find her husband.

  Chapter Seven

  She didn’t come at a run.

  She didn’t come slowly, either.

  Sally Greenway walked down the hallway toward the clothing room like a woman who meant to die on Halloween—like a woman who knew right where she was going.

  Her face, the face that had been made of black marble and wrinkles, looked young and smooth and soft. She wore a short-sleeved yellow dress and she was barefoot, with her ebony hair flowing long and natural down her shoulders. She might have lived in the 1920s or the ’30s or the ’60s. She was timeless, and she was free, and she headed straight for Decker.

  He started to cry. Then he opened his arms wide and Sally fell against him, wrapping herself around him until every part of her was touching him somewhere.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, but he told her she was silly, and that he loved her, and that he was the one who was sorry for getting himself dead trying to break her out of Lincoln, and they laughed, and the bells rang, and I never wanted them to have to let go of each other.

  My fingers drifted to my bracelet, and I squeezed the wood and iron against my skin. Whoever gave me the bracelet—did they love me? Did they give me up to keep me safe?

  Would anyone ever care about me like Decker cared about Sally?

  Levi kept me about twenty feet away from the couple. Anytime I leaned closer, he held up a hand to stop me.

  He kept his voice quiet as he said, “These aren’t ghosts, just so you know. They’re more like spooks. Maybe specters.”

  “What?”

  Levi’s mouth pressed into a straight line as he watched Sally and Decker. “Imogene’s books up in the tower—she writes down everything she runs into at Lincoln. Got herself a sort of system. She says ghosts, they’re just a sad bit of soul that got lost going to the other side. But up from that, there’s stronger spirits. These two here, they got a touch of Madoc blood, so they’re spooks at least. They can hurt you.”

  I didn’t say anything. I didn’t even know where to start asking questions.

  “They can’t cross over by themselves,” Levi said. “I have to help them.”

  I shook my head. “Leave them alone. Your idea of helping is to hunt them like animals.”

  Levi’s smile seemed wry and sad. “I use things every soul’s afraid of, that’s all. It’s too dangerous to leave energy like that loose on this side.”

  I wanted to argue with him, but thought better of it. What did I know about spirits? Exactly nada. And he’d kept his bargain with me so far. Decker and Sally were together, and they’d at least have a shot at remembering each other when they crossed.

  “Let them hold hands, okay? Let them keep touching each other.” I don’t know why that felt important, but it did.

  Levi shrugged. “If it makes you feel better.”

  He approached the couple slowly.

  They let go of each other and turned to meet him, and heat blasted out of them, whipping past me like a sandstorm and dousing the lights in the hallway. My skin stung all over, and I blinked furiously, trying to clear the sensation of grit in my eyes.

  Levi started to radiate black fog. Then he spread his arms and started talking. The bells seemed to ring louder.

  “Haint,” Decker said, “you can take us now. I won’t fight you anymore.”

  “I’m not a haint,” Levi said.

  “You somethin’,” Sally whispered, and I winced at the fear in her voice. “Even death didn’t want you.”

  Levi shrugged. “Guess I’m unforgiven, like my grandmother.”

  Unforgiven.

  What did that mean?

  More energy crashed into me, knocking me against the wall and holding me fast. I could see, but I couldn’t move or speak.

  The clothing room door opened behind Decker and Sally, and I saw an endless, swirling black hole. I got dizzy so fast I would have collapsed if I hadn’t been pinned to the wall.

  As I stared into the whirling mass of nothingness Levi was urging Sally and Decker to approach, I thought I saw shapes. Trees and hills, big ones, rounded like ancient mountains.

  Levi’s voice dropped even lower, and he seemed to be chanting. Whatever held me turned me loose, and I found myself walking. All I could see was beauty in the darkness. Voices started to sing, sweet and soft and achingly haunted, and I had to get closer. I had to see the singers.

  Keeping up his chant, Levi moved Sally and Decker to the edge of the darkness, which turned misty and spread into the hallway. Black fog spilled toward my feet, and when it reached me, I heard the singers more clearly.

  Yes. That was right. I needed to keep walking.

  Levi joined Decker’s hand to Sally’s. “This is for Forest,” he said, and eased them into the breach together.

  He followed them, palms on their shoulders.

  I followed him.

  Stardust blended with midnight and nothing. Obsidian mist chilled my face, and still the singers called to me. How could anyone hear that sound and not answer? I wanted to sing with them until I laughed and cried and forgot everything I had ever known. I wanted to dance until I couldn’t
dance another step.

  Black became light, and light sizzled into blackness. I smelled pine and honey and fresh river water rushing over smooth gray rocks. I heard the daylight and the moon, smelled tomorrow, and felt yesterday’s breath on my neck. My bracelet grew thorns that stabbed deep into my wrist, and the pain tasted like sunshine. Nothing dissolved into everything, and I walked into a meadow with blue-green grass that tickled my fingertips as I bled on the soft brown earth.

  Decker and Sally ran ahead of me, laughing and holding hands, until they vanished into the weeping branches of nearby willows. I had a sense of life all around me, life and death and everything in between. There was so much beauty here, and so much darkness. The grass, the dirt, the rocks, the trees—they all seemed to be aware of me.

  They all seemed to be reaching for me.

  “Forest!” Levi’s shocked voice snaked beneath the songs in the fresh, warm air. Then he was standing in front of me. He was taller here, and too handsome to believe.

  Grass wound around my ankles. Leaves drifted down from branches and landed lightly on my cheeks. Vines seemed to grow where I stood, stroking my legs and filling me with their joy. Birds and squirrels came closer, to stare at me. Deer and wolves, too, and stuff I didn’t recognize.

  “Forest,” Levi said again.

  This world seemed to know me. It was waiting for me, and had I been waiting for it? I felt completely alive and totally at peace. I didn’t even care about the darkness at the edge of my vision.

  I wrapped my arms around Levi’s neck and held him close, feeling his warmth and his terrifying power cover every inch of my skin. He smelled better than anything. He wasn’t hurting me and I wasn’t burning him, not here in this perfect moment, in this perfect place.

  A storm was coming. It charged toward me from far out on the edges of my awareness. I felt it, I knew it, and I didn’t care. It was death, and I was life. I wouldn’t allow it to touch us.

  Levi cradled me like a fragile thing, binding me to him and setting me free forever, until he broke the embrace and broke my heart, pressing his lips against my ear and telling me in a voice like distant thunder, “You can’t be here. It’s not safe.”

  He pushed me away from him, away from the onrushing storm, and I fell backward.

  I fell into darkness.

  I fell forever.

  And I landed alone in a dark stone hallway, bleeding from a dozen holes in my wrist and listening to the sound of my own sobs.

  The bells were still ringing.

  Leslie wept as she held my bracelet out of the way and bandaged my wrist.

  It was too much for her, losing Miss Sally and me in the same night. She told me so—two or three times—and she never seemed to hear me when I said I was sorry. She kept looking at the pink slip on the bench beside me and shaking her head, saying it wasn’t right. The ghosts in her braids kept smiling at me, and I tried not to look at them. The line between real and not real wasn’t so clear to me yet.

  I wasn’t sure if it ever would be again.

  Through the open door of the nurse’s station, I saw the gurney go by with its pitiful cargo, the sheet pulled tight and tucked over Miss Sally’s head and feet.

  “The bells rang from the time she died until the minute I found you,” Leslie said. “Two solid hours. Where did you go, girl? And where you goin’ now, without this job?”

  “I don’t know,” I admitted, tears slipping down my cheeks. Had I really dreamed about a field with singers and lovers and a handsome guy with the blackest eyes I’d ever seen?

  I couldn’t quite settle on my memories. They kept changing. One second, Levi’s appearance and Decker Greenway’s meeting up with Miss Sally seemed solid and right and real. The next, I lost the details, and everything turned to black fog and haunting songs.

  “Something happened to you,” Leslie said. “I know it did.” She pulled me to her and kissed my forehead. “Let me take you home with me. See to you ’til you come back to yourself.”

  My heart leaped at this suggestion, but my bracelet tingled above the thorn wounds, and the beads started to burn.

  Going with Leslie wouldn’t be right, maybe not for me, or not for her—but the bracelet was giving me a clear message, so I hugged her, and I said no, and she cried.

  My last night as a Lincoln employee felt like both the worst and best moment of my life.

  I gave Leslie my badge and keys and left the geriatric ward without waiting for Security like I was supposed to do. I didn’t travel in the normal way, though. I moved ... to the left a bit. Somehow. I stepped to the side of what was supposed to be and what had always been, moving into the world that ran just under-neath and beside the one I had grown up knowing.

  Doors unlocked when I touched them. Nobody noticed that but me. And nobody even glanced in my direction when I crossed the campus to Tower Cottage, pressed my palm against the griffin door knocker, walked inside, and climbed up the stairs toward the painted sky. If I kept going up, I knew I could walk into somewhere else. But I didn’t, because Levi had told me that the other side wasn’t safe for me. Going there once had already changed me in ways I didn’t understand. So I stopped at the bells and sat staring out at Never, Kentucky, until night went away and sunlight covered my cheeks with warmth.

  Time passed, but it passed outside of me. I had no more part in it. I didn’t know how or why, but I knew I was separate from time now, still human, still myself, but more ... aware. I couldn’t put it into words, but I knew that going to the other side had awakened something deep inside me, some kind of power. I couldn’t describe it except to say that I was living outside everything I had ever known.

  Ten hours or ten months or ten years might have passed before I came down from the tower. I hadn’t changed on the outside, but other things had. I walked back to the geriatric ward, enjoying the spring flowers and budding trees. Inside, I noticed new paint and different light fixtures. The clothing room sign was gone. A new-looking white plaque read PATIENT BELONGINGS.

  The doors didn’t have locks anymore. Instead there were little boxes with red lights that scanned bar codes on badges to let people through. The lights turned off when I touched them, and the doors opened. Nobody paid me any attention as I made my way to where I knew I needed to be.

  Leslie Hyatt was now in the room where Miss Sally Greenway had lived and died. I wondered if Leslie had asked for it. She seemed so tiny now, with hair thicker and whiter than Miss Sally’s had ever been. I gently bathed Leslie and picked her out a gown of spring purple. Then I changed her sheets and made sure her room was spotless. Later that day, when I held the straw for her to drink a chocolate shake, the confusion left her eyes for a moment, and she stared at me and took my hand and whispered, “I always knew I’d see you again. You’re one of those old souls, girl. I know you are.”

  I hugged her and kissed her cheek and took care of her until she didn’t need me anymore.

  Most people who die, they don’t linger. It’s a good thing.

  He came to me the day after Leslie died, or maybe it was the next year. Time didn’t matter much anymore, or at least, I didn’t think it did.

  I was sitting with the bells in Tower Cottage again, gazing out at the riot of fall colors spreading through Never.

  Levi sat beside me, careful not to touch me, but so close his jeans brushed mine every time he took a breath. He was handsome as ever, and I wanted to slap him, and I wanted to kiss him, and that was okay for now. I was glad to see him.

  And I was ready.

  “At least we know for sure you’re like Imogene and me,” he said. “Otherwise you couldn’t have gone to the other side and come back.”

  “So I’m ... unforgiven,” I muttered.

  He snorted. “I guess, yeah. You’re one of us.”

  One of us. That was a new one. I’d never really been part of group before. Now I was officially ... what? A granny-woman?

  Yay?

  “What does it mean?” I asked him. “‘Unforgiv
en.’ What did we do to need forgiving?”

  Levi shrugged. “Nothing. Our great-greats must have been real pains, though. According to Imogene, until the good Lord decides to give us a pass and let us get old and die like normal folks, we have work to do to make up for their evils.”

  “Nice to know.” And not something I really wanted to think about. I glanced at Levi, enjoying the way the light kissed the teardrop tattoos on his cheek. “If I take the bracelet off, can I touch you without burning you?”

  “Probably. But don’t.” His hand twitched like he wanted to rest his fingers on my knee. I wished that he would, but I knew he couldn’t. “You might need it someday, and I’d rather you be safe than sorry.”

  “When can I go back to the other side?”

  He laughed. “Someday.”

  I leaned back, letting my head loll against one of the big bells. “Man, when someday does show up, I’m going to keep it busy.”

  Levi laughed again. I really enjoyed that sound.

  “Imogene’s waiting,” he said. “She’s got a bunch of lessons for you, about Madoc bloodlines and haunts and haints and shades and spooks and stuff. She’s been writing definitions of every spirit she’s seen at Lincoln for most of her life, and she’ll teach it all to you whether you want to learn it or not.”

  “Tons of fun,” I muttered. “Can’t wait. I’m still planning to go to college, too, just so you know.”

  “Fine with me.” Levi stood. “I like hanging around with smart girls.”

  I could tell he wanted to offer me his hand, but he refrained.

  I pushed myself up and stood with my lips perilously close to one of his bright-red teardrops and whispered, “Have you seen Decker and Sally since they crossed over?”

  He hesitated, just for a heartbeat. Then, “Yeah. I have.”

  I grinned. “Are they together?”

  “They’re together.”

  “And happy?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m waiting.”

  Levi rolled his eyes. Then he cleared his throat and said, “You were right, and I was wrong.”