Insanity

by Susan Vaught

  The guy at the table stood and gave us a wave.

  The captain waved back, and the guy trotted away toward the main section of campus, leaving the chair empty and waiting for me.

  “Radio if you need a bio break,” Captain James said. “I’ll send you relief for dinner around seventeen hundred.”

  I couldn’t swallow, much less get a word out, so I nodded. My gaze popped back to the hole in the wall, and I turned the volume down on the radio to hush the bursts of static and Security chatter. It was hotter than it should have been. Sweat dripped down my face, stinging my eyes until they watered.

  “I knew him, you know.” The captain sounded matter-of-fact, and it took a long second for his words to sink all the way into my brain.

  “Him,” I repeated. My lips felt numb. I couldn’t look at the captain. I couldn’t not look at that hole. I knew who he was talking about, and I was pretty sure I didn’t want to hear the rest of what Captain James had to say.

  “I was just a boy.” He paused. Cleared his throat. “He drove the ice-cream truck in my neighborhood.” Another pause. A nervous-sounding laugh. “Never will forget that music. Kids’ songs, you know? It’s how he snagged his victims. The children he killed.”

  I didn’t move. Not even a twitch. The hole in front of my frozen eyes radiated its darkness, and the radio spit out static in voices I couldn’t understand.

  The captain clapped his hand against my shoulder and I jumped, but I still didn’t look at him.

  “Sorry,” he said. “Must have been hard, growing up in that bastard’s shadow.”

  When I still didn’t answer—couldn’t answer—he added, “I wouldn’t worry, son. You’re nothing like him.”

  Then Captain James walked away and left me standing there like a big idiot, not sure if I should spit or piss or run back home again.

  It took me a full five minutes to get my brain together enough to walk over to the sunlit table and sit down in the chair. It strained like it was going to collapse under my big butt, but it held, and I sat there staring into the hole.

  A minute passed.

  Maybe this job was a bad idea.

  The thorn around my neck caught the full afternoon sun and got hot under my yellow shirt.

  Another minute passed.

  More sweat gathered under my black hat.

  Maybe this job was a really bad idea.

  Three minutes, then four, then five.

  Then the music started, soft and faraway, from somewhere way down in that black mouth with the brick teeth.

  “Pop Goes the Weasel,” slow-like and tinkly, as if it came from a big music box, or from the speakers on an old-fashioned ice-cream truck.

  Chapter Twelve

  “It’s not something I want to discuss.” Mama squinted at me as she gripped the arms of her wheelchair. She looked all rumpled in her gown, with her black-and-silver hair going in every direction. “Especially not at two in the morning.”

  “Mama.”

  She turned her face away from me and stared at the far wall of her bedroom. “We will not be doing this, Darius Hyatt. That man is dead. Let him stay buried.”

  I sat in the wing chair across from her bed and remembered what Captain James said, about growing up in Eff Leer’s shadow. I’d taken a little teasing about my monster of a grandfather, but it pretty much stopped when I hit six feet tall in eighth grade. What had Mama gone through at school? At church? At home in her neighborhood? I didn’t even want to think about it.

  “I’m sorry, and I know it’s late.” I studied the back of my knuckles for a few seconds before I caught Mama’s eye and gave it another try. “I’ve tried to find out what I need to know online. There’s hardly anything. And at the library, those years are missing from the newspaper archives.”

  Mama’s gaze dropped to her lap, and my eyebrows lifted. Okay. Now I knew how the newspapers disappeared.

  When she looked at me again, guilt dug deep in my gut. I needed to tell her the truth if I wanted her to do the same with me.

  “Sometimes I hear things. Sometimes I see things, too. It’s getting harder to not pay attention to them.”

  Mama didn’t say a word back, but her eyes went bright like she was scared and mad all mixed together. I could almost hear what she was thinking. Voices. Hallucinations. We will not be doing this, Darius Hyatt.

  “At Lincoln today, I heard music, like from an ice-cream truck. It was playing ‘Pop Goes the Weasel.’”

  Mama flinched so hard her wheelchair rattled. Then she covered her face with one hand.

  I hated myself a little. I had left out the tunnel part, and how I was stationed outside the Rec Hall, sweating and listening to that freaky tune for hours until my dinner relief showed up and I pretty much ran all the way back to the Security station. I didn’t tell her that the whole time the music played, I just sat there like a coward, about to piss my pants but not about to lose my job or be stupid enough to go looking for the source of that noise.

  “Mama, I don’t know if it was in my head, or something—you know. Like Grandma Betty’s problems. It feels like things from the past, things that run underneath the present.”

  Mama saw stuff like that. She taught school and went to church and tried to pray it all away, but I knew it still happened to her. Sometimes I caught her staring at the same things that caught my eye, or listening to nothing, just like me.

  She kept her hand over her face. Through her fingers, she muttered, “Eff Leer died when I was nothing but a baby myself, boy, and ghosts don’t exist.”

  “You told me the police never found his body. Just Grandma, all burned, walking down a road.” Whatever had gone down that night, Grandma got locked up in Lincoln for about two years afterward. They didn’t have burn units back then, so she almost died from infections in her burns. That much Mama had told me. Why wouldn’t she let go of the rest of it? “How do you know for sure he got killed?”

  Mama shuddered. “He’s dead. Trust me on that.”

  “But how do you know?” I leaned forward.

  Mama didn’t even try to look at me. The room seemed to get all cold. The skin along my spine prickled, and when I let out a breath, I saw fog in the air. Then a whispery cloud formed beside Mama’s wheelchair. It didn’t have a real shape, just an outline, but I knew what it was.

  “Mama,” I whispered, staring at the thing in the air beside her. I should have been terrified, but I was more amazed. Maybe glad. Something was seriously wrong with me.

  Mama’s hand drifted back to her lap. She acted like she didn’t see the cloud beside her, but I saw her shiver. “Your grandmother had a pocket full of teeth. And she was carrying an ax.”

  “What?” My skin was going numb from the cold, and my brain, too.

  I had more than an ax, the Grandma Betty–shaped cloud whispered in a voice like snow falling on a faraway hill.

  “More than an ax,” I repeated, keeping my voice as steady as I could.

  What I started, you got to finish, the cloud told me, and I heard disappointment, like she was sad I hadn’t already taken care of business. It’s so hungry, Darius.

  Mama’s mouth trembled, and a tear formed in the corner of her eye. “She had that ax. And she was carrying ... she was carrying some of his head, too.”

  The cloud sighed and shifted, then dissolved away to nothing but sparkles. Had I really seen that? Had my grandma Betty’s ghost been right in front of me, talking to me?

  And she was carrying some of his head?

  My full attention snapped back to Mama as the room got warmer.

  “Times were different back then,” Mama was saying, her shoulders slumped so far down it was hard to hear her. “Everybody knew what my father was, what he’d done. Nobody wanted your grandmother to suffer for saving all the children he would have killed. Your other grandmother—your father’s mother, Leslie—was already working over at Lincoln, and she helped us and the police and the judge work it out.”

  It took all my strengt
h, but I kept my face still and nodded my head when Mama looked at me. I even got up and hugged her and thanked her and helped her back to bed.

  “There’s a book,” she said as I tucked her in. The light on her bedside table was on, so I could see she was crying. “It’s in my bottom dresser drawer. I knew you’d ask me one day. I never wanted to hand you all that ugliness unless you needed it.”

  When I got finished helping Mama, I went to the drawer, did my best not to look at her underclothes as I pushed them aside, and pulled out a scrapbook the size of one of those picture collections people keep on living-room tables. Then I walked back to where Mama was lying, kissed the top of her head, set the brakes on her wheelchair, and turned off her light.

  Then I went back to my room and read about a monster.

  Mama had newspaper articles in there from fifty-two years ago, when everything had happened. There were a few police documents and pictures of the five boys the police thought Eff Leer murdered. They were all six years old. Eff had pulled out some of their baby teeth, the sharp ones on top—canines, the police report said. Grandma was carrying them in her robe pocket when they found her with that ax and the nasty piece of evidence that Eff Leer was done killing.

  She was screaming and talking crazy about evil trees, and her face was burned so bad they had to ask Mama to be sure it was her. She got shipped off to Lincoln right quick and quiet. My grandfather’s death made the headlines.

  Child Killer Meets Justice in Fire

  I had seen a couple of photos of him before, but none as good as these. He was tall like me but skinny, with a long nose and a pointy chin tipped with a tuft of beard. He reminded me of a sharp-dressed Pinocchio, all black suit and wooden parts and sharp joints. It was his eyes that really got my attention, though. Wide and dark and colder than black ice on frozen pavement. Just looking at them made me shiver, so I covered his face with my palm and kept reading.

  The article said my grandfather was trying to burn trash with gasoline, and the gas ignited and killed him. The whole headless thing didn’t make the paper, but the teeth did. They were recovered and given back to the parents of the dead boys. My grandmother was described as “distraught” over her husband’s crimes, and “recuperating at Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital.” My grandma Leslie was quoted in the article, asking people to give my family some privacy as they dealt with all the shock and tragedy.

  My cell phone buzzed in my pocket. When I took it out, I saw it was close to three in the morning. It was Jessie, who never slept.

  U awake?

  Y, I texted back.

  U ok?

  Y. Lie. I was good at lying. Like my grandfather. Like my mother. Another text buzzed in.

  U a dumb@z?

  That dragged a smile out of me. I typed No U R and sent it. Then I pulled up Trina’s number and sent her an Ilovu.

  Two seconds later the phone played Trina’s song, and when I answered, she said, “I was just now wanting to hear your voice.”

  And I just now found out my grandmother took an ax to my grandfather’s head, then set him on fire. I needed to talk about it, but like Mama said, I didn’t want to hand all that ugliness to Trina. There are some things you just don’t say to people, even if they’re true.

  “You coming up this weekend?” she asked.

  “I’m supposed to work Saturday.” My evil, dead, murdering grandfather might be haunting a tunnel at Lincoln Psychiatric. “I’ll try to come Sunday.”

  If I’m not locked away forever in Loony Land.

  It would hurt Trina if I lost my mind, so I couldn’t let that happen, right?

  “I’ll be waiting, Dare.”

  Like the ghost-cloud of my grandmother and “Pop Goes the Weasel,” down in hell.

  I closed my eyes. “I like hearing that, baby. I’ll see you Sunday.”

  Chapter Thirteen

  Sometime after I talked to Trina and before I woke up on Friday morning, a child went missing.

  The guy on the news said he was six years old, his name was Jonas Brown, and the FBI and the National Guard were organizing a search. It took the local reporters ten minutes to bring up my grandfather. It took the national anchors five.

  I made breakfast, put Mama in the car, and took her to spend the day helping clean our church, just in case reporters figured out we were what was left of Eff Leer’s family and showed up at our door. I didn’t want Mama bothered, especially if I wasn’t there to look after her. I talked to Trina again before she went to class, and she gave me her love. I went by Starbucks and hassled Jessie while he played his online game. He gave me the finger. He also gave me a long lecture about the fact my grandfather was dead, and nobody was carrying on his evil. The kid probably got lost. They’d find him farting around some lake or clubhouse, and everything would be fine.

  I wanted to believe that. I really, really did.

  That afternoon, I went to work. When I got to Lincoln and found Tunnel next to my name on the assignment board, I wasn’t surprised. Jessie wasn’t on the schedule until Sunday, and there was no sign of Captain James, so I was on my own.

  A bunch of security officers got to the time clock at the same second as me, so I waited my turn, swiped my badge, and headed out of the main building for the long walk to my post. They didn’t stare at me or start whispering behind my back as I went, so I figured everything was okay, at least for now.

  It wasn’t sunny and hot like the day before. It was cloudy and dark and hot—the kind of day where the sky turns to metal and the air stinks like scummy puddles. By the time I got to the back section of the Rec Hall, sweat stung my eyes, and I wanted a water from the cooler on the card table in the worst way.

  The guy stationed at the table saw me coming, gave me a pretend salute, and ambled away as I huffed the last few yards to the chair. When I opened the cooler, I found a half-empty bottle of water. Great. Whoever that guy was, I hoped he didn’t have typhoid, and I killed what was left in a few gulps. Then I loaded some ice into the bottle and set it on the table to melt.

  I sat down and checked out the area. Somebody had picked up the plastic horseshoes and stacked them near the metal stake in the sandpit. Otherwise, it looked pretty much the same as the last time I was here, with the big field bordered by woods, the basketball court, and the two volleyball nets. Everything had a steely gray coloring because of the weather, and the thick-feeling air made the silence seem too loud.

  I glanced at the hole in the Rec Hall wall that led down into the tunnels. Still taped—wait. Did something just move in there?

  I hit my feet so fast the ice bottle tumbled off the table. Something was moving. Walking up through the darkness from the warren underneath Lincoln. Pain stabbed through my ribs. I grabbed at my chest, catching the thorn pendant in my fist. Could guys my age have heart attacks? ’Cause—

  Wait a minute.

  As the thing in the shadows came closer, I could make out the yellow shirt and black pants and ball cap that matched what I was wearing.

  Captain James hurried around the edges of the tape, his shoulder to me, then his back. He didn’t wave or slow down or anything, just kept walking. Man, but he didn’t look right. Too thin. Too tall. I almost couldn’t tell the color of his skin. For a few seconds it seemed as dark as mine, then lighter, then too light, like if I squinted, I could see right through him.

  My breath hitched. I thought about running.

  As if he could feel me staring holes through his shoulder blades, Captain James stopped at the corner of the Rec Hall. He turned toward me slow, like he was trying to decide what he was going to do if somebody was watching him. Never mind how hot it was, I turned completely cold as he looked at me, smirked, and lifted his hand in greeting.

  I let go of the thorn and lifted mine in answer.

  I was waving to skin on a skull—a skull missing two teeth in the front. The pointy ones on top.

  It’s in my head. It’s not real.

  I wanted to yell, but my throat was dry, my voice not
working. Air whistled out between my open lips.

  Captain James didn’t stand around long enough to turn normal again. He left me with my hand in the air like a fool. My fingers curled into a fist. I kept my eyes on the spot where I thought I had seen the skull thing dressed in the Captain James suit. Had it really been there? Was it all in my head?

  I lowered my arm and counted under my breath until I got to one hundred. That always helped me not to be afraid of weird stuff when I was little. This time, it just helped me feel stupid. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and touched Trina’s contact picture. We weren’t supposed to use cell phones when we were around patients, but the only crazy person out back of the Rec Hall was me.

  It rang three times, then went to voice mail. She was still in class. I listened to her sweet voice tell me she wasn’t able to take my call, and that I should leave a message. I didn’t trust myself to make sense, so I hung up instead of talking to her. Then I called Jessie and asked him to snag me some waters and a bag of ice and some grub and drive them to my station.

  Half an hour later, when I saw him jog around the building toward me, I started breathing normal again.

  “Dude!” Jessie said when he saw the hole I was guarding. “That’s ginormous.” He handed me the heavy bag of water and ice. “Think I’ll get in trouble for being on campus when I’m not on the clock?”

  “Not if you’re bringing me lunch.” I put the bag on the table. It was totally stupid, but I had a sense that the tunnel—or maybe whatever was down inside it—was behaving because Jessie was here. No more weird pretend security captains crawling to the surface, no repeat of the creepy ice-cream truck music from yesterday, no vortex sucking me down to Hades. Nothing. It just sat there, all innocent. It might as well be smiling at me.

  Jessie started loading the ice and waters into the cooler, and I just kept staring at the opening to the tunnel. “My grandmother whacked my grandfather.”