by Susan Vaught
Levi grunted with pain and Forest apologized, and then the world smelled like flowers and grass and lakes after a fresh rain, and I died, and then I didn’t, and—
Now his eyes.
I can’t. Even Imogene couldn’t pull that off anymore. She’s too old.
You have to try.
Fine. But only the right one. There’s nothing left of the other.
Good enough.
And I woke up seeing two worlds instead of one.
Chapter Twenty
“You ain’t Stevie Wonder, but you’ll do.” Imogene patted my hand as I stood in front of a mirror in the Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital records room, way up in the bell tower that used to scare me to death. I was checking out the pair of shades she and Levi and Forest had made for me, with a little help from Trina and Jessie. They were glasses like a lot of blind folks wore.
The right side of my face was smooth and perfect, and so was that eye, so even though the lens on that side had a dark coloring, it was just tinted glass, and I could see fine and normal—I could see the world I grew up in, with none of the extra stuff.
The left side of my face was covered with pinkish-white scars, and in the two months since we chopped up a tree in the basement under Lincoln, Levi had gone to work on the edges of the damaged skin, coloring and shaping like a real-world tattoo artist, only better. The scars blended into something like a tribal sun. As for the eye on that side, it was weird. All white and seemingly blind, but it wasn’t. It saw things. The glasses turned down the volume on the light and colors that threatened to explode my brain whenever I focused too much on what my bad eye tried to show me.
I lifted the glasses and stared at myself and Imogene in the mirror, and then at Levi, Forest, Jessie, Trina, and Mama. In the reflection, my normal eye gazed back at me, and so did my white eye. Without the glasses, I could see Levi’s mix of light and darkness, and the unbelievable yellow glow that surrounded Forest. Imogene had a glow like that, too, only hers seemed thinner and weaker.
Mama had an aura, a soft bunch of white flickers. Jessie, he looked steel-blue and steady. I always knew Jessie was a good guy, but now I could actually see it. He didn’t have any scars from the battle below the nuthouse, but he had cut his crazy hair and shaved, and then signed up for karate and weight training. Forest said maybe he was going soft in the head and starting to believe he could turn into a ninja. That would be a stretch, with his worn-out jeans, Lincoln Psychiatric sweatshirt, and that bunch of stubbly red hair sticking out on both sides of his head.
Trina slipped up next to me, staring into the mirror as she took my hand. She had on jeans and a pink sweater. Her aura was different—bright silver, with a sparkly kind of lightning at the edges, especially in the corners of her beautiful eyes.
“I like the glasses,” Trina said, so I put them back on, and she squeezed my hand. No scars on her, either—not on her skin, and not on her soul or emotions, either. She was still in school and planned to finish, but she was changing her major to social work and planning to take her first externship at Lincoln so she could stay close.
I hadn’t sensed Grandma Betty at all since I saw her ghost at Lincoln, but I hoped she’d approve. Forest had gone looking for Grandma Leslie a few times, too, but had no luck. I thought they were both gone on to the other side to stay this time, and it made me sad, but happy, too. Maybe they were resting now, or gone to heaven, or to whatever kind of life we live next. Wherever they were, I hoped they were finally and completely at peace.
We all kept standing there, Trina and Jessie and Imogene and Forest and Levi and Mama and me. Seven of us, staring in a mirror and wondering if we really understood all that had happened, and all that was about to happen.
“Well?” Mama asked. “You people figured it out yet?”
“It was the thorn,” Levi said. “Betty must have taken it from the witch tree the first time she fought with it. When Darius stabbed the tree’s eye, he poisoned it with the only thing strong enough to hurt it—a piece of itself.”
I studied him, trying to balance everything I could see. “And my grandfather—you’re sure he’s crossed over for good?”
Levi managed an expression almost like a smile, but not quite. He didn’t smile much, unless Forest was involved. “Without the tree, he was weak as a pinkie mouse. He won’t be back.”
Mama frowned. “Unless there’s another witch tree that wants to let him out.”
“There isn’t another tree,” Forest said. “Not like that one.”
We all gazed at her. It was clear down in that basement that my grandfather had recognized her power. It was rare, and strong enough to scare people—and spirits, too. I wanted to protect Forest like I wanted to protect Trina, only for different reasons. It seemed like the right thing to do, like something the world needed—especially the little piece of the world around Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital.
Maybe Forest was destined to take up the job Imogene had been doing for way too long. We had to help her figure things out, and we had to look after her.
“It’s time to go,” Trina said, and I nodded.
Jessie flexed the muscles in his right arm. “Shift will be changing soon. Captain James worked second today, so he won’t stay for third. We better move.”
Mama frowned, but she didn’t argue with us. She just flicked the brakes on her wheelchair, to make sure we knew she didn’t approve, and that she’d be staying in the bell tower. She was still worried about me getting in trouble, even though I had been cleared of all charges when the police decided the real bad guy had kidnapped me and tried to set me on fire underneath Lincoln.
The police didn’t know about Captain James, though. How he had been some kind of minion for my grandfather and that tree. He had Madoc blood, according to Imogene’s records, and some kind of power of his own, but it was turned for evil. Imogene said he had gone rotten inside, and we couldn’t let him walk around free to hurt people. I figured I was about to find out whether Levi really could kill people by tearing out their spirits or souls or whatever.
“I really don’t need help with this,” Levi said, but nobody even looked in his direction as we filed down the bell-tower steps. “I can go with Imogene. We’ve always done this stuff alone.”
“The time for working alone has passed, Levi,” Imogene told her grandson. She was right in front of me at the back of the line, walking faster on those stairs than I thought was possible for someone her age. “When the good Lord sends you help, you take it.”
It seemed weird to hear her talk about God, so before we got to the door in the main hallway of the bell tower, I said, “You talk about the good Lord, but I thought you were a witch, Imogene.”
Everybody stopped walking when I said that. Levi glared at me, but Imogene only laughed.
“I been called worse than that, lots of times.” She held out her hand and gave me a slip of paper. Then she gave other slips to Trina, Forest, Jessie, and Levi. “There, now. Put those in your mouths.”
Nobody hesitated but me. After a few seconds, I lifted the paper and put it onto my tongue like everybody else did. It bubbled a little and then dissolved, tasting like peppermint.
“What was that?” I asked.
Imogene’s grin freaked me out sometimes, because it made her look both older and younger at the same time. Her wrinkly eyes glittered at me as she said, “Nothing poison, just a bit of Scripture with a drop of mint oil.”
From the witch. She didn’t say it, but I saw it in the laugh lines twitching at the edges of her mouth.
“I’m not real religious,” I admitted.
“Don’t matter what you believe,” Imogene said. “I’m the one who wrote those words to protect you tonight.”
“Levi says you control spirits,” Trina said, her voice quiet in the deserted tower. “That you keep records of all the different types of ghosts you’ve seen at Lincoln.”
“Used to. I’m old now, like I keep saying.” Imogene glanced at Levi. “And like everybody
keeps tellin’ me. But Levi’s a good boy, and Forest is strong, and you three are, too.”
“Are we going to need strength?” Trina asked.
“Around this old asylum, strong’s always good.” Imogene started walking toward the tower door.
I followed after her. “Why?”
“This place has got troubles,” she said. Then she opened the big wooden door like it didn’t weigh anything, and held it open for us to walk outside into the cold January night. “They have to be seen to, or terrible things can happen.”
I motioned for Trina and Jessie to go on outside. “Troubles—you mean the crazy folks?”
“What looks crazy now might be sane later.” Imogene shook her head, making her thick white braid bob back and forth. “You know they used to lock girls up here for having boyfriends out of wedlock? They sent ’em all here—wet-brains and feeble-minded children and teenagers who mouthed back to their parents and sick people dying from consumption or the ague. Anybody who was different or made folks angry, they got locked up here until they died. Truly, crazy’s always been the least of it.”
Trina stepped onto the porch and turned around to face Imogene, hugging herself to keep warm. “What’s wrong with Lincoln? You were here when it was built, so you have to know.”
Imogene reached up and switched off the tower’s porch light as Levi and Jessie and Forest crowded behind Trina in the sudden darkness, waiting for the answer.
“I always figured this place was a lot like me.” Imogene let go of the light switch and ran her knotty fingers up and down the edge of the door. “Lincoln’s got some Madoc blood flowing in all this stone and wood. It lives in both worlds.”
When Imogene looked at me, her eyes seemed so old and haunted that I got to wondering if maybe she was the hospital come to life somehow—or if the hospital was keeping her alive. But that was seriously nutty thinking, so I didn’t say it out loud.
“If a strange thing exists,” Imogene went on, “or if it ever did exist, you’ll see it here at Lincoln sooner or later. Crazy, oh, yes. And so many ghosts the air buzzes with ’em. They aren’t all bad, but they aren’t all good, either.”
“The witch tree wasn’t good.” I let out a breath, feeling its warmth on my cheeks. “My grandfather was worse.”
Imogene stepped outside, caught my wrist, and tugged me out of the bell tower with her as the door closed behind us. “Just remember, not everything that’s bad around this place is dead. Keep your wits about you all the time, and keep both of those eyes open. You’ll need ’em.”
We all moved forward, except for Levi. He was standing on the top step, facing the nature trails and acres of woods on our right. Even in the dark, I could tell he was frowning.
“Do you smell something?” he asked in a voice so quiet and deadly it made me go absolutely still.
Then I smelled it, too. I lifted my glasses, and my bad eye picked out the thin gray wisps drifting past us.
Smoke.
Smoke with a sweet, wrong scent that made me start to shake way down inside. I lifted my fingers to my scarred face as Levi clenched his fists.
“Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death,” Imogene said as she hobbled past us and started down the front stairs, “I will fear no evil ...”
But I was fearing evil, fearing it bad, and I didn’t want to walk out into that valley of the shadow of death.
Somewhere out in the cold night, someone was on fire.
We found the pyre on a piece of ground that seemed like it belonged more to an ancient forest than the woods separating the asylum from Never. It was a perfect spot, just remote enough that normal folks would never have seen a thing—or smelled it.
I held Trina’s hand as we faced the embers with Jessie and tried not to notice the eerie outline of the bell tower in the distance, blacking out the stars and moon.
“Who did this?” Levi asked without looking away from what was left of the burning body. The corpse’s fingers curled into strips, then crumbled in the flames.
“Same one as killed you, boy,” Imogene said. “Same one as been at it for years. He’s got something against Madocs. Maybe he fancies himself doing our work better than we can.”
“He?” Trina asked, her voice flat and colder than the winter air.
“It’s a man.” Imogene sighed. “And before you go askin’, that’s all I know.”
Forest stepped out of the trees nearest the fire. She had been trying to sense the spirit of the murdered man, to find it and cross it over if it hadn’t already gone on its own. “The dead guy—it was Captain James, Imogene. You were right. I got him across. Do we need to go after the one who killed him?”
Imogene shook her head. “No. There’s been enough dying tonight.”
“Are we calling the police?” Jessie asked.
I didn’t need to see Imogene shake her head to know the answer to that. “Let them find what they find, when they find it. I’m not sure anyone will be lookin’ for the likes of this one.”
“You came looking for me,” Levi said. No emotion in the words, and yet every emotion in the world.
Trina’s fingers squeezed mine so hard my knuckles cracked.
“What’s this freak’s body count, if he’s been at it for years?” I asked. “Twenty? Thirty?”
Imogene didn’t answer, and I had a horrible feeling it was way more than that.
“Another serial killer,” Jessie said. “Unbelievable. Welcome to Never.”
“Maybe he thinks he’s getting rid of evil things that laws can’t control, the way we were planning to do,” Trina said in a shaky voice. “Maybe he’s trying to do the right thing. How can we judge him without judging ourselves?”
“But whoever this killer is, he makes mistakes,” Forest said as she came to stand beside Levi.
“And you never have?” Trina asked Imogene. She shifted her gaze to Levi. “You’ve never gone after some criminal who was using his Madoc blood to do bad things and figured out later that you got the wrong person?”
“Easy, baby.” I pulled her close to me and held her. She trembled in my arms, breathing too fast. “This is too much. Let’s get Mama and go home.”
She finally put her arms around me and hugged me back, and after a few seconds, she nodded. We were all staying together at my house, Mama and Jessie and me, Forest and Levi, too. Trina was planning to move in with us—with me—just as soon as she spoke to her father.
As for Imogene, her home was an apartment near the top of the bell tower. She didn’t leave the campus. I didn’t even know if she could. After seeing this burning mess in the woods, I wasn’t sure I wanted her to.
Lincoln Psychiatric needed watching. Maybe all of Never did, too.
“Come on,” I said to Trina, leading her away from the fire. “This isn’t anything we can fix tonight.”
Trina followed me into the woods, and everyone else straggled along behind us. I was glad nobody said the rest of what I was thinking out loud.
This isn’t anything we can fix at all.
Maybe we couldn’t.
But maybe the bunch of us were strong enough—and stupid enough—to stay right here and try.
Part III
The Scream at the End of the Hall
Trina
Chapter Twenty-One
Witch.
It was such an ugly word. I couldn’t get it out of my head, but I couldn’t ignore it, either. Not anymore.
“Why do you want to go to the store, Trina?” my father asked without looking up from the book in his lap. “Addie doesn’t need your help.”
I sat across from Never’s best-known preacher two hours after his Sunday afternoon prayer service, imagining a body burning on a pyre deep in the woods near Lincoln.
Witch.
My father would slap me if I called him that.
Murderer.
He’d do more than slap me if that word came out of my mouth.
The dead man in the woods—Captain James
—had been wrong inside. He had been evil. If my father did kill him, was that so bad?
“I missed Addie while I was at school,” I told him. That wasn’t a lie. I had to clench my hands together to keep from fiddling with the wax plugs in my nose. I opened my lips just enough to get air, but I made sure my father didn’t notice. Or I thought I did. With my father, it was hard to know what he caught or didn’t catch until it was too late.
And I will cut off witchcrafts out of thine hand; and thou shalt have no more soothsayers, my brain recited. The line was from the Bible, from the book of Micah. My father liked quoting Scripture. He just wasn’t so good at living by it.
“Mmm,” he said, keeping his eyes on his book. He was tall, with lean muscles and hands big enough to squeeze skulls until they exploded. He had gone bald when I was barely old enough to remember him having hair, but otherwise he hadn’t aged. His skin was so smooth and dark the only thing I ever saw to rival it was a dahlia somebody gave him as a gift one Easter. He always wore suits without jackets, and his coal-black eyes had a sharp gleam. He missed nothing, and he wanted an accounting for every action, every second spent out of his sight.
“Seems like a waste of time to me, Trina. You could be studying.”
Sweat gathered at the back of my neck. I should have run back to Lexington, Kentucky, after we found that body burning in the woods. I should have gone back to college, back to a future that didn’t include Pastor Martinez sitting in his overstuffed recliner, controlling every minute of my time and passing judgment on every breath I took.
His fingers brushed across the cover of his book. It looked like leather, but I knew what it really was.
Skin.
His second wife, Adelaide—Addie to me from the day I met her—slipped out of the kitchen and came to stand behind his chair as he read the old spell book he had taken from somebody in Never. Somebody with Madoc blood. Somebody evil—or that he had decided was evil.
Another body, burning in the night.
“I haven’t seen Trina much this visit, Xavier.” Addie’s voice sounded matter-of-fact. “Let us have some girl time.”