Insanity

by Susan Vaught

  I had walked straight into the land of the insane and had no road map, no clue where to turn next. I couldn’t focus on anything but the sad, scared people around me. I didn’t know what the voice wanted, so I just kept moving, following commands I felt more than heard.

  My head turned left, and I saw images of people in rooms and in hallways, blurry shapes, so many of them. They were packed together like cordwood, and when I looked into their hollow eyes, I could see that they were sick, all of them. They surged at me, grabbing at my shirt, dark mouths open in silent screams.

  Another door seemed to spring out of nowhere, and I fell through it into a deserted ward. The baseboard lights flickered and shut off, leaving the hall in darkness. My ears throbbed. My eyes bled tears that dripped onto the tile floor. I felt like my soul was shredding. For a few dread-filled seconds, I thought the bugs were coming for me, and the ghosts, and the bats and faces and shouting ceiling tiles.

  How dare you ignore their agony? the voice asked again, louder, and full of so much righteous anger I wanted to cover my head.

  “Please,” I managed to say. “Let me go.”

  They beg for release, too, those poor people. The voice in my head was definitely a man, and he was furious. They plead for mercy, and you don’t act. You, with all your power. Do they mean nothing to you because they’re still alive?

  “If I could help them, I would.” My words sounded slurred and hollow. “I’ve tried.”

  Disgust and loathing ricocheted through my bones. Lies!

  This time my mouth wouldn’t move. Helpless to explain, I conjured an image of the first sick person Imogene and I had tried to heal at Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital. It was a kid, a boy about nine years old. Imogene had told me it wouldn’t work, but I had to try, and she knew I had to do it in order to learn.

  I relived the way we had sent our healing power into him and tried to fix his broken thoughts and stop the voices he heard. I showed the thing in my head how the healing had backfired, tearing away the boy’s skin as he screamed, leaving nothing but his spirit to cross to the other side.

  Tears crowded the corners of my eyes. “See? There’s no way to fix it. When I tried, my power healed him the only way it could—by moving him on.”

  The spirit got quiet, but I felt its anger.

  “We tried one more time with a grown-up, thinking we might have better luck, especially if we worked together.” The effort of forcing out sentences left me doubled over in the darkness, gripping my own guts like they might fall out, but I could tell the thing in my head knew what had happened next.

  The man died.

  “Yes.”

  You’re telling me your healing power can’t repair mental illness.

  “We can fix problems in the body, but not the mind.” The cramps in my belly eased a fraction, enough for me to try to stand. “We didn’t think killing mentally ill people was okay, so we stopped trying to help them.”

  A new emotion built in my chest, something like grudging understanding, maybe even agreement. The grip on my mind eased another fraction, and standing became easier.

  What about all the lost souls trapped in these walls?

  “I didn’t know there were so many,” I said. “Imogene’s said as much, but I can’t see them for myself. Not that clearly. I have to get help from my dogs or Imogene, if the spirit doesn’t have any Madoc to it.” Something like hope filled me up. It wasn’t mine, but I thought I knew what the thing in my head wanted from me now. “If I ever figure out how to see as good as Imogene does, I’ll do what I can to help them.”

  The next sensation I had was close to surrender. I didn’t know whether to be grateful or angry, but I never got the chance to choose.

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  I was about to ask who was in my head and what it really wanted and needed when Imogene burst onto the ward, pulling Trina by the hand. Cain thundered through right after them. As the metal door turned solid behind them, Trina jumped at me with her willow charm, plastering it against my chest.

  My eyes went wide as Cain whined and pawed at my feet.

  The fact that I didn’t explode from Trina’s charm surprised me. The wood felt cool and peaceful—until Trina said something in Latin. She looked directly into my eyes as the braided wood jolted me like electric paddles. “I mean it, Daddy,” she said. “You get out of Levi right now!”

  I braced myself against the witch power slicing out of that charm and directly into my chest.

  Daddy? I thought. Oh, wait a minute. No way. No. Freaking. Way.

  My brain wouldn’t go there at all, so I stopped trying.

  “No need for threats,” my mouth said, and my bones wrenched, my consciousness blinking along with the lights. “I’m going.”

  Cain brushed his fur against my fingers, and I held on to him. Sweat broke across my neck and forehead. I wanted to knock Trina’s charm away. I didn’t think I could stand it, but it was working. Like some spirit-knife, it cut the black cloud right out of me until it hovered between us.

  Trina lowered her charm.

  Imogene caught my elbow and steadied me before I fell. I waited for Trina to blow up the cloud, but she just stood there with her arms at her sides, staring at the glittering ball of darkness. Cain snarled softly. I knew that, like me, he was debating whether to jump on the spirit and rip it to shreds, but something about Trina’s expression held us back.

  “You might as well take your real shape.” A tear leaked from the corner of Trina’s eye, though her voice stayed strong. “We all know exactly who you are.”

  The cloud shifted, then slowly drew itself into the form of a tall man dressed in a black suit and tie. I stared at the big hands, remembering them with and without the knives he’d used to stab me to death. His bald head and smooth, dark skin seemed almost solid, yet still translucent.

  Specter, I thought, since he was strong but didn’t have any Madoc in him. Even as a spirit, Xavier Martinez had dangerous eyes, black like coal.

  My murderer had taken over my body. That gave me the cold shakes, and it pissed me off something fierce. I pulled out of Imogene’s grip and drew my bone knife, wondering if it would cut him.

  He didn’t seem to notice me at all. Pastor Martinez gazed at his daughter, and something like a smile played at his lips. “You grew up beautiful, little girl.”

  Trina’s mouth worked as she exerted a mighty effort not to burst into sobs. I could tell she wanted to say a hundred things to him and ask him a hundred more, but she knew we didn’t have that kind of time if we meant to save Darius and Forest and Addie.

  “How long have you been here?” she managed to whisper to the remnant of her father.

  “I don’t know.” The pastor glanced about the hallway. “Time isn’t trustworthy in this place. There was a disturbance today, though, and I gained enough energy to take action.”

  “When the thin spots closed,” Imogene murmured, “the other side must have lost its pull on him.”

  Trina took several quick breaths, still fighting with her feelings. “Addie’s in trouble,” she said, getting straight to the problem. “She’s trapped on the other side, and so are Darius and Forest. A serial killer’s shade took them.”

  The pastor’s blazing stare shifted to me. “Can’t you go after them?”

  I shook my head. “Forest closed the thin spots.”

  Pastor Martinez considered this for a few moments, and I saw some of Forest’s logic reflected in his eyes. It was a horrible thing, yes, but in the end, the world was safer without those thin spots. Why not leave it that way? It was like he was saying I should leave things just like they were.

  “I won’t,” I said, my fingers tightening on the hilt of my blade. “I will find a way to get them back.”

  “You think he’ll murder them?” the pastor asked like he didn’t feel a thing. “This killer? Is that why he took them?”

  Misery flared in my heart and on Trina’s face and in Imogene’s eyes. I had to close my own eye
s before I said, “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t lie to me, boy!”

  My eyes flew open. “Yes. He’ll kill them. He may have already.”

  The pain of saying that out loud nearly broke me. Every piece of my mind and heart yelled for Forest, and I wanted her beside me right now. I needed to see her. She couldn’t be dead. I wouldn’t believe it.

  The pastor studied me, and I saw the moment when he decided I couldn’t do anything to save the people I loved. He didn’t think I could do much of anything at all.

  Heat shot through my muscles. It was time this fool understood what I could do—what his killing me had wrought, once Imogene brought me back from the other side. I sheathed my knife and stood straighter, growing taller as I let go of the little bit of glamour I usually kept, even when I didn’t need to be invisible to most folks. “You killed me. You owe me for that. And you owe me for every Madoc you’ve killed who didn’t need to die.”

  Trina’s small gasp hurt me, but my anger made me strong.

  “I don’t owe you anything—” the pastor began, but I interrupted him without flinching from his glare.

  “Help me get to the other side.” My voice echoed when I spoke, getting louder and lower with each bit of glamour I released. “And maybe I’ll see fit to forgive you.”

  “You don’t have the power to forgive me anything, boy.”

  My rage escaped in a long, low growl that brought Cain to full alert beside me. I banished all glamour from anywhere around me and heard Trina gasp again as she saw Cain’s true form. I towered over the specter of Xavier Martinez, more than a foot taller than he was. My skin glowed with the light Imogene had given me when she brought me back from death.

  The pastor’s eyes fixed on my face, and I knew he was horrified by my tattoos, the bloody teardrops under my eye that had marked me from the moment I took a breath after his attack. Times like this, when my feelings got so strong, the tattoos bled, slow and steady. The air around me crackled, and I had a sense that Lincoln had come awake.

  The hospital was watching me.

  I felt the heat of the fire blazing in my own eyes, just like Cain’s. “I was born at Lincoln, just like Imogene,” I said as black mist rolled off my arms and shoulders. It could heal or hurt, that mist, and I let it hang in the air all around me. “This is my place to tend, from its walls to the bell tower to the trees outside, all the way to the fences. You’ve done wrong in my place, pastor, and I do judge that, and Imogene and Lincoln itself will back me up if you want to fight about it.”

  The pastor’s mouth fell open, but he didn’t say a word.

  “One more thing,” I told him. “Don’t ever call me ‘boy’ again.”

  Why had I let this guy kill me? Why had I let him possess me? It was stupid, and it wouldn’t happen again. I knew it, and so did he.

  After a few more seconds of quiet, the pastor said, “I’ll do what I can to help you—but only if you don’t take Trina out of ... out of the world I know. I don’t want her on the other side again.”

  “Agreed.”

  From somewhere behind me came Trina’s angry shout, followed by, “I should get a say in that!”

  “No,” Pastor Martinez and I said at the same time, but it was what we didn’t say that probably hurt her most. Once before we had asked the women we cared about not to take a risk, and they had ignored us. Trina ended up going to the other side and losing a lot of years, and she never saw her father alive again.

  I pulled in my power and turned to her. “Please, Trina. You can help me search, but when it comes time to go after the Harpes, that needs to be my job. I can fight better if I don’t have to worry about you.”

  It wasn’t completely the truth and she knew it, and so did the pastor. I was worried about her safety, no question. But I was also worried what her witch power might do on the other side if it misfired. If Forest, Darius, and Addie were still alive, Trina could as easily kill them as save them.

  “I’ll do everything I can to bring Darius and Addie back to you,” I told her. “I’ll find a way. I promise.”

  Trina swallowed hard, but she gave in and stopped arguing.

  All the manners Forest had been drilling into me gave me the presence of mind to say, “Thank you.” Then I turned my attention back to the pastor. “Have you been to the other side—even touched it a little?”

  His brows pulled together. “I’ve seen a glimmer of it, but it was like watching a movie. I think I watched it for a long time but never stepped inside. Does that make sense? I was always trying to get back here, to help Trina.”

  It did make sense. The pastor had been existing in a thin spot, and he might have come through it just as Forest closed them—or maybe right after.

  Please let it be after.

  “Can you show me where you saw the movie?”

  Again, he had to think hard, like he was rifling through his whole brain. “It’s below here,” he said. “You have to go down.”

  “Great,” Trina muttered. “I should have known, because I really, really hate that basement.”

  I reached out to take Imogene’s hand, but she shook her head. “Can’t, boy. I’m sorry. I’ll be heading back to the bell tower.”

  She took a breath, and I knew she had left something unsaid. That made me nervous. I glanced at Trina, who looked as nervous as I was. For the first time since she and Trina made the pastor’s spirit let me go, I really looked at Imogene. She had gone sheet-pale, and seemed a lot thinner than she ought to be.

  My knees went a little weak, but Imogene patted by arm. “You’ve known it was coming, and a long time at that. I’m just like an old battery, running out of juice. I don’t get to choose when my lights go out, and neither do you.”

  “No.” It was all I could say. The sadness behind it was too much to stand. She had schooled me to do what I could in her stead, and I’d known she was losing power, but I never thought it would happen so soon.

  I couldn’t—she couldn’t—

  “Boy, you can either stand here and moon over nature finally taking its course, or you can go fetch your girl and your friends.” Imogene’s smile was the only thing about her that kept its full strength. “I’ll get myself back to my rooms and my books.”

  “Will you be there when we get back?” The question came out of me in a little boy’s voice, but I couldn’t help it.

  “Mayhap,” she said. “If ’n you hurry.”

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Trina and Cain and I wound down three sets of twisting stairs, following a specter into the absolute darkness of the basement.

  I had pulled some of my glamour back into place so I wouldn’t make Trina so nervous. Even though she was glad to see her father’s spirit, she still seemed pretty close to a meltdown over Darius. As for me, about Forest, about Imogene—

  Couldn’t do it.

  I had locked myself down, feeling-wise.

  When we reached the first basement hallway, Trina walked into the blackness beside me, quiet as a cemetery headstone. Her eyes tracked her father’s spirit, which was the only tiny bit of hope we had. Her hand stayed in her pocket, and I figured she had hold of her willow charm.

  It took me a minute or two to realize we weren’t walking through the basement I usually saw, with its offices and canteen and storage rooms. This basement had a life to it I had never seen before, yet I didn’t feel any power other than mine. I didn’t smell the mold and cleanser and formaldehyde and mixture of potpourri, carpet freshener, and spritzing mint scent machines that always made me cough.

  The walls had become shadows, pressing toward us as we moved. No patients called out or moaned from above. No plumbing whooshed or clanked. The air system failed to rattle. I wasn’t sure I had ever heard the asylum so quiet.

  It seemed as if the hospital were watching us again.

  Our breathing echoed with the soft slap of our steps, and now and again the sound of dripping water fractured the unnatural silence. We came to a corner and turn
ed. A bit later, we turned again. Minutes passed, then more minutes. The darkness got even darker.

  At the next hallway crossroads, the shimmering form of Pastor Martinez hesitated. “I’m not certain,” he said in a whisper as Cain eased to his haunches beside him. “Nothing seems familiar to me.”

  Trina hugged herself and sighed.

  On instinct, I rested my hand on the stone wall—and jumped. The rock should have been cold, but it was warm, as hot as any human body. A faint, steady rhythm tickled my palm and fingertips, and I yanked my hand away. My muscles tensed even as my mind tried to pitch out what I couldn’t believe.

  “What is it?” Trina asked, her voice just a mumble in the quiet.

  “Lincoln,” I said, though I didn’t really know what I meant. “It’s ... the asylum. The walls—”

  She put her own palm against the wall, and seconds later pulled it back, her eyes going round with fear. “Levi, that’s a heartbeat.”

  “Impossible,” said the ghost of the pastor, but he hushed himself before I could say anything. Here we were, a preacher’s spirit leading a witch, a barghest, and a guy who had come back from the dead through halls too dark to be real. “Impossible” had no place here.

  I knew the building had weird awareness sometimes. I was the one who had told Forest the hospital was alive, that it had been soaking up crazy for years. But I hadn’t meant it like this.

  So, is the old asylum on our side—or not?

  My breath came too shallow, and the last thing I wanted to do was put my hand on the warm stones again. I cursed myself for being a chicken, then reminded myself that Forest was worth anything I had to face, even a haunted hospital threatening to come to life.

  I set my jaw, lifted my hand, and placed it against the rocks.

  They pushed and pulled against my fingers.

  Breathing.

  Easy now. My chin lifted, and I stared into the darkness of the stones, directing all my attention at the pulse inside.

  “I need your help,” I said to the wall—to Lincoln itself. “We need to go to the other side, and we can’t find a thin spot. Will you lead us?”