by Susan Vaught
“Your giant ugly dog got mad when I blew you up,” she said.
“Ouch.” Forest winced.
“Cain!” I looked around. “Where is he?”
“Locked in the clothing room,” Trina said. She pointed at the tattered legs of her jeans. “I hope.”
Then she forgot about me and launched herself at Darius.
Addie and Forest glanced around the room, and Addie frowned. She looked at me, her eyes narrowing. “Where’s Imogene?”
All the sadness I’d been fighting rolled over me at once, and I coughed when it choked me. I barely got out my stupid answer of, “I don’t know.”
Then the door to the records room opened with a creak, and Imogene slowly limped into the room.
“I’m still here, boy,” she said. She gave Forest a wink. “We got a little work to do, you and me. Can’t leave until my business gets finished.”
When she saw me looking from her to Forest, searching for some sign that healing me and bringing me back had cost Forest the way I thought it had cost Imogene, my grandmother said, “Leave it alone, boy. She just helped your nature along a bit. Given time, you’d have figured out how to bring yourself back. That’s the curse of being my grandson—you have to stay alive until the good Lord’s through with you.”
“I ...,” I started, but couldn’t find any words.
“I been tellin’ you for years, Levi,” Imogene said. “You’re just too stubborn to hear me. My time’s passing, that’s all. You didn’t hurry it, and you can’t slow it down.” She patted my arm. “Even with all the attitude you put out, I’d rather have you as not.”
Before I could say anything else, Addie and Forest embraced my grandmother. I just stood there staring at her, but I could breathe again. Imogene was still here. My world hadn’t split itself in two just yet, and I was so grateful.
When Forest finished making over my grandmother, she stayed close to me, and whenever she moved away, I followed. I couldn’t help it. I didn’t want to let her out of my sight.
Later, when the sun had moved toward afternoon, my stomach proved how alive I was by growling and grumbling until I had to admit I was starving. Forest and I went out for lunch. We stuffed ourselves with burgers, then tacos, then pizza and ice cream on top of that, and then we went back to the rooms we kept at Darius’s house and slept the day around until the sun was ready to rise again.
When I got up, I checked on Darius and Trina and Addie, then gave Imogene a call at the bell tower. Everyone was still fine and safe and happy.
I showered, then met Forest on the front porch in the gray light of dawn. A warm breeze stirred her damp curls as she stood in front of me, close enough to touch, but far enough away to keep me from going completely nuts.
Her voice was musical when she asked, “Want to go have coffee?”
“My place or yours?”
“Funny.” She flicked a wet strand of hair out of my face, then held one finger just above my teardrop tattoo. “It’s a good thing you make me laugh.”
“Meet me at the top of the bell tower,” I told her, and she laughed again.
“Ooh, scary as always.” She tapped my tattoo and sent a jolt of warmth through my entire being. “You like to live on the edge.”
Less than an hour later, we stood together at the top of the spire, looking out across the greens and yellows and whites of spring in Never, Kentucky. The old asylum seemed to hum beneath us, ancient and watchful as always. For today, at least, it noticed us, and it seemed happy that we were there.
Forest warmed me with her nearness, and when she turned to me, I smiled at her as if I had no worries.
This one morning, I really didn’t.
She brushed her fingertips against the back of my hand, and I drank in the burst of heat. I gazed into her eyes, helpless and not even caring, and I realized I had no reason to hide from Forest any longer.
When I brushed my lips across hers, I laughed away the sting. “Darkness needs light, and light needs darkness.”
She leaned forward, and her breath tickled my ear. “I’m taking off my bracelet tonight, Levi.”
For a long, long time, I couldn’t stop looking at my light, and my light couldn’t stop smiling at her darkness.
Then I reached up and gave the nearest bell a gentle push.
It rang softly, just for us.
Acknowledgments
In my Acknowledgments section, I usually thank my readers, so let me start there. THANK YOU, dear readers, for exploring my story. I hope it brought you excitement and joy, and a few moments of total creepy-crawly sensations. I have always loved spooky horror, short on gore but high on scream value—the kind of story that leaves you hunched over a book on a rainy day, twitching each time you hear a strange noise. Thanks also to Victoria Wells-Arms, the best editor ever, who is moving on to greener pastures as an agent. Let this be a prediction: you will do very, very well. Last but not least, thanks to Erin Murphy, my longtime agent, for believing in weird directional changes, and to Laura Whitaker, for taking on a project midstream and putting up with all my quirks.
I would also like to take the unusual step of thanking a place. No, not my current place of employment, which I affectionately call the Old Asylum. Certainly, it is historical and beautiful and magnificent, and ... late at night ... with the lights low ... profoundly creepy in its own right. However, the Old Asylum wasn’t the primary inspiration for the setting in this tale. I based Lincoln Psychiatric on my memories of the original Middle Tennessee Mental Health Institute, born in 1852 as the Tennessee Hospital for the Insane and torn to the ground, while many sobbed in 1999, to make way for a Dell assembly plant. For most of its life, it was known as “Central State,” and it didn’t become MTMHI until around the late ’70s or early ’80s. MTMHI was a monolith of my childhood, and anyone raised in or around Nashville could immediately drive without a single wrong turn to the former grounds. MTMHI also had a role in my early professional life. Almost all mental-health practitioners in the mid-South area spent time training at MTMHI, with the ancient buildings and the ivy and the gigantic rosebushes and the terrifyingly rattletrap cage elevators—and the tables used by Civil War generals to read maps and plan strategies. It was a place of pain and healing, of darkness and light, of change and hope and mystery. Progress must happen, and, no doubt, the new facility constructed in 1995 serves its patients in much more comfortable surroundings.
Still, the world lost something when “Central State” was erased from Nashville’s map. RIP to the original Old Asylum and all of its wonderful and terrible haunting tales. I hope I did it some justice with these stories.
Also by Susan Vaught
Stormwitch
Trigger
My Big Fat Manifesto
Exposed
Going Underground
Freaks Like Us
The Oathbreaker saga with J B Redmond
Part One: Assassin’s Apprentice
Part Two: A Prince Among Killers
Copyright © 2014 by Susan Vaught
All rights reserved.
You may not copy, distribute, transmit, reproduce, or otherwise make available this publication (or any part of it) in any form, or by any means (including without limitation electronic, digital, optical, mechanical, photocopying, printing, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher. Any person who does any unauthorized act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.
First published in the United States of America in February 2014 by Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
by Bloomsbury Children’s Books
www.bloomsbury.com
This electronic edition published in February 2014
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
; Vaught, Susan.
Insanity / by Susan Vaught.
pages cm
Summary: The intertwining stories of three teenagers who find themselves haunted beyond imagining in the depths of a Kentucky mental institution.
[1. Psychiatric hospitals—Fiction. 2. Haunted places—Fiction. 3. Horror stories.] I. Title.
PZ7.V4673In 2014 [Fic]—dc23 2013034321
eISBN: 978-1-5999-0839-7
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