Elizabeth turned to me, amused at my silence. “I thought you were a skeptic, professor—a man of reason. What's the matter? Surely you aren't scared?”
The two of them followed me out the door into the warm evening. I leaned against the brick facade of the cafe and lit up a Viceroy, letting the smoke stream from my nostrils. The scent of lavender came rushing in from a copse of trees down the street, and from the bar next door I was struck by a melange of Axe body spray and the odor of cheap beer. I looked down the street, at the chattering clouds of clubbers circulating the watering holes like gnats. It was probably the caffeine—and the nicotine—talking, but I thought I felt something in the air. Excitement, maybe? No, on further inspection, it seemed more akin to scientific curiosity.
Despite my lack of belief in the supernatural, I'd been drawn to the asylum from the very start. I'd taken Dave Thackeray up on his invitation and had listened to that eerie phone call, and had subsequently spent my day reading up on the asylum's history. No matter how much I denied it, I was becoming rather interested in the place, and as I paced about the sidewalk, taking in the warm breeze, I found myself with fewer and fewer reasons to delay a visit.
It was hard to articulate just why I was so interested in this investigation of the ghostly. I tried anyhow. Pointing down the street with my cigarette as though it were an orange-tipped laser pointer, I said, “A little while back, a kid died here. Got hit by a truck, as I'm sure you heard.”
Elizabeth and Jake were both take off-guard by this. She nodded sullenly. “Yeah, I heard about that.”
I took a long drag, my back pressed to the wall, and looked up at the black sky. “I was there when it happened. I was on my way to class when I saw him step out into traffic. I was the first one on the scene. Watched him die.” This was the first time I'd told anyone about the incident, and in doing so I felt lighter, less burdened by the memory. “First time in my life I ever watched someone pass away. It was spooky, shocking—but not because there was anything paranormal about it. It was just that I realized—it really sunk in—that at some point, that's the same fate that awaits all of us. If you're lucky, the end doesn't come speeding at you in the form of a truck, but we're all going to end up just like that kid someday. Only a matter of time. Erased. Since then, I've had this nagging feeling. I dunno what it is, but...” I put out the cigarette on the sole of my shoe and glanced at them. “There's something about this asylum business that has me hooked. Curious.”
Elizabeth smiled, her features lit up by the headlights of a passing car. “So, you're saying that you're a believer now?”
I shook my head. “Not a believer, no. Not yet. I'm not sure I'll ever be. But I have some questions that need answering and there's just something about this asylum that's pulling me in. Something about that phone call last night... it reminded me of that dead kid, of the accident. Something he said...” I trailed off. “If you really want to go visit the place tonight, that's fine. But I'm driving.”
Jake looked ready to protest, shot me a venomous look, but I shut him down immediately.
“Jake, if you aren't interested in coming along, that's perfectly all right. I promise not to let Elizabeth out of my sight.”
His scowl tightened and he took a step towards me. “Yeah, right. Fat chance. I'm coming, too.”
I was happy to hear that. Not that I liked the kid, far from it, but the extra company was welcome on a trip like this one. “OK,” I said, leading them down the street. “I'm parked down here.”
Elizabeth, giddy as could be, towed Jake along by the arm. “I can't wait!”
11
Elizabeth was feeling talkative. Sitting in the backseat of my Cavalier, looking out the window with wide eyes, she rambled on about all kinds of things so that we had no need of the radio. It was a reasonably long drive to Chaythe Asylum. It sat on a lonely stretch of road up north, mere miles from the Ohio-Michigan line. All things considered, we were looking at a trip of some forty-odd minutes, provided that we didn't get turned around or lost.
Elizabeth, who hated the shortening of her name to “Liz”, talked about her upbringing. She'd been born in rural Swanton, grown up in a loft apartment over a stable where her parents had kept horses and where fleas had run rampant. Her parents still lived there, though her dad—after a riding accident—didn't get around nearly so well as he once did and was hoping to soon retire. She'd met Jake in high school, and alluded to the fact that her folks—“just about the warmest people you'd ever meet”—didn't really care for him. She talked about how life in the dorms was strange, and that she wished there were more greenery in Moorlake. As a child, she explained, she'd always wanted to move far away from her parents and live in a big city; movies and books had made life in a metropolis seem so much more exciting than the quaint, rural upbringing she'd had. Now, though, she had designs to settle in a nice country home not unlike them. Her major was in psychology, but she didn't seem particularly devoted to it, and was considering becoming a veterinarian instead.
She paused only long enough to make it known that she wanted me to chime in with some of my own history. I kept things short and sweet.
I'd been born in the Columbus area in the mid-80's. Hopped around from school to school. Wanted to become a novelist, but like so many others, went for the next best thing when it came time to choose a career—teaching—AKA, discussing other people's books. She missed my sarcasm with that one. I mentioned that I hadn't spoken to my parents for the better part of a decade, and with good reason, and that I hoped to still be teaching at Moorlake over the summer.
Jake sat silently in the passenger seat, staring out at the dark road like a statue. Either he really didn't want to be in the car with me, or else he was getting increasingly nervous about visiting the asylum. I suppose it could have been both.
“What's wrong, chief?” I asked. “Getting a little freaked out now that we're visiting the place?”
He rolled his eyes but didn't say anything, just staring on ahead.
I cracked a window to let a little air in and glanced repeatedly at the speedometer to make sure I wasn't going any faster than ten miles over the limit. From my center console I fished out a tin of Altoids, tucking a pair of them under my tongue. For a time, I rested my hands on the steering wheel and relished a rare break in conversation, listening to the wind as it buffeted the car.
Elizabeth spoke up again, her voice seeming more distant this time. “You asked me before why it was that I'm interested in the supernatural,” she began.
From the passenger seat, Jake stirred uncomfortably. I thought I saw him look at her in the side mirror, but when I turned he quickly averted his gaze back to the road.
“When I was a kid, something happened to me. No one could explain it, and ever since I've been looking for answers,” she began, her voice low and confessional. “I was born blind.”
I thought she was cracking some kind of inappropriate joke and chuckled, but an icy silence grew up out of my reaction and I cut it out. “Seriously?”
She nodded. “I was born completely blind. There was nothing doctors could do for me, and until I was six years old I couldn't see a thing. I still remember what that was like... But then, one day, something happened.”
I glanced back at her. “What, like a miracle?”
Cocking her head to the side, she stared out the window, her orange locks slipping over the shoulder of her jacket. “Something like that. I was outside, crossing the street with my mom. We'd gone into town for something and were at a cross-walk when suddenly I heard her scream. Next thing I knew, something had hit me. Hard. I felt myself lifted up into the air, heard my mother's voice, but then I was out like a light. I'd been hit by a car.”
The mints under my tongue started to burn something fierce. I cleared my throat, grip tightening on the wheel. “Uh-huh?”
“I came to in the hospital a week later. According to my mother, I was very, very close to death. There'd been a lot of blood loss, some serious br
ain swelling. They had to put a drain in my skull,” she said, pointing to the crown of her head. “Anyway, when I woke up, I found I could see. I opened my eyes in that hospital bed, and for the first time in my life, I could see the world around me. It was so strange. Scary, really.”
Jake's frown had intensified, and judging by the way he wrung his hands in the pocket of his hoodie, he didn't really like hearing this story.
“You don't say?” I offered. It was a pretty unbelievable story, but I'd read of miraculous things like that sometimes occurring. Wheelchair-bound people gaining the ability to walk, the deaf or blind having their senses reinstated; these things were exceptionally rare, but when they did occur they always made a splash in the media and the experts involved seemed to have neat, scientific hypotheses at the ready to explain them.
But not in Elizabeth's case, apparently. “The doctors couldn't explain it. They brought in a specialist from California who couldn't make heads or tails of it. I underwent some therapy, but in the end I went home with a cast on my leg and twenty-twenty vision. For a year afterward I visited a bunch of different doctors throughout the State. None of them could tell my parents why I could suddenly see. To them, it didn't make any sense. Something, they figured, got jostled in the accident—something, previously incomplete in my body, had been set right by the front bumper of a speeding convertible. But I've always had my own suspicions about what happened. When I was in the hospital, my mother told me I coded. My heart,” she explained, patting her breast, “it stopped. They managed to bring me back, but for a brief while I was dead. When they resuscitated me, I must've brought back my eyesight as a souvenir from the other world.”
What she was describing sounded like a myth, a fable. “You paid the underworld a visit and came back up with your eyesight, huh?” I asked. “I feel like I've read that somewhere before. You didn't meet Eurydice while you were down there, did you?”
She ignored me. “Ever since then, I've wondered about the other side. You know, what awaits us after death. I've always wanted to learn more about the supernatural. I'm not sure I'll ever get a full answer to any of my questions, but if I can at least find proof of a world beyond this one, then that'll be enough for me.”
Jake finally spoke up, muttering, “I don't see why. You got your eyesight back. Isn't that proof enough?”
“No,” she replied, “I was given my sight for a reason. I want to see what that other world has to offer. I want to see it with my own two eyes. Right now, I feel that world, but that isn't enough. I want to see some of it, glimpse a fragment. Peek behind the curtain, right?”
After that, there was a lull. We all sat silently, looking out across the highway in search of the towering black building we expected to pop up on the horizon at any moment.
Nearly five minutes later, it finally did.
It was much larger in life than it had been in photos. Clashing against the almost lightless sky, its ebony borders aglow in the sparse moonlight, the rough, monolithic facade of Chaythe Asylum called to us from the left side of the highway.
12
“It looks like something out of a black and white horror film,” said Jake as we pulled up alongside the tall metal fence at the border of the property.
He was right, of course, but to simply stop there would be to do the compound a disservice. It was a thing of sharp angles and towering triangular peaks; the internet had referred to it as a specimen of “gothic revival” architecture. The facade of the place was in relatively good order despite its years of abandonment, and most of its large windows remained intact. A wide road ran from the lip of the highway; the asphalt, largely stripped of its black color by the seasons and its length peppered in the waving green fronds of invasive weeds that'd taken root in its numerous cracks, seemed to wind all around the property, its terminus not in sight from where we sat.
Though rusted, the fence that surrounded the property on all sides, and which called to mind a penitentiary, was sturdy. I know, because after shutting off the car, I stepped outside and gave some of the chain links a shake. There was a gate, shut with an imposing lock, and a sign posted just above my eye line that read: “PRIVATE PROPERTY. KEEP OUT.” For yards and yards beyond the edge of the fence, tall grass swayed in the breeze. Further out, unkempt trees could be made out against the darkness, their unruly limbs reaching out strangely, chaotically, and their foliage still lacking in these early days of spring.
I paced about the front gate, fiddling with the lighter in my pocket, and whistled. “It's one hell of a building, huh? Looks like a frigging castle.”
Jake sat back near the hood of the car. He really didn't seem to like the place, but wasn't going to tell us why.
Elizabeth, though, was entranced, and before she even seemed to know what she was doing, she gave the gate a hard tug. It didn't open, of course, but that didn't stop her from trying a second, and then third time. “It's so big!” she cried, standing so close to the fencing that her nose protruded from the space between the links. “I wish we could get closer to it!”
It was a sight to behold, make no mistake. They just don't make buildings like this anymore. But I wasn't exactly raring to get up close and personal. Quite the contrary, there was something about the place—something that I couldn't readily put a name to—that made me want to get back into the car and put it in my rearview. The Chaythe Asylum, in a word, was imposing. Unlike the house you live in, or the supermarket you shop at, which were probably designed to look inviting and comfortable, this place was a different animal completely. If one could assign to a place a personality, then the Chaythe Asylum was Jack Nicholson in The Shining. There was something wrong with it, something standoffish and possibly hostile. It sounds silly to talk about a building in such a way. A building doesn't really have a will of its own.
But from the onset, it was clear to me, even from more than a hundred yards, that Chaythe Asylum was no regular building.
The front of the place was picturesque enough; had it not been for the darkness, it might have lost some of its intimidating qualities and simply looked like an impotent antique. Jutting out from its rear like a pair of mutated limbs were what appeared to be long passages which wound around in easy angles to meet somewhere on the other side of the property. It reminded me of the Pentagon—a closed system with what I expected was a green, overgrown courtyard and pond at its center.
As one might expect of an insane asylum that'd been closed since the first season of The Simpsons premiered, there were no lights to be seen in any of the highway-facing windows. Everything we could see of the place was penciled in by the moonlight, and though there wasn't a lot of it, there was enough for me to corroborate certain of the things I'd read about the property online. For instance, in a patch of land that looked permanently upturned and pock-marked, were the remnants of a foundation. This, I believed, was where the now-demolished children's ward had once stood.
Like a junkie aching for a fix, Elizabeth kept tugging at the fence and tried to force the gate. Pulling up the orange sleeves of her jacket, she threw her meager bodyweight into it and nearly landed on the ground.
“Lay off,” warned Jake, approaching her from behind. He tested the gate himself and then shook his head, cleaning his hands off on his pants like he'd just touched something foul. “It isn't going to give. You'd have to cut the links and climb through.”
“Or get permission from the damn owner to unlock the gate,” I added, a hint of annoyance rising in my voice. “We aren't going in, guys. Elizabeth wanted to have a look at the place. So, look.” I motioned at the building. “Take it all in.” From the grass nearby there issued an ominous buzzing. Several reddish beetles, roughly the size of dimes, came whizzing towards us, dive-bombing until I batted them back into the grass. “Think you've seen enough?” I asked. “I'd like to be getting back to town, if that's all right with you two. This is interesting, but until we can arrange to go inside—legally—I suggest we call it a night.”
Edging
to the right, Elizabeth took great care in examining the links of the fence. She was looking, it soon became clear, for a hole big enough for her to crawl through. “There has to be a break in this fence somewhere,” she said, licking her lips and walking alongside the road in search of a weak spot. “Help me find one!”
Jake hesitated, glancing at the two of us in turn. “Maybe we should go,” he conceded. “We can come back later, babe. Even if there is a break in the fence we could get arrested for going in.”
Either Elizabeth didn't hear him, or she didn't care about the consequences. She walked on, rattling the fence as she went, testing the flexibility of the lowest links. Maybe she thought she'd be able to crawl underneath it, on her belly.
I pointed at the car. “Come on, you two. Let's get out of here.”
Just as Elizabeth seemed about to comply, and Jake had started back towards the car, a flash of light washed over the three of us. Startled, I turned back towards the building, finding a pair of bright headlights coming towards us from the lengthy drive. “Shit,” I said. “Someone's coming this way.”
“Security?” asked Jake, bumping into the side of the Cavalier.
I nodded. “Probably.”
That snapped Elizabeth back to reality, and she jogged to the car, fiddling with the door. “Damn, let's get out of here! Before they see us, guys!”
The vehicle—an SUV, by the looks of it—was gaining speed, though. It flashed its headlights and roared towards us. I could have dashed back into the car and taken off at full speed down the highway. We might've made it. Instead, I waved at the other two and told them to stay put. “He's seen us,” I said. “We're going to have to say hello.”
* * *
The SUV had a light bar on its roof that began flashing with yellow lights as it drew near. I braced myself, told the other two to let me do the talking, and as the security vehicle came to a stop, its driver climbing out to approach the gate, I gave him a quick wave.
Asylum: The Afterlife investigations #1 Page 7