If not for my innate skepticism, I'd have considered the possibility just then that the spirit of Enid Lancaster was trying to reach out to the world of the living on the anniversary of her death.
I jotted the details in my Moleskine. It was precisely the kind of strange coincidence that Elizabeth would run with, but even if nothing ultimately came of it I thought it worth writing down. I wondered if it might be possible for me to learn more about the killer, Enid, and I scoured my readings for any mention of her. Details were scant, though. If not for a well-timed leak, the world would never have known her full name, just that she'd been a 28-year old patient in the asylum's third ward.
But I did find something almost as good. Interviews with insiders had been conducted on the one-year anniversary of the incident in March of 1990. The story had still been pretty hot, locally, and a few people once affiliated with the institution had been approached to talk about the murders. One of them, a former orderly named Corwin Stuyvesant, claimed to have been wounded in the attack, and to have witnessed much that fateful night.
And, because his parents had been so kind as to give him such a distinctive name as “Corwin Stuyvesant”, I was able to find him on social media without difficulty. The picture in the 1990 interview showed a fresh-faced kid of about 20; a bit stocky, with dense, black hair and an uncertain smile. The Facebook profile picture I now studied showed the same person, still smiling uncertainly, albeit 28 years older. His cheeks had thinned out a lot, robbing him of his baby face, and the black hair—now grey—had also thinned. But it was him. I had no doubt.
Would Corwin be open to talking with me about what he saw that night? If I wanted to learn more about the killer, then I'd need to speak to someone who'd been on the inside back in '89. So far, unless we were going to bother Jake's aunt, this former orderly was our best chance at finding out what happened that night and getting a good idea of what life in the asylum was like during its final days.
I sent him a message, letting him know outright that I was a professor doing some “research” on the history of the asylum. I mentioned the interview he'd done in the 90's, and asked if he'd be willing to talk to me—either online or in person—about his time at Chaythe Asylum and the event known as the Third Ward Incident.
When I'd sent it, I put my phone away and carried my leavings to the garbage bin. I refilled my iced tea before heading out, standing beneath the front entrance and looking across the empty street. Until classes started up again, Moorlake was going to be a ghost town. As I started walking down the road, I found I was too deep into my own thoughts to really notice the desolation.
Who had Enid Lancaster been, and why had she gone on a killing spree?
Why had the calls started coming in to Dave Thackeray just recently, mere weeks before the anniversary of the incident?
And, for that matter, who was responsible for those calls? Was it possible that Enid—that is, her spirit, if such things even existed—was the one reaching out? And for what reason?
My phone dinged as a new message came through. I was pleased to discover a reply awaiting me from Corwin. He'd written me back with a tentative, “Well, I don't know that there's much more to tell, but...”
Maybe I'd be able to answer a few of these questions.
15
Corwin was an easy person to talk to, though he did wear a little too much cologne. It was the original Polo, unless my nose was misleading me. He'd damn near bathed in the stuff. A life-long townie, he'd agreed to meet me at Reverend's bar that day, where I plied him with a draft beer despite his polite protestations.
Seated at a table, sipping foamy pilsners, we made some polite chit-chat. I learned that he worked at a locally-owned computer store, repairing PCs. He shared a few stories about the messes students had brought him; in the last week he'd had to vacuum colonies of both ants and cockroaches from the inside of computer towers. He and his wife lived in a small rental not too far from my own place, but were thinking of buying a condo.
I ordered us some refills and then got to the heart of things. “So, you worked at Chaythe Asylum, huh?”
He nodded, his salt n' pepper hair combed neatly over a conspicuous bald spot. “Yep. I was a young one, then. Landed that job just out of high school. A family friend put in a good word for me and I interviewed pretty well—though at that time, things were already going downhill. They probably would have hired anyone.” He laughed. “You should have seen some of the people who worked there. Some real headcases. Miracle they weren't the ones admitted. It was the summer of '86 when I started there, if I recall.”
“And the Third Ward Incident... you were there that night, weren't you?” I sat back, awaiting his response.
Taking a generous gulp of beer, Corwin began to fidget. For a moment, he was lost in thought, staring down at the wreath of beer foam in his glass. “Yeah,” he finally replied. “I was there. I'd been considering a degree in nursing at the time. Figured that if some of those pinheads at the asylum could do the job, I could, too. But after what happened that night, I kinda lost interest in that whole racket.” He took another sip of beer, holding it in his mouth a moment. “Really puts a bad taste in your mouth, something like that.”
I nodded. “I can imagine. So... what was it like? In the asylum, I mean?”
“Oh, it's a huge place. Real big, easy to get lost. I worked there awhile, but even I could get turned around if I wasn't paying attention. By the time I got there it was kind of rundown. The building itself was solid, seemed like it could withstand a missile, but the equipment we had was cheap shit, always breaking down. They never had the funds for the nice, state-of-the-art stuff, I suppose. Anyway, not everyone working there was too bad. There were some nurses, some other orderlies, who were all right. We got to know each other real well. You tend to do that when you work long nights like I did. You become a sort of family, you know? Well, that night in '89...” He shuddered. “It wasn't pretty. Something out of my nightmares. I'm lucky I made it out with only a little cut.” He pulled up the sleeve of his flannel shirt, showing me a long, thin scar. “Had she gone deeper I might've been in trouble.”
I looked over the scar with morbid curiosity before asking, “The killer—it was a patient named Enid Lancaster, am I right? Did you know her?”
Corwin wet his lips, his fingers tracing the scar tissue on his forearm. “Seeing as how I was an orderly, I knew most every patient in that joint. I wasn't always assigned to the same patients, but yeah, I'd taken care of Enid a few times.”
“And what was she like?” I held my breath while waiting for his response.
“Enid? Before that night, she was a nice girl. Thin, with big eyes and black hair. She had good manners, too, I seem to remember. Would ask you how your shift was going when you stopped in to check on her and all that. I mean, she was as nice as you might expect a severely disturbed young woman to be. She stayed in the third ward. That's where we put all of our serious headcases. Enid, though... I heard rumor she'd initially been admitted for something less serious, to the first or second ward, and had only been placed in the third one a year or so before she flew off the handle. I don't remember what was wrong with her. Might've been schizophrenia... bi-polar...” He shrugged. “When she cracked she was like a completely different person, though. An animal.”
“I'm sorry, but... you say she'd been admitted to one of the asylum's lesser wards? As in... she became more seriously ill during her stay?” This was a bit of new information, and I made sure to file it away mentally. “That's strange, isn't it? Aren't the patients supposed to get better when they're admitted to a place like that?”
Corwin nodded. “Usually that's how it works. Some, though, they have episodes. They get a whole lot worse before they get better. I can't explain it.” He set down his glass and leaned forward, his nose a bit rosy. “And of course, some don't get better at all. Like Enid. She was a patient of Dr. Corvine's, and although I didn't think much of it at the time, I think that he might've had
something to do with it.”
“Dr. Corvine?” I meditated on the name for a moment. “Oh, isn't that the doctor who got in trouble? The one doing unsanctioned experiments? I read that he lost his medical license.”
“That's the one,” replied Corwin. “And the rabbit hole goes deeper than that. It's a miracle they didn't lock his ass up. I don't know the full extent of it, mind you, but his experiments supposedly bordered on torture. That's why so many of his patients, especially in those later years, ended up turning... strange, violent. Enid was one of 'em, and I can only guess that she didn't take well to the treatment... if you can even call it treatment.”
This piqued my interest. I hadn't read a whole lot about the doctor or his methods; in all the sources I'd found he'd been only a footnote. “What kind of treatment did he subject her to?” I asked.
Unfortunately, Corwin was at the limits of his knowledge on that subject. “I don't really know a whole lot. I was just an orderly, you know? One of the nurses might've been able to say, but my job was just to take them and pick them up from treatment. I remember Corvine's patients never wanted to go, though. Some would fight me, hard. And when I'd pick them up, they'd seem like completely different people.”
“Calmer?” I chanced.
He shook his head. “No, not quite. They seemed broken. Unwell, let's say.” He took a drink and then wiped at his lips with a napkin, glancing around the bar. “It wasn't my job to ask questions, you understand. But looking back on it after all these years, I reckon Corvine's treatments had something to do with the rampage, and that's why the medical board went after his license. I heard that later they tried to throw his ass in jail, bring charges against him—serious charges, but all of his records had mysteriously disappeared. And for that matter, so did he. If he's even still alive, he's probably getting up there in years, but lots of rumors went around about how he changed his name and went into hiding. Or maybe, because he was ashamed of what he'd done, he destroyed all of his notes and killed himself.” Corwin shrugged. “No telling what really happened there.”
“But you think that the treatments must've pushed Enid over the edge?” I pressed.
“Let's put it this way: unless she was under the influence of some experimental drug, I don't know how else to explain what I witnessed that night, when she lost it completely.”
I offered to order him another beer, but he refused. “So, take me back to that night, then. March 28th, 1989. The so-called 'Third Ward Incident'. You were working your shift...”
“That's right,” replied Corwin. “I was a third shifter, and the first few hours of the shift had gone by pretty well, except that there was one hell of a storm going. I was doing my rounds, touring the different wards with another guy, my buddy Chaz. We decided to split up. He had a look at the first ward while I checked out the second and third wards. At some point, while the staff was all hanging out at the nursing stations and there were just a few of us orderlies walking the grounds like security guards, the lights went out.
“Now, we were supposed to have a backup generator at the asylum. Brief power outages weren't so uncommon in bad weather, and we had procedures to follow for that kind of thing. Usually, you only had to wait about a minute for the back-up power to come on. But this time, it didn't. I remember standing in the hall with my flashlight, waiting for the lights to return. I'd just stepped into the third ward—it's a big, long hall, that one. The doors are sturdier, harder to look through. Patients in that ward—the ones that were still awake—were making all kinds of noises in their rooms. They didn't like the dark, these folks. And I couldn't blame 'em. Standing in the hallway with only a flashlight in that place gave me the damn creeps, too.
“I walked a little further, not sure what to make of the power outage, and then caught sight of someone standing at the other end of the hall. Come to find out one of the patient rooms had been opened. Don't ask me how; it didn't look forced, and the locks weren't reliant on electricity. But I'll never forget glimpsing the door to one of those rooms sitting open and Enid standing outside it.
“Bear in mind, I'd seen Enid earlier that night. I'd picked her up from her treatment and escorted her back to her room at the beginning of my shift, around 8 PM or so. Corvine, unlike a lot of the doctors, preferred to work late. Well, she was standing in her white gown, breathing real hard. And I saw that she had something in her hand—something she wasn't supposed to have.”
“A meat cleaver?” I asked.
He nodded. “I guess she'd smuggled it out of the kitchen, but I have no idea how. That stuff was supposed to be kept under lock and key.” Corwin made himself very small in his seat, cradling himself with his arms. “So, she's standing there, and her hair's all matted to her face. Enid was a nice-looking girl, usually soft-spoken whenever I dealt with her, but she looked like a completely different person when I saw her standing there in the dark. I called out to her, asked what she was doing out of her room. Tried to play it calm, you know? And I asked her, too, what it was she had in her hand. That was when she came running at me.”
“She ran at you?” I looked down at his arm, where earlier he'd shown me the scar.
“Yeah. But she came at me so quickly that I could hardly brace myself. You ever see those sprinters on the Olympics? Usain Bolt? She ran at me like a goddamn bullet, like an animal, and she gave me a good whack with that cleaver. I managed to clock her with my flashlight and I nearly restrained her, but...” Though it might have only been the low lighting playing tricks on my eyes, I thought his complexion went a shade or two paler. “She turned and looked at me. And those eyes...”
I waited for him to go on, nursing the rest of my beer. I ordered myself a third and closed the tab while Corwin sought the nerve to continue his story.
“I don't really like telling this part. People look at you like you're batshit crazy, right? But I swear to God above, when I tried to grab her, keep her from running down the hall, she looked back at me and her eyes were black. Jet black. The whole damn thing, like she'd swapped out her eyeballs with coal briquettes. And the strength she had—she wasn't just ungodly fast, no sir. She gave me a shove, a hard one. You'd have thought her an NFL linebacker with that kind of power. She dropped me like I was nothing and then sped off down the hall, into the darkness.
“Now, I'm not trying to make it sound like she was, you know, possessed. But... that's the easiest word to use in describing what I witnessed. She moved, looked, acted completely different. Sometimes, our patients could take on extra strength, and I've heard tell of certain psychotic episodes affecting the coloration of the eyes. And when you factor in the possibility that Corvine had her on some untested, experimental shit, then who knows what was going on in her brain. There's a scientific explanation, for sure. But it scared the hell out of me.” He chuckled, but did not smile as he added, “I about shit my pants, I kid you not. It was like staring the devil himself in the face.”
It was hard to imagine a young female patient suddenly becoming the Incredible Hulk, but I tried to suspend my disbelief. “So, what happened after that run-in?”
“Well, I took off down the hall, tried to catch her.” He patted his knee. “I ran track in high school and was still in pretty good shape back then, but I couldn't catch up with her. Plus, in the darkness, I had no way of knowing where she went. There was screaming, lots of roughhousing, but it was impossible to say what was what. Patients were freaking out in their rooms because of the blackout, which only added to the confusion. Overall, there were some deaths that night, and I only managed to see Enid again at the very end, when the lights came on. She was found in the main lobby, near the front doors. We kept them locked—tightly locked—but it looked like she'd intended to break out. A receptionist went out to the main lobby when the lights came on and found Enid on the floor, her skull bashed in and a puddle of blood pooling on the floor. She still had the cleaver in her hand, and it looked like she'd been struck down in the middle of attempting her escape. No one knew who
did it, though. Who struck the fatal blow, that is. No one owned up to it.”
There was little more to tell. Now that he'd finished with the hard parts of his story, Corwin gave a quick rundown of the aftermath; the closure of the asylum, his search for a new job, and other less interesting tidbits. I dragged him back to the subject of Enid, and he bristled. “So, she was killed before she could escape the asylum and they never found out who did it. What about her family? Did they press charges or anything?”
He shook his head. “To the best of my knowledge, she didn't have any family. She'd been an orphan, I think, and she'd spent the majority of her life in institutions. It's a damn shame—she was a nice girl, before all of that happened. And anyway, anyone who'd killed her had done it in self-defense. Under those circumstances, no one would have gone to jail for it. But no one ever came forward.”
We made some small-talk for awhile and then Corwin excused himself. I thanked him for his time and he thanked me for the beers. I watched him leave, sitting back in my seat and enjoying the last of my third draft. Having had so much to drink on an empty stomach I was feeling rather buzzed and considered walking across the street to the Corner Grill for another breakfast platter.
Instead, though, I sat down and considered everything I'd just learned.
“The rabbit hole goes deeper than that,” Corwin had said of Dr. Corvine's experiments.
Now I was determined to see just how deep it went.
I pulled out my phone and shot Elizabeth a text. “Find out when Jake's aunt is free. I want to talk to her and see if she ever met a Dr. Corvine while she was at the asylum.”
16
It turned out that Josephine Tamblyn-Marsh was almost always home, and that she sought out every opportunity she could find to meet with her “favorite” nephew. When the three of us arrived, she was sitting on her front porch, throwing a red Frisbee to her golden retriever who pounced through the well-manicured lawn after it.
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