Asylum: The Afterlife investigations #1

by Ibsen, Ambrose

  Jake probably felt like he needed to say something to me, but considering where we were and his own opinions on the matter, he didn't speak up for Elizabeth. Instead, he fell into step behind me and gave her a pleading look, as if to say, “Don't make this hard.”

  Lips pursed, Elizabeth slung her backpack forcefully over one shoulder, hitting me in the chest with it as she zipped back into the front lobby. Without a word, she led us back the way we'd come, down the hall that would take us to the cafeteria. She refused to speak, looked ready to throw down, and marched several paces ahead of us. Jake followed behind her, shoulders rounded and head low. When this night was through, she was going to let him have it, I could tell.

  As we walked, I let myself have it, too. What were you thinking? This whole thing has been monumentally stupid. You brought them here to this dangerous old building, and for what? Did you really think you were going to find something shocking? Some bombshell about those old murders? Proof of ghosts? You're just as stupid and naive as she is. Your head's been messed up ever since the accident. Watching that kid die fucked your head up. Of all the places you could have gone to sort yourself out, you chose this?

  The sound of a metal door falling shut filled the passage ahead. The three of us paused, sighting a human silhouette in the darkness.

  Adjusting the bill of his hat, Terrence walked out, meeting us half-way. “Oh, there ya are. Just got done having a look at the first set of rooms. Cafeteria's all set.” He focused the beam of his flashlight and looked past us, squinting. “Who's that with you, in the lobby there?”

  He was speaking to me, and I was the last person in line. I turned quickly, glancing back into the lobby, but saw no one.

  Terrence wiped at his eyes. “Sorry,” he muttered. “I think I'm seeing things. Light ain't so good.”

  Elizabeth approached the groundskeeper, putting on a diplomatic smile. “Sorry, Terrence, but could I ask you a favor? I know you still have some things to check out on this floor, but would you mind terribly showing us the upstairs? I'd love to see the third ward, but my friends here don't seem too interested in going without you.”

  “Can't say I blame them,” was Terrence's reply. He tongued his molars, glanced down at his wristwatch. “I suppose we could make a trip up there. I don't like doing things out of order, but then I wouldn't mind getting that section over with.” He led us back through the lobby, which he stopped only a few moments to inspect, before continuing on to the stairwell we'd discovered just minutes earlier. “This way, folks. Stay close. The lights up here can be spotty,” he warned. “And you'll find there are several sections that are blocked off. Gonna steer clear of those.”

  The door closed behind me as the group began to ascend the concrete stairs.

  24

  This upper level proved a carbon copy of the first in many respects. The only difference?

  It was darker.

  True to Terrence's word, the lights up here didn't work quite as well as those on the first story—and those lights down below had largely been trash to begin with.

  “These here,” he said, motioning to the doors that began appearing on either side of us, “were offices for doctors, I guess.”

  I felt a hint of excitement, and wondered if we might find the office that had been W. R. Corvine's. Just what the doctor had hoped to prove with his experiments on live subjects, the particulars of which had only been hinted at in articles, was impossible to say. That those experiments had contributed to the decay of Enid's mental state over the course of her stay and ultimately caused her to embark on a killing spree seemed clear, however. To my dismay, the placards outside the offices had mostly all been stripped, and the rooms proved almost completely bare. This shouldn't have come as any sort of surprise, but as I peeked into the first few, my spirits drooped and I felt doubly stupid for having arranged this trip.

  There was no mystery to this asylum. Patients had been taken advantage of, people had lost their lives and the institution had been rightfully shut down. Nothing more. Everything else that had come from it—the phone calls, the stories—was rubbish. My imagination had gone into overdrive and I'd spent days riling myself up over a mystery of my own invention.

  And now here I was in Chaythe Asylum, stumbling around in the dark, and none of the questions I'd entered with had been answered. In fact, none of them seemed to carry any weight at all at this point. I felt ashamed of myself for ever having entertained the possibility of ghosts or other strange things lurking in the building.

  Jake remarked on the emptiness of the rooms. He pulled up his sleeves and shot his light into the nearest doorway, asking the groundsman, “Where did all of the stuff go? Did they just pitch it all? I expected to find more junk laying around—furniture and supplies, you know?”

  Terrence took notice of a small, ring-shaped water stain on the ceiling of one room. Making a note in a small, yellow notepad he carried in his breast pocket, he walked on. “A lot of it got trashed, yeah. Some of it got moved to certain storerooms, too. Or the basement.”

  Elizabeth shot me a knowing look. “So, some of the things that once belonged to the doctors are in the basement? I'd love to go down there and have a look.”

  The groundskeeper's jaw tensed. “Yeah, but it's like I've been sayin'. Hard to get a real good look at anything down there. Dark as pitch and crowded with all kinds of junk. Just setting foot down there is a bit risky. Could get crushed by loads of old boxes. Wouldn't recommend it, wouldn't recommend it a bit.”

  While Terrence busied himself inspecting yet another room—and shooing away a small field mouse that'd somehow gotten in—the rest of us wandered further down the hall. I was keen to stay close to the guy, lest we wander too far and Elizabeth's curious impulses take over.

  Signaling to one room near the end of the hall, which terminated in a pair of beastly metal doors—fitted with dense locks and faded graphics that stressed the fact that only authorized personnel were allowed inside—Jake asked, “What's this one?” His light had landed upon a small sign, intact unlike so many of the others, which read simply SUPPLIES.

  Elizabeth pushed the door open casually, and was apparently impressed with what she found within because she suddenly said, “Whoa...”

  I leaned in just as Jake thrust his light into the room. This one was larger than the rest—perhaps twice as large as any of the offices had been—and was full of shelves. These shelves, made of stainless steel wire, teetered with an ungodly amount of junk. There were unsightly stacks of paper fused together by dust. Piles of books protruded from crumpled cardboard boxes. Between the shelves, burdened with boxes of what appeared to be office supplies, were mildewed office chairs from some bygone era. The air felt heavier as I stepped inside, though it may have only been the claustrophobic effect produced by the dozen or so shelves that surrounded us, and which reached nearly to the ceiling.

  “You mind?” I eyed Jake's flashlight, and he surrendered it with considerable hesitance. Approaching the first of the shelves, I had a look at the mess of office supplies and other 80's ephemera. The papers were mounds of office forms whose ink was almost too faded to read. The headers read things like PROGRESS REPORT, HISTORY AND PHYSICAL, CONSENT FOR TREATMENT and MEDICAL ADMINISTRATION RECORD. These, then, had probably been copies of oft-used forms, printed in huge quantities for the convenience of the doctors who'd worked out of the nearby offices. The sheets must have numbered in the thousands. “Looks like a bunch of the stuff they didn't know what to do with got stuck in here,” I said, continuing into the room.

  Elizabeth studied what looked to be an ancient dot matrix printer, its tangle of black cords hanging from the shelving like so many black mambas. “Man, look at all of this. They should have had a yard sale.” Peering into an open-faced box on a lower shelf, she startled, loosing a yelp and falling into the next shelf over. The contents of the box spilled out onto the floor and the flurry of dust that resulted had us all coughing for some minutes. Of the thing that'd spooked her
I'd only seen a few too many black legs dashing across the floor. “Big spider,” she said with a shiver.

  The stuff in the box sat in a heap, and little of it was interesting. A bunch of creased folders had come spilling out of it, as well as a pair of staplers and a roll of scotch tape that had long ago dried out. From the doorway, Terrence looked in on us. “Don't go making a mess of things, now,” he urged, taking a quick glance about the room. He walked the distance between the shelves, slipping between each to look at the floors, walls and ceiling, before continuing his rounds. The actual stuff that was being warehoused here apparently didn't matter to him.

  “Don't you have to inventory all of this old crap?” I asked, cracking a grin.

  “Nah.” He leaned in the doorway. “It's all junk. They left it to rot. One day, if Mr. Blake gets around to doing something with this building, it'll all get tossed. For now, though, it's just a whole lotta stuff that'll never get sorted.”

  Elizabeth and Jake followed Terrence to the door. The rooms of the second and third wards were coming up, and Elizabeth was particularly keen to visit them. “You coming?” she asked me from the doorway. Jake looked back at me pleadingly, wanting me to return his flashlight.

  “Just a sec,” I said. Kneeling, I set the flashlight on the floor and started throwing the spilled items back into the box. The rest of the group stepped out into the hall and prepared to advance.

  I was very nearly done, had shoved the last of the folders into the box, when something caught my eye. It'd been sitting underneath the pile so that I'd overlooked it up until that moment. A tape recorder. “Well, how about that?” I muttered. I gave it a little shake, dusting it off. It was a flat thing, with all of the wide rectangular buttons situated upon the front lip, and a small speaker embedded into the rear. There was even a flimsy plastic handle.

  It'd been years since I'd seen such a thing. I peered into the little plastic window, spying a Maxell cassette sitting within and toyed with the buttons. Age had made them squeaky, stubborn, but they still had that satisfying click to them that I could remember from my childhood.

  What I didn't expect was that it would actually turn on.

  There must have been the barest vestige of power left in the batteries, because the tape suddenly began to play, albeit in a slow and slightly wobbly way. It was a grainy recording of a man speaking, and it apparently hadn't been rewound, beginning in an awkward spot, mid-sentence. “—showed promise twenty-eight minutes after the administration of the drug. That is, 5 micrograms of—”

  The tape cut off abruptly just then as the batteries gave their last. The little wheels within the tape stopped turning and the speaker fell silent.

  But I'd heard enough. Enough to recognize the voice on that tape.

  Some nights ago, I'd listened in on a strange call at Dave Thackeray's studio. The man on the phone had spoken with a deep, clear tone—a tone that I recognized without the least doubt in the tape I'd just found. The speakers were one and the same.

  I pried open the player and yanked out the cassette, finding a scrawl on the label.

  DICTATION: 05/26/89 W.R.C. had been written on it in faded ballpoint.

  W.R.C.

  William Reynholm Corvine.

  This tape, recorded a mere two days before the third Ward incident took place, had been a recorded dictation by the infamous Dr. Corvine. It had been left in the player, forgotten by its owner and apparently overlooked by the people in charge of sorting the asylum after its closure. Sitting beneath a pile of junk, ensconced within the player for almost three decades, the tape looked perfectly preserved.

  I stuffed it into my pocket without even thinking about it.

  It had been Corvine's voice I'd heard over the phone. It'd been his voice that had asked cryptically, at the call's end, “Can you hear them?” The girl whose sobbing I'd heard on the phone, I felt safe in assuming, had been Enid Lancaster. Perhaps it had been a recording made during one of their experimental sessions. Perhaps the content of the call itself resided on this very tape I now held.

  Jake startled me as I went to stand. “Hey, you coming? Elizabeth's about to lose us.”

  “Y-Yeah, sure.” I handed him back his flashlight and made sure the tape was secure in my jacket pocket.

  At the end of the hall, Terrence was holding open the thick metal doors for us. It was no small task for a man of his size, and his limbs quivered for the effort he made. Jake and I slipped through, and he let the doors crash closed behind us. Managing to get a few of the lights on in this new passage, he removed his hat and briefly scratched his scalp, a grimace on his lips. “This here's the second ward,” he announced.

  25

  The rooms in this section weren't so different from the ones we'd seen earlier, except that they were a bit leaner in the way of amenities. There were no windows to be found in any of them, of course, but I was surprised to find that some rooms—their doors extra thick—didn't even have sinks or toilets in them.

  Starting down the hall and trying to keep up with Elizabeth, I glimpsed a dark, bent thing staring down at me from the corner nearest the double-doors. A drooping, black security camera hung from the ceiling by two loose bolts. The patients once housed in this ward had been more problematic than those in the first, and had probably required more involved care—and supervision—than their peers.

  Elizabeth rushed down the hall, whose lights were staggered and weak, and only paused when Jake and I both shouted to her. “This is cool, but what I really want to see is the third ward. I'm sure it's probably ahead, right?”

  “Terrence will get us there when he's ready,” I replied. “Why not do another voice recording in one of these rooms?”

  She shrugged. “I guess I'm just not feeling a whole lot here.”

  “What, you a psychic now?” I looked back to the groundskeeper, who weaved in and out of rooms like a bee navigating a hive. “I'm getting real tired of this. We should call it a night. I think we've seen enough, haven't we?”

  For the look she gave me, you'd have thought I'd slapped her in the face. “No, no way! We have a lot more to see. The third ward—and don't forget the basement. I came here to look for proof, professor. Until I find it, I—”

  “See, here's the thing about your proof,” I said. “You won't find it. Because the things you're looking for don't exist. This is just an old building where a lot of bad things happened. Patients were abused, people were murdered. That's where it ends, though. We should really pack it up. I regret having supported this farce for so long.”

  Elizabeth was prepared to trade barbs for as long as it took. As long as she got her way, nothing else mattered. “I'm not budging,” she said. “I know there's something here, and we're going to find it soon. Or, it'll find us.” With that, she continued down the hall, head held high. Her message was clear: “Come along, if you want. Otherwise I'll go on ahead without you.”

  “Jesus, why does she have to be so stubborn?” I asked Jake.

  He shook his head, watching Elizabeth as she hiked on. “This is important to her. It always has been. In the past, she's dragged me to cemeteries and stuff, trying to capture proof of ghosts. You should see her computer—she goes looking on conspiracy theory websites for pictures of alleged spirits and stuff. It's her biggest hobby. A few of her other friends are like that, too. I've never been too into it, but she takes it seriously.”

  I sighed. “So, you mean to say that when we roll this club out to the student body after spring break, we can expect at least a few more Elizabeths running around?”

  “Yeah, probably.”

  “Wonderful.”

  Terrence was writing something on his notepad again. “Another leak. Mr. Blake needs to shit or get off the pot; this building will be unsalvageable if he doesn't do something with it soon.” He glanced up at us. “Where'd the young lady go?”

  I nodded towards the other end of the hall. “She pressed on ahead. Wants to see the third ward.”

  The groundskee
per clicked his tongue. “Better not let her get too far ahead. She'll disappear on ya. And if you get lost in this place, it's damn hard to find your way out. There are pockets of this here building that ain't been occupied in decades.” He returned to his work, cursing as he stuck his head into another room whose ceiling featured a leak, and left us to our wandering.

  Jake and I started back down the hall, the dozens of rooms on either side of us becoming a single dark blur. Up ahead, a lone lightbulb jutted from a sconce in the wall, where it blinked at us in even intervals like the winking of some far-off, orange eye. We passed by a small alcove where nurses, or perhaps security guards, had once sat, and soon found ourselves standing at the end of the hallway before another set of metal doors whose exterior was marked with the roman numeral three. Unlike the last door we'd come through, this one had red tape all about its borders, meaning it was a no-go.

  Elizabeth waited just outside of it, her fingers teasing the edges of the red tape. “What?” she blurted defensively. “I'm not going in there!”

  With this way blocked, we'd have to wait for Terrence to show us another route into the third ward. The three of us waited patiently for him to complete his rounds, and when he met us at the end of the hall, he explained that we'd have to go down one floor, walk down a certain hallway, and then take another set of stairs back up in order to enter the only part of the third ward that was still accessible. “This end of the ward got shut up, but we can go up and around to access it from the other side.”

  He showed us to a nearby stairwell. The three of us followed him back down to the first floor, where we started retreading old territory. A crack in the floors had made certain parts of the third ward unstable, he claimed, so that it could only be safely approached by way of this detour.

  We were some minutes out of the stairwell and down the long, semi-lit hallway where the laundry services had once been located when I realized one of us was not present.