Cherry Hill

by James A. Moore

  “No,” he actually chuckled. “I like to keep on top of the list of patients and see if I can get a fresh perspective from time to time.”

  Translated, you think my doctor is a loser and you want to make sure he doesn’t screw me up any more than is necessary. John nodded and settled back into his seat.

  “I see that the two of you have discussed your past a bit…”

  “He said it’s an important part of understanding what makes me a sociopath.”

  “I sincerely doubt he used those words, John”

  “Well, no, but I saw on my file that I’m considered a danger to myself and to others, so I figured it was as good a term as any.” He smiled, and the doctor looked away, suddenly uncomfortable.

  “How do you feel about your progress so far, John?”

  “There haven’t been any life altering epiphanies if that’s what you’re hoping for.” He shrugged his shoulders and ignored the itching sensation that was chewing into the stump of flesh below his knee. “But I’m not really expecting any until I can get past whatever it is my mind is hiding from me.”

  “Do you think your mind is hiding something, John?”

  “Well, I haven’t exactly been able to remember my name…”

  “Well, we have good news on that front at least.”

  “Really?” He sat up straighter and his heart decided to get all jumpy on him.

  “Yes. It seems you gave Dr. Harrington an address. It took a few phone calls, but as near as we can guess, you actually do have a name.” The man’s voice was teasing and despite the temptation to reach out and shake the doctor until he gave up the information, Doe did his best to stay calm.

  “Are you going to make me guess? Or did you think actually telling me could be useful?”

  “Well, the only pictures we could find are on their way to us from California, and it will take at least a day to get them here, but from what we could gather, your name seems to be Dr. Jonathan Crowley.”

  Doe looked at him for several seconds and then shook his head. “Name doesn’t mean a thing to me, Doc.”

  “Well, again, it’s not even certain that we’re correct in that assessment. We’ll find out when the pictures show up.”

  “What was I a doctor of?”

  “Exactly what you said you were teaching, John. Psychology, theology and parapsychology.”

  “What about my family? Did I have a family?”

  “Indeed you did.” He nodded his head. “Again, though, John, you have to remember that all of this is purely speculation until we can get some more solid evidence.”

  “That’s fine.” He waved a hand for the doctor to push past the bullshit and get to the meat of the subject. “Now, I get the feeling there’s something you’re not telling me, so please, let’s get on with it.”

  Finney looked at him and pushed his glasses back up his nose, fidgeting and nervous.

  “John, the information says you might be Crowley, but if so, there are a few inconsistencies with your claims.”

  “Like what?”

  “For starters, there was a plane crash in the area you spoke about, and Jonathan Crowley was on that plane. But the crash didn’t happen a few months ago. It was closer to six years ago.”

  John stared hard at the man, comprehension coming slowly. “So it’s possible that I just forgot five and a half years?”

  “There’s more, John.” The doctor looked at him with deep sympathy and just possibly a bit of pity. “While Jonathan Crowley did have a wife and children, they disappeared about three weeks before the plane you were supposed to have been on crashed. If they were your family, they died over six years ago.”

  “Jesus.”

  “If you are Jonathan Crowley, you’ve been missing since they disappeared. You’re scheduled to be declared legally dead in three months time.”

  “Do I have any next of kin…if I am this Crowley person?”

  “No. No one left alive or currently locatable at any rate.”

  He felt his skin go numb and his mouth dry out as he thought about that.

  “Doctor, what happened to the last six years of my life?”

  “We don’t know, John. All of this could be the wrong information.” The man shook his head, his eyes showing nothing but pity now. “We’re going to try to find out, but it won’t be the easiest thing in the world.”

  Doe (or Crowley, he wasn’t really sure which) shook his head to clear away the rabidly growing cobwebs.

  “Okay, John, a last bit of news and then I want to discuss how you feel about all of this.”

  He looked at the doctor and nodded, unable to find the words to express much of anything.

  “John, the photos of you are coming to us by way of a courier. That courier is actually a detective from California. It seems that if you are, in fact, Jonathan Crowley, that there’s a serious possibility they’ll want to know if you killed your family.”

  “Well,” he looked at the doctor and smiled. “Isn’t that just a peachy little detail?”

  “So, John, let’s go over this again. How do you feel about everything that you’ve just heard?”

  He resisted the urge to kill the man on the spot.

  ***

  The ambulance trip from Cherry Hill to the closest town was long and circuitous. The number of bridges built into the road was ludicrous at best, but the design was there primarily to allow as little actual alteration of the surrounding environment as possible.

  Larry Summers looked at his patient and resisted the urge to gag. “Can you go any faster, Pete?”

  Pete, his partner, was driving just exactly at the speed limit, with the sirens going hard and the flashers painting everything around them in red and white.

  “Not unless you want to take a swim in the swamp, good buddy.”

  Larry nodded and despite his revulsion put his hand on what he assumed was a left arm, looking for a pulse. It was there and strong, which only made the whole thing worse. He knew Ernst Holbrook. If he’d had to guess, what he was dealing with wasn’t Ernst. But the people at the loony bin swore that it couldn’t be anything else.

  The mouth opened again and the thing on the gurney let out a faint, whistling shriek. The one remaining eye rolled back in the head and the whole malformed body bucked again, leaking blood from under a few of the pressure bandages.

  Larry looked away, horrified, and cursed himself for his weakness. He’d seen burn victims this badly chewed up by flames, but this was different. Not only was this one of his poker buddies, but there were no signs of real trauma, nothing that looked like it could be healed eventually. Whatever had happened to him had caused tremendous trauma, but none of it easy to patch up. There were wounds, yes, and there were large portions of his body that seemed to be missing, but rather than leaving holes in the flesh, it had sealed the places where he was hurt. The alterations were obvious, but there were only a few spots where external signs of injury existed. Frankly, he looked like a wax doll that had been partially melted and then left to cool down. Entire clusters of muscle were missing, just…gone, and a few bones looked like someone had grabbed them and twisted them around like they were made of clay.

  The Ernst-thing let out another moan and shivered. Despite his revulsion, he didn’t pull back when the lump that should have been a hand clutched his forearm.

  “Lrreeee…” Oh fuck it all, the thing was trying to talk to him.

  He leaned down closer and nodded. “We’ll have you to the hospital soon, Ernst old buddy.”

  “Luhreee…hurrrrts.”

  “I know, bud. But I can’t give you anything, yet. I don’t know what it would do to you.” He swallowed. “Ernst, what happened?”

  “Dunt know.” That was the clearest phrase Ernst had used, but the strain of trying to talk had hurt him, his entire body shivered again. “Cold.”

  “We’re almost there, buddy. The doctors will fix you up.” A bald faced lie, but he wanted to give the poor bastard some kind of hope.


  Ernst closed his eye and then let out another scream. His body bucked hard and Larry heard the sound of muscles or something vital inside of the man tearing.

  “Jesus Christ, Pete! Get a move on, we’re gonna’ lose him!”

  Ernst’s body let out a long whistling moan and the covers of the gurney turned red under him.

  “Oh shit.”

  “What’s going on, Larry?” Pete was driving. He couldn’t spare the time to turn around and look, not on a road as twisting as the one they were currently traveling.

  “Don’t worry about speeding up, Pete. I think he’s gone.”

  “You gonna’ try to resuscitate him?”

  “Would you want me to work on you in this shape?”

  “No, man. No, I wouldn’t.”

  Pete killed the sirens and kept driving.

  Larry checked for a pulse again and felt it fade away.

  ***

  Recreation time.

  For almost a full hour, John was allowed to walk around the walled-in garden that passed for an entertainment area. Most of the people who were out there with him were too stoned on their medications to do much more than smile or frown at their own thoughts. That suited him just dandy. He had other things to think about.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated, tried to make his mind remember things that it apparently didn’t want to, and felt them as they came closer. The dead were moving around him, lost in their own places and times, some of them little more than memories stumbling about and others almost so vivid that he could have reached out and touched them.

  He opened his eyes and saw them. There were probably more dead people in the area than there were living, but it was hard to stare directly at them: they were elusive, though he didn’t think that was deliberate on their part.

  I should be pissing myself. I should be screaming and bouncing off walls. There are dead people looking at me and no one else sees them. He chuckled. Guess that makes me the nutcase of the day.

  But they didn’t scare him in the least, not even the ones that were actively looking at him, actually seeing him, caused him any trepidation.

  For some reason, he took their reality for granted. Maybe it had something to do with what he’d done in the past. He kept getting images, most of them less substantial than the ghosts moving near him, of things he’d seen or done. None of them were enough to give him any real hints, except to let him know that sometime in the past he had been capable of amazing savagery.

  Worse still, he’d enjoyed it.

  The itching was back, the insane, painful itching at his knee, and it was spreading. His skull was feeling the same sensation and when he scratched he felt the thick scar tissue under his hairline.

  Are scars supposed to itch? He had no idea.

  One of the ghosts came closer to him, a portly young man with wide set eyes and a receding hairline, and tried to touch him. He looked right at it as it started pushing spectral fingers against his flesh.

  “You need to back off there, bucko, unless you’re feeling a need to hurt.”

  The ghost looked at him, shocked to be seen, apparently, and stepped away as if he’d burned its hand.

  “Good boy. Now go away. You’re annoying me.”

  Just like that, it vanished from sight, but he was still aware of it as it moved further away.

  He looked at the other inmates enjoying the recreational time and noticed that two of them were actively interacting with the dead. One man was talking, muttering really, at a young woman who he’d have guessed was at least fifty years in the ground by the antiquated clothes she wore. The other patient was pacing along the far wall, pretending to ignore a spirit that was angrily yelling but making no noises. Doe guessed that if he wanted to, he could hear what it was saying, but he didn’t really care.

  As far as he knew, the dead seldom had anything interesting to say. That, like a few of his other thoughts, was clearly associated with his past. He just wished he could remember that past well enough to do something with it.

  The guards came and took him back inside. He wasn’t there to see it when the thing that hid itself inside of Alex Granger suddenly devoured the screaming, ranting ghost. What was left behind still screamed, but no longer made coherent comments.

  Chapter Five

  Phillip Harrington wasn’t exactly thrilled with the way his review was going, but was pleased that he’d managed to get information on his John Doe. That was the saving grace of his reviews so far, that, and his ability to take copious notes.

  Finney stared at him, a nice, bland expression on his face. He hated that the man never seemed to be upset by anything. He also hated that his direct supervisor was waiting for a response to the reaming he’d just received.

  “So, how do you want to handle this, Roger?”

  “Well, you’ve been carrying a lot of cases. Do you think it would help to reduce the numbers a bit? Maybe give you a little more time to work on individual cases?”

  “Who were you thinking of taking away?” He felt his stomach fall. Phil didn’t like the idea of failing; it went against his nature on every level. He liked even less that some of his more interesting charges might be shipped off to one of the shoe lickers like Sebastian. Charles Sebastian was a good enough doctor, but he was also a smarmy bastard who couldn’t have cared less if his patients were people as long as the results he got were satisfactory.

  Finney was looking at him again, studying him for any reactions he might make. “I was thinking of taking Granger away from you, and Schulman.”

  Relief swelled through his muscles in a wash that took away a lot of the tension threatening to hit him. “I thought for sure you’d take John Doe from me.”

  Finney shook his head and smiled. “Not at all. I think you’re doing wonderful work with him. He’s certainly a good deal more responsive to questions now than he was a few days ago.”

  “Well, I have to say I’m a little disappointed, not in you or Cherry Hill, but in myself, but I think I can live with the changes.” That sounded like the sort of shit Sebastian would have said in the same situation.

  Finney smiled. “Don’t be disappointed, Phil. All we’re doing is giving you a little breathing room. It’s not easy working with the sort of patients we have here.”

  He couldn’t argue that. And honestly, he was glad to get rid of Granger. Thinking about what he’d done to the man’s head made him nervous. On good days he could almost convince himself that anyone could have made the same mistake. On bad days, when he was honest with himself—and they were rare days indeed—the guilt he felt for cutting half of the man’s mind away still made his stomach want to tie itself into knots.

  Something about Alex Granger brought out the worst in him from the first time he’d dealt with the little murdering bastard. Even being in close proximity to the man he was supposed to make better had set him on edge. Thinking about him on a daily basis was enough to make him miserable. So yes, getting rid of Granger was a huge bonus.

  “Well, thank you for the chance to stay here, Roger. I mean that. I love this job.” It was the truth, too. He did love working with most of his patients and trying to sort out the reasons for their behavior. It was a challenge and he thrived on sorting out the puzzles that had twisted them from useful members of society into something better left locked away for everyone’s safety.

  “You’re an excellent doctor, Phil. I’d like to see you continue to treat your patients here and I’m hoping to see some serious progress with them.” Finney stood up and unconsciously straightened his hair and his tie. “Now, unfortunately, I have to go to a meeting.” He looked troubled for just a moment; a brief flash of worry and then it was gone as if it had never been there. “I have another meeting with the police, and then I might be calling on you in a while, if the officer from California shows up before we call it a day.”

  “You know it’s the damnedest thing.” Phil looked at his boss as he stood up. “I’ve been trying to think of why I know the name Jo
nathan Crowley ever since we heard back from the Irvine PD and I can’t think of a reason, but the name is stuck in my head.”

  Roger flashed a smile. “Maybe you’re thinking of Aleister Crowley.”

  “What? The mystic?” He grinned himself, more at ease now that Roger wasn’t focused on his career. “There’s a man who should have joined us here.”

  “Please.” Roger made a face. “I’ve read about him. I wouldn’t have wanted the troubles that man could have caused around here. The last thing we need is anyone spouting off about supernatural occurrences.”

  ***

  For the first time in its existence, it wanted contact with another being. While Kimberly used the sponge and water to bathe Alex Granger, it moved closer to what was left of its host’s mind and spoke to him.

  “Hello, Alex.”

  It took a few moments, but eventually Alex spoke a response. “You’re still here? I thought they got rid of you when they—he was lost for the right words and instead sent a mental image of a hundred knives hacking through his brain, his memories—when they did that.”

  “No. I’m still here. I think I’m still here, at least, and that should count for something.”

  “How come you can talk now?” Alex sounded as scared as he was puzzled. “How come you never did that before?”

  “I’m trying new things,” it explained. “I want to learn about the world, Alex. How can I do that?”

  “My old man, he says you can’t learn except by experience. You have to do things to learn about them.”

  It reached into Alex’s memories, what were left after the doctor had finished cutting—and sought recollections of Granger’s father. What he saw was an older reflection of Alex himself, heavier around the waist, but cheerful enough with his lot in life. There were a few bad moments in the thoughts, times when Alex had been punished for one thing or another, but mostly the associations were pleasant.

  Each entity it had consumed in the past seemed to give it more cognitive abilities. The thought came into its mind full blown and it wondered how that was possible. Perhaps some piece of each mind stayed with it.