Cherry Hill

by James A. Moore

  That was why he had earned the nickname ‘The Screamer.’ Because they never left him alone for very long. If he hadn’t known better, he’d have thought the only reason they were in the asylum at all was to make sure he learned his lessons and learned them very well.

  Adam didn’t want to learn any more lessons. He’d had time to think about it and decided he’d rather just be left alone. He’d tried explaining his new position to Dr. Sebastian, but the man frowned and made a lot of notes instead of replying. It was disheartening, really. He just wanted to get the hell out of the prison he was living in and try again on the outside world.

  “I can be better now, I know I can.”

  The faces came back, looking at him from the walls. He knew they weren’t real, knew that they couldn’t hurt him, but he saw them and they scared the shit out of him whenever they came around.

  Maybe it was because he thought he could recognize them if he tried hard enough or, that even with the meds they kept feeding him, he knew the faces shouldn’t have been there in the first place.

  Dr. Sebastian—a large man, heavyset with dark curly hair, a little van dyke beard and the most annoying mole over his left eyebrow—almost never spoke to him anymore. He just nodded his head and made notes. Adam couldn’t figure out how that was supposed to be helpful. He thought about Dr. Sebastian a lot lately, especially when the faces came closer like they were doing now.

  “What do you want?” He spoke the words softly, knowing that they could hear him because they always reacted. This time, they gathered together, a half dozen faces sliding along the walls and pooling into a mess of features as they examined him closely. Twelve eyes stared at his face, looking hard at him as if trying to decide what they should do about his continued existence.

  Finally, one of them reached out a hand and touched him.

  And once again he began earning his nickname. Adam screamed, his voice echoing off the walls of the cell.

  He kept screaming as the hands moved over his body, reaching into his flesh and doing horrible things to his insides and his mind.

  ***

  John rolled over on his mattress and groaned. He’d been hoping for a night without any of the damned yowls from the idiot down the corridor; a night with sleep and maybe, for an exciting change of pace, a few pleasant dreams instead of fragmented memories. Naturally, he wasn’t going to get that lucky.

  He crawled out of bed, hating every ache and pain that ran through his body, and wondering why his skin was itching with such persistence. The Screamer was going full force, begging whatever it was that tormented him to leave him alone. When the pleading failed, he resorted to letting out another shriek of epic scale.

  “Will you shut your damned mouth? Some of us are trying to get some rest!” He didn’t expect a response, but hearing himself yelling back beat all hell out of listening to the nutcase down the hallway.

  There was five seconds of blissful silence before the screams started up again.

  He looked at the door and shook his head. He couldn’t very well walk through walls. If he could he’d have left Cherry Hill within minutes of arriving. The lock was on the other side of the door and unless he managed to make his fingers grow a few feet longer he doubted he’d be able to pick it.

  “Since when can I pick locks?” He thought about that for a few seconds—it helped drown out the noises from down the hallway—and shook his head. No idea where the information came from but he had no doubt that given a pocketknife, he would have been able to open the lock to the room.

  He was looking out the small wire mesh window when he saw motion from the corner of his eye. When he looked straight at the source of the distraction, there was nothing to see, but he’d have sworn there was something a moment earlier.

  The Screamer let loose with another yelp designed to shatter eardrums and John sneered. “If I ever get out of this room and see you, I’m going to give you something to shout about you piss wad!”

  And there it was again, something moving in the hallway. He kept his eyes focused away from whatever it was and tried to use his peripheral vision instead. There was definitely something in the hallway, crawling along the tiled floors, but the more he tried to focus on it, the harder it was to see, like an evaporating daydream. It was maddening not being able to look directly at it, but he kept focused on it just the same.

  It was a dark red mass, run through with other colors. Whatever it actually was, it moved across the ground slowly, creeping forward a few inches at a time and, yes, it made noises. They were barely audible over the sounds from the Screamer, but a series of wet, slippery sounds came from the thing. Part of the redness moved forward and he saw a rudimentary hand at the end of the growth. That hand grabbed the tiles and pulled as misshapen legs pushed, moving the unpleasant lump forward.

  From close to the center of the shape, another mass moved, lifting up and revealing itself as a malformed head on a spindly neck. The face was crude at best, and though there were spots for two eyes, only one was revealed; a white, milky mass that looked around blindly as the head turned first to the left and then to the right.

  John slowly let himself look closer at the object of his attention, and watched as the thing changed, growing at a disturbing rate.

  “Well, what the hell are you supposed to be?” He spoke directly to the thing and it looked in his direction with that sightless eye and opened a tiny slash of a mouth.

  And then it screamed; a high, keening noise that started weakly and grew though the Screamer quickly drowned it out down in his cell.

  The thing tried to stand, pushing with enormous effort and almost unfolding as it rose on thin, misshapen legs. What features the face of the thing had were twisted into a knot of pain as it wobbled in the hallway, trailing a thin mucus of red and pink behind it.

  It stepped forward and the bones supporting its thin, frail leg cracked. The aberration fell forward and collapsed on itself, moaning in pain as it struck the ground.

  John watched, chilled, as it tried a second time to rise and failed. A moment later it stopped moving at all. Within two minutes, during which time he continued to stare, the mass had putrefied, pooling into a thick reddish black stew that gave off an odor like he’d have expected in a slaughterhouse suffering through August heat.

  He stared at the soupy mess for several minutes before convincing himself that it was real. It was still there two hours later when the new night shift guard finally got around to walking the corridor. He was pudgy, short and looked like he hadn’t slept in five days.

  Being a helpful sort, John pointed it out to the man as he came closer. “Clean up in aisle 4.”

  The man looked directly at him and blinked his eyes. “Huh?” He then set his left shoe square into the congealing puddle and let out a bark as his feet left the ground. A moment later the guard hit the ground and stared up at the ceiling, the wind obviously knocked out of his lungs by the impact. From top to bottom his backside was covered in the foul smelling ichor.

  “You all right there?” John pinched his good leg to stop from cracking up.

  “Unnn… Yeah…” The guard stood up and caught a whiff of the fluids covering his backside. He was made of sterner stuff than the inmate expected; he didn’t throw up on the spot.

  “You might want to go change your clothes, fella. And maybe you could call someone about the mess?”

  The pudgy man slammed a nightstick into the mesh on John’s window, and managed to mash one of his fingers in the process. “You need to watch your mouth, shit head. If I want opinions from a nutcase, I’ll ask for them.”

  John looked at him through narrowed eyelids and smiled. “That’s right, big man, I forgot, you’ve got all the power, don’t you?”

  “And you better fucking remember it, too!”

  “You know what? Only one of us smells like shit around here, and it isn’t me.” The guard made a few more fish faces, this time from outrage instead of clumsy stupidity. “You want to swing that stic
k of yours, buddy boy, you best make sure you know who you’re swinging it at.”

  “Well, ain’t that your problem? Can’t remember your own name?”

  John leaned in close to the bars again, but not quite close enough to have to worry about the guard’s weapon. “I got a name now. Suits me just fine, too. Anytime you’re feeling jumpy again, you just open this door and we can have a talk about your attitude.”

  “Yeah,” the man snorted. “I’m not that stupid.”

  “Hey, you’re the one with the Billy club and the keys. What? You afraid of a one legged old man?”

  “Not afraid of you at all.” The man waited a moment while the Screamer finished his latest round of desperate yelps. “Just not in the mood to get fired because some old fart wants to get out of his cage.”

  John waited until the man had turned his back and then he smiled. “Pussy.”

  The guard spun around fast, his eyes half wild and his outrage obvious in every action he made. He was past the point of following procedure, apparently, because he grabbed for his key ring and started unlocking the door, probably intent on bashing John’s skull in.

  John stepped back to give the man room to enter his little cell. The guard took the invitation, his round chin quivering with anger. Part of him wanted to laugh at the notion, a thirty something man coming in to beat all hell out of a sixty something handicap.

  He wasn’t laughing when the nightstick got cocked back and then swung at his head. Instead he brought his left arm up and deflected the blow, catching the younger man in the forearm before the stick could make contact with any part of his body. While the guard was wondering just what had gone wrong, John brought his right fist into the man’s padded ribcage and doubled him over. Two additional quick blows and the guard was down for the count.

  John slipped out of his cell and left the guard where he was, but took the keys from the door. He had some unfinished business to take care of exactly three doors down on the right side of the hallway.

  He got his first look at the Screamer, a man who was writhing on his bed and sweating profusely. He was lean and hard and currently had his hands locked on either side of his cot, the fingers sunk deep into the mattress as he bucked and writhed. His skin was pale and covered in a thick sweat, and his face was tense with a nearly perpetual expression of pain.

  He opened his mouth to let out another scream and John pounded on his door with a closed fist. “SHUT UP!”

  The Screamer stopped and looked at him, surprised by the sudden outburst. His face was still in pain, but he did not scream.

  “I’ve had it with you! If you scream one more time I swear I’ll open this door and beat you to death!”

  “Oh, God, help me, please…” The man held out a hand to him and shivered violently.

  John looked harder at the man, harder, his perceptions shifting like they had before, and saw for the first time why the man was screaming. How he could see them, he did not know, but for the first time, John saw the ghosts that crawled over and through the man. He’d seen them the other day as well, but at the time it had seemed almost natural that he should be able to witness them. Now it wasn’t exactly freaking him out, but it seemed more of a phenomenon. They were mere shadows, broken remnants of specters, not a one of them complete. He doubted that they were even fully aware of what they were doing, but even stranger as far as he could tell was that the man could see them and feel them.

  The Screamer looked at him again. “Help me…”

  A flush of heat ran through John’s body and he stepped away from the door.

  “No.” He shook his head. “No. You just shut up. Keep it down for a while, okay?”

  The thought of going to the man’s aid was enough to send chills through him that watching the dead things didn’t even come close to. He knew as sure as he knew how to walk that he could help him, but there was something dangerous in it. Not physically dangerous, per se, but not good for his health.

  Feeling overwhelmed by a sudden case of butterflies in his stomach, he went back to his cell, pulled the unconscious guard out, and dropped the man unceremoniously into the rotting stew on the floor. He then locked himself back into his cell, making certain to leave the keys where the guard could get to them.

  The guard woke up a few minutes later, blinking hard and shaking his head to rattle all the marbles back into their proper places. By the time he was standing up and looking around, no doubt wondering exactly what the hell had just happened, John was back on his mattress and trying to sleep.

  ***

  It stared at the screaming man and contemplated his dilemma. The dead things that crawled over him were leftovers, really; animated remains from previous meals.

  For some reason, they found the screaming man useful. Curiosity made it wonder why, and for the first time it decided to explore with them in an effort to understand.

  The dead things instinctively pushed away from it as it waded into the strange flesh. The screaming man bucked, his eyes rolling up into his head, obviously in agony as it pushed deeper with its senses.

  It had brushed through bodies before—being without a physical form made the ability possible and as a result it had experienced overwhelming new sensations, most of them metaphysical or emotional—but not like this one. There was something about the screaming man that was different, but it lacked the ability to define what that something was.

  It thought about the problem for a while, ignoring the gasping pained body it moved through as it considered what to do. Finally it decided the best way to learn was to study the issue more carefully, as it had done with the previous night guard, Ernst.

  Though it felt no particular hunger for physical gratification, its desire for knowledge was growing insatiable.

  Long before it was done the man was dead. If he had a spirit inside of him, it left without being seen, or just possibly was consumed when it began to feast.

  Chapter Eight

  Phillip Harrington looked at his patient and tried to tell himself he was seeing things. Maybe he was, but Jonathan Crowley looked better than he had since he’d arrived. He seemed more fleshed out and had color for the first time since joining the other patients at Cherry Hill.

  “How are you feeling today, John?”

  “Not bad. I would have felt better without the disturbances.”

  “Disturbances?”

  “Well, let’s see. For starters, the Screamer was going strong again last night. The man needs a muzzle. Then there was the mess in the hallway…”

  “I heard about that. The janitors had quite a time cleaning that off the floor. Any idea what caused it?” He had to ask, of course. The foul puddle had been found closest to Crowley’s door.

  “Ask your night guard. He’s the one that found it.”

  “I take that to mean you don’t wish to comment on it?”

  “Take it anyway you want to, Doc.” The man smiled, his eyes locked on Phil’s. Once again there was a slight hint of menace or contempt coming from the man. Harrington still couldn’t decide which.

  “Humor me. If you had to come up with a theory about where the mess came from, what would that theory be?”

  Crowley shrugged. “I’ll give you a different answer than the one you want, but try this. Get a sample of the stuff and have it studied. If I had a dollar and I was betting man, I’d risk that very dollar on the fact that the stuff is a simple protein of unknown origin.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Remember my line of work, Doc? Just a guess, but it’s an educated one.”

  Harrington made a note to see if he could get a sample of the substance for evaluation. It was more likely that the mess had already been washed down the drain along with the mop water.

  “So, did I tell Detective Montoya what he wanted to know?”

  “You mean when we tried our new techniques?”

  “Yeah. When you tried your new techniques.” Crowley stared at him still. “Did I tell you or the detectiv
e anything useful?”

  “Detective Montoya was not in the session, Jonathan. You know that.”

  “Yes, I do.”

  “So why are you worried about what you might or might not have told him?”

  “I’m not worried. I’m curious. Did I actually have anything useful to say?”

  “Do you remember any of the session, Jonathan?”

  “Very little after you put the needle in my arm.”

  He thought the man was telling the truth.

  “Well, Jonathan, we still have to look everything over. We need to check the notes and try to differentiate the facts from whatever stories your mind made up.”

  “So nothing that proves I’m sane then?” The man looked amused.

  “Sanity is an issue for most of the patients here, Jonathan. You gave some very unorthodox answers. What we need to do now is examine those answers carefully and decide what really happened and weigh that against what you said happened. It’s not always easy to know for sure.”

  “Got that right the first time.” Crowley leaned back as much as he could in his chair, rattling the chains that anchored him to the floor. “Did I say what happened to my family?”

  “Yes.”

  The man’s smile stayed the same, but his eyes narrowed a bit. “Let me guess. That’s one of the parts you’re not really sure happened, am I right?”

  “You said you used to hunt monsters, Jonathan. Can you elaborate on that?”

  “I was a parapsychologist.” He shrugged. “I guess that means I was looking for ghosts and demons, right?”

  “Do you think you ever found any?”

  “I’m pretty sure I must have, but again—” he reached up and tapped the side of his head. “Not everything upstairs is what it’s supposed to be.”

  Harrington looked at his pad of paper when he spoke again. “Do you believe in God, Jonathan?”

  “Yes.”