Cherry Hill

by James A. Moore

  “Is there anything that can be done for her?”

  “Not by me.”

  “How does she get to heaven?”

  Crowley shrugged. “How the hell would I know? I’ve never been there.”

  “You have to have some idea about how ghosts get stuck here, don’t you?”

  “Well, yes. But that doesn’t mean I know how to make them unstuck.” Crowley held up his hand again. “Okay, I’ve got a message for you. She says you’re drinking too much, you need to get serious with Nancy and not to let her situation bother you.”

  Branaugh stood up and moved away from the table. Without another word he moved out of the room and into the hallway of the asylum, looking at the ground and trying not to hyperventilate.

  Crowley didn’t say a word as he left the room.

  Harrington, the doctor, spoke softly, but Branaugh heard him anyway. “Did you make all of that up, Jonathan?”

  “Don’t be a moron. I’ve got too big a headache to play with anyone.”

  “How long have you had a headache?”

  “Since this morning.”

  Branaugh heard them, but he wasn’t really listening. His mind was running over Elizabeth’s short life and how she had ended it. For years he’d tried to find out who would have wanted his sister dead. She was one of the main reasons he’d even bothered to become a cop, so he could help other people when a loved one was taken unexpectedly. All the years he’d spent because in his heart of hearts he just knew his sister wouldn’t have taken her own life, and now he’d discovered he’d been deluding himself.

  It was humbling and humiliating.

  “Jonathan?” Harrington was talking again.

  He heard the tone changing in the doctor’s voice. First it was just a question, but then the alarm set in. “Jonathan, are you all right?”

  Crowley mumbled and his chains rattled. “No. No, I don’t think so. Get the hell out of me.”

  “Jonathan! Stop!”

  Branaugh turned around in time to see the old man stand up abruptly, his arms corded with strain as he wrapped both of his hands into the chain that anchored him to the ground and pulled, throwing his weight into the gesture.

  The old man’s eyes had rolled into the back of his head and his teeth were bared as he kept pulling, straining to separate his cuffs from their restraining links.

  Branaugh moved back into the room mostly on instinct. It was in his nature to want to stop people from getting hurt and something was wrong with the old man.

  He stopped dead in his tracks when the geezer pulled the chain loose from the floor. The sudden shift in tension was more than enough to send Crowley sailing backwards and Branaugh wasn’t quite fast enough to avoid getting slapped in the arm by the length of chain as it whipped away from the ground. He let out a yelp of pain and the man in front of him hit the ground hard, thrashing around like a trout freshly yanked from its stream.

  “G-G-Get it out of me!” Crowley yanked his arms in separate directions and snapped the shorter links that cuffed his wrists together. Branaugh knew for a fact that the test strength on those cuffs was right at 800 pounds of pressure per square inch. Even with the padding to protect the man from the harsh restraints, it was a miracle that Crowley hadn’t shattered both of his wrists.

  Harrington stared and did little else for several seconds. Branaugh didn’t have that luxury. He moved fast, and as the old man twisted himself around, he grabbed the cuffs from the back of his belt and tackled him. Or at least he tried. He landed on Crowley, sure enough, but instead of pinning him in place and then locking the cuffs onto his target, he got a sharp elbow to his temple for his troubles. The blow hurt enough to make him lose track of his agenda.

  Crowley brought up his good right knee and clubbed him in the family jewels. The pain was immediate and enough to leave him praying that permanent damage hadn’t been done.

  Before he could suffer the insult of having his ass kicked by a man old enough to be his grandfather, two security guards entered the room, ready for action. A burly ape of a man managed to catch both of Crowley’s wrists and to get a knee in his midsection for his trouble. At the same time, the other guard injected a sedative into the patient’s arm. Whatever was in the syringe worked fast; Crowley lasted for another fifteen seconds and then stopped fighting. The two men very carefully picked him up and started heading for the infirmary.

  ***

  It left the old man’s body, shaken by what had happened. At first everything was fine. It merely sat back and enjoyed the ride because it hadn’t been planning to do much of anything but experience the perceptions from the old man in an effort to better understand human emotions and feelings. After only a little time thinking about it, the decision came to experience what it could from a more seasoned source.

  It was also curious to know what would happen if it tried to hide inside someone aware of its existence. There were too many experiences it had yet to have, too many different concepts aside from mere sensation and hunger. It wanted to know everything and while it was being as patient as it could, it was learning another new emotion as it continued on. It was learning frustration.

  So it tried something new and everything was fine for a while, it could hide inside the man—and here it learned a new phrase: demon-ridden—but as soon as it attempted to learn more, to reach into the man’s thoughts, the man reacted violently.

  The waves of resistance were almost enough to knock it out of his body, but it held on, struggled desperately to stay where it was, and finally managed to at least keep its mental grip, but was exhausted by the effort.

  The people with the old man in the room struggled to keep him calm and failed. Eventually, they medicated him, and that was a new sensation as well, because it had never felt Granger leave his quasi-conscious stage. Alex stayed in a stupor constantly these days, and had ever since the surgery where Harrington—a word that it had known but never had a real association with before—opened his skull; the moment when it was truly born as a conscious entity. Still it couldn’t decide if it should be grateful to Harrington or enraged with Harrington as a result of being freed.

  Time would tell.

  For now, once again, it needed to recover its strength and it needed to feed.

  It stared down at the old man as it lifted slowly from within his form. He slept, but the rest was not a peaceful one. It knew enough these days to understand that sometimes the rest of the people within the building were helpful and other times it did nothing to help them recover their strength.

  Good, it thought. Let him suffer. I don’t like him. All of which was true. It did not like the old man. It feared him. That was another new sensation it found unpleasant. Fear was not a comfortable thing.

  It left the area and sought Alex Granger and the only safety it had ever known, unaware that for the first time, it had referred to itself as “I.”

  Evolution can be a slow process, but it had begun.

  ***

  Deep within the bowels of the central building of Cherry Hill, there are secrets buried. No one living knew of them, or even suspected the truth of those secrets.

  There were times in the past where it became convenient to forget a patient or overlook an accidental death. The only person who’d ever been aware of what happened in that narrow little crawlspace behind the main water heaters was the man who had handled the unfortunate events. He had, in his time, buried no less than seventeen bodies, most of them belonging to children born within the walls of the asylum.

  Albert Miles came to the Cherry Hill Sanitarium once a month for over twenty years. He claimed he was a specialist and handled several medical functions at the asylum on the occasions when he came to visit. He never stayed long, but was compensated to attend to different medical functions that the doctors at the time found distasteful. He was paid handsomely for his efforts.

  His specialties included lobotomies—a fairly new practice at the time—and the birthing of the infants born on the premises. I
nvariably the children were bastards, unwanted and often malnourished.

  Albert handled the lobotomies himself. The only people who knew exactly what he did with the newborns were the good doctor and one of the groundskeepers he paid on the sly.

  Kirby Fenner had no interest in children. He was a single man and a raging alcoholic. He took the money he was given, waited until the doctor had finished with his “preparations” and then disposed of what was left. If the infants were still alive and squirmed when they were buried, he made it a point to drink a little more and tell himself it was all his imagination, because the money was too good and because Albert Miles scared him too much to ever consider reporting what the man did to the proper authorities.

  It should be noted that Fenner disappeared around the same time that Albert Miles made his last visit to the asylum. From that moment on, no one ever knew what happened to the children, or to the two patients that did not survive Miles’ attempts at surgery.

  They remained exactly where they were buried, where they have rested for a long, long time; forgotten flashes of history that never made much of an impact on the world around them.

  An interesting geographical note, however, is that the mass grave is situated exactly one story below the cell that had belonged to Alex Granger since the time of his own lobotomy.

  Chapter Nine

  Jonathan Crowley woke up with a headache large enough to fill the first floor of the asylum and an attitude that matched it perfectly. He also woke to discover himself wrapped into a straight jacket.

  He was not amused.

  Dr. Finney was sitting on a chair in his room when he came to, making notes as he waited patiently for John to join the land of the conscious.

  Finney watched as he sat up and offered a tentative smile. “How are you feeling, John?”

  “Like I got the crap kicked out of me and then got shot full of sedatives and locked into a straight jacket. How are you?”

  “Well as I understand it, you were doing most of the kicking and talking about getting something out of you.”

  Crowley simply stared at him.

  “We didn’t know what you were talking about, but to be safe, I took a series of x-rays. It looks like you were right. You do have something in you. More specifically, it seems you have a piece of metal lodged into your skull, John. And I wouldn’t say it was put there deliberately.”

  Crowley shook his head. “I’m guessing that came out during the let’s fill John with Happy Juice session.”

  “Well, I wouldn’t use that exact term, but yes.”

  “Still not remembering much of that, Doc.”

  “Would you like to read a transcript of the session? Do you think that would help?”

  “I don’t think it would hurt.”

  “So what happened to you this afternoon, John?”

  “I think something was trying to possess me.”

  Finney thought about those words in silence for several moments and made himself a promise that he would personally be at any additional interviews with Crowley in the future.

  “John, I have to say I’m a little worried about your insistence that there are supernatural influences in your life.”

  “Really?” Crowley arched one eyebrow and smiled a crooked little grin that was pure predator in action. “Why?”

  “Because you strike me as surprisingly rational for the most part.”

  “Now, see, I could say the exact same thing to you, Doctor Finney.”

  “Do you think it’s irrational of me not to believe in ghosts and demons?”

  “See, I was hoping to avoid any more discussions of philosophy and religion here. Obviously, that’s not going to work out.” Crowley shrugged four times and while Finney was watching, stood up and began sliding out of his straightjacket. Finney watched him in silence. He wasn’t really worried about being attacked, because despite his history of rather extreme violence, as far as he could tell, Crowley wasn’t in the mood to pose a threat. He was rather surprised to see the man get out of what he had been assured was one of the finest restraints ever made, but he’d seen enough escape artists in his time—some of them patients—to know that no cage was designed to hold a man forever. The same was apparently true even of the best-designed straightjackets.

  Crowley tossed the jacket on the floor and settled himself down on his cot. “So, let’s get this done. You don’t want to believe in ghosts. Why does my belief in them prove delusion?”

  “You’ve said you can see them. I read about your reports earlier, but there are ways to convince a person that you’re seeing ghosts, aren’t there?”

  “Given enough knowledge in advance and enough time you can convince anyone of anything.” Crowley shook his head. “Of course, that’s true of more than just ghosts, isn’t it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Do you go to church, Doc?”

  “Naturally.”

  “Why?” Crowley shrugged. “Is it force of habit or a belief in God?”

  “A little of both, I suppose.” He knew where Crowley was going, of course.

  “Have you ever met God?”

  “Not that I know of, but I think I see evidence of His existence.”

  “So you’re going on faith alone?”

  “Faith and maybe a few hypothetical evaluations of life in general.”

  “If you saw God walking down the street, how would you know He was God?”

  “Well, I imagine there would be a few things about Him that would make Him stand out.”

  “So, I’m in a room earlier and a policeman asks me if I can see any ghosts. I look right at the woman I’ve seen standing next to him since he entered the room, a woman I’ve seen touch him and look at him and even speak in his direction. A woman he does not see, I might add. I can see her. She’s not quite as in focus as the people around her, the detective and the doctor, but I can see her. I also notice that she casts no shadow, and if I actually make myself focus on her, she gets a little clearer into my view but still not enough to look like she really belongs where she is.” Crowley cocked his head. “I know she’s not fully there in the same sense as the cop and the shrink. But I know she’s still there, in some sense. What would you make of that situation, Doc?”

  “Frankly, I’d be inclined to think you were delusional.”

  “Or maybe if it was an old man with a beard, I was seeing God.”

  “Have you ever seen God, John?”

  “Not that I’m aware of.” He grinned as he answered.

  “Why would I make up someone who looks like the cop I just met? Have you ever asked a person who’s delusional to fill in all the details of the hallucination you’re accusing them of seeing?”

  “Several times.”

  “How good are the details?”

  “That varies a bit from patient to patient.”

  “I can’t prove that I am seeing ghosts definitively to you, Doc. But you can’t prove to me that God exists, either.”

  “Fair enough. So how is it that you can see ghosts, John?”

  “I honestly don’t know. I know what I’m seeing when I see them, but that doesn’t mean I understand all of the mechanics involved.”

  “Alright then,” Finney smiled. He found himself liking the oldster in front of him. In different circumstances he might have even considered properly befriending the man. “Acknowledging your memory issues, do you think you can tell me where ghosts come from?”

  “Well, that depends on the definition now doesn’t it?”

  “There’s more than one definition?”

  “Of course. Depending on who you talk to, ghosts can be full-blown spirits that exist in the afterlife, roaming the world until the end of times or faint echoes, spiritual reverberations that are stored in the walls of the place where they died.”

  “How about a bit of undigested beef?”

  “That too.” Crowley smiled, warming up to the subject. “Assuming the supernatural in this case, it depends largely on wh
ere you are. In some parts of Asia ghosts are effectively the equivalent of angels, sent back from Heaven and given assigned areas to watch over, from something as small as a tree to an entire area where they work as messengers and guardians. This, however, is the United States. Most of the ghosts recorded and alleged around here are considered as full spirits, normally out to protect loved ones, defend their buried secrets, or seek revenge.”

  “Okay, John. I’ll play. What sort of ghosts do you think we have around here and where do they come from?”

  “I’ve been thinking about that a lot, because, I gotta’ say, you have more ghosts here than I would have expected. I mean, a regular hospital, sure, but an asylum? Been doing a lot of surgeries around here, Doc?”

  As in botched surgeries. He got the implication and chose to ignore it. “And have you come up with any theories?”

  “Generally I’d say that most of the spirits I’ve encountered that I can remember had a few common points going for them. First, there’s traumatic death. That one seems to generate a lot of potential ghosts. Second, there’s the possibility of unfinished business. Not always a big one, unless there are unusual circumstances, but it happens. Occasionally a ghost wants to chat over something important and can’t figure out how. Mostly though, it seems to be strong emotions.” He chuckled. “That, by the way, is the sort I’m seeing most around here, simple emotional echoes. Whether or not there’re full spirit manifestations I just don’t know.”

  “Well, by that theory, I’d say every asylum in the world must be a hotbed of ghostly activity.” He meant it as a joke, but Crowley wasn’t laughing.

  “You have a good point there. Not really too many of your patients would be happy to be inside these walls, now would they?” He stood up and paced, once again doing the rolling gait that allowed him to walk on the artificial limb. “Factor in the length of time this place has been open and it’s almost a guarantee of increasing the population of dead people walking around.”