Carl leaned against his car for a moment, trying to collect his thoughts. “What the fuck?”
He looked inside the Crown Victoria and thought about calling it in, but had no idea what, exactly, he would say. Dispatch, this is Branaugh. Come quickly, someone has replaced all the bridges on Cherry Hill road! Oh yes, that would go over well.
He looked toward the asylum a second time and saw only the old and familiar concrete he was used to seeing. Looking back the way he’d come for the second time, he saw the bridge there had reverted to normal too.
After a full minute of looking in both directions again, he headed for Cherry Hill. It’s official, tomorrow I call in sick.
***
Phil Harrington sat at his office desk and looked over files. There were, to his best recollection, three patients of his who claimed they saw ghosts. Not a huge number, but enough to be an issue in light of Crowley’s insane ramblings.
He’d finished his letter to the Board, suggesting a re-evaluation of Roger Finney’s competence as the head of Cherry Hill, but hadn’t decided just yet if he was going to mail it. For now it would sit in his desk. He would wait a few days just to see if the insanity was temporary.
Phil made notes about the three patients and decided he’d spend a little extra time with them today.
Then he got out of his seat and headed for the break room. He needed coffee if he was going to have to deal with Crowley and he had no doubt he’d run across the man sooner or later. He was hoping hard for later, at least if Crowley was still walking around without restraints.
Phil saw Branaugh as he came into the building and smiled.
“Now I know what I forgot.” Without even acknowledging the detective’s wave, he went back into his office and started searching his Rolodex. Two minutes later the man he wanted to speak with was on the phone line.
“Detective Montoya, this is Phil Harrington from the Cherry Hill Sanitarium. Yes, that’s right, where Jonathan Crowley is being kept. There have been some interesting developments in the case.”
***
Kimberly Walker stared at Jonathan Crowley with a frown on her face. She’d met him the day before in the hallway, but had no idea that he was a specialist. Now he was being introduced to her because he wanted to go down into the dungeon and look at all of the patients who were stuck down there.
Dr. Finney vouched for the man and that would have to be good enough. Still, there was something about him that she found unsettling: like standing near a vicious dog that was behaving for the time being, but one she knew could go off at any moment.
The man smiled pleasantly enough and was quiet and polite, but she still got a bad vibe from him. Work long enough around the criminally insane and you develop good instincts. She was a little wary as she led him down to the lowest level, but had little actual choice in the matter if she wanted to keep her job.
“What exactly are you going to do down here, Mr. Crowley?”
“I’m just making an assessment of all the wards, and figured I’d work from the bottom up.” He looked into the first cell, where Anders Faulkner sat in semi-darkness, restrained by a straight jacket to avoid hurting himself anymore. Anders was harmless about ninety-five percent of the time, but during the other five he liked to scratch at his own skin until he was bloody. There was no rhyme or reason to his actions; he just went off from time to time.
She watched Crowley’s reaction as he studied the man in the cell. His face stayed mostly calm, but she could sense the tension rising in the stranger’s body. The next five cells were all the same; each time he stopped, studied the person in the barred room and shook his head.
“Are you all right?”
“No. I’m disgusted.” He looked at her and shook his head. “What happened to these people to leave them in this state?”
“Most of the patients here are catatonic, Mr. Crowley. They are down here because they need special treatment. They need much closer supervision to make sure they stay safe.” Her tone was defensive, because he made her feel that she was somehow to blame for what was going on.
“How many of them came here that way?”
“Well, not all of them, but quite a few.”
“So some of them started off with the ability to think and reason and now they’re just drooling vegetables? Yeah, that’s modern medicine for you.”
Kimberly felt her blood pressure rise. “The doctors here are some of the finest you’ll find, Mr. Crowley. They’ve worked hard to ensure their patients get the best possible care.”
He turned his back on her and kept looking, stopping only when he got to Alex Granger’s cell. “Yeah? What happened to this one? Looks like a little brain surgery went wrong.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, look at his head, I can see where he was operated on. The sutures used were hardly what I’d call up to snuff. He’s fifteen feet away from me, in a dark corner, and I can count the damned stitches from here.”
“Alex was a very violent man when he came here.” She shook her head, hating that a part of her agreed with the man, despite his snide attitude.
“Alex Granger, huh?” He sneered and got a distant look in his eyes. “Bet Alex hasn’t put up much of a fight in a while, has he?”
“No. His surgery didn’t go well. But he’s the exception, Mr. Crowley, not the rule.”
“Who performed the surgery?”
“I don’t remember.” Lie. She knew exactly who had been on the team that operated on Granger. She just wasn’t going to give the man she was dealing with the satisfaction of getting the knowledge from her. If he wanted to cause troubles for Dr. Harrington, he’d have to find out on his own.
Crowley stared at her hard, his eyes almost feverish as he focused his attention. After half a minute, just long enough to make her nervous, he nodded his head. “Sure. I’ll find out on my own. Wouldn’t want you to feel like you were collaborating with the enemy or anything. It isn’t like the patients here are people, or should be treated like them.”
She felt herself flush with embarrassment, but he’d already moved on to the next cell. Ten minutes later he’d looked at every one of the inmates and was on his way back up the stairwell as soon as she unlocked the door for him.
Kimberly sat at her desk and placed her head in her hands, shaken by the way the man made her feel. She hadn’t done a thing wrong, but somehow he made her feel like a criminal.
***
Roger Finney came back from several sessions with his patients and found Jonathan Crowley looking through his files again. Just that fast, he felt a headache start.
“John, the door was locked for a reason.”
“Yeah?” He shrugged and tossed another file onto the desk. “Opened for me.” There were stacks of files all over the desk, burying his work and threatening to slide all over the floor.
“What are you looking for?”
“Alex Granger, Walter Sawyer and Paul Cioffi’s files.”
Roger frowned in thought. “Why those three?”
“Because every last one of them has something weird going on inside of them.”
“Excuse me?”
“You wanted me to find out exactly what is going on with the strange manifestations, and those three patients have the potential to cause all sorts of strange happenings.”
“Okay, John. Would you care to explain that a little better?”
“Do we really need to get into another metaphysical discussion, Roger?”
“Well, it might make me feel just a smidge better about you breaking into my office and rifling through all of the confidential files.”
“I already told you, if I’m going to help, I need access.”
“Yes, you did. But access doesn’t mean breaking in to my office.”
“Sure it does. That way you can deny that you let me look at sensitive materials.”
“It frightens me that I can see your reasoning on that.”
“Don’t be afraid, just accept it.
”
“I’ll find the files.” He moved past Crowley and started looking through the files that hadn’t yet been molested. Five minutes later, he was putting the rest of the files away and Crowley was looking through the requested documents, his mouth pulled down in a frown of concentration.
“Can you tell me three things all of these men have in common?”
“You mean aside from being at Cherry Hill? They’re all in the dungeon, and they all have violent histories.”
“And they’ve all been operated on, and they’ve all come out of their surgeries in worse shape than when they went in, and oh yeah, they all had the same surgeon working on them.”
“Yes, I believe they all had Phil Harrington as their surgeon.” Roger frowned. “Are you trying to imply something?”
“Oh, not me, Doc. I would never imply that one of the skilled doctors here might have screwed three patients beyond all hope of repair. Where would you get a notion like that?”
“Lobotomies are traditionally difficult surgeries to handle, John. Phil Harrington has an exemplary record. He’s managed more successful lobotomies than most doctors twice his age and he’s a very skilled neurosurgeon. I wouldn’t have trusted too many people to handle the radical surgery he had to perform on you.”
“I’ve seen my share of surgeries, Doc. I know what the risks are. Just seems a little strange to me that one surgeon would fry three different patients and not get into hot water for it.”
“John, we have a review board to handle cases where doctors might have gone beyond what they should have and Phil has never been called to question for those surgeries.”
“I looked at all three of those men. Every last one of them looked like a first grader had sewn their skulls back in place when it was all over with. I mean, come on, Roger! Did you look at the end results of his surgeries? Was there some sort of shortage of thread? Frankenstein’s monster was stitched back together with more finesse.”
“That’s enough!” Roger slammed the drawer shut and whirled around, furious. “I appreciate your attempts to help us solve whatever is going on here, John, but I’ll be damned if I’ll let you call one of my doctors to task for doing his job.”
Crowley didn’t back down on this one. He moved in closer, his long face splitting into a nasty grin. “Look at the men, Roger. Don’t just look at the files. Go down there and physically look at the shoddy job he did sewing them up and tell me there isn’t a reason to worry about how well he might have operated on them. I’m not saying Harrington is a bad man, hell, I kind of like him, but believe me, I saw better surgical skills in the Nazi concentration camps.”
Roger caught himself grinding his teeth and made himself stop. “Fine. I’ll look in on them. If I find the work is substandard, I’ll file a report to that affect. In the meantime, is there anything else you needed to look over?”
Crowley shook his head. “Not really. I just wanted to take a closer gander at those three. I can’t say what it is yet, aside from the scrambled brains inside their heads, but there’s something with all three of them that’s not right.”
“Duly noted.”
“Aw, come on now, Doc. I didn’t mean to ruffle any feathers. I just think maybe someone dropped the ball on these guys. Alex Granger went from a 164 IQ down to non-functioning. I saw the history, I know about the violence, but that doesn’t mean a doctor didn’t make a mistake somewhere.”
“I said I’d look into it, John. I meant it.”
Crowley shrugged. “I’m going to take a walk now. There’re a few places I still need to check out. I’ll let you know if I find anything.”
Roger watched him leave and felt the skin between his shoulder blades crawl.
He’d checked the files himself, made notes himself in them, and knew for a fact that Phil’s screw ups had been properly covered. He didn’t like that anyone, even a man as admittedly unusual as Jonathan Crowley, could take a look at the files and make the connections as quickly as he had. Granger, Cioffi and Sawyer were all problem cases and it was true they hadn’t been handled in the best possible way, but all three of them were still considered successes. Three violent men had become docile after the surgeries.
Did he feel any guilt about the decision to let Harrington off the hook for what might have been shoddy work? Yes, but not all that much. Not when he considered how many of his employees had suffered injuries at the hands of all three men.
Was the work sub par? He didn’t know. He didn’t like to think about it, and now Crowley was making him look into the surgeries again, because, damn it, if Crowley could find the problem, so could someone else.
Roger Finney sat down with the three stacks of documents pertaining to men who were less dangerous now than before they were operated on and started reading. What he found wasn’t exactly what he was looking for.
***
It came back to Alex Granger as it always did, elated and exhausted by its latest experiments. Still, there was no time to rest. It had things to do and experiments to try.
Granger was looking poorly, his skin was sallow and his body seemed to be falling apart from lack of use. It wanted to see if it could fix him, make him better, but for now, it was afraid. One mistake and it could ruin the host it had been with since it gained full consciousness. There was still that question of surviving away from Granger indefinitely to consider as well. It thought it could, but wasn’t quite ready to take that leap of faith. It might have been a god, at least according to Granger, but why take unnecessary chances?
So instead of sleeping, it slipped away again, heading to another floor of the asylum and seeking the right target to consider making changes on.
As it moved, it sensed the old man who had almost captured it before. He had changed, made himself better than before and even re-grown a limb. As a result, it knew that physical improvement was a possibility; the challenge was to discover the right connections, the right methods of improving the damaged host.
The third floor of the South Wing proved to be just the right place for trying. The minds it encountered were muted, dulled by drugs and in a few cases, severe brain damage. They would work well for its purposes.
The first body proved difficult to work with; the man—his name was Luis Mercado—had a dangerous mind, seeking physical gratification in ways that it understood were not normal. Mercado derived his satisfaction only in the mutilation of others and his mind was a tempest of past victories over a great number of life forms ranging from ants all the way up to people. It understood the differences now and appreciated the careful nuances that made one life form different from another.
The man started screaming as soon as it entered his body. A simple move took care of that: one touch and the vocal chords atrophied. Luis Mercado tried to scream, but nothing came out except a dull bark of pain.
Removing parts for examination had proven easy enough, but changing the parts to improve them was far more challenging. Mercado died after it had altered only the central nervous system. Not wanting to waste the effort, it consumed the spirit that rose from the dead man, absorbing his memories in the process.
Mercado’s mind lived on, a small part of the sum of its being.
Two cells over, Joseph Orr proved a far better subject. It started carefully, working through the sleeping man’s body and meticulously checking each step of the alterations as it went along. He survived the changes to his heart, and his nerves endured the manipulation of both his pain receptors and his pleasure center.
Joseph Orr, a man who had taken to violence as the answer to every dilemma, slept through the process. When it was done with its work, Orr looked the same, but was, in theory, a far more efficient machine than he had been before.
It reached out with one of Orr’s hands, and caught the edge of the cot where the man slept. It pulled, using the puppet it had recreated, and the hand tore through fabric and padding alike as if they were tissue paper.
It left the man behind, satisfied with its handiwork.
Then it moved to the next cell and started again, carefully manipulating the systems it wanted to understand better.
It stayed busy throughout the day, checking and rechecking the abilities it had developed.
It wasn’t motivated by curiosity alone. The old man, the one who had changed himself, was a threat and it understood that. So it made obstacles it could use later to slow down the threat and make certain the old man stayed distracted.
Finally, exhausted, it slipped back into Alex Granger’s body. It was too tired to repair him now, but thought it understood how the repairs could be made safely. The only thing it would not repair was the damaged mind of Alex Granger. If Granger could think, he might be able to react to its presence, and that was not acceptable.
It wanted to remain anonymous.
For now.
Chapter Seventeen
Jonathan Crowley started his investigation in the attic space of the asylum. It was a miserably hot, filthy area overrun with rat droppings and dust. Decades worth of debris had risen from the lower levels to fill every available spot with old files, outdated equipment and everything else that could be considered a pack rat’s dream.
“Perfect. I just love crawling through rat shit.” He moved through the area with a perpetual scowl of distaste plastered to his features and began digging in the boxes.
A great deal of what he found was useless, trivial details about the day-to-day workings of the asylum. But there was just enough that might be significant to keep him going, small nuggets of gold amongst the endless flow of papers.
Among the information he picked up were several invoices made out to A. Miles, for both body removals and, of all things, lobotomies. But there was more. Well before he was finished with his investigation, he’d pulled over a hundred files on long dead patients that had endured rather traumatic deaths within the confines of Cherry Hill.
Cherry Hill Page 21