Cherry Hill

by James A. Moore

  I will know you. It reached further into her mind, sorting through memories and pulling at her psyche to better understand her deepest secrets.

  “No, please!” Amelia tried to fight back, tried to get her mind back from whatever was trying to pull her apart. Every attempt she made only caused it to focus on her more, and she sensed its frustration as it continued the assault.

  I will know you NOW. Something slithered through the wall, a darkness that drew her eyes and frosted the air in the room as it came closer to her.

  Amelia tried to scream, but the sound was torn away from her, absorbed by the black essence that spilled over her and around her.

  Whatever she thought she knew of violation, she was wrong.

  It was worse than she had ever imagined.

  ***

  Phillip Harrington stared at the diplomas on his wall without seeing them. He was locked into a different mode of thought, one brought on by the things he’d seen the day before and magnified by the events of the day. He’d already looked at the bodies, going through the violent ward and identifying patients for the doddering old fool of a medical examiner.

  The man made him think of Jonathan Crowley when he’d first come into Cherry Hill, and that simple fact infuriated him. Crowley the old man had been sarcastic, true, but he’d also been frightened and vulnerable enough to make it possible to look past the sarcasm.

  The new Crowley was younger (an impossibility), had grown back his leg (also impossible) and had regenerated massive trauma to his brain (a third and exceedingly annoying impossibility). The new Crowley was either capable of magic (a concept that Phil refused to accept) or was pulling off one hell of a hoax. Worse still, most of the people who’d met him seemed to think he was some sort of miracle worker.

  He also didn’t like the way Crowley looked at him now. It wasn’t just that creepy as hell smile of his. No, there was something else there that scraped away at his nerves. Crowley looked at him with contempt.

  Phil’s hands caught hold of a memo he’d written to himself regarding a reexamination of the Charles Waters case. He started slowly tearing strips of the paper away, unaware of his own actions.

  “Your problem, Jonathan Crowley, is that you’ve grown too big for your own britches.” Half an hour before the murders, he’d been informed that Crowley was no longer his patient. Finney had taken over the case, knowing full well that any documentation on Crowley was all but a guarantee of a book deal. There had never been another case like this one and Finney, who swore that he was on Phil’s side, had taken the case from him without so much as a consultation about it. Oh, he’d be sure to put a spin on it, to make it look as if he was doing it solely to make sure Crowley stayed at Cherry Hill, but Phil was no longer willing to play that particular game.

  There were ways to take care of troublemakers. If he played it the right way, he’d get rid of Finney and take care of Crowley once and for all.

  Because Jonathan Crowley was a threat, any rational man could see that. He was manipulating the other doctors involved with him and even the police from not one, but two different states.

  “Damned if I’ll let you get away with this.” His hands finished with the first sheet of paper and started seeking other things to tear apart. It wasn’t long before he was shredding the full case file for Charles Waters. The notes were irrelevant, really. He’d already decided Waters was a good candidate for a lobotomy.

  His hands stopped tearing and Phil smiled for the first time in the last two days.

  The paperwork for transferring Crowley’s care from him to Finney hadn’t even been written yet, forget processed. Phil’s hands pounded a drumbeat across the edge of his desk as he thought about that.

  He still had a letter to the Board regarding Finney’s activities and while he’d been toying with not sending it, he decided instead that there was no time like the present.

  He’d have to think fast but that was never a problem for him. The catch was to make sure it didn’t look like he was out to get Crowley until everything had been resolved. With the atrocities committed earlier, Finney was going to be on thin ice already. A scathing letter showing that he had all but handed a dangerous psychotic the keys to the kingdom would go a long ways toward ending Roger Finney’s time as the head of the asylum.

  ***

  It pulled away from the woman, more confused now than when it had started its examination of her. She made no sense. Her memories were a jumble of experiences she’d had as a human child, as something that seemed immortal, and as an amalgam of the two.

  Perhaps she was in some way similar to what it had become since devouring the force that had inhabited Walter Sawyer. Perhaps it could learn as much from her as it had from Sawyer.

  It stared down at the woman crying before it, and decided the best way to find answers was simply to consume her. It had tried to be reasonable, tried to learn from merely searching through her mind, but she’d fought too hard and now…well, now she was not completely as she had been.

  There was so much to learn and it felt a growing sense of unease, a certainty that if it didn’t learn quickly enough, it would be at risk.

  It reached down again, this time not seeking to merely study, but to eat.

  The woman below it opened her eyes and stared as it touched. Something happened beneath the surface, something within the depths of the woman ignited and as it sank into her flesh it felt a searing lightning bolt of pain leap from her prone form and into its essence.

  It tried to pull back, but whatever it was inside the woman gripped it, pulled and tore and lashed at it with a thousand hooks of liquid pain.

  The smile that came across the female’s face was subtle, but cruel, and the presence within her eyes was not the same as it had examined before.

  Panic! Pain! Fear! The emotions rippled through it as it heaved and bucked and thrashed in an effort to escape. When all else failed it resorted to exactly the sort of behavior it had studied in the life forms in the cellar. In an effort to save itself it tore free from a part of its own essence—chewing away a caught limb—and escaped, shrieking its pain for all to hear.

  The woman, the old man, they were not what they seemed. The pain faded quickly, the loss of energies was not as deadly as the terror it felt. In an instant it forced its way back into Alex Granger’s still form and hid, confused by what had happened.

  It studied the woman again, but this time cautiously, from a distance. It felt the changes that took place within her, as whatever had come up from below the surface of her being once again receded.

  Arrogance had nearly cost it everything, and it understood that now. For one foolish moment it had let itself think it couldn’t be hurt and the end results had been disastrous.

  It was lessened. Some of what it had taken from Walter Sawyer was gone now. It was stronger than before it consumed Sawyer, yes, but drained now of so much of the energies it had stolen. There was another, of course, who held as much power, but it needed to think carefully before it took what it wanted from him.

  After several hours of careful thought, it returned to what it had been doing before the woman distracted it.

  It remained unfamiliar with emotions, inexperienced in what caused them and why they were important. Two emotions seemed prevalent at Cherry Hill, and it decided that those were the ones it would try to understand better.

  Understanding came with experimentation. From within the safety of Granger’s body, it reached out again and spread itself thin, touching the minds of the people, living and dead alike, that it encountered.

  ***

  The drugs slowed down the changes, but did not eliminate them. Throughout the entire facility, the patients grew restless as fear overwhelmed some of them and anger ignited slow burning fires within the rest.

  ***

  In the guards’ changing room, where they put on their uniforms or skivvies as they came and went from Cherry Hill, Don Michaels was just putting on his work shoes and checking that the pe
pper spray and nightstick were properly situated in his belt when Lionel Copper came storming into the room.

  Don had been late on his last twelve shifts. He replaced Lionel at the desk and apparently he wasn’t moving fast enough to keep Lionel happy.

  “What part of ‘be on time’ is confusing you, Don?” Lionel sneered at him and began switching over to his civilian clothes.

  Don, who had been dealing with a frail mother on one front and a rapidly worsening divorce on the other looked at Lionel for a moment and finally shrugged his shoulders. “I get here when I can, man. Deal with it or report me. I don’t fucking care anymore.”

  “You’re goddamned right I’m reporting you! I’m tired of waiting around for your sorry ass every single day!”

  Don was barely aware of grabbing his pepper spray and firing it into Lionel’s screaming face. He was barely aware of anything for several minutes, and when he once again noticed his surroundings, he also noticed that Lionel was on the ground in a growing pool of blood and that somebody had been beating the poor bastard senseless. Lionel’s face was broken into a new shape, and it looked like half of his teeth were missing.

  He started feeling the pain in his hands around the same time he noticed the heavy bloodstains on his baton.

  He was still trying to figure out exactly what was happening when the detective from town put handcuffs on his wrists.

  ***

  Marianne Hambly, a fifteen-year veteran of Cherry Hill, was well respected and well liked. In the entire time she’d been at the asylum she’d never once called out sick or been accused of cutting corners when it came to taking care of her charges.

  So no one really thought about it when she went into one of the supply rooms for almost half an hour. No one suspected a thing, really, until after she’d handed out the afternoon medications.

  She never lost her smile as she handed out the rat poison-filled capsules and in a few cases injected the stuff straight into the veins of her patients.

  When the first signs of poisoning started to show themselves, she kept the guards busy as long as she could with idle chatter. It would have worked if she’d used a poison that didn’t cause muscular seizures.

  Three patients died. The rest were sent to the emergency area and treated for their poisonings.

  Marianne had never administered strychnine before. She didn’t know how big a dose to give to the people who constantly filled her nightmares.

  ***

  On the second floor of the West Wing, Mark Evers rammed his head into the wall again and again until he finally managed to kill himself. The voices he’d managed to ignore for a long time had come back with a vengeance. He recognized them, of course. They were the voices of his victims.

  He was not among the haunted at Cherry Hill. At least not those haunted by ghosts. The only phantoms he had to deal with were the ones in his head. Until an hour ago he’d never let them get to him, but his sudden fear that they would be with him forever was enough to make him choose what his father had always called the coward’s way out.

  Seconds after he was dead, his spirit was grabbed by thin tentacles of something dark that pulled him through walls and bodies alike until it drew him into the blackness that made up its body.

  ***

  Jonathan Crowley walked to his room and unlocked the door. He’d forgotten all about Amelia Dunlow. She was a low priority on his list of grievances.

  She lay sprawled across her bed, her skin pale, her respirations shaking and hyperactive.

  John stared at her for several seconds, shocked to see her in her current stare. Finally he moved closer and touched her.

  “Amelia? What happened?” His voice was soft, concerned, too worried to remain his usual caustic self.

  “Something tried to take me.” Her voice was a whisper, and he saw for the first time that she’d bitten through her lower lip during whatever had happened to her.

  “Something?” He put his hand on her forehead to check her temperature. She was slightly feverish, but not where she had any risks.

  Amelia rolled her eyes to look at him rather than risk turning her head. “It wanted to know more about me, Jonathan. It wanted to kill me.”

  Crowley shook his head. He knew the force that lived inside of her wouldn’t permit her to die easily. “Well, we’ll put up a few wards, see if we can’t keep you safer from now on. I’m sorry this happened.”

  Amelia managed a fragile smile. “I’m not. I got something for you.”

  “What did you get for me?”

  “It tried to eat, but it couldn’t. And the thing inside of me, that tried to eat, too. So much energy, Jonathan,” her voice drifted off, awed by the sensations running through her. “So much power, it’s like a generator inside of me.”

  “Don’t get used to it.” Without a second’s hesitation, he placed his hands on her shoulders and spoke words that no living being had heard in over three hundred years. Amelia bucked and let out a whimper, her body arcing off the bed. Crowley closed his eyes and looked away as the power she’d siphoned from something else jumped from her body and into his arms.

  His skin shivered and muscles twitched as the current drained into him. He could have taken all of it, but didn’t. What he left would help her recover from her traumas, mental and physical alike.

  Amelia opened her eyes and looked up at him. Before she could speak, he sent her into a deep slumber.

  Fifteen minutes later the room was protected as best he could manage and he left, smiling to himself. His mind processed the essence inside of him and he ran through a dozen tests inside his skull to see if he could identify what it was that had come to Cherry Hill. The thing had hidden away from him, but now he understood how it remained invisible: now he knew how to find it. Finally he had a few answers.

  The next few hours would give him more information, and if he was very lucky, even a way to stop something he had never encountered before.

  A living ghost.

  A hungry ghost that was consuming everything it could in a gluttonous fit wasn’t all that unusual, but as a rule, they had to be dead first.

  Crowley intended to rectify that situation.

  Chapter Twenty

  For almost two hours, the thing that had taken residence inside Cherry Hill played games with the minds of the people around it. The results weren’t as spectacular as it had hoped, and most of the people were either simply edgy or sullen for that time. Eventually it grew tired and decided to rest properly again within the body of Alex Granger.

  Granger did not try to speak to it this time and that was a fine thing. It was still hurting from the loss of the energies it had taken before. It was stronger true, but not as powerful as it had been before the female drained it.

  It slept, and as it slept, it shared in Alex Granger’s dreams and memories.

  Alex had always been a bright boy, one of three children from a lower income family, and he had always been his mother’s favorite. His father couldn’t have much cared as long as Alex stayed out of his way. Alex learned very early on that catching his daddy’s attention was not a good thing. He learned to be quiet, and it stuck with him.

  By the time Alex was ten he seldom spoke at all. Oh, a few teachers might have worried about him, but his grades were always good and his demeanor said that he was harmless, just quiet.

  At eleven, Alex had an epiphany. He decided that since God did not answer his questions, he must be dead. By twelve his logic, flawed perhaps, had changed a great deal. God was dead because he never got enough sacrifices. Somewhere along the way, the sacrifices had been replaced with simple prayers, which never had enough power to them. Prayers, he reasoned, were better received with an offering.

  At thirteen, he started killing, making sacrifices to the Dead God. That was the year his father died, proof positive that sacrifices made a difference. It was painful to kill: the animals liked to fight back and he was scratched and bitten several times even with his first sacrifice, a local stray cat
that seemed to grow extra claws as he held it down. He had on his jacket, so the actual damage done to him was minimal and the sort he could hide.

  Two days later, he didn’t have to worry about hiding anything. His father dropped of a massive coronary and took care of a lot of his worries. Praise the Dead God.

  It contemplated the images and memories as they occurred, confused by what they showed, because it had experienced Alex’s recollections of his father and they were mostly gentle. The worst the man had ever done to him was to paddle his rear end when he tried to cross the road at the age of three.

  It knew almost everything about Alex, though in a second-hand way. Alex grew up in a decent household, with loving parents. Alex was given to violent fits from an early age. Alex killed things in order to satisfy it, the Dead God, and now, perhaps, it understood what Alex thought it was.

  It remained uncertain as to whether or not it was a deity. Still, becoming a god could have advantages.

  Finally rested, and tired of Granger’s jumbled dreams and fractured memories, it left him again and sought what it knew it needed: Sustenance and power. It knew exactly where to go.

  ***

  While the Dead God of Alex Granger’s demented dreams was resting inside of its host, life went on inside Cherry Hill. So did death.

  The medical center inside of the facility was overrun with poisoned patients and Jonathan Crowley was running around like he owned the place. Carl Branaugh was staying busy, handling the processing of Don Michaels and Marianne Hambly, both of whom were seemingly in a state of shock. Michaels couldn’t believe he’d beaten a man half to death and was trying his best to apologize for it. Neither Branaugh nor Roger Finney wanted to hear any of it.