Cherry Hill

by James A. Moore

  For the first few moments, the dead were too stunned by the light to react. It was, in their long incarcerations, something that they had all but forgotten. They had little use for the light in the prisons of their own minds. As time passed, many of them had simply fallen into a stupor, a deep sleep that left them dormant. The Dead God had changed that a bit when it fed on them, but there were many who simply had no reason to respond, even when they became food for the unborn deity.

  This, however, was something completely different: this was stimulus.

  It was enough to wake them from their slumbers.

  For some it was nearly a miracle. The sudden awakening let them remember things from their pasts, let them see that they were free from their wretched pasts, allowed at last to escape from the prisons that had killed them in life. For others, it was an annoyance, an awakening from the only peace they had ever known.

  The dead woke from their long naps, and looked into the light with absolute fascination. They did not act in unison, but they did act. And this time around, the living noticed them.

  ***

  The buildings that made up Cherry Hill had been built and rebuilt several times over the years. Originally there had only been the large wood and stone building where the central hub of the structure stood now. Over the course of time it was taken down and replaced with brick and stone. Later still, there were additions put in place and the hub was dismantled and rebuilt with three additional stories. As time went on, there were security additions put in place. More than one person working within the facility had joked about falling through the basement and into the older asylums buried below. Happily that wasn’t the case. There were no substructures that were unknown and the newer buildings were all on the same ground level and in some cases even used the original foundations. A little digging here and refinishing there had taken care of that sort of problem.

  That led to the odd changes in perception that the people in the asylum quickly became aware of: Little changes, like patches of building that no longer existed showing themselves through the newer structures and what happened to Clifford Donald Hummel. Cliff was a strong man-at least in his own slightly delusional mind—and a pious one as well. He believed that he led a righteous life and that the Lord watched out for him as a result of his piety.

  In a perfect world, Cliff would have been playing for the Phillies and blasting a few hundred home runs out of Veteran Stadium every season. In the real world, he had just been promoted to head custodian of Cherry Hill. The only time he ever got to use his baseball bat these days was when he was smashing the heads and bodies of the occasional field mouse or rat he found wandering around the basement area. If he could kill them with one blow it was a home run. So far he’d managed about fifteen for the season. A lot of foul balls, too—where the little bastards crawled away after he wounded them—but you took the bad with the good and thanked the Lord for both if you were smart. Say Amen.

  He took what he could and called himself lucky. At least the administrators were letting him keep his baseball bat around for just such unpleasant situations.

  It was starting to seem like the season was going to be over earlier than he’d expected. He hadn’t found a single living critter to smash in the last few days and he’d made it a point to go looking for them. Luck would be with him eventually and he’d find a few of the bastards where they belonged, but in the meantime, he decided it was time to check out the attic storehouses and clean them out properly. It took a few days but he’d gotten permission to clear the rooms of their potential fire hazards, which meant he had a damned fine excuse for killing a few critters. That they were paying him for it was a sweet bonus. Say Amen.

  The day wasn’t too hot when he got there and Cliff gave himself the hardest work assignment, which put the rest of the custodial staff grateful to their new boss. They got to handle the light work and cleaning and he got the hard tasks. He’d never minded heavy lifting; it kept him in shape for the ladies, right? Say Amen.

  He’d been going strong for almost two hours. He hadn’t actually thrown any of the boxes out, but he’d moved most of them and found a nice nest or two, of mice and rats alike. Only two home runs, but not a single foul yet. Not even the pinkies were fast enough to escape him and those things could move fast if they were scared. He could have done without the spiders, but the little fuckers were everywhere and impossible to escape. Say Amen.

  Cliff sniffed the air and stalked his prizes like a bloodhound. The nests always smelled the same way and judging by the odor, he figured he must have hit the mother load when it came to colonies of vermin. In the far west corner there was a stack of boxes that he guessed hadn’t been moved in over fifteen years, and the odor of rodent droppings was so pungent it almost made his eyes water. Say Amen.

  His stomach fluttered with anticipation and nervous excitement. On the one hand, he hated mice and rats. On the other hand, he loved bashing their little bodies into bloody pulps. Besides, he was looking forward to at least doubling his home runs for the season.

  The boxes were heavily mildewed and smelled of rotting paper. Even the outside of the corrugated paper containers had that nasty green powdery stuff on them. He pulled the first box off the stack carefully and grimaced at the stench of the nest down in the boxes below. It had been strong before, but now? It was like walking into a cave full of bats or something. He could hear the rustling of the nasty little buggers and felt the thrill of anticipation grow brighter inside of him.

  The second box didn’t come off the stack the way he wanted it to and the cardboard container slid across the bottom and spilled its innards all over the front of his clothes and the floor directly in front of him.

  “Motherfucker!” The papers that spilled out were not intact. Most of them had been chewed into new shapes by the mice that were now crawling all over his body. They squealed in protest as their home for at least a few generations crumbled all over him. The mice were on him, too, and his skin shivered with revulsion as the creatures used tiny claws to hold onto his clothing and to climb up his shivering form like his body was a big old tree and the ground below was a raging flooded river.

  Cliff let out a decidedly girlish shriek of his own and stepped back, reaching for his Louisville slugger. “You little shits!” The creatures were everywhere, and while he knew there weren’t really thousands of them moving all over him, it sure as shit felt that way. He swatted madly with his left hand even as his right claimed its prize. Furry little bodies, hot and squiggly, slid off his shirt and one tiny set of teeth sank into the web of flesh between his index and middle fingers, drawing a hot line of blood from inside him. Great! Now he had to worry about rabies, too!

  Cliff looked down at the mice as they fell, some of them landing with the grace of cats and others bouncing like half-deflated rubber balls as they hit the cold stone floor.

  He lifted his left leg and stomped hard, even as his right leg rose. His feet hit like hammers, smashing as many of the nasty little buggers as he could, his heart beating faster than he would have expected.

  Finally, with the baseball bat held up and just over his right shoulder, he added his trusty weapon to the foray.

  It should have been the most glorious day of his entire baseball season. Say Amen! Instead, the floor disappeared from under him and Cliff let out another much louder scream as the mice, the files and Cliff himself all took a forty-five foot plummet to the roof below.

  In the world of the living, Cherry Hill was seven stories high in the hub and four stories elsewhere. In the realm of the dead the rules were a little different. The original structure that had been built on the land was still there, a ghost of the past as it were, and it was far more dilapidated. The Dead God was changing the rules of reality, and in the process, Cliff Hummel was the first living person deliberately thrown over from one reality to the other.

  He crashed through the roof of the ancient structure and plummeted down another ten feet before the floor stopped him and t
he rain of vermin and papers that cascaded down with him. The impact shattered bones throughout his body and crushed half of his internal organs. The trauma done to his body should have killed him on the spot. At the very least, he should have been knocked unconscious as a result of shock.

  Unfortunately for Cliff, the laws of reality were in flux. His body lay shattered and dying, his spirit lay with it, unable to break free of the mortal coil and proceed into death properly.

  Cliff learned soon after his impact that the dead could scream. They were screaming even as they entered the ruined cell he’d broken through on his descent. They screamed as they crawled over him and touched him, unfamiliar after so many years of being locked in their own personal hells, with the notion of flesh and what it was for.

  ***

  The walls shimmered. All around the medical ward, the air grew cold and the whitewashed surfaces changed, merging with the landmarks from the past as seen through the eyes of the insane. Barriers that were never meant to be breached weren’t merely opened, but completely destroyed as the entity that Jonathan Crowley had tried to stop did exactly what he’d been afraid it would do and opened wide the proverbial gates of Hell.

  The dead didn’t come from a great distance; they simply appeared. Death was not kind to the dead. Many of them looked nearly normal, but the majority were broken things, wretched shadows of what they had been in life.

  Somebody behind him let out a scream that was almost instantly echoed from a dozen living throats. The dead cringed at the sounds but did not flee. Misshapen forms looked toward the source of the sounds and studied them carefully. A few of the braver spirits moved closer, fascinated by whatever it was they saw when they looked at the living.

  And then one of the things reached forward and struck Weasel in the side of his head. Had the dead thing known the man? Crowley had no idea. What he did know was that the thing was pushing an arm into the man’s face and that while it seemed to cause Weasel a lot of pain—judging solely on the way the man fell to the ground and flopped like a fish on dry land—the dead thing seemed to enjoy the sensation.

  He wanted to help Weasel. He wanted to move over and rescue his new pal from the bad dead thing, but he didn’t have time. What was happening now was just the first stages and if he didn’t do something soon the asylum would be the last of his problems.

  If the medical ward was any example, the dead in Cherry Hill far outnumbered the living. If he didn’t put a stop to the madness soon, he knew the dead from other places would be drawn here. They’d come to feed the thing that had summoned them. Worse, they might come to feed themselves on the living people they met along the way.

  Jonathan Crowley could have told his doctors something if they were present in the room with him. He could have explained that the hungry dead never stop being hungry and that from time to time they lead by example. He was already dealing with one powerful entity. If he didn’t stop the rift from growing, it was very possible that he might have to deal with more of the dead things that wanted to eat the spirits of the living and the dead alike.

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  There are things that can go unnoticed and things that cannot. The sudden appearance of the dead qualified as the latter. Inside their cells, the inmates at Cherry Hill were open game for their predecessors. Most of the patients were heavily medicated to keep them from hurting themselves and others. Unfortunately that left them unable to defend themselves.

  Not all of the ghosts attacked. Some merely watched and others ran their hands over whatever they could find, fascinated by textures and sensations they had long forgotten about. Others touched the living people they found, just as amazed by the sensations.

  The dead had texture now themselves. Without the barrier that kept them from this world, they could touch and be touched. The sensation wasn’t pleasant for the recipient. Being dead meant having no mass. The flesh was replaced by a thick substance that the local coroner would have been very familiar with: ectoplasm. Jonathan Crowley could have explained to the people around him that ectoplasm is a simple generated protein capable of mimicking human flesh: with it the dead can create bodies, touch the material world and interact with the living. The catch is, it takes a great deal of energy to generate and to maintain. Without enough energy, the substance collapses and quickly breaks down. In most cases, ghosts can only manifest for a short time before they are exhausted. Few are powerful enough to incorporate in the world for very long. Ectoplasm is not flesh. It can look like flesh, but it will never be flesh. In any case, the fights didn’t go as planned.

  The ghosts did indeed build their bodies from the ectoplasm; drawing on whatever memories they could to rebuild themselves. The results were seldom-accurate examples of what they had been in life.

  The patients were usually kept in a mildly drugged state, but not nearly all of them were blind or unconscious. The immediate reaction was what would be expected: panic.

  In several cases the patients simply curled in on themselves and tried not to see what was right in front of them, but in most instances, they reacted violently to being touched by things that simply should not have been possible.

  One Bruce O’Reilly, incarcerated and then remanded to Cherry Hill after torturing several men to death in his basement, thought he could fight back against the four ghosts that had been haunting him since he killed them. They had always lacked the power to make themselves known to him, except in dreams.

  That situation was rectified. They took turns beating on him and cutting him until he was at the edge of death himself. They did not kill him. His death might have given him power and none of them wanted that. So they left him where he was, pinned to his bed by his own entrails, and merely watched him as his body functions ceased.

  It might have actually become a problem for them. Bruce might well have come back as a ghost himself and rained down his fury on the four smaller men, but the Dead God was still hungry and devoured all five of them as it continued to build its body.

  Throughout the asylum the inmates hid, fought, or tried to flee. Those that fought usually didn’t fare well. Those that hid soon discovered that a ten by ten cell is not a good place to curl up and hide away. Those that tried to flee encountered the barriers that kept them imprisoned but did nothing to stop the dead from coming for them.

  In the corridors and offices of Cherry Hill, most of the employees discovered the same difficulties. The dead were simply mad. Some paid no attention at all to the living, as if they had not just been allowed access to a forbidden place. Others took their revenge on anything that happened to be nearby.

  And while the hospital patients and staff dealt with the dead, Jonathan Crowley dealt with the living as directly as he could.

  He looked at the body of Alexander Granger and shook his head. He’d hoped to fix everything before the sanitarium could become a war zone. He failed. Left with no other options, he reached out his hands and grabbed Granger’s head in his fingers.

  Alex Granger opened his eyes and stared blankly at John, his face registering only the slightest shock at the contact.

  He looked into those unsettlingly empty eyes and concentrated on what was going on inside the brain held between his fingers. There was activity, and a lot of it.

  All around him the screams continued as Mr. Weasel and the other workers at Cherry Hill were confronted by the dead. Some of them held it together and tried to handle their patients first while others chose to run for dear life. Crowley did his best to ignore the noise and come up with a proper solution.

  In theory, he could heal Granger and reverse what had happened, but it would take time and energy that he didn’t know if he could spare. The man was a lunatic to begin with. He’d read the file and knew that Granger was exactly where he needed to be. He also would have guessed that, thanks to the gentle surgical hands of Phillip Harrington, the only way that Granger would ever come back was if he took the time to repair the damage done to the man’s brain. He wasn’t actually
sure that helping the man would remove the monster that had come from the wreckage of Granger’s mind.

  In the end there was only one logical choice. He firmed his grip on Alexander Granger’s chin and slid his other hand to the forehead before wrenching the man’s skull violently to the left. The snap of vertebrae separating was loud enough to hear, even if he hadn’t felt the jolt through his hands.

  Granger’s eyes lost what little focus they had and the man died while John looked at him.

  Unfortunately, the screams continued around him. His simple solution had just failed miserably.

  ***

  The Dead God felt it when Alex’s life ended. It focused on the death of its host and trembled until it realized that it was still there.

  Had it the need to breathe, the Dead God would have held its breath, dreading whatever would happen next. And when it realized that it still existed without Alexander Granger to anchor it to the world, it let out a roar of jubilation.

  All that fear for nothing. All that wasted time being cautious, when it was now strong enough to survive away from Granger.

  “Poor Alex.” It could have captured his spirit as it left his body, but chose not to. Long exposure to Alex had left it feeling tainted by his mind. It wanted nothing more to do with the man who had given it form and purpose within his twisted mind.

  Still, it hungered. The body it built made great demands of both the physical and the spiritual realms. The ghosts were easily consumed and the flesh was taken from anyone who caught its attention.