Out of the Shadows

by Timothy Boyd

“What is it?” Henry leaned in closer to hear his father’s words, his brow furrowed with concern. It was nothing more than whispered babbling – incoherent syllables.

  Robert stopped mumbling and stared at the ceiling before letting out a hideous bellow that frightened Henry, jolting his spine upright. His heart raced, and his hands shook.

  This isn’t how it’s supposed to be, he thought. I need you to listen, Father! You have to listen to me! But his feet were already carrying him quickly back down the hallway in which he’d come. He felt the walls closing in around him. Turn left, and he ran. Right and through the double doors! His soggy shoes slid across the surface of the linoleum around the turn. He clumsily regained his balance and continued his flight.

  Through the round vestibule he fled, his brain a frazzled tsunami of fractured thoughts. A voice calling out his name. His dam of emotions cracking, threatening a salty deluge. The whiteness blinding him. Blood pounding in his ears. At the door back into the main foyer now. Hand balled into a fist, pounding on the barricade. Pounding, pounding, hand going numb. Screaming for Charise.

  Suddenly, the door hissed and opened quickly.

  “What’s wrong, Child?!” the woman demanded, her gaze on the hall beyond the young man, her grasp securely on her nightstick in its sheath.

  He placed a weak hand on her shoulder and muscled past her, gasping for air and wiping the wetness from his red cheeks.

  “Li’l Bobby!” she persisted.

  He reluctantly looked at the caring woman, his resolve crumbling. “I can’t do this. Not tonight.”

  Her face softened as she gave him a bittersweet smile, grabbing hold of his arm. “Child, there may not be a tomorrow for Dr. London.”

  “I know that! But I…” Henry wasn’t completely sure why he’d run from his father’s room. Images of his parents flooded his brain; they were smiling, and laughing, and bouncing “Li’l Bobby” on their knees. Henry closed his stinging, puffy eyes, drowning in the memories. “I know that, Ms. Jacobs.”

  Charise unsheathed her nightstick and waved the black, wooden bludgeon in Henry’s face. “If ya don’t stop with that ‘Ms. Jacobs’ crap, you’ll be walkin’ funny for weeks!”

  Henry forced a smile and gasped between sobs. “I’m sorry I forgot your soda.”

  She waddled back behind her desk and plopped down into her seat, its springs protesting the abuse. “You got any idea what a caffeine headache does to a woman of my constitution?”

  Henry tipped his head to her out of respect and said, “I’ll try to stop by tomorrow.”

  As he turned and reached for the oak doors’ handles, he heard Charise bitterly say, “Go on home, then.”

  Noticing the irritation in her tone, he stopped and turned to her. “What?”

  She rolled her eyes. “Now you listen to me, Child, and you listen real good. I love you like my own, but there ain’t room for cowards in this hospital!”

  Henry was speechless, anger rising within.

  She continued, “You think this is hard on you? What about the old man?! You just stand there and take a minute to think on it!”

  The fiery rage building within Henry suddenly coalesced into an inflamed shame. She was right. The conversation he needed to have with his father would be just as important to Robert as it was to Henry. But this woman had no idea what it was like. No one would ever know.

  “Now, you walk back there and visit with your daddy, or you best hope I ain’t on duty next time you show that pretty face ‘round this lobby. ‘Less you want another earful!”

  A deafening crack of thunder shook the asylum, quickly followed by the sound of a distant explosion. The lights flickered, fighting to hold their power. And then, with a shower of sparks from Charise’s console, the fluorescents rescinded their illumination and gave way to a sickly yellow glow: the backup emergency lights.

  Charise cursed, immediately retrieving a flashlight from a desk drawer. She picked up the phone and listened for a moment. “Dammit!” she muttered to herself and slammed it down onto its receiver. “Child, what did you do?” she asked, as if the hospital’s main power going out were somehow connected to Henry’s cowardice. She removed her walkie-talkie from its hip-clip and depressed the side button. “Tom, how we lookin’?”

  The man’s voice that crackled through in response was labored and panting; he was obviously on-the-move. “Problem in the Alley – Gary’s out. I’m on my way there now! You stay put!”

  Charise’s eyes widened as she considered Henry standing by the exit doors. She suddenly rose from her squeaky chair and headed for the door into the institution.

  “Tom said to stay here!” Henry protested.

  “Yes, well. I ain’t no coward when the people I care about need me.” And with that pointed statement, she opened the door leading back into the bowels of hell.

  In Darkness

  III

  Courage.

  Having the fortitude to confront fear, uncertainty, and pain. Courageous men were not fearless; they simply understood that there was something more important at stake than their fear. Their fear became a lesser priority.

  Henry trembled with fear but found no courage within.

  He was afraid of many things, but the greatest of these nightmares was that he would one day disappoint everyone he loved. There was much potential in this day to bring his fear to fruition.

  He knew he was not equipped to follow Charise into the hospital corridors, nor would she have allowed him to accompany her. But her words had struck a chord with him: “I ain’t no coward when the people I care about need me.” So, now he stood outside the penitentiary’s entrance doors, a deluge of wet blackness cascading from above, chilling the marrow of his bones.

  If he couldn’t offer Charise support against the evils within, he could at least circle the soggy grounds to find out what had caused the explosion that had occurred directly before the emergency lights had come on.

  Lightning probably zapped the generator, he rationalized as his swelling fear crashed farther up the shore of his mind with every step he took through the glistening grass, past the massive sycamore trees encasing the perimeter and rounding the corner of the building to his left.

  If he weren’t certain of his sanity and logical thinking skills, he would have sworn that over the din of the rainstorm and howling wind gusts, he had heard a soothing whisper that had uttered one simple word: “Henry.”

  His body violently shivering (not totally from the chill of freezing rain), he continued down the length of the stone building, damning himself for not having checked Charise’s desk for something useful, like an extra flashlight or a weapon of some kind.

  Shadows crept and crawled their way around Henry’s body from the surrounding foliage, their sinewy grasp constricting his chest. He found it difficult to breathe. Seeing was no small task with rain streaming down the lenses of his glasses, and his hands were numbed from the chilly wetness in the air, his senses quickly becoming crippled. Oh, what he wouldn’t give to be back at home in his father’s former den, sitting in front of the warm firelight while his mother sat on the leather couch, knitting, and his father poured through texts behind his desk!

  A fractured bolt of lightning sizzled across the sky and crashed down onto the roof of the hospital, illuminating the heavens for a brief second. And in that miniscule moment in time, Henry saw a figure twenty yards ahead.

  A woman with long brunette hair, bathed in a flowing white gown. Her ghostly appearance petrified him. It was uncanny how much the woman looked like…

  “Mother?” he said softly to himself.

  But as long as it took the lightning to appear and disappear from the sky, so did the apparition slink back into nothingness.

  With no memory of having lifted his feet at all, Henry was already standing at the spot where the woman had materialized. He gasped to catch his breath as he searched around frantically. No footprints. No woman. Nothing.

  A pop and a shower of sparks erupted nex
t to him, and a small fuse box mounted to the wall now crackled and smoked, a casualty of Mother Nature. Next to the box was a metal door labeled “Maintenance.”

  As he opened it, a cloud of black smoke poured out from the generator room, and his lungs became flooded with the overwhelming stench of seared oil and damaged mechanics. He quickly covered his mouth and let out a short hack. After a few seconds, the smoke had dissipated, and he entered the space now bathed in yellow emergency lights.

  The massive generator, no longer running, coughed sparks at consistent intervals. Henry followed the conduit line from the outside fuse box up the wall, across the ceiling, and down to a control panel on the other side of the small room. On the left panel, he noticed a large push-lever the size of his fist, stuck between the “on” and “off” positions.

  Here goes nothing, he silently prayed, wrapping his wrinkled, waterlogged fingers around the lever and pushing it up into its “on” position.

  The instant he did so, he knew he’d made a grave mistake. He felt a shockwave rock his body as he quickly removed his hand from the console, which whirred in protest, sparked with dazzling defiance, and fell silent once again.

  * * *

  Charise jogged briskly through the sickened yellow hallways, flashlight at-the-ready, prepared for the worst. Her heart was pounding at the thought of having to enter The Alley. There were many stories about their most disturbed patient, Gary, but she’d only experienced a handful of his episodes in person. Gary was enough to make her wish they were permitted to carry firearms.

  She charged over the threshold in front of her and into the round vestibule that housed the trio of doors into the separate wings of the hospital. “Goin’ in The Alley, Stan,” she said to the old guard behind the circular desk.

  “I’m sorry, Charise. No, you’re not.”

  She stopped and shifted her hefty weight to properly glare at Stanley. “Say that again?”

  “Tom and his crew just went in. He told me if you showed up, I wasn’t to let you in.”

  “Well, I don’t give half-a-rat’s ass ‘bout what Tom says. You let me through that door!” she spat, pointing her nightstick at the center door behind him. She faintly heard the alarm sounding in The Alley – an indication that a security system had gone offline.

  “Please, Charise. Don’t do this,” he requested of his co-worker.

  Her fiery stare drilled into his soul, and she spoke with a quiet intensity, “Stanley: Open… that… door…”

  He kept eye contact with her as he slowly stood from his chair and placed his hand on the head of his sheathed nightstick.

  * * *

  The Alley.

  The expansive two-story cell block echoed with the primal moans and screams of the lunatic-filled cells lining both sides of the walls, the long, claustrophobic hallway up the center barely a safe haven from the hospital wing’s violent inhabitants.

  Crazy Gary Shorno stood at the Plexiglas-barred gate of his cell on the second floor at the end of the room. His eyes twinkled with a glimmer of hope as the emergency lights came on and The Alley’s alarm sounded. The high-pitched siren filled his senses with the blood frenzy of gruesome murder as the foam from his chapped lips ran down his stubbled chin. Snot oozed above his upper lip as he wiped his face haphazardly on his orange T-shirt sleeve, already caked with dried mucous and dirt. He took a moment to fill his lungs with the glorious aroma of his own sweat-covered body, the feces in the stagnant toilet, the mildewed stains on the bed linens and walls… and he smiled at the potentially fantastic night ahead.

  His waxy ears reveled in the symphonic clink-ker-chunk of his cell’s glass gate unlocking and retreating into the wall. The alarm’s pulsing sound waves fed Gary’s thirst for revenge – for cold-blooded murder.

  He hobbled out of his cell and onto the thick Plexiglas walkway that lined the walls of the second floor. The other inmates giggled eerily and looked to Gary for guidance. His eyes filled with passionate insanity, and he thrust his arms into the air – freedom! The sound that burst forth from his throat was a monstrous cheer, leaving the other patients with no other choice but to echo its mesmerizing vocal strain.

  The only entrance into this chamber, two hundred feet on the other side of the room at the beginning of the long hallway, crashed open as ten security guards filed in, their clubs at the ready, instantly targeting the crazed man bellowing at the top of the spiral staircase on the second floor’s balcony walkway.

  The guards ran, their hearts pounding in their ears, anticipation of the confrontation ahead searing their nerve endings. Gary was a wild one; they had experienced that fact first-hand – especially the head of security, Thomas Aikers. On numerous occasions, Tom’s club had tasted Gary’s rotten flesh, and Gary had threatened to steal his life if he were ever to get out of his cell at night.

  Just another incident. No idea how he got out, but all the same, Tom thought to himself, hearing nothing but the pound of his own echoing footsteps. He was so focused on getting to Gary that nothing around him existed. No alarm, no screaming patients, no other guards. His sights were set on Gary – The Alley’s self-assigned leader, for all intents and purposes.

  Tom’s sweaty hand reached for the railing of the spiral staircase leading up to the lunatic. He saw the wild fires blazing within the eyes of a madman. And a flicker in his chest filled him with a terrible premonition: this would be the last time he would ever have to deal with Gary. No matter which way the scale would tip, he felt in his gut that this was it.

  And then something unexpected happened. The building shook once more from the ferocious mauling of the storm, and the sound of the alarm was drowned out by the release of a hundred locks. All the other gates slowly eased open, releasing every single patient in the crowded two-story chamber. Ten guards against one hundred bloodthirsty delinquents…

  Tom panicked only for a second before finding his resolve. Eyes on the prize, Tom. Finish this first! He lunged up the final step and barreled straight toward Gary. As the disgusting man’s meaty fist reared back for an attack, Tom raised his club into the air, ready to bring it down on the madman’s face.

  And then the lights went out.

  In Darkness

  IV

  How far over the line of morality did one need to step to protect the people they loved? There was good in everyone.

  But also evil.

  Robert London had once recognized this fact and sought to further understand it, because this duality often blurred the boundaries of what was right and what was wrong. Would you kill to save your friends? Would you kill to protect your family? Would you kill to ensure your own life continued? A life was a life whether the mind had become consumed in darkness or not. And after the sweet release of death, a person became remembered by their actions.

  Charise Jacobs did not want to be remembered as a killer. Nor did she want to be killed. But there were people she loved in terrible danger within the hospital.

  She danced gracefully on the line of morality as she swung her nightstick at Stanley’s head, hoping with everything in her heart that he would duck and save himself from unconsciousness – or worse.

  He did.

  “Jesus, Charise!” he yelled, suddenly intimidated by the hefty woman.

  She advanced quickly with two steps and waved the stick in his face with a flourish. “You best back away from that console ‘fore I put your face through it!” She didn’t know Stanley very well, but she was acting on a hunch that she would win this battle without any bloodshed.

  The building rumbled, and Charise had to regain her footing. This ain’t how tonight was s’pose to go down! she thought, listening to the muffled, whining drone of The Alley’s blaring alarm past the closed door. Come in, do my job, and get out. She locked eyes with the guard as she heard the door into The Alley release its hydraulic pistons. This was s’pose to be easy…

  Thankfully, Stanley made no attempt to block her path. As she stepped toward the door that would lead to her f
riend, Tom, a surge of power electrified the emergency lights, and sudden darkness filled the vestibule.

  “Shit!” she heard Stanley exclaim as he fumbled around in his desk drawers, finally producing a flashlight. As he flipped it on, the harsh beam sliced through the claustrophobic blackness and flashed through Charise’s eyes.

  “Get that out of my face!” she cursed, shielding herself with the hand clutching her nightstick. She noticed the eerie silence that permeated the air now that the alarm had stopped working. With the other hand, she flipped the switch on her own light, illuminating a small path in front of her to the now-unlocked door.

  “Charise…” the old man pleaded.

  She spun and pointed her light at him. “Get on your walkie. Radio maintenance. Tell them we need these lights back on…” …or we all gonna die, is what she almost said but decided against it.

  Stanley unclipped his walkie from his belt and contacted maintenance, but Charise was not listening to him. All she heard was the sound of her beating heart, hoping that after tonight it would continue to do so. Lord Jesus, she silently prayed. Keep an eye on Li’l Bobby for me.

  She pushed open the door and entered the pitch black Alley.

  * * *

  Tom saw Gary Shorno rear his fist back to attack, a sneer on his grizzled face that would have nauseated anyone not accustomed to his villainy, so Tom brought his nightstick up into the air to counter, prepared to do battle on the second floor walkway. When the lights suddenly went out and the alarm ceased, he thought he’d been knocked unconscious from behind but realized he felt no pain.

  Gasps and curses filled the blackness, as well as a few giggles and echoed diabolical laughter. This was not a good situation. He felt something breeze by the side of his face and assumed it was Gary’s fist missing its mark. He performed a calculated horizontal swing of his nightstick, and it made contact with flesh. Gary let out a soft oof and fell to the side into the railing.