cracked pavement and cut a sharp right, heading down
through a ditch then up into a pine-and-oak wooded lot
that stood like a thick curtain wall around the old asylum.
Dawn was just beginning to creep over the horizon.
The lighting was eerie and ethereal, a misty haze of pink
and lavender shrouding the Gothic structures with an oth-
erworldly glow. Even bathed in soft pastels, the place held
an air of menace.
The contrast was what had brought her out to the loca-
tion this morning. Shooting it at dusk would have been the
more natural choice, capitalizing on the haunted quality of
the abandoned structures. But it was the juxtaposition of
warm dawn light against a cold, sinister subject that ap-
pealed to Gabrielle as she paused to retrieve her camera
from the bag slung over her shoulder. She snapped off a
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half-dozen shots, then clapped the lens cap back on, and
continued her trek toward the ghostly buildings.
A tall wire security fence loomed in front of her, barri-
cading the property against nosy explorers like herself. But
Gabrielle knew its hidden weakness. She had found it the
first time she had come to the place to take exterior pic-
tures. She hurried along the line of the fence until she
reached the southwest corner, then squatted down near
the ground. Here, someone had discreetly severed the links
with a wire cutter, creating a breach just large enough for a
curious adolescent to wriggle through—or a determined
female photographer who tended to view No Trespassing
and Authorized Personnel Only signs more as friendly sugges-
tions rather than enforceable laws.
Gabrielle pushed open the flap of snipped fence,
shoved her gear inside, and scrambled spiderlike on her
belly through the low opening. A shiver of apprehension
coursed along her limbs as she came up on the other side
of the fence. She should be used to this type of covert, soli-
tary exploration; her art often depended on her courage to
seek out desolate, some might argue dangerous, places.
This creepy asylum could certainly classify as the latter, she
thought, her gaze drifting to graffiti spray-painted next to
an exterior door that read, BAd VIBeS.
“You can say that again,” she whispered under her
breath. As she brushed the dirt and dried pine needles off
her clothes, her hand drifted automatically to the front
pocket of her jeans for her cell phone. It wasn’t there, of
course, still in the possession of Detective Thorne. Just one
more reason to be pissed at him for standing her up last
night.
Maybe she should cut the guy a little slack, she thought,
suddenly eager to focus on something other than the omi-
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nous feeling that pressed down on her now that she was in-
side the asylum grounds. Maybe Thorne had been a no-
show because something bad happened to him on the job.
What if he’d been injured in the line of duty and didn’t
come by as promised because he was incapacitated in
some way? Maybe he hadn’t called to apologize or to ex-
plain his absence because he physically couldn’t.
Right. And maybe she had checked her brain into her
panties from the second she first laid eyes on the man.
Scoffing at herself, Gabrielle picked up her things and
walked toward the soaring architecture of the main build-
ing. Pale limestone climbed skyward in a steep central
tower, capped by peaks and spires worthy of the finest
gothic cathedral. Surrounding this was a sprawling com-
pound of red-brick walled and tile-roofed outbuildings
arranged in a batwing layout, connected by covered walk-
ways and cloisterlike arches.
But as awe-inspiring as the structure was, there was no
dismissing its air of slumbering menace, as if a thousand
sins and secrets loomed behind the chipped walls and
smashed mullioned-glass windows. Gabrielle strode to
where the light was best and took a few pictures. There
was no current point of entry here; the main door had
been bolted shut and boarded up tight. If she wanted to
get inside to take interior shots—and she definitely did—
she had to go around to the back and try her luck with a
ground-level window or basement door.
She skirted down a sloping embankment, toward the
anterior of the building and found what she was looking
for: wooden shutters concealed three windows that likely
opened into a service area or crawl space of the structure.
The shutter’s rusty latches were corroded but not locked,
and they broke away easily with a little encouragement
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from a rock Gabrielle found nearby. She pulled the
wooden covering away from the window, lifted the heavy
glass panel, and propped it open with the window brace.
After a perfunctory sweep of her flashlight to make
sure the place was empty and not about to cave in on her
head, she shimmied through the opening. As she hopped
down from the window casement, the soles of her boots
crunched broken glass and years of accumulated dust and
debris. The foundation of gray cinderblock bricks ran
about four yards in, disappearing into the gloom of the un-
lit basement. Gabrielle shot the thin beam of her flashlight
into the shadows at the other end of the space. She ran it
back along the wall, holding the light steady when she
came across a battered old service door bearing the sten-
ciled words No General Access.
“Wanna bet?” she whispered as she approached the
door and found it unlocked.
She opened it and shone some light around the other
side into a long, tunnel-like corridor. Broken fluorescent
light fixtures hung down from the ceiling; some of the
panel coverings had fallen to the industrial-grade linoleum
floor, where they lay shattered and dust-coated. Gabrielle
stepped into the dark space, not certain what she was look-
ing for, and a bit apprehensive of what she might find in
the deserted bowels of the asylum.
She passed an open room off the corridor and her
flashlight skimmed across a red vinyl dentist’s chair, a little
worse for wear, and poised in the center of the room as if
awaiting its next patient. Gabrielle removed her camera
from its case and took a couple of quick shots. She moved
on, passing more examination and treatment rooms in
what must have been the medical wing of the building. She
found a stairwell and climbed two flights, pleased to find
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herself in the central tower where tall windows brought in
generous amounts of soft morning light.
Through her camera lens, she looked out over wide
lawns and courtyards flanked by elegant brick and lime-
stone buildings. She snapped a few pictures of the faded
glory of the place, appreciating both the architecture and
the warm play of sunlight against so much ghostly shadow.
It was strange looking out from the confines of a building
that had once held so many disturbed souls. In the eerie si-
lence, Gabrielle could almost hear the voices of the pa-
tients, people who had not been able to simply walk away
like she could now.
People like her birth mother, a woman Gabrielle had
never known beyond what she had heard as a kid through
hushed conversations between social workers and the fos-
ter families who would, eventually, one by one, return her
into the system like a pet that had proved more trouble
than it was worth. She lost track of the number of places
she’d been sent to live, but the complaints against her
when she was bounced back were always the same: restless
and withdrawn, secretive and untrusting, socially dysfunc-
tional with self-destructive tendencies. She’d heard the
same labels applied to her mother, along with the added
distinctions of paranoid and delusional.
By the time the Maxwells came into her life, Gabrielle
had spent ninety days in a group home, under the supervi-
sion of a state-appointed psychologist. She’d had zero ex-
pectations and even less hope that she might actually make
another foster situation stick. Frankly, she’d been past the
point of caring. But her new guardians had been patient
and kind. Thinking it might help her cope with her emo-
tional confusion, they had helped Gabrielle obtain a hand-
ful of court documents pertaining to her mother.
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The young woman had been a teenage Jane Doe, pre-
sumably homeless, with no ID, and no known family or ac-
quaintances, except for the newborn baby girl she had left,
squalling and distressed, in a city garbage bin late one
August night. Gabrielle’s mother had been brutalized,
bleeding from deep puncture wounds in her neck that had
been made worse by her hysteria and panicked clawing at
the injury. While she was being treated at the emergency
room, she slipped into a catatonic state and never recov-
ered.
Rather than prosecute her for the crime of abandoning
her infant, the courts had deemed the woman incom-
petent and sent her away to a facility probably not much
different from this one. Not a month into her institutional-
ization, she had hanged herself with a knotted bedsheet,
leaving behind countless questions that would never have
answers.
Gabrielle tried to shake off the weight of those old
hurts but standing there, looking out the hazy glass win-
dows, brought her past into tighter focus. She didn’t want
to think about her mother, or the misfortune of her birth,
and the dark, lonely years that had followed. She needed
to concentrate on her work. That’s what always got her
through, after all. It was the one constant in her life, some-
times all she truly had in this world.
And it was enough.
Most of the time, it was enough.
“Get a few shots and get the hell out of here,” she
scolded herself, bringing the camera up and taking a cou-
ple more photos through the subtle metalwork that was
meshed between the double panes of glass in the window.
She thought about leaving the same way she had come
in, but wondered if she might find another exit somewhere
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on the main floor of the central building. Going back
down to the dark basement was not exactly appealing. She
was creeping herself out with thoughts about her crazy
mother, and the longer she lingered in the old asylum, the
more her skin was beginning to crawl. She opened the
stairwell door and felt a little better to see dim light filtering
in through windows in some of the empty rooms and at
the end of the adjacent hallway.
Evidently the “bad vibes” graffiti artist had made it in
here, too. On each of the four walls, strange scroll-like
symbols had been rendered in deep black paint. Probably
gang markings, or the stylized signatures of the kids who’d
been here before her. A discarded spray-paint canister lay
in the corner, along with a smattering of cigarette butts,
broken beer bottles, and other debris.
Gabrielle took out her camera and looked for a good
angle for the shot she had in mind. The light wasn’t great,
but with a different lens it might prove interesting. She
fished around in her bag for her lens cases, then froze when
she heard a distant whirring noise coming from some-
where beneath her feet. It was faint, but it sounded impos-
sibly like an elevator. Gabrielle stuffed her gear back into
the bag, her ears tuned to the vague sounds around her,
every nerve flooded with a chilling sense of foreboding.
She was not alone in here.
And now that she was thinking about it, she felt eyes on
her from somewhere nearby. The prickling awareness
raised the fine hairs at the back of her neck and sent a
spray of goosebumps along her arms. Slowly, she pivoted
her head and looked behind her. It was then that she saw
it: a small closed-circuit video camera mounted in the
shadowed upper corner of the corridor, monitoring the
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stairwell door she had just come through a few minutes
before.
Maybe it wasn’t working, just a leftover from the days
when the asylum was still in operation. It might have been
a comforting thought, except the camera looked too well-
maintained and compact to be anything less than current
issue, state-of-the-art surveillance. To test that idea,
Gabrielle took a long step toward it, placing herself almost
directly beneath the camera. Soundlessly, its base mount
tilted, angling the lens until it was staring Gabrielle in the
face.
Shit, she mouthed into that black, unblinking eye.
Busted.
From deep within the empty compound, she heard the
metal creak and crash of a heavy door. Evidently the aban-
doned asylum wasn’t quite abandoned after all. They had
security at least, and the Boston PD could take a few
response-time lessons from these folks.
Footsteps p
ounded at a steady clip as whoever was on
guard started coming for her. Gabrielle turned back into
the stairwell and took off sprinting down the steps, her
gear bouncing against her hip. As she descended, light
grew scarce. She gripped the flashlight in her hand, but
hated to use it for fear of creating a beacon for security to
follow. She hit the last stair, pushed open the metal door,
and plunged into the dark of the lower-level corridor.
Back on the stairs, she heard the monitored door swing
open with a bang as her pursuer thundered down behind
her, running hard and gaining on her fast.
Finally, she reached the service door at the end of the
corridor. Throwing herself against the cold steel, she
rushed into the dank basement, and raced for the small
window that was open to the outside. A blast of fresh air
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gave her strength as she slapped her hands onto the case-
ment and hoisted herself up. She vaulted through the win-
dow and tumbled onto the pebbled earth outside.
She couldn’t hear her pursuer now. Maybe she had lost
him in the dark twisting hallways. God, she hoped so.
Gabrielle shot to her feet and ran for the breached cor-
ner of the perimeter fence. She found it quickly. Diving to
her hands and knees, she scrambled under the snipped sec-
tion of wire, heart pounding in her ears, adrenaline jetting
through her veins. She was too panicked: in her haste to
flee, she scraped the side of her face on a rough edge of
wire. The cut burned her cheek and she felt the hot trickle
of blood running near her ear. But she ignored the searing
sting and the bruising crush of her camera case as she
wriggled on her belly through the fence and out toward
freedom.
Once clear of the fence, Gabrielle leaped up and made
a mad dash across the wide, rough lawn of the outer
grounds. She spared only the barest glance behind her—
long enough to see that the huge security guard was still
there, having exited from somewhere on the ground floor
and was now bounding after her like a beast straight out of
hell. Gabrielle swallowed a knot of sheer panic at the sight
of him. The guy was built like a tank, easily 250 pounds
and all of it muscle, capped off by a large square head, his
hair buzzed military style. The big man ran up to the tall
fence and stopped at last, smashing his fist against the links
Midnight Breed - Book - 01 Page 8