Insane

by H G Lynch

  I shook my head, and held up a finger to indicate for him to give me a minute. He nodded and I turned around, sucking in deep lungfuls of the chilly air. I focused on breathing steadily, on breathing through the pain and grief. Stop it, Callie, I told myself angrily. It wasn’t your fault. You weren’t driving the other car. Chester is not dead because of you…

  I paused, halting my mantra there. I’d repeated it to myself constantly the first few days after I started seeing Chester’s ghost, but to start with, I would always add, Because Chester is not dead. I’d been in denial. I’d stopped adding that only in my last couple of months here in the hospital. I knew Chester was dead. I knew he was a ghost. I knew it wasn’t my fault. And I’d gotten better at accepting all that. But I was still working on it.

  Once I had my composure again, I turned back around, and started walking without waiting for Casey. He hesitated before catching up to me. I started talking before he could say anything. “He died in a car crash. Six months ago,” I said, both my mental voice and my real voice flat and mechanical. “It was the middle of the night, and he was driving to my house because I’d freaked myself out watching a horror movie on TV. My dad was called into work on some sort of emergency nose-job or something – he was a plastic surgeon, before he got fired – and my brother was staying at a friend’s house, so I was on my own. Ches was on the phone with me while he was driving, trying to keep me distracted so I wouldn’t feel so alone.”

  I paused to take a breath, remembering what the police had said about the crash. “He was pulling onto the road a couple of streets down from mine when some idiot – a drunk driver – in an Audi came tearing around the corner too fast. Chester was only going twenty-five, but the Audi was going about forty, so when they crashed…” I trailed off.

  I’d had the phone pressed against my ear, sitting curled on the sofa with all the lights on and the TV on mute so I could hear Chester laughing. “Cal, I can’t believe you’ve got me driving all the way over, just because you’ve suddenly turned chicken-shit. My mum’s going to kill me when she finds out the car’s gone tomorrow morning,” he’d said.

  “Shut up. It’s not like you don’t love an excuse to get me in the house alone anyway,” I’d teased back. Flirting had always been a game for us.

  He’d made a purring noise over the phone, and I’d covered my mouth to keep him from hearing me giggle. “Damn right. What are you wearing, Callie? Tell me it’s something sexy, like that nurse outfit you wore for Halloween last year. Or the–Oh, shit!” He’d spat the curse with panic in his voice, and then there’d been a clatter, like he dropped the phone. But the call was still running.

  “Ches?” I’d asked, worried. “Ches, what happened?”

  Then I’d heard the squealing of someone slamming on the brakes, and a moment later, the horrendous crunching and screaming of metal as the two cars collided. It was a deafening, unholy sound, and it made every muscle in my body freeze with terror.

  I’d screamed down the phone, but Chester didn’t answer. Then the call cut out, and I was left sitting in a too-bright room, clutching the phone in one hand and a sofa cushion in the other, while terrified tears streaked down my face.

  Two hours later, a policeman showed up at my front door to tell me that my best friend was dead. But I already knew.

  When did you know he was a ghost? Casey’s voice startled me out of the memory, and I glanced at him, grateful for the distraction. But then, the memory of me discovering Chester wasn’t completely gone after all wasn’t much better.

  I looked down, a little surprised to see that Casey was still holding my hand. Lifting my face to the frosty sun, I spoke softly. “My best friend was dead, and I wanted to die too,” I started, shrugging as if it was no big deal. Casey’s fingers tightened on mine, but I refused to look at his face. I went on. “In fact, you know what I was doing when he showed up as a ghost? I was sitting on the bathroom floor with a bottle of my mum’s old painkillers, really strong ones, in my hand. I popped the lid off, and I even wrote a suicide note, but I only got down about five pills before Chester appeared. He just showed up out of thin air, kneeling right in front of me, shouting at me. He was furious.” I smiled, remembering how angry he’d been.

  “At first, I thought the pills had knocked me out or something and I was dreaming, or maybe hallucinating. I just sat there, staring at him. But then he tried to grab my arms to shake me, and his hands went right through me, but I felt him. Like an electric shock where he'd tried to touch me. Only it was more than that – it was like, a tiny spark of...of his soul or something was touching me, just for a second.” I shook my head.

  “Just like that, I knew I wasn’t dreaming or hallucinating. He was really there. And I started crying. I was hysterical for a while, and Chester just sat next to me on the bathroom floor, and he was crying too. He made me promise not to try to kill myself again.” I shrugged again. “So I haven’t. That’s probably the only reason I’m locked up in a psych hospital instead of in a casket.” I turned to Casey and tried to smile, despite the coldness trembling inside me.

  He didn’t smile back. His eyes shone with sympathy, his eyebrows pitched up. Callie– he started, his tone soft.

  And then Chester popped up between us, appearing between one blink and the next, and shouted “Boo!”

  I leapt back with a shriek of surprise at the same time as Casey yelled, “Holy shit!”

  Chester froze, and I leaned around him, gaping. “YOU CAN TALK!?” I yelped, the shock reverberating through my mind into his. He blinked, his gaze sliding past Chester – who looked as surprised as I was – and landed on me. Then I realized how my screech of disbelief could have sounded insulting. I frowned. Sorry, I didn’t mean that to sound so–

  He smiled unevenly, clearly still a little thrown from Chester’s shocking appearance, and held up a hand. It’s okay. Yes, I can talk, he replied, reverting to using telepathy. I was a little disappointed – I wanted to hear his voice again. His real voice. Part of it was fascination, and part of it was something else that I couldn’t quite define.

  “But…I thought you were…” I pressed my lips together, not certain how to say what I meant without it coming off really badly.

  But Casey just shook his head. “Deaf?” he asked, speaking aloud. I tried not to look so startled this time, but it was still so jarring. I’d known the guy for over a week, and I’d never heard him say a word until now. “I am. I just wasn’t always deaf,” he said quietly. I stared, feeling like I might pass out. His voice – his real voice – was slightly different from his mental one; smoother, deeper, richer. More musical. The Voice I heard in my head was sort of flat in comparison, like the difference between hearing a guitar on a CD and having someone playing one right in front of you.

  Chester waved a hand in front of my face, and I blinked, leaning back. My mouth was hanging open and I snapped it shut, a hot blush rising to my cheeks. I searched for words, opening and closing my mouth like a fish, but I wasn’t sure what to say. And then Casey laughed at my obvious shock, and my mouth fell open again. I’d seen him smile – he had a really nice smile – but I didn’t realize until right then that I’d never heard him laugh. His smile had nothing on his laugh.

  Something deep inside me quivered in response to his bright, smooth laughter, and I decided I needed to sit down. So I folded myself on the ground in the middle of the pathway, and Casey grinned down at me for a moment before joining me with infinitely more grace than I had used. Chester scowled at us like we were idiots, and then joined us on the ground with a sigh.

  I knotted my fingers together in my lap, chewing my lip. Finally, I asked, “How did it happen?” For a second, Casey looked like he wouldn’t answer. Then he glanced at Chester meaningfully, and I understood. “Ches, would you give us a minute please?”

  He scowled, but then he nodded. In the blink of an eye, he vanished. I turned to Casey, who sighed, watching his own fingers as he drummed them on his knee in a gesture I was coming
to realize he used a lot when he was upset or annoyed. He started talking, his voice low in my mind.

  My mum died when I was a kid. Cancer. But she always loved music, so I loved music too. It was my life. Then when I was twelve, my dad met a new woman, married her eight months later. My step-mother…she was a bitch. I didn’t like her, and she didn’t like me. One day, my dad got attacked – he’s a lawyer – and he went into the hospital. He nearly died. I guess it scared my step-mother about what would happen if he did die. See, we’re not exactly poor and I was – I am the sole beneficiary in my dad’s will. My step-mother argued with him about it – I always suspected she was a gold-digger but, you know, I couldn’t really say anything to my dad. But that day, he figured it out, and after she started insulting me…well, dad wasn’t happy. He told her to leave – for good.

  My eyes were wide, and I made a face. “I bet she wasn’t thrilled about that.”

  He smiled thinly. That would be an understatement. When I got home that night’ he paused, his fingers drumming faster, and I could sense him fighting strong emotion. When he spoke again, even his mental voice sounded choked. When I got home, she was waiting. She attacked me. Stabbed my eardrums with a letter opener.

  I gasped, my hand going to my mouth in horror. “Oh my God,” I breathed.

  Even though he couldn’t see my lips for my hand in the way, he must have been able to tell from my expression what I’d said. He nodded, his eyes pained. Yeah. The last thing I heard was her saying, “Let’s see how amazing and talented you are when you can’t hear your precious music.” After she did it, she just stood there, laughing. I could see it on her face – she was happy, enjoying my pain. So I… He looked away, his jaw working. His fingers stopped drumming and formed fists on his knees. Without thinking, I reached out and put my hand over one of his. He bowed his head, letting out a breath. I picked up the letter opener and I stabbed her.

  Shock made me go still. My stomach turned over, and I felt cold all of a sudden. It took everything I had not to pull my hand away. And then he lifted his head and met my gaze, and I saw the tears shining in his green eyes. Aloud, he whispered, “I killed her.”

  Chapter Five

  ** Callie **

  I was still thinking about my conversation with Casey hours later. That night I stood at my window, my fingertips leaving smudges on the cold glass, my brain whirring. Casey’s words played over and over in my head. I killed her. I killed her. The pain on his face when he said them…god, I thought I was messed up. And weirdly, I was less scared of him now than I had been even before I suspected he was a murderer. I was actually sort of…fascinated. He was obviously damaged – I wanted to know how deep that damage went. I wanted to know him.

  I was no longer trying to deny that I had a crush on him. After today, after what I’d learned about him and seeing the ghosts in his eyes, I was tumbling headlong down that hill with no way to stop. And I was beginning to be less freaked by our weird, telepathic link – I had a ghost for a best friend. Clearly there were things out there that science couldn’t explain.

  Plus, it seemed fitting that there should be something freaky going on in my head, since that was technically why I was in here – but I was curious. Why did we have this link? I’d never met him before last week. We didn’t even seem to have anything in common. His mother was dead – mine was a cheating bitch. He loved music – I loved horror movies. The only thing we both seemed to share was that we were both in the psych hospital without being legitimately crazy.

  But maybe that was it. Maybe it was why we were each in here. He was attacked – I saw a ghost. He needed to hear, and I was apparently susceptible to the supernatural. Maybe…our telepathy was the world’s way of trying to fix an injustice. Call it Karma or Fate or whatever. But Casey shouldn’t have been deaf, and I wasn’t going to run screaming from having another person’s voice in my head, because, well, it didn’t make me any crazier than seeing Chester’s ghost did.

  “What are you thinking about?” Chester asked. I looked at the dark glass and saw the reflection of him sitting on my bed.

  I turned around to face him and shrugged. “Nothing much.”

  His hazel eyes narrowed and he tilted his head down, glaring at my through his brown curls. His eyebrow bar and earrings glinted in the light and for a second a nasty, cold feeling washed over me. He’s dead. He shouldn’t be here, a voice whispered in my head. Not Casey’s – just my own sanity. Then Chester sighed and grumbled, “You were thinking about him, weren’t you?”

  I blinked, feigning confusion. “What? Who?”

  He scoffed. “You’ve always been a crap liar, Cal.” He shook his head, his expression sour. He wouldn’t look at me. “I don’t like him,” he muttered, sounding petulant. I laughed. He turned another glower on me. “I’m serious, Callie. There’s something freaky about him.”

  Rolling my eyes, I said, “Most people would say the same about you. Or me, for that matter.” I pointed at him. “Ghost.” I turned my finger on myself. “Sees ghost. I’m pretty sure freaky is par for the course.”

  Chester growled, unamused. He opened his mouth to snap at me some more, but his Hate-Casey rant was cut off when the lights abruptly went out. Just like the other night. “Shit,” he muttered, “Not again.”

  I shivered as the room temperature suddenly dropped and chills crawled down my spine. “Ches?” I squeaked. It was so dark that afterimages from the light floated in front of my vision. That was when I realized I couldn’t see Chester’s glow like I had last time, and my fear spiked. “Chester?” My voice was high with panic. But he didn’t reply. He was gone. I closed my eyes – at least the darkness behind my lids felt less scary.

  The click of the door unlocking again made me jump, and I backed into the wall, my heart pounding. Come on, Callie, get a grip. There’s nothing there, I told myself, but the goosebumps prickling over my skin said my body didn’t agree. Suddenly, I decided being alone in this dark room wasn’t an option.

  Opening my eyes, I slid myself along the wall until I found the door. Inching it open, I held my breath and peered into the black hallway. It was just as creepy as before. Endless blackness. Silence. It was so quiet my ears were ringing, and for a second, I wondered if this was how Casey felt. If so, it was amazing he was as sane as he was – then again, he had been here for two years. He’d had time to adjust. But still, I doubted I would handle sudden deafness nearly so well.

  “Okay, Callie. Suck it up and go,” I hissed to myself, lingering in the doorway. Before I could chicken out, I darted out the door and started down the hall, walking as fast as I could without knowing exactly where I was going or what might be in my way. I kept one hand out in front of me, and the other on the wall. My breathing rasped in the silence, and every nerve in my body was tight and tingling with the fear that someone – or something – would lunge from the darkness and grab me.

  After all, last time the lights went out, a patient died.

  That thought sent me into a full out panic.

  I ran.

  ** Casey **

  One thing that was worse than being drenched in silence, was being drenched in silence and blackness. Deaf and blind. Combined with an icy chill in the air, it was terrifying. But I’d learned my lesson last time – this time, I wasn’t going to go searching for a nurse. I was going to sit right here on my bed and wait for the lights to come back on. I counted my breaths to keep from freaking out, and wondered if Callie was trying to escape again right now.

  The thought was almost enough to make me want to go looking for her. If she escaped, I’d lose my only connection to another human voice. I’d be alone again in silence, and I didn’t think I could take that. Also, I liked her. She was weird and spunky and pretty. She didn’t seem to care that I was deaf, and she didn’t run screaming from me, even after I told her what I did to land myself in this place. She saw the ghost of her dead best friend – who, by the way, was a total douche – and if I hadn’t been able to see Chester too
, I’d have said she was crazy.

  Then again, anyone outside this hospital would have called us both crazy if they knew we heard each other’s voices in our heads. If hearing her voice in my head made me crazy, so be it. Sanity was overrated.

  Something warm touched my knee, and I jumped, scrambling backward into the wall. In the pitch blackness, all I could make out was the vague, pale shape of a person standing by the bed. Panic made my heart slam into my ribs, and I balled up my fists, ready to take a swing if the figure got any closer.

  It’s me! Casey, it’s just me! The figure held up its hands, pale blurs on the blackness.

  I let out a breath and lowered my fists, relaxing. Callie?

  She took a step closer to the bed, and a beam of light speared the room. Squinting against it, I saw Callie smiling, a torch held under her chin, casting shadows around her eyes and nose.

  Mwuhaha! Scared ya, she said, her laugh bubbling inside my head.

  I felt myself smile back despite my still-frantic heart rate. What are you doing here? I asked silently. Then I frowned. Wait, how did you find my room?

  She swung the beam of light down, aiming it at the bed between us as she folded herself boldly on the end. She shrugged. Her lips moved, but it was too dim for me to make out the exact words she was saying. She must have realized it, because she frowned and repeated what she’d said telepathically. I tried three rooms before this one. Found the torch at the nurse’s station along the hall. There’s nobody out there, you know. It’s creepy. She shuddered, and I resisted the urge to shift closer and put my arm around her. Her eyes flicked up to mine, glimmering pale blue in the dimness. Suddenly, it didn’t feel so cold anymore. The darkness was close, but not claustrophobic – it made the space between us feel smaller. Intimate.