Asylum (3 page)

            “
Chloe!”
It said again, almost like a real voice.

           
Chloe walked
faster, following the corridor around a  bend. Ahead of her the hall dead-ended
at a door, an open door.  The only open one she had seen in the whole
basement.  It yawned wide, displaying nothing but a wall of black behind the
threshold.  Chloe paused uncertainly.  She didn’t really want to find out why
that door was open.

            But
that was fear talking, wasn’t it?  And fear was irrational.  She should only be
afraid if she believed the voice was real, and she was mostly sure it wasn’t. 
Mostly
. 
So the logical thing to do would be to keep going and see if the unlocked door
was an exit.

            Chloe
stood still again, waiting to see if the voice would call her. It didn’t call,
but it was there.  It breathed.  When she had counted a full sixty seconds of
silence, she took another step towards the door.  As she moved, it banged shut.
A blast of hot air whooshed by her.  Chloe screamed.

CHAPTER TWO

            “Chloe!”

            Chloe
forced her way through the panic that kept her eyes clamped shut, to see Seth
looking down at her.  He held her firmly by both shoulders.

            “What’s
wrong with you?  What happened?”  He demanded.

            She
had been running then, running with her eyes closed and her arms out, and what
had reached out and grabbed her hadn’t been some unknowable evil basement thing
after all.  It was just Seth.  Seth, the R.A., who she had begun to think might
actually like her.  But nobody liked crazy.  Chloe took a deep breath.

            “I
just…there was a noise, and then this door…slammed, right in my face.  I guess
I got…spooked.” she edited.

            Seth
dropped his hands.  Her shoulders still felt hot where he had touched them.

            “Sorry,”
she mumbled.

            “That‘s
alright.  It’s creepy down here, isn’t it?” his voice was calm and reassuring. 
“The truth is, it’s just air, and pressures and vacuums and stuff like that. 
Whenever you open one door another slams shut.  I opened the door to storage
and voila, another one slammed shut and scared you.  It’s even worse in the
winter when the heat kicks on.”

            Seth
put a hand between her shoulder blades and steered her back towards the
stairs.  It actually was marked ‘EXIT’, in large, red, hard-to-miss, letters.

            “Old
buildings like these…they just have floors that creak, and mice that live in
the walls, and doors that won’t stay open.  Then you add a couple of hundred
kids and you get the inevitable freshman year ghost stories.”

            “Ghost
stories?” Chloe worried.

            Seth
rolled his eyes.  Next to the stairwell door he had already stacked the pieces
to Chloe’s bed.  He handed her a bedrail and took the head and footboards
himself.

            “Sure,
ghost stories.  Tell one person you got scared down in the basement because a
door slammed shut.  Then come back next year and there’ll be a story about the
freshman who went into the basement and just disappeared.”

            Chloe
trailed behind Seth as he began lugging the bed pieces up the stairs.

            “If
you go to any college campus, probably anywhere in the world, they all have the
same ghost stories.  There’s always one about a girl who kills herself because
she finds out she’s pregnant, or because her boyfriend left her.  If the
college has a bell tower, then chances are there’s a story that someone hung
themselves in the tower, or that someone jumped.  It’s all a bunch of
bullshit.”

            Seth
turned and caught the door at the top of the basement stairs with his foot,
holding it open for her.

            “You
don’t believe in ghosts at all?” asked Chloe as they began climbing the main
stair.  A few girls wearing sympathetic smiles darted out of the way to give
them room.

            “God,
I’m glad I didn’t get the fourth floor this year,” he muttered and then,
“Ghosts?  I don’t know.  I never wasted any time thinking about it.  I’ve never
seen one, and even if I had…so what?  What’s a ghost going to do?  Sneak up
behind you and shout ‘boo‘?  That’s more annoying than scary.  If you think
about it, deer are scarier than ghosts.”

            Chloe
stopped on the second floor landing and turned around, not quite sure she heard
him correctly.

            “I’m
sorry, did you say,
deer
?” she asked.

            “Yea,
deer.  There are tons of white-tailed deer around here.  You could be driving
along, and one could run out in front of your car.  You could hit it and smash
up your car, or you could swerve, hit a tree, and die instantly.  There’s a
higher chance of that than there is of a ghost tripping you as you walk down
the stairs, and yet none of the freshmen ever tell deer horror stories, or have
nightmares about deer.”

            “You’re
joking?” Chloe guessed.

            “I
was making an attempt at being funny, yes,” he said with mock dejection.

            Chloe
smiled again. 

            Back
in the room, Sam was still talking animatedly on the phone.  Seth dropped his
load on the ground, and Chloe leaned the rail against the wall.

            “I’ll
go back and get the slats and the other rail and get this together for you,
alright?”

            He
winked at her before walking out.  Chloe turned to see Sam watching with an
evil grin.  She pursed her lips and made mock kissing sounds.  Chloe blushed
and tried not to look pleased.

            “Alright,
Mom, alright…okay, yup.  I gotta go.  See you in a bit.”  Sam hung up the phone
and put her hands on her hips as she looked Chloe up and down.

            “Well,
someone seems to have made an impression with the R.A.  He’s on the hockey team
too you know…nice.”

            “I
don’t know,” Chloe tried to play it cool. Sam raised an eyebrow.

            “You
should ask him to go out with us tonight.  We’re getting a bunch of people from
the floor together and going to the Eat.”

            “The
Eat?” Chloe wondered.

            “Yes,
the Eat.  You’re in the U.P. now Babe, da
upper
peninsula! Don’t look
for Applebee’s or Chili’s here.  The restaurants
are all
mom-and-pop type places.  Most of them just have a sign up that says “Good
Food” or “Eat” or my favorite, the old “Food Here”.  The Eat is a campus
institution round these parts.”

            “Okay.”
Chloe agreed.

            “Not
that we go there because the pasties are so good.” Sam added.

            “The
wha-”

            “Pasties,
never mind you’ll be sick of them in no time.  We’re going to get wasted!” Sam
exclaimed gleefully.

            “Ummm,”
was all Chloe could think to say.

            “This
is college!  What were you planning on doing…studying?” Sam laughed.

            “I’m
barely 18,” Chloe admitted.

            “No
kidding.  Again, this is the U.P., no one cares.  That’s the beauty of it!”  
Sam put an arm around Chloe’s shoulders.  “So…what took you so long…all alone
in the basement down there with Seth the hottie R.A.?” she teased.

            Chloe
took a deep breath.  Sam was so bright, so friendly, such a relief from
everything she had been imagining for days on end.  What had happened in the
basement?  Certainly she had felt the same old panic, the same struggle to
force logic through her fear and determine if the voice really came from
somewhere outside her own head.  This time had been different.  In the past,
when she gave in to it, extreme measures had to be taken to bring her
back…restraints…sedatives even.  This time, Seth had waved it away with a calm
voice and a lecture on the dangers of white-tailed deer.  After all, there
would be a long school year full of opportunities for her to risk alienating
Sam with her problems.

            “Nothing,”
she said, “But I think…I think I like him.”

            “Obviously,”
agreed Sam.  “Now the question is…what are we going to wear?”

            Four
hours, a few clothing changes, and a short drive later, Chloe and Sam found
themselves crammed into a corner booth at the Eat with a large group of loud
and excited freshmen. 

            The
place seemed more like the type of restaurant that would draw
weathered-looking, old farmers for morning coffee than a college hotspot.
Dingy, chipped, linoleum countertops banded in chrome, and teal, vinyl seat
cushions patched in places with duct tape, left no doubt that the restaurant
hadn’t changed since it opened its doors.  Even their waitress seemed to be
vintage.  She had big hair, a stained pink dress with a white apron, and a
nametag which read: May.

            “Uhhhhhh,
whatcha got on tap tonight, May?” Sam smiled brightly.  May made a face that
suggested she might have been trying to use her tongue to pick something from
between her teeth while staring over their heads.  Chloe worried.  To her it
seemed May was deciding how best to throw all ten of them out the door after
she asked for the I.D.’s that she knew none of them had.

            “We
got Bud or we got Bud Light,” May recited in a bored monotone.

            “I
don’t know, I just don’t know…Chloe?  What do you think?  I don’t suppose I
could see the wine list, May?”  Sam’s grin widened as May rolled her eyes and
blew out an exasperated breath.

            “B-bud,
Budweiser for me, thank-you,” Chloe stuttered while giving Sam a sharp
under-the-table jab with her elbow.

            “A
round on me, May,” Sam confirmed, “and start me a tab would you?”

            May
scribbled an angry flourish on her pad. “We don’t
do
tabs here,” she
informed them before stomping away.

            “What
is wrong with you?” Chloe demanded in a whisper, “Are you trying to get us in
trouble?”

            Sam
stuck her tongue out and blew a raspberry.  “Oh, screw May,” she said a little
too loudly.  “This whole town lives off the college and they act like we’re a
damn plague or something.  There’s nothing else here but a post office and a
church.  No factories, no farms, nothing.  Maybe a few tourists in the summer
and that’s it.  I mean look at this place.  The only thing keeping it open is
good, old-fashioned, college binge-drinking.  They know it.  We know it.  You’d
think they’d want to try and cater to us just a little bit.  Maybe have some
microbrews on tap, or God forbid, liquor.  But nooooo, I don’t think they’ve
even updated the juke box in the last twenty years.”

            As
though to underscore her point, the jukebox suddenly sprang to life and the
song, “Rock the Casbah” blared out of its crackly speakers.

            “The
Clash are timeless though,” Chloe observed with a smile.

            “The
who?  The point is tha- Chloe!  It’s Seth!”  

            Chloe’s
head snapped in the direction of the door.  Just as quickly, Sam reached out
and yanked her chin to turn her face back.  One of the girls in the booth
giggled, and several of them made much less conspicuous glances towards the
newcomers.

            “Don’t
look!” Sam hissed.

            Seth
walked by their booth with a group of boys who were all, quite obviously
upperclassmen, and took a seat at a table against the far wall, his back to
Chloe and Sam.  It seemed to Chloe that her heart immediately began beating
louder.  She could hear it in her ears and feel her face warming.  Sam did a
quick once over of all the other faces at the table, making sure no one was
watching, before leaning in to whisper in Chloe’s ear: “Wait at least ten
minutes.  Give him a chance to look for you first.”

            Chloe
nodded.  Seeing Seth show up had proved Sam’s intuition was more trustworthy
than her own.  Hours earlier, Sam hadn’t actually invited Seth, but had made
several marked references to their plans for the evening while he reassembled
Chloe’s bed.  She had assured Chloe after he left that he would be there, and
then become a whirlwind of flying clothes and cosmetics as she chose and
rejected outfits for them both to wear.  She had settled on one of her own
dresses, a short, black, exposed shoulder number for Chloe, and a sequined,
lace-up-the-back top with black pants combo for herself.  Sam had piled Chloe’s
long, brown hair into a pinned-up arrangement, artfully contrived to appear
messy and random.  She had dusted Chloe’s pale, high cheek-boned face with
mineral powder, and lined her already wide grey eyes in black Kohl. Glittery
silver eye shadow, pencil-darkened brows, and a peach-tinted lip gloss
completed the makeover. Leaving the dormitory, on Sam’s stiletto heels no less,
Chloe had felt like she was wearing a disguise.  Her make-up mask and tight
clothing made her feel brave.  She had laughed in the car, introduced herself
without Sam’s assistance, and even smiled at one or two of the boys crammed
into the booth with them.