Asylum (4 page)

“Wait, you guys, come take a look at this.…” Jordan said, and the catch in his voice got their attention.

He was standing on the far side of the desk, his flashlight pointed at the wall, where there were even more photos, hanging in frames.

“How awful,” Dan said.

“Quiet.”
Abby spoke in barely a whisper.

She moved closer to one of the pictures, gently wiping the dust off the glass frame with her sleeve. It was a photograph of a little girl, no older than nine or ten, with light-colored hair down to her shoulders. She was standing up, her hand resting on what looked like a wooden post, like she was posing for a formal portrait. She had on a patterned dress and was wearing fine jewelry. But a jagged scar slashed across her forehead and there was something wrong with her eyes.

“She looks so sad,” Abby said.

Sad was one way to put it. Empty was another.

Abby stood still, staring so deeply into the photograph that it looked like she was in a trance. Dan didn’t have the heart to tell her that given the scar on the little girl’s forehead and the emptiness in her eyes, it was likely that she’d been given a lobotomy. What kind of monsters would perform a lobotomy on a little girl?

The picture hanging next to it shocked him from his thoughts. It showed a patient struggling, pinned by two orderlies in white aprons and restrained by a muzzle on his face. One of the orderlies holding him looked positively evil. Dan was mesmerized by the photograph. Who had taken it, or any of these pictures for that matter, and who had hung them up on the wall?

“It’s hard to remember they were here to get help,” Jordan said.

“He was ill,” Dan replied automatically.

“So? Does that look humane to you? Those doctors wouldn’t know the Hippocratic oath if it kneed them in the balls.”

“You have no idea what was going on,” Dan shot back. Then he stopped himself. Why did he feel the need to defend the very doctors who had probably performed a lobotomy on a child? Or who were getting ready to torture a man? When he looked down at his crossed arms, a bolt of fear shot through his body, and he rushed to fill the awkward silence. “I guess we’re just lucky the field has come a long way since then.”

“Why leave these here?” Abby cried suddenly, gesturing at the photographs. Her chin was quivering. “They’re … horrible.”

“Well, at least it’s honest,” Jordan replied, putting an arm around her. Abby shrugged him off. “I hate when people skirt around the truth. And lest we forget, this
was
locked.”

“I don’t care if they locked it up.” She wouldn’t stop looking at the photograph of the girl. Dan had an urge to grab Abby away before the hollow girl in the frame could reach out and pull her in. But of course that was ridiculous. “She shouldn’t be here. She should be put somewhere safe.”

Slowly, Abby raised both her hands and pulled the frame off its hook. A light patch showed on the wall where the picture had been. Abby hugged the photograph to her chest, her arms wrapping protectively around it.

“What are you doing?” Dan said, unable to stop himself.

“I’m going to take her back to my room. She’ll be safe there.”

“You can’t take it, Abby,” said Dan, trying to keep the desperation out of his voice. “It’s
supposed
to be down here. You need to leave it alone.”

Abby was about to say something else when Jordan spoke up. “Hey, relax, both of you. It’s not like you know her, Abs. You should put it back. Someone might notice it’s missing.”

“Who?” she demanded with a soft little scoff.

“Someone,” Jordan replied testily. “I don’t know.… Maybe there’s a catalog of all the crap in here somewhere.”

Abby didn’t seem to hear what Jordan had said. She stood silently, like a statue, gripping the picture to her chest.

“Please, Abby, leave her where she is. She belongs with the others,” Dan insisted.
“Please.”
He couldn’t believe he was arguing with one of the hottest girls he’d ever met.

Just let her have it, Dan. You want her to like you.

But the need to speak was more compelling.

Abby’s eyes seemed almost as vacant as those of the girl in the photograph. Then a shiver came over her and she blinked. Gently, almost
affectionately
, she put the picture back on the wall. She touched it one last time and said, “Poor little bird. I wonder if she ever escaped her cage.”

With the picture in place, Dan felt a sense of relief. He couldn’t exactly say why.

“Come on,” Abby said. “Let’s go back. I’ve had enough.”

That was all they needed. They scrambled out of the old office like it was a race, and Dan was only too glad to shut the door behind them.

“Hey, the lock,” Jordan said, just as they reached the vending machines.

“Don’t worry, I already took care of it,” Dan said, ready to be far, far away.

“You sure?”

Without waiting for an answer, Jordan turned back to double-check. The lock was still hanging on the door where he’d left it.

“My bad,” said Dan, laughing nervously. He really could have sworn he’d locked it. But then, his memory had been known to play tricks on him.

UNCORRECTED E-PROOF—NOT FOR SALE

HarperCollins Publishers

.....................................................................

CHAPTER

N
o
 5 

D
an was dusty and exhausted by the time he got back to his room. Opening the door carefully, so as not to wake Felix, he took a step in and was gripped by cold.

This isn’t my room
. Dan blinked, disoriented. It looked like a cell of some sort, with floors and walls made of heavy gray stone. An operating table covered with a thin, white sheet stood in the middle of the room. In the corner nearest him was a drain—why, Dan could only guess. A small window cut into the top of the far wall was covered by crisscrossing metal bars. But the most unnerving thing about the room was the pair of shackles that were bolted to the wall on the left. At first, Dan had thought they were rusty, but now that he really looked at them, he could see that the dark red stains were far too wet to be rust.

Why do I know this room?

Dan quickly closed the door and started rubbing his arms with his hands to get rid of the chill. He tried to rationalize what had just happened. Had he opened the wrong door by mistake? That would explain it. He was extremely tired, and had just taken a wrong turn and ended up at the wrong room. A nightmare room that hadn’t been used in decades.

Yeah, right.

He checked the door number. 3808.

That
was
his number.
What was going on?

After rubbing his eyes with trembling hands, Dan opened the door again. And there was his room, two desks, two chairs, and two beds, with the sleeping lump of Felix on the nearer one.

Dan stepped in and closed the door. Leaning against it, he tried to catch his breath, coughing from the dust still lodged in his nose and throat. His mind had wandered, that was all. It had wandered far, but now he had it back.

Unsurprisingly, Dan couldn’t sleep. Tossing and turning, he’d banish the photographs from his head only to be overcome by the weird hallucination he’d had. Intermittent snores from Felix didn’t help. Around two thirty, when he finally gave up trying, he grabbed his laptop from the desk and crawled back into bed with it. Maybe he could find out more about Brookline, something that might explain those horrid photographs.

He typed in “Brookline and History,” and that brought up a list of various towns called Brookline. Adding in “New Hampshire” turned up a vague summary of the sanatorium’s history which contained nothing Dan didn’t already know—that it had housed the mentally ill, both men and women, and had been bought by the college after it closed. He decided to try an image search. Instantly, a results page full of vintage photographs of Brookline’s exterior showed up. In black and white, the building looked even more menacing.

Narrowing the parameters further, Dan typed in “Brookline AND history AND asylum.” And there, finally, was a link that looked promising. Judging by the garish purple background and abundance of animated gifs on the page, it was a “homemade” website, to put it nicely. The title was what caught his interest, though: “Brookline—Curing the Insane or Creating Them?”

Pretty sensationalistic
, Dan thought. But it only went more over the top from there. The page was long and gave off some serious conspiracy-theory paranoia vibes. Sal Weathers, investigator, hobbyist, and—
oh, boy
—ghost hunter, had painstakingly compiled what must have been every bit of news Brookline had ever made in local or national papers into one long text block. Statistics about how many patients had been at the asylum at its peak, stories about how when it closed in 1972 patients had been relocated to other hospitals or released … Repeatedly, Dan came across references to the difficulties Brookline had had in keeping a warden. The turnover sounded worse than McDonald’s.

Finally, about three-fourths of the way through Sal’s winding write-up, Dan found something—a line, a throwaway maybe, but he read it to himself several times:

It wasn’t until 1960 that Brookline found the man who would redefine and refocus its entire purpose.

And his name was? And what was the new purpose? But the article didn’t say.

“It’s called narrative focus, Sal—look it up,” Dan said aloud. Then he remembered he had a roommate. Luckily, Felix seemed to be a deep sleeper.

Dan scanned down the page. The reason behind Sal’s literary ADD quickly became obvious. Why fixate on garbage like the rate of warden employment when there were
serial killers
to discuss?

By far the most controversial of Brookline’s patients was the serial killer Dennis Heimline, known more commonly as the Sculptor. Between 1960 and 1965, he terrorized a small rural community in Vermont. Police estimate that he killed at least a half dozen people, earning his name from the grisly way he left his victims posed like statues. One report described the “cold, terrible beauty” of a young woman found “dancing” in the wilds of the White Mountains, her mutilated arms tied to tree limbs high above. The most horrifying crime he committed occurred at a local pub. The victims were posed in various places throughout the bar—some standing, some sitting, and some engaged in a kind of revelry on the dance floor. All held in place by ropes and wires.