Darling (28 page)

Dear God, these are simply the tragedies that I know of! What has gone unnoticed here in this place? What goes on now behind locked doors when the lights are out? What has happened to all of the poor folk who have disappeared during my years here?

Will I be next? Something lusts for me, the way I lust for Mike.

Mike... Have I damned you? If so I am truly sorry. I had to have you. I dreamed of you every night, your young flesh pressed against me, and I just had to have you. Perhaps I have lived in this building so long that its desires have seeped into my blood.

Like most of us here, it becomes difficult to separate my own impulses from this place’s horrid nightmares.

Nightmares...there is a clue there, I think. I’ve tried to plot it out, but it’s no use. A wall has slammed down in my thoughts and all I can think of is the dark behind those doors, the dark that calls my name as sweetly as a flock of mockingbirds singing in the sun.

There are things to be known and things unknown. Nature herself has gifted us with certain faculties that both amaze and horrify us but even we, with our highly evolved cerebral cortices, cannot learn what hides behind the veil. We can only go forth, part the curtains, and discover what the greatest mysteries truly are. Then we may have a story to tell.

My grandfather was a storyteller. People would gather around the front porch of the old country store in Oneida where he’d sit, spinning his yarns about pioneers and revenants. One hot summer night springs to mind, my entire family huddled around his feet, sipping from sweating glass bottles of ice cold Coca-Cola, as he told us one of his stories. He used to say that God was the first storyteller and that the angels were His words. They held the vocabulary of all creation, their dreams shaping reality to His whim. That was the truly frightening thing about the Fall, he’d said. That these powerful words were banished to dark places.

A roach just scurried across the kitchen tile. I thought they had sprayed recently?

I’m tired. I need rest my eyes but a moment, a single fragile moment. I hope the dreams pass me by. If they come now, I know the song that they will sing, the story they will tell, and it is the most tragic and delicious thing I have yet heard here.

In our dreams, we can be anything we want to be. We cannbe anything we fear to be. Yet so many dreams spring from the baser parts of us. Why do we dream so much of lust, of rage, of fear?

If our brains were broken, would these dreams leak out onto the pillow, seep out of our skulls and into the world around us?

So tired.

* * *

Needing desperately to make sense of things, to ground his ever-shifting reality, Mike shuffled across the hall and knocked on Margot’s door.

While he waited, he assessed himself. Things had been changing since he had moved here, especially since the accident with Lucy, and the metamorphosis wasn’t limited to his maturing lifestyle. There were the emotions that he had been experiencing, not only with Margot, but also the new found confidence he had, the clarity he sometimes experienced. He couldn’t articulate how he felt about these things, but they did not feel natural. It was almost like they had been
inserted
into him, fed to him, some strange type of software downloaded and installed into the directory of his brain.

If that weren’t enough, there were the voices. Whispers heard late at night, indiscernible bits of conversation outside his window or in the halls. When he would check, there would be no one there. Other times he could feel eyes watching him,
judging
him, urging him toward a purpose he couldn’t fathom.

Was his mind broken?

He wondered if Dennis experienced the same things.

His only rock had been Margot. She had cemented him in reality, anchored him to the here and now. It was as though he had grown roots through her into the very soil here, deep down into the dark, under the foundation and

—through the concrete tube where once hundreds of bodies were

spirited away out of sight of

still-dying patients,

the corpses hauled downhill

where trucks secretly gathered,

a tunnel capped at one end by the road that ran by,

on the other by a giant iron grate,

the supermarket atop it,

a conqueror astride his horse,

the hounds devouring anything that came near

as they had done since the last string of bodies,

their caretaker wishing they would die,

hating them but fearing them,

feeding them still as was his charge

when the fat man’s father hired him,

a true disciple that one,

tending the madness here like a garden,

feeding the soil with blood and pain

until that fateful day

when the bone flowers would bloom again—

The force of the thoughts drilling into his head drove him to one knee. Blood trickled from his nose, his mouth burned with the taste of battery acid and

—Jack

Jack

Jackie Boy

Jack and Diane

Jack be nimble

they come for you

they wait until you sleep

and then drag you from your workshop

by hook or by crook

and only the shadows will mourn your passing—

His eyes itched, tears pouring like someone had turned a shower on full blast, ears ringing with

—the Scarecrow’s roaches return,

the whore’s legs both welcome and birth them,

and the walls weep torrents

as the earth turns

and the dreams come to an end

my darling

my sweet sweet darling

help me awaken

these nightmares are splitting me in twain DOYOUFUCKINGHEARMEMYCHILDIHAVETAKENYOUROFFERINGANDWEAREBOUND—

When he came to, Margot stood over him, her eyes as raw as fresh meat, her face as pale as bone. She wore a green robe and crossed her arms over her breasts.

He struggled to sit. “Margot? What happened?”

She sniffed back a tear.

“What?”

She turned and closed her door. “I suppose it’s about time.”

He pressed his palms against the wall and fought to stand. “What are you—?”

“Shhh….” She kissed him. “I dreamed all of this. Do you have the dreams? Probably don’t remember them— most don’t. I think that’s why we were drawn to one another. I can remember, but you…You will be my memory.” She took his hand and led him down the hall.

“Where are we going?”

“To gaze out over Paris.”

“…Eiffel?”

His mind struggled to press the pieces of the puzzle together, but the picture wouldn’t form. Something important was missing, some scattered pieces that others in the building held, who he couldn’t say, but his failure to collect the pieces would be disastrous.

When they stepped from the elevator on the top floor, he was struck by how cold it was, the icy wind grappling with dust across the floor. The second thing that struck him was that the sheet of white canvas was gone.

Margot led him to the couch and they sat. Her hand found his and gripped it tight. Across the field, storm clouds rolled through the sky but did not break.

“I feel like I was supposed to teach you something.”

He squeezed her hand. “About what?”

She shrugged. “If I knew
that
…”

“What are we doing up here?”

“I wanted you to see.”

“See what?”

She leaned over and kissed him again.

When her lips retreated and his eyes opened, her tears still fresh from where their cheeks had pressed together, she was gone.

He jumped to his feet and looked around.

She wasn’t there.

He glanced out at the field—

—and saw her walking through the tall grass and onto the pavement of what could have one day been a packed and crowded parking lot. She stepped to the doors of the supermarket, looked up at him, and smiled.

The doors parted, and she stepped inside.

“NO!”

He was in the hall again, on the ground. His head rang like when his father had punched him, his face slick with tears.

My tears? Or hers?

Margot’s door was cracked open. He struggled to his feet and pressed it open farther.

“Margot?”

He could feel by the stillness in the air that she wasn’t here.

He rushed past the elevator and into the stairwell. The echo of his feet pounding down the stairs was like a crowd following him. He sprinted by the pool, through the grass that he had avoided since the accident, stopping short on the pavement.

The doors were wide open.

A cold breeze blew by him.

He lost his breath when a snake slithered past his feet.

It leaped through the air, flying several feet before coming to rest on the concrete again. He was wrong, it was no snake, but a long fabric belt, the same color as the robe that Margot had been wearing in his —what? Dream? Vision?

He stared into the black. There was no movement, no shapes. There weren’t even the shades of black that shadows and darkness usually held, no gradation as the light faltered. Light simply ceased at the space where the doors parted.

Something whispered, faint, barely like a voice at all, as soft as two pieces of fabric brushing against one another.

The breeze blew stronger, bits of dry leaves swirling over the concrete, dancing some obscene dance to a tune that he thought he could
almost
hear.

The whispering grew, not in volume, but texture. It thickened as layer upon layer of soft, rustling voice was added, a veritable chorus communicating from the black.

He fell to his knees. They collided with the concrete with the sound of a hollow drum, the pain stabbing upwards into his thighs and vibrating down through his shins. He registered this, but did not
feel
it. All he could feel was the cold, the dark, and the gentle tickling of the hushed voices speaking from inside.

He knelt there and listened.

In the distance, a coyote howled a long and mournful dirge.

Chapter Fifteen

“Hi, you’ve reached Dennis. Leave a message—”

She hung up and threw the phone across the room. It collided with her couch, bounced once, and thumped onto the carpet.

Smart move, Eileen.

She walked over and picked it up. Nothing seemed broken.

She was so angry she could hardly think. She couldn’t remember the last time she had spoken to Dennis. All of her calls went to voicemail. He was never at work when she went by. He didn’t respond to her e-mails or Facebook posts. As far as she was concerned, they were through.

But she needed to know why.

Her emotions had been like an airplane running out of fuel, traveling up and down between pure rage, excruciating sorrow, and a deep and powerful feeling inside of her that said something was wrong.

She had spent far too long waiting for him. If they were done then so be it, but goddammit he was going to tell her
why
. She had thought they had something special.

The tears came again, threatening to break over her. She sniffed them back, grabbed her purse, and headed down to her car.

A half an hour later she pulled up the steep hill toward that God-forsaken building, the sky already darkening behind it, the setting sun casting its odd light on the thing in such a way that she felt it sneered at her.

The idea that the building itself tormented her was not a new one, but she had been giving it more and more weight lately.

Her nightmare had only been one of the reasons that sent her out researching this place in her spare time. The other, of course, was Dennis. Past experience told her that he had likely met someone new, but the part of her that worried about him pointed to the building as the cause of whatever psychological rollercoaster he was riding.

After she had found the information on the atrocities at Camp Opey, she had been compelled to keep digging. Every page seemed to reveal some new and horrible story. There was, of course, that awful doctor and his whore of a mistress. Though some of the details varied from Margot’s story, all of the high points were there. His suicide note had made quite a splash with the local newspapers.

The next mention of the place was in a series of stories from nineteen fifty-eight. Local farmers had been trying to have Raynham torn down and the land auctioned to one of them for years, but talk of opening a new general care hospital in the ruins had kept the building in legal limbo. Then, that summer, a group of homeless squatters, “hobos” the newspaper had called them, had taken up residence. The community used their presence as a further reason to destroy the old place and, in order to settle things down, the police drove up there one morning to force the squatters out. What they found was as strange as anything else in the history of the place.

The squatters were discovered in the basement, their bodies ripped and torn to shreds, their bones gnawed on, bits of each of them missing. The police said it looked like a pack of wild dogs had gotten into the building. That in and of itself wasn’t so odd, but what was “peculiar,” as one patrolman called it, was the fact that all thirteen men had been found lying in a circle around a burned out fire. Not a single one of them had tried to run or flee. It was as if each of them had resigned themselves to their fate, gladly allowing whatever had gotten in to devour them.