Asylum Lake (18 page)

Brady had always wanted an Ouija Board as a kid. Something about the thought of communicating with ghosts had always intrigued him. Maybe it was his obsession with reading Stephen King, from haunted cars and hotels to vampires, the dead seemed very much alive in the works of his favorite author.

Alone in the confines of the asylum’s icy morgue, Brady clutched Ellis’s bracelet, unsure of how one actually goes about summoning a spirit.
Hell, if a five-year-old can do it.
He mused, thinking of Abby
.
Then I sure as hell ought to be able to figure it out.

He peered around the room, noting the bank of metal drawers on the far wall. Nine iron boxes, he cringed, imagining what they may still contain.
No way am I checking to see if they’re empty!

The light from Brady’s flashlight danced around the shadow filled room, reflecting off the oversized porcelain table dominating the center of the tiled floor. Rusted stains traced down the table’s sides, spreading in jagged fingers across the cold floor. Brady was left to imagine what gruesome acts had been committed; flesh and bone memories leaving the stench of death to linger long afterward in the abandoned room.

While working at The Tribune, Brady had on occasion found himself lurking about the Cook County Morgue. Always nasty and full of god-awful smells, morgues were notorious for dark humor and loose lips. Here, however, in the crypt beneath the Lake View Asylum, secrets were plentiful and Brady was in no mood for laughter.

The room was much bigger than Brady had imagined even possible. Creeping forward into the darkness, he expected his light to eventually fall across a wall or doorway. Instead, the thin beam continued to slice deeper into the darkness. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity, the glow from Brady’s flashlight revealed an end to the massive room.

Although still tiled in the same pale green color, the far wall was stained a deep rust color. Tracing his light along the length of wall, Brady was sickened by what it revealed. Anchored deep into the walls, heavy chains hung, ending in thick manacles.

Brady followed the trail of chains down the wall, his light dimming as it neared the corner. He crept forward, convinced that something waited in the shadows. His clumsy feet stumbled through debris. Redirecting the light to the floor before him, he found himself amidst a sea of skeletal remains.

“What the fuck?” he wondered, raising the light from the floor and back to the shadows ahead. Through the gloom, two red orbs blazed like beacons. With a final nervous step, the light from Brady’s flashlight fell across the last set of chains. Clasped together by time in the rusted manacles, with rotted rags hanging from its shoulders hung the skeletal remains of what had assuredly been a most unfortunate soul. From within its empty eye sockets, a pulsing red light emanated. Brady heard the scraping of bones as the skull twisted, turning its attention upon him.

The bracelet in Brady’s hand came to life, snaking its way tightly about his wrist, biting into the exposed flesh. Brady looked from the glowing eyes to his arm and back again a chilling voice tight with rage filling the room.

“I do believe you requested a dance.”

Abby awoke from her nap screaming. Gruff immediately began to howl as April and Maddie came running in from the next room.

“Right here, baby, mommy’s right here,” April sat cautiously beside her troubled daughter, still weary from their last encounter. She took Gruff’s lack of a growl as a permissive gesture on the part of her daughter’s furry guardian and wrapped her arms soothingly around the child. Maddie hovered nearby hands clasped nervously over her face.

“It’s okay, baby,” April stroked Abby’s blond hair, rocking her back and forth on the edge of the couch. “Mommy’s right here. Nothing is going to hurt you.”

Abby slowly caught her breath, wiping her tear-stained cheeks on her mother’s shoulder. “It’s not me, mommy,’ she said between sobs, “it’s Brady.”

April looked nervously from her daughter to Maddie. The Sheriff’s wife shook her head slowly, not understanding the child’s fears.

“What is it, Abby? Why are you afraid for Brady?”

The answer came with a crack of thunder overhead, accompanied by a bolt of lightning which instantly made the darkness beyond the windows light like fire. As the light exploded outside, inside the world went dark. All of the electrical appliances went dead as the power went out with a spinning finality that left behind nothing by a murky silence. April, Abby and Gruff all looked to Ms. Griggs as the sudden silence was pierced by the first shill sound of the warning sirens erupting through the storm. Maddie ushered her guests to the basement.

Brady was unsure which disturbed him more, the blood dripping to the tile floor from the constriction of the plastic bracelet about his wrist or the surreal conversation he was preparing to undertake with the mass of bones chained to the wall.

“Well,” Brady glanced down at his bracelet biting into his wrist, “can I assume that this blood debt has been repaid?”

The voice in the room laughed.

“I seem to recall your grandfather being equally as humorous,” the disembodied voice stated. “Of course, his laughter died with a single bullet. Pity, really. Much of this…nastiness could have been avoided if he had not taken the coward’s way out.”

Brady’s years of verbal sparring with his father-in-law had proven very enlightening. He could now recognize and deflect goading attempts for confrontation. While the ghostly voice teased, Brady contemplated possible next moves. His reckless planning had only taken him so far; roughly here and he quickly found his once clear thoughts now overtaken by panic.

“That’s one way to look at it, Ellis,” Brady was slowly backing away from the skeletal form chained to the wall. “I can call you Ellis, right?”

The red orbs brightened as the skeleton’s boney arms rose, snapping the chains free from the wall. With two staggering steps, the thing that was Ellis stood before Brady.

“Why yes,” it hissed, “that would be just fine.” It leaned closer, “I do believe you were about to make a point.”

Brady paused, collecting his thoughts, before raising his eyes and setting his chin. “Cowardice is one way to look at his actions,” Brady stated, shaking atop two very unsteady legs. “Although it seems to me that it took a fair amount of courage to pay your price. Blood for blood, right – that’s the going rate for vengeance these days?”

Ellis’s eyes burned with rage. “What do you know of vengeance? Of the price one must pay to find it? Only a man who has lost everything looks to vengeance to fill that void.” A boney hand shot forward, grasping Brady by the wrist. “The time has come, my clever young friend, for you to learn of loss.”

Frank stumbled forward through the darkness, no sign of the good Reverend.
Crazy old man is on his own.
Frank concluded more than a little put off by the man’s disappearance.

The .38 in former lawman’s hand provided an illusory comfort; he knew that bullets would be of very little help given the current situation.

Frank’s worried attempts to reach Brady by phone had proven fruitless, the savage storm outside was surely not helping the situation. Frank did his best not to worry about Jeff’s chances of riding out the brutal storm unscathed in his lightning rod of a mobile tin can.

As he approached the hallway leading to the morgue, he finally heard voices, barely audible above the sound of the storm. Brady’s usual confident tone was shaken, but still easily recognizable. The other voice, although having just the slightest hint of familiarity, remained a mystery. Frank halted, dousing his light, and waiting for his eyes to adjust to the darkness. A few moments later he crept forward, gripping his useless .38, and softly humming the theme from Ghostbusters.

Brady’s world gave way to blackness as he drifted between consciousness and…something else. The closest his racing mind could come to quantify the experience was a frenzied sense of déjà vu; everything seemed foreign yet familiar at the same time.

My flashlight! Where’s my fucking flashlight.
He panicked, urging his eyes to more quickly adjust to the darkness. Ellis’s chilling voice responded.

“No need for light, Tanner. It is through my eyes that we look and they are more than accustomed to the darkness.”

Brady tried unsuccessfully to close his eyes against the disturbing vision that was slowly coming into focus before him. It took a moment for his racing mind to settle, but when it did he knew that what lay before him was no hallucination, but more remarkably, a memory.

Cradling the squirming bundle of rags against his chest, Ellis knelt in the back of the ambulance. Emily’s cries for help, once intermingled so strangely with the raucous laughter of the men, had ceased. In its place an empty silence reigned.

The Packard roared to life, once again lurching toward what Ellis could only imagine was the asylum. The car’s previous stop revealed little, although the sound of a seagull impressed upon Ellis a proximity to the lake. Beyond that clue, the whereabouts of his beloved remained a mystery.

Ellis’s grip on reality was slipping; the events of the last several hours replaying on a continuous loop in his weary mind. His thoughts bounded from one memory to the next; Emily strapped to the table in the morgue, Clovis’ bloodied hands between her outspread thighs, their escape through the trees beneath the burning sun, the demeaning encounter with local law enforcement, and the final separation in the back of the bloodstained ambulance. These brutal images, although shared with the love of his life, would forever be burned into his soul; a wound beyond healing.