Insanity (11 page)

I made breakfast, put Mama in the car, and took her to spend the day helping clean our church, just in case reporters figured out we were what was left of Eff Leer’s family and showed up at our door. I didn’t want Mama bothered, especially if I wasn’t there to look after her. I talked to Trina again before she went to class, and she gave me her love. I went by Starbucks and hassled Jessie while he played his online game. He gave me the finger. He also gave me a long lecture about the fact my grandfather was dead, and nobody was carrying on his evil. The kid probably got lost. They’d find him farting around some lake or clubhouse, and everything would be fine.

I wanted to believe that. I really, really did.

That afternoon, I went to work. When I got to Lincoln and found
Tunnel
next to my name on the assignment board, I wasn’t surprised. Jessie wasn’t on the schedule until Sunday, and there was no sign of Captain James, so I was on my own.

A bunch of security officers got to the time clock at the same second as me, so I waited my turn, swiped my badge, and headed out of the main building for the long walk to my post. They didn’t stare at me or start whispering behind my back as I went, so I figured everything was okay, at least for now.

It wasn’t sunny and hot like the day before. It was cloudy and dark and hot—the kind of day where the sky turns to metal and the air stinks like scummy puddles. By the time I got to the back section of the Rec Hall, sweat stung my eyes, and I wanted a water from the cooler on the card table in the worst way.

The guy stationed at the table saw me coming, gave me a pretend salute, and ambled away as I huffed the last few yards to the chair. When I opened the cooler, I found a half-empty bottle of water. Great. Whoever that guy was, I hoped he didn’t have typhoid, and I killed what was left in a few gulps. Then I loaded some ice into the bottle and set it on the table to melt.

I sat down and checked out the area. Somebody had picked up the plastic horseshoes and stacked them near the metal stake in the sandpit. Otherwise, it looked pretty much the same as the last time I was here, with the big field bordered by woods, the basketball court, and the two volleyball nets. Everything had a steely gray coloring because of the weather, and the thick-feeling air made the silence seem too loud.

I glanced at the hole in the Rec Hall wall that led down into the tunnels. Still taped—wait. Did something just move in there?

I hit my feet so fast the ice bottle tumbled off the table. Something
was
moving. Walking up through the darkness from the warren underneath Lincoln. Pain stabbed through my ribs. I grabbed at my chest, catching the thorn pendant in my fist. Could guys my age have heart attacks? ’Cause—

Wait a minute.

As the thing in the shadows came closer, I could make out the yellow shirt and black pants and ball cap that matched what I was wearing.

Captain James hurried around the edges of the tape, his shoulder to me, then his back. He didn’t wave or slow down or anything, just kept walking. Man, but he didn’t look right. Too thin. Too tall. I almost couldn’t tell the color of his skin. For a few seconds it seemed as dark as mine, then lighter, then too light, like if I squinted, I could see right through him.

My breath hitched. I thought about running.

As if he could feel me staring holes through his shoulder blades, Captain James stopped at the corner of the Rec Hall. He turned toward me slow, like he was trying to decide what he was going to do if somebody was watching him. Never mind how hot it was, I turned completely cold as he looked at me, smirked, and lifted his hand in greeting.

I let go of the thorn and lifted mine in answer.

I was waving to skin on a skull—a skull missing two teeth in the front. The pointy ones on top.

It’s in my head. It’s not real.

I wanted to yell, but my throat was dry, my voice not working. Air whistled out between my open lips.

Captain James didn’t stand around long enough to turn normal again. He left me with my hand in the air like a fool. My fingers curled into a fist. I kept my eyes on the spot where I thought I had seen the skull thing dressed in the Captain James suit. Had it really been there? Was it all in my head?

I lowered my arm and counted under my breath until I got to one hundred. That always helped me not to be afraid of weird stuff when I was little. This time, it just helped me feel stupid. I pulled my cell phone out of my pocket and touched Trina’s contact picture. We weren’t supposed to use cell phones when we were around patients, but the only crazy person out back of the Rec Hall was me.

It rang three times, then went to voice mail. She was still in class. I listened to her sweet voice tell me she wasn’t able to take my call, and that I should leave a message. I didn’t trust myself to make sense, so I hung up instead of talking to her. Then I called Jessie and asked him to snag me some waters and a bag of ice and some grub and drive them to my station.

Half an hour later, when I saw him jog around the building toward me, I started breathing normal again.

“Dude!” Jessie said when he saw the hole I was guarding. “That’s ginormous.” He handed me the heavy bag of water and ice. “Think I’ll get in trouble for being on campus when I’m not on the clock?”

“Not if you’re bringing me lunch.” I put the bag on the table.
It was totally stupid, but I had a sense that the tunnel—or maybe whatever was down inside it—was behaving because Jessie was here. No more weird pretend security captains crawling to the surface, no repeat of the creepy ice-cream truck music from yesterday, no vortex sucking me down to Hades. Nothing. It just sat there, all innocent. It might as well be smiling at me.

Jessie started loading the ice and waters into the cooler, and I just kept staring at the opening to the tunnel. “My grandmother whacked my grandfather.”

“No joke?” He didn’t even slow down on arranging the ice. That was the thing about Jessie. He could be completely annoying, but he had no mean judgment in him anywhere.

I sat in the folding chair, pawed through the snack bags and sandwiches Jessie had brought, and grabbed myself a roast beef and cheddar with sour cream and onion chips.

Jessie plopped down on the ground beside the table, found himself a sandwich, and picked a bag of cheese puffs. After we had eaten for a minute, both of us keeping our gazes fixed on the tunnel opening, I said, “I got on Mama last night and finally made her talk. My grandmother took an ax to the murderer, then set him on fire.”

A small laugh popped out of Jessie, almost like a cough. A few flecks of cheese puff hit the grass in front of him, looking redder than his hair. “Go, Grandma Betty.” He wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “Bet she saved a lot of kids—but that must have been hard for her.”

I told him everything Mama had finally shared, even the part
about Grandma carrying some of my grandfather’s head. He didn’t vomit or anything. He also didn’t take his eyes off the tunnel.

“When she was dying,” I went on, trying to crank out what was worrying my brain, “she said something I thought was crazy talk like always, but now I’m wondering.”

Jessie didn’t say anything. He was waiting, letting me get everything out in one big wheeze. That was good, because if he interrupted me, I would stop talking.

I put down the last piece of my sandwich. “She said, ‘What I started, you got to finish.’”

Now it was my turn to wait. Jessie stopped eating his cheese puffs and finally tore his eyes off the tunnel long enough to glance in my direction. After another few seconds, he shrugged. “If she cut off his head and burned his body, I’m pretty sure she finished what she started.”

“Yeah. I kinda thought that, too.”
But that tunnel plays ice-cream truck music when you’re not around to make it behave, and Grandma Betty’s ghost showed up to shame me last night, and now a kid’s gone missing.

I had to be losing my mind. No other explanation for how crazy I was thinking. Something like sadness crawled into my chest, mostly because I knew better than to lay the really nutty stuff in Jessie’s lap. I shared everything with him and Trina. Almost.

“Your grandmother was probably all confused and scared that monster was coming to get her,” Jessie said, turning his
attention back to his cheese puffs and the tunnel. “That Jonas Brown kid—no ghost took him. I’m telling you, he just got lost or something.”

“Everybody in Never probably thinks my grandfather’s back.” I shook my head. “Nothing like being the bogeyman’s grandson.”

“Sucks to be you.” Jessie kept eating until rain started to fall. Nothing heavy. Mostly random spatters, but it was enough to get Jessie scrambling to his feet.

He helped me stow the few remaining bags of chips and pieces of sandwich in the bag, scrape out enough cooler ice to stow it in the Igloo, and lock the lid down before he took off jogging back to his half-wrecked Mustang. He said he was parked close and wouldn’t get too wet. That was more than I could say for myself.

I made sure the communications radio was fastened into its leather case, pulled my ball cap tighter over my eyes, and got ready to ride out the wet. No way was I taking shelter at the edges of that tunnel.

Jessie hadn’t been gone five minutes when the ice-cream truck music started. “Pop Goes the Weasel,” just like before. I glared at the tunnel opening, more pissed than anything, but I could feel ... something. Pulling at me. Teasing me. Almost daring me.

“You can knock it off,” I said, refusing to think about who or what I was really talking to. “I won’t be falling for that mess.”

The music hesitated.

My heart nearly stopped beating in the silence.

Then the creepy tune started right back again, slower. My brain filled in each word as the notes played.

All ... around ... the mulberry bush ...

“Not working. I’m not coming down there.”

Seconds passed between each note, like the tunnel was mocking me.

The monkey ... chased ... the ... weasel ...

“You’re dead, and you’re staying dead.”

And I refuse to lose my mind.

My whole body was shaking.

I forced myself to look away, running my gaze along the Rec Hall wall. I didn’t have to look straight at it to save patients, right? I could glance all around the hole to be sure nobody was getting close.

Maybe if I didn’t stare directly into that darkness—

The mon-key ... thought ... it was ... all ... in ... fun...

POP! goes the weasel.

The last notes rushed together, loud and off-key. I winced and covered my ears.

When I finally pulled my hands away from my face, I heard something different rising from the earth below Lincoln Psychiatric.

Tiny, halting sniffles. Little choking sobs.

Oh God.

It was the sound of a little kid crying.

Chapter Fourteen

I didn’t slow as I crashed through the yellow tape. My fingers fumbled with the flashlight on my belt, and as I ran down under the floor of the Rec Hall, under Lincoln Psychiatric, I managed to keep the thin beam shining ahead of me.

The floor was brick. The walls were brick. Old, dark red. Stained. I didn’t want to think about it. Everything was arched and rounded, about the size of a train tunnel. The air was hot, then got cooler as I outran the gray glow from the world above me. The flashlight’s beam seemed to get smaller. The air smelled like dirt, then stinky water. The walls were getting closer.

Old bulbs lined the ceiling, long and broken. My breathing sounded too loud, and the echoes of my running footsteps ricocheted on the brick. I felt like I was crushing the noise I was trying to find—the cries of a kid.

Please don’t let this be happening.

The kid might be Jonas Brown. This might be real. Or I
might be crazy. But if there was even a tiny chance the kid had found his way down into the tunnel, I couldn’t let him die. My blood, my family—if I had to die to save a little boy, I’d be paying a debt we owed.

My heart thumped as darkness crowded in on me. My flash-light punched at shadows too dark to light up, and the crying echoed ahead of me. The floor slanted down, and the walls got even closer. I wished I could run faster. I wanted to bellow and make all the stone drop away until I came face-to-face with the kid.

The notes of “Pop Goes the Weasel” started plinking like somebody had opened a demented music box. If I got my hands on whoever was playing that junk, I’d choke them. Made it hard for me to hear the kid, but there was only one way to run—straight ahead and down. It was cold now. My teeth started to chatter. I swept the flashlight left, then right, then left again. If I held out my arms, I’d hit the brick walls to either side of me. The tunnel was getting narrower and narrower.

The crying got louder. The kid sounded scared.

I growled and ran faster, the flashlight beam barely picking out fallen chunks of brick before I tripped over them. A chicken voice in the back of my head wondered how many kids heard that same music from my grandfather’s ice-cream truck right before they died.

What was
wrong
with somebody that would make them kill little children? Or chop up their husband with an ax? What kind of diseased genes did I have, anyway? Had to be why I was crazy.
Had to be why I was hearing things now, but there was nothing I could do except run down that tunnel, because it was real. I didn’t care what anyone thought, because it was
happening.

My fists tightened as my arms pumped, making the flash-light jerk up and down. Twisted shadows dangled toward me. Snakes?

I dodged.

The shadows got bigger, and the space got so tight I had to slow down. Soon I was walking with my shoulders hunched forward so I’d fit through the tunnel, my elbows barely missing bricks. I was burning up and sweating even though it was frigid. The giant snakes weren’t snakes at all. I could see that now, having managed to shine the flashlight high enough. I was looking at tree roots, and stumbling over the bricks and mortar the roots had dislodged.