Insanity (2 page)

“It’s all right,” Leslie told them, easing up on her combing. “It’s just Maintenance caving in those old tunnels under the
Administration Building.” Her deep tone rippled across the stone floor like the kind of thunder that made people smile and sleep deeper at night. She was around sixty years old and had come to work at Lincoln when she was twenty-three. She had known some of these patients for most of her life—and theirs. They stopped rolling, or at least stopped fussing and looking worried.

The building rattled again, and this time the lights blinked off. The few seconds of darkness before the backup generator kicked on made me gasp. We had no real windows down here, just a few rows of glass panes so high they touched the ceiling—and it was October, so it got dark almost as soon as we finished serving dinner.

When Leslie grabbed my arm, I jumped.

“You got to stay calm,” she told me in a gentle voice lined with steel. “They’re helpless, and they don’t know what’s going on. All this jackhammering and blasting, it’s likely to give some poor soul a heart failure.” She handed the comb back to me. “As nervous as you get, you really planning to work your first double to night, this close to Halloween?”

Why was my heart beating so hard? I tried to answer but worried I would squeak at the thought of spending the night in the hospital, so I nodded instead.

“Well, okay.” Leslie shook her head. “You’re cut out to work with my little peoples down here, but I don’t know if you got what it takes for night shift. When the bells start ringing and you’re runnin’ the dark halls pissin’ yourself before you can get to a bathroom, you remember I warned you.”

“The bells don’t ring.” I went back to combing Miss Sally’s
head, careful not to tangle my bracelet in her hair. “They told us so in orientation. Hasn’t been a sound out of Tower Cottage for thirty years.”

Miss Sally started talking to her picture, all little whispers and laughs. I caught “bells” a few times.

“Thirty years is what they
say
.” Leslie winked at me and headed back to the patient whose hair she’d been combing out before she came to help me with Miss Sally.

“Bells,” Miss Sally whispered again, staring down at her photo.

When Lincoln was built back in 1802, the superintendent’s residence got a tower that had three big bells at the top. They rang for wake-up, meals, and bedtime, five times a day, regular as the clock on the face of that odd-colored limestone. If the bells rang any other time, people in Never were supposed to bolt their shutters, lock their doors, and come help look for whichever patient had escaped. Back then, four thousand patients lived at the hospital, some from the day they were born to the day they died. Today, we had maybe three hundred patients, mostly people too old or too sick to go to placements in Never or the surrounding towns in southern Kentucky. Tower Cottage was closed around 1980 because it cost too much to keep it in good repair. Lincoln used it to store files and records now.

“Don’t walk at night,” Miss Sally told her photo as I finally got a good start on a braid. “If the bells ring,
don’t walk at night.
”

My fingers went still.

Did I hear that right?

Miss Sally talked in sentences, but they were usually all gibberish with some names and real words now and then.

“Don’t walk at night,” she said again, then nodded her head like she was agreeing with somebody.

I let go of her hair and walked around her wheelchair until I could kneel in front of her and look into that carved-marble face. Her eyes were fixed on her photo, and her lips were moving.

Another explosion sounded in the distance, then rippled through the old hospital like a storm about to break.

“Hope they know what they’re doing over there,” Leslie said loud enough for me to hear her across the hall. “Them tunnels been a menace for years.” Without taking a breath, she went straight into, “It’s all right, everybody. It’s okay. Even if they knock that old tower on its head, we’ll be fine down here.”

“Don’t walk at night,” Miss Sally whispered to me as she eased her knotty fingers onto my bracelet. She touched the wood and took a breath, then looked at me—
really
looked at me. The film of confusion cleared from her eyes.

Chills broke across my neck and arms. My mouth fell open. I needed to say something back to her, but I couldn’t think of anything that made sense.

Miss Sally held out her photo as though she wanted me to take it.

No way.
No way.

She shook the photo at me and whispered, “He wants to talk to you.”

I absolutely could not move.

I knew Miss Sally had an illness, that she had been hearing voices and talking to that picture since way before I was even alive. I’d heard the tales of how Miss Sally had been married and had kids, but her mind went south after her last baby, and she started running naked in the streets and screaming about “haints” and the “other side” and listening to voices nobody else could hear. I had no idea what they called her sickness back then, but her diagnosis now was all modern and official: schizoaffective disorder, bipolar type. She had never gotten better on any medicine, and she had never been able to go home again. Her husband visited her every day until sometime in 1952, when he just stopped coming.

Miss Sally was a very sweet but very ill woman who couldn’t help that she believed in things like talking pictures. It was my job to stay in reality and help her. I needed to be kind to her and comfort her and not upset her on purpose by ignoring the amazing gift of her holding out that picture to me, but I didn’t want to look at it. I really, really didn’t.

“Forest.” Leslie’s voice sounded calm but urgent. “She’s offering you a piece of her heart. Go on, now. Take it, then give it back to her when she wants it.”

“The bells,” Miss Sally said so that only I could hear her, and this time she almost poked the picture into my eyeball.

With the hand she wasn’t holding on to, I took the photo. It was just an old picture. What was wrong with me? I could be such an idiot.

When I looked down at the picture, the man was so blurred from wear that I couldn’t make out many features. He was
wearing a hat and maybe overalls. His head was turned looking toward a shack next to a little cornfield.

I squinted. The picture seemed to get a little clearer. Definitely a hat. Overalls for sure. His hair was cropped close to his head, and he had big ears. Kinda cute. The overalls were dark blue and looked new, and his shirtsleeves were clean, as if he’d gotten all dressed up to come see Miss Sally. The shack was more like a small wooden house. The corn was healthy. I could smell it, sort of a dirty, earthy scent, and I could smell new jeans, too, the cotton fresh and still stiff and itchy.

Do you know who you are?
The voice in my head didn’t even scare me, because I knew he would talk like that, all deep and playful.
Do you know what you can do?

And then the man in the picture turned to look at me.

The world shook.

Chairs rattled against the ward walls, and the lights went dark with a loud fizz and pop. I dropped the photo like it was made of blue fire, and Miss Sally let go of my bracelet and started wailing.

“Bells!” she shrieked. “Bells!”

The hospital bells were ringing.

My right mind told me it was just the bell clappers jittering like the chairs had done because of the explosions Maintenance was setting off down in the tunnels. My idiot mind told me a picture talked to me, then looked at me and made the bells start ringing.

“You have got to be kidding,” Leslie muttered.

The sound of her sneakers squeaking as she ran to calm
scared patients was the only thing that kept me from breaking into shrieks louder than Miss Sally’s. I felt around wildly in the dark, scooting my hands across the floor until I found her picture. I snatched it up and pushed it into her hands.

“Here it is. It’s okay.” God, I didn’t sound calm at all. “It’s okay, Miss Sally.” She kept screaming. My heart thumped in my throat so hard it hurt. “Miss Sally.” I held on to her fingers, closing them gently around the picture. “I hear the bells,” I told her, “but they’re just moving because of that explosion.”

“Don’t walk at night,” she shouted.

The backup generator hummed to life, and the lights came back on. Miss Sally stared at me, but the white film of confusion was closing over her eyes again. She pulled her hands away from mine, glanced at her picture, then smiled and gazed off into the distance like she always did.

Before I could react to or even try to understand what had just happened, the nurse came flying out of the office at the far end of the hall. Arleen looked like a mean pumpkin in her orange scrubs, and I almost groaned at the sight of her fuzzy blond hair. She wasn’t my favorite person. Always loud, never paying attention to the patients—

“Leslie,” she yelled, obviously jacked up about something. “Leslie!”

I heard Leslie’s irritated “What?” from inside a patient’s room to my left.

Arleen bounced up and down on her toes like a little kid. “They found a body in the tunnels!”

I got up slowly, not believing that at all, but Arleen was
chattering about the Kentucky State Police coming as fast as they could get here and there being bones—a pile of bones.

Leslie stuck her head out of the patient’s room. Her usually calm face was twisted in complete annoyance. “Say what, woman? We got a situation going on here—”

“A body.” Arleen talked right over her, clapping her hands together once. “There’s a body in the tunnels underneath Lincoln Psychiatric!”

Chapter Two

It was one o’clock in the morning before I got my first break on my overtime shift. Leslie was long gone, and I was on my own as I walked the long corridor between the geriatric ward and the canteen. The hospital basement was quiet, with only a single strip of night lamps glowing along the baseboards.

Flashing blue police lights punched through the windows near the ceiling, keeping a clockwork rhythm on the walls. The Kentucky State Police had been on campus all night so far. Arleen, who was working a long shift, told me they had roped off Administration and the tunnel with the bones.

Bones.

I didn’t want to go there. I had never been so aware that Lincoln Psychiatric Hospital was five miles from anything, smack in the middle of six hundred acres owned by the state, surrounded by a big stone fence. The patients sensed how nervous we were, and they knew the blue lights didn’t mean anything good. We’d had
to climb on chairs and hang sheets over the ward windows so they would stop crying and screaming and settle in for bed.

My footsteps banged too loud against the stone floor, and my breathing seemed to echo. The hallways weren’t heated in non-patient areas, so every time I blew out air, fog trailed across my vision. When I rubbed my palms against my blue sleeves, the flashing police lights made me look dead and alive, dead and alive.

The picture. Miss Sally talking in sentences. The Tower Cottage bells ringing. The
picture.
What had I really seen? I rubbed my arms harder, trying to ignore the freaky blue lights. I wasn’t—well, I didn’t like to use the word “crazy,” because it seemed disrespectful now that I worked at Lincoln. I didn’t have a mental illness. At least, I didn’t think I did. Okay, so I got a little jumpy sometimes, but I was trying to eat and pay rent and save for college. I had a right to be jumpy.

Forest.

The whisper came from behind me.

I stumbled, then stopped and turned quick to look.

The hallway behind me was totally empty. Nothing but closed office doors, blue lights strobing against the dark walls, and at the very, very far end of the hall, the clothing room where we kept donations for the patients. That door was shut, too, and locked, like it was every night from end of day shift to the start of the next.

As I stared at it, it seemed to move out, then in, like the room was breathing.

Pain stabbed into my chest, right where my heart throbbed.

This isn’t happening.

I sucked in a breath and let it out. Fog swirled around my face. The air smelled like ... pine? Cleanser, maybe. But it seemed fresh and not as strong as the stuff Housekeeping used to scrub the bathrooms.

“Nothing,” I said out loud, and almost screamed at the sound of my own voice.

The door at the end of the hallway stayed still, like doors are supposed to do.

I was creeping myself out. I spun back toward the canteen and started walking faster. I tried not to think about the door or imagine something in the hall behind me, walking quietly, ghosting my steps, moving forward, moving faster, faster—

I hit the canteen door with both palms and shoved it open as I ran inside. I didn’t even give it time to swing shut, slamming it myself and holding on. I even thought about using my keys to turn the lock.

Nothing pushed against the door.

Of course it didn’t.

I hadn’t just heard a whisper in the hallway, and Miss Sally’s picture did
not
look at me and talk to me.

So why was I shaking?

Because I was cold.

Time to jam my quarters into the vintage beverage dispenser, get my hot chocolate, and take my meal break. Except I couldn’t make myself stop holding the canteen door shut.

Oh, jeez. What if there were people in here watching me act like an idiot?

I turned to my left and glanced down the long, semidark room. Tables lined the right-hand side, built into the walls with booth seats, all secured so they couldn’t be knocked over or picked up and thrown. More vending machines were on the left. Nobody was watching, thank God.

Seconds passed. I made myself breathe, then finally took my hands off the canteen door. It was hard to walk away without first dragging something over to block the door, but it’s not like I actually could—even the trash bins were bolted to the floor.

I walked slowly, quietly, listening for extra noise each time I took a step. I didn’t hear anything, though my heartbeat was loud enough to drum for a metal band. The hot-beverage machine was at the end of the row, and as I passed the first soft-drink machine, lights flashed and gears whirred, and I almost died right there.