Insanity (24 page)

Levi swallowed once and blinked, and I found myself waiting for that bloody tear on his cheek to drip onto the patio. “Seems like right and wrong don’t matter much now. What matters is getting rid of Carl Mahan before he hurts somebody else.”

My brain tried to latch on to the reality that Levi was looking at the man who murdered him, and that man was my father. If Imogene hadn’t been whatever she was—if she hadn’t been able to cross spirits back—Levi would be dead right now, and my father would still be killing anybody he thought had Madoc blood.

“I’ll stop Mahan,” my father said. “Then you can do with me as you will.”

“You can’t do it alone,” Forest said. “He’s a shade, and you can’t cross him over.”

Addie considered this, then murmured, “Maybe we can, if I find the right spell. I’ll study my books, and Xavier’s, too.”

“We don’t have time for that.” Levi kept his eyes averted. “We’ll have to work together.”

Right and wrong don’t matter much now.
The words wouldn’t stop running through my mind. I fidgeted with my fingers. “I don’t think we can use our spells,” I told Addie. “They might work, but they just as easily might give Mahan more power.”

“I want to go to the hospital,” Forest said, surprising me and everybody else.

Levi turned toward her, his mouth slightly open. “No. That monster’s running around loose. We have to think this through.”

“That spirit looked like me. She could be related to me—and maybe she could help us with Mahan.” Forest touched Levi’s
hair, keeping her eyes trained on his. “I need to go back to Unit C and find out what’s going on.”

“Not now,” Levi said, sounding stunned and sad all at the same time. “Mahan first, then the shade.”

“It’s far too dangerous, Forest,” my father said, and I heard the protectiveness in his tone.

“If she wants to go, we should take her,” I said, feeling a mix of relief that my father was being protective of Forest like she was a real person to him, and frustration that she was getting dismissed so fast. I turned to Darius. “Imogene just went back, right? And Mahan knows he’s taking on Levi and Imogene now. He’s not going to attack right away, not until he figures out how to beat us. Now’s the perfect time.”

“Sorry, baby, but I vote with them.” Darius gave my hand a squeeze. “We’ll go when we’ve got a plan for taking on that monster.”

Addie and Ms. Hyatt didn’t say anything, and something in Addie’s expression, a resignation mingled with a glint in her eyes, made me keep my mouth closed even though Forest looked crushed.

After a long minute of silence, my father brought up the idea of making dinner before we did any more work. He and Jessie and Darius decided to grill us a meal, and the meeting broke up quickly as they headed off to retrieve hot dogs and ground beef from the Hyatt kitchen. Ms. Hyatt gave directions and instructions, but she didn’t go to help, and neither did Addie. Levi stayed next to Forest for a few minutes, then got up to sit on the brick wall where Imogene had been. I figured he needed to be alone with his thoughts.

The four of us sat together quietly until the men were out of earshot, and then I put my hand over Forest’s trembling fingers. She was staring at her own feet, and my touch startled her into meeting my gaze. She had tears in her eyes.

“Who do you think she was?” she asked me, her voice shaking.

“It was you,” I said. “Unless you have a twin sister.”

“Not that I know of,” she told me.

“Anything’s possible,” Ms. Hyatt said, but Forest never stopped staring at me.

“What did your mother look like?” she asked.

The question caught me off guard, and my stomach did a quick little flip. “I don’t really know.” My eyes darted to Addie. I was never sure how she felt about hearing things related to my biological mother, and I didn’t want to say anything that would make her unhappy. I know most kids stayed all torn up about parents who were missing from their lives, but with Addie around, I had never really cared that much. I loved Addie, and she loved me, and my mother, wherever she had decided to go, had made a choice not to be a part of my past or my future.

“My father always tells me my hair is like hers,” I said to Forest. “And my eyes, and—oh.”

In that moment, we all saw the same thing, and we saw it clearly. The knowledge passed from face to face, lighting our eyes and minds with the truth, and the truth was this:

We had to pay a visit to that spirit on Unit C, for Forest.

We had to find out if it was Forest’s mother, and somehow we all knew that nothing was more important than doing this, no matter what the risks might be.

“They think we always need protection.” Forest nodded toward the house, where the boys were beginning to bicker about the best way to light Darius’s grill to cook hamburgers. Levi was still perched on the wall nearby, off in his own world. “They’ll never agree to it.”

“We don’t need their permission,” Addie said.

Maybe they were right, my father and Darius and Jessie and Levi. Maybe it was too dangerous to go near Lincoln Psychiatric, even if Imogene was back in her bell tower. There was always that possibility, but there was also the possibility that we were right, too—that it was important to get to that spirit and gain a better understanding of what she knew about Carl Mahan, and Forest, too.

My father and Jessie and Darius—even Levi—wouldn’t help us. They would try to stop us, and possibly destroy any chance we had of finding out what we needed to know.

Addie picked up her bag. Then she cleared her throat and waved a hand at the men.

“Never mind about those hamburgers,” she said. “I can make us all a nice, juicy pot roast in under an hour.”

Chapter Thirty

A little after sunset, the men of the house—Levi included—succumbed to full bellies and a bit of after-dinner tea laced with some of Addie’s best hops and valerian. We figured we had at least a few hours, but with my father and Levi in the mix, who knew. At least we got out the door without a fight.

No one spoke as Addie drove Forest, Ms. Hyatt, and me to Lincoln Psychiatric, which took about fifteen minutes. We used the employee badge I had clipped to my collar to get past the guard at the main gate, and I directed us to the parking lot outside the entrance closest to Unit C.

“I never worked anywhere but the geriatric unit, and that was years ago,” Forest said as she and I walked to the heavy metal door that would let us into the basement of the old asylum. “Since then, I’ve mostly been at the bell tower. Everything looks different now.”

I shook out the kinks as I moved, still feeling weird twinges from my fight with Mahan. It was hard to remember that when
Forest crossed spirits to the other side, she stepped out of time. She couldn’t really go backward in history, but she could go forward in a huge hurry. Even though she was my age chronologically, she had actually worked at Lincoln Psychiatric years and years ago. It was weird. And it made me wonder about Levi. Forest said he was our age, or close to it, biologically, but when had he actually stepped onto this earth?

We reached the darkened corner of the main building and had to cross out of the comforting halo of a sidewalk lamp to get to the door, where we stopped to wait for Addie and Ms. Hyatt. The sudden rush of darkness made me shiver. My fingers hovered over my pockets, where I had my willow charm and a little bag of graveyard dirt, snakeskin, powdered bones, sulfur, and other things I didn’t even recognize. Addie gave it to me because it was one of our best offensive spells. I hoped we didn’t have to use it. Aside from just plain not wanting to fight Mahan again, that dust smelled like pepper and cow manure, and it burned like hellfire.

Addie had also given us a bunch of dimes with holes punched in them strung on little leather strips and hung around our necks, wrists, and ankles. She said the shiny silver would go dull or turn black if we got close to anything evil. As Addie walked out of the shadows on the sidewalk, pushing Ms. Hyatt in front of her, dimes glittered all over her body. My father’s kill bag rested in Ms. Hyatt’s lap, along with Addie’s spell bag.

“Won’t you get into some kind of trouble with your husband?” Forest asked Addie as she parked Ms. Hyatt in the darkness beside us.

“I already told you, I don’t need his permission to do what’s right,” Addie said. “Despite what he might think, I don’t need his permission for anything, and neither does Trina.”

“We look like dime trees,” I said as I lifted my badge to the sensor outside the door. “If we get caught, Security probably won’t call the police. They’ll just take us to Admissions.”

Ms. Hyatt grunted at that, then laughed.

The lock clicked, and I pushed open the door to let us into Lincoln, into the basement four floors beneath Unit C.

We walked in single file, me in the lead, Forest next, and Addie and Ms. Hyatt bringing up the rear. The door swung shut too fast, and the heavy metallic clank made me flinch.

“What is this place?” Forest whispered as we took in the long hallway stretching out before us. It had brown stone walls and a brown stone floor, just like castle dungeons in fairy stories. A yellowish glow rose from a strip of emergency lights positioned where the floor met the wall on the hall’s right-hand side, and on the left—

“That’s a cage,” Addie said in low, tense tones as we studied the steel mesh making up most of the hall wall on the left. The door to the cage was padlocked, and gurneys and wheelchairs filled the cobwebbed space inside it.

“Storage,” Ms. Hyatt said. “Now, anyway. I don’t want to think about what it might have been a hundred years ago.”

Something thumped above us, and we all jumped. When I looked up, I saw long pipes running the length of the ceiling. Hot water? Gas? Crazy juice? Who knew?

“I’m not finding a light switch,” Forest said as she felt among
the various boxes at our end of the hallway. “When I worked here, they kept the emergency lights in nonpatient areas on at night. The basement was always deserted, except at break time, when people hit the canteen machines four halls over in that direction.”

Forest jerked her thumb toward the hall door closest to us, but it was even darker than this one.

I glanced at the ceiling and remembered something from my social-work supervisor’s chattering orientation about the thickness of the stone walls, and how many feet of steel and rock separated each floor. The old hospital doubled as a storm shelter, a fallout shelter, and a disaster center. It was built to be a fortress, back when fortress-building was still an active art. It was nearly impossible to escape, with so many locking doors, and because so many patients used to yell twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, the engineers had made it pretty soundproof, too. Noises didn’t carry very far.

In space, no one can hear you scream
, my brain unhelpfully offered, in Darius’s voice, no less. I hated him for making me watch
Alien
.

Addie bent forward and rummaged in her bag. She came out with a long black flashlight, which she handed to Ms. Hyatt, who switched it on and let the beam drift up and down the stone walls. Cool air chilled my cheeks as the flashlight chased shadows to the ceiling, then back down to the floor again. The air smelled like wet rock and bleach.

The door rattled, and the bunch of us jumped again.

“Wind,” Ms. Hyatt said, focusing her beam on the wheelchairs
and stretchers. “We need to stop being silly and find the elevator to get up to the floor where Trina saw the ghost—oh, dear God.” Her hand shook, making the light dance.

She had stopped on a silver gurney covered with sheets. There was something under the sheets—long and human-shaped and definitely not moving.

I swallowed hard and tried to breathe, but my throat wouldn’t cooperate. All I could manage was a tight, wheezing gasp. Forest caught hold of my hand, and the both of us stared at the sheets.

“It’s too small for a body,” Addie said with the confidence of someone who worked at a mortuary. “An adult body, at least.”

“Is that supposed to make us feel better?” Ms. Hyatt swung the light to Addie’s face. “Are you crazy?”

Forest let go of me, took the flashlight away from Ms. Hyatt, and walked slowly toward the cage, shining the beam through the gloom of the cramped space. I wanted to grab her and pull her back, but I glanced at the dime around my neck. Still silver, as best I could tell in the low light. And I’d been to the mortuary, too, a lot of times. Whatever was on that gurney under the sheets, it didn’t stink like a dead thing. It didn’t have the cold, empty feel of a dead thing. So it was either alive, or it was—

“Plastic,” Forest said. Then, kind of amused, “It’s Harold.”

We all stared at her as she turned, directing the flashlight to her left.

“The first-aid dummy,” she clarified. “When I trained here, they used Harold to teach us CPR, how to apply bandages, that kind of thing. The training nurses liked to leave him sitting around in odd spots in the hospital, just to freak people out.”

“What a lovely tradition,” Addie said, her voice as frosty as the air in the hallway.

“The elevator is that way.” I pointed to where Forest had aimed the flashlight. “Past the cage.”

Nobody moved.

Something human-sized ran across the hall entrance, flashing in the bright beam.

Forest yelped and dropped the flashlight, and I pounced on it and picked it up, shining it left and right and up and down, but there was nothing. My heart rate accelerated, and the hairs on my body seemed to stand up all at the same time.

It had gotten colder. I could see my breath.

“Patients used to be able to walk around down here,” Forest said, puffs of white fog shooting out of her mouth with each word. “Do you think that was one of them?”

“My supervisor said everybody stays on their wards now.” The flashlight beam jittered as I tried to keep my hands steady. “Why is it colder? And everybody saw that, right?”

Addie pushed Ms. Hyatt past us and held out her hand for the light. “We saw it,” she said as I passed it to her. She did a quick check of our dimes, all of which glittered brightly in the strong beam.