Insanity (3 page)

“Crap!” I banged my hand against the machine’s plastic picture of a soft drink, and the motion woke up the dispenser next to it, and then the next one, on down the line. “Crap, crap!” I hit the machine again, even though I knew all these contraptions “slept” like computers with their lids closed until they sensed somebody walking by, and then popped to life with moving parts and glowing pictures of icy drinks or potato chips. Energy saving. Economically efficient. Whatever. It was a
stupid
thing to have in a psychiatric hospital.

It was all I could do to get my hot chocolate, sit at a table, and
drink it. The hot liquid burned my mouth, and it felt good. I held the cup so tight I almost squashed it, letting the heat seep into my fingers. The iron beads on my rowan bracelet seemed to absorb the warmth, tingling against my wrist until I started to think straight again. Rowan was supposed to be enchanted wood, protecting against everything from getting lost to getting stolen by evil fairies. The trees grew mostly in Britain and Europe. One of my high school biology teachers figured out what my bracelet was made of and asked me where I got it. No idea. I just knew it was the only thing I had from my real family, whoever they were. It made me feel better.

In half an hour or so, I’d have to go back into that long, dark hallway where I did not, did not, did
not
hear something whisper my name or see a door breathing. I closed my eyes and rubbed the bridge of my nose.

Just my luck, to work my first night shift after Maintenance finds a pile of bones in a tunnel. In orientation, we learned that the tunnels were built during the Civil War so patients and staff could move around campus without getting shot by soldiers battling in nearby fields. Those bones could have been there a hundred and fifty years.

Or just a few months.

Was there a killer wandering through the tunnels under Lincoln Psychiatric?

The smell of fresh pine wafted through the canteen, and wild geese started honking in the distance.

My eyes popped open.

Geese?

But it was the middle of the night, and way past migration time.

Honk, honk, honk...

I stood up so fast I knocked over my cup, spraying leftover drops of hot chocolate across the table.

Dogs started howling, sudden and so loud they had to be right next to me. I backed against the table, looking everywhere but seeing nothing except drink machines still whirring and blinking.

The police brought dogs. Yeah. That was probably it. Right? Blood blasted in my ears, but not loud enough to blot out the dogs and birds—and the bells. The bells were ringing.

Don’t walk at night!
my mind screamed in Miss Sally’s voice.

“Decker!” a guy hollered from the hallway outside the canteen. I heard each syllable and letter in my brain, in my clenched teeth, in my toenails. I smelled them, too.

They smelled like pine.

Chills ripped across my skin, and all my hair stood up like I’d been hit by lightning.

Another guy yelled—only it was more like a scream.

Sweat broke across my forehead and neck.

Patient
, my thoughts managed to sputter.
Patient in trouble.

The dogs barked. The geese honked. The Tower Cottage bells rang and the lights blinked and went out and there were bones in a tunnel, and I ran through the pitch black for the canteen door like a nightmare dancer, staggering and jerking and not really sure what I was doing. I yanked the door open so hard I nearly fell when it swung, then lunged into the hall in time to see a silvery
glow explode through the whole space, turning the limestone walls to polished stardust. Everything looked sparkly and new and unreal.

A guy ran past me. Jeans. Dark skin. Screaming. He wasn’t anybody I knew from the wards.

Dogs charged after him, yelping like they were chasing a fox, and goose shadows slid along the ceiling where the lights should have been.

And behind the dogs—

Who was
that
?

My hands curled into fists as he came toward me. I opened my mouth to yell, but no sound came out.

He was six feet tall, maybe taller. Thin. Black jeans, black shirt, black coat dusting the floor. His hair was black, too, and longer than mine. Massive winglike shadows arced into the nothingness behind him.

He was glowing. He was both the light and the darkness, and he had teardrops etched under his right eye—so, so red and terrifying, and I knew in my guts they weren’t made with ink. They were some kind of blood tattoos.

The hounds cornered the first guy at the clothing room door, and the dark-light guy passed me by as if I didn’t exist.

“It’s time to go, Decker,” he said to the guy cowering from the hounds.

“No!” the man he called Decker yelled, and I figured he was a patient, even if I couldn’t remember him. I was shaking so hard I couldn’t think. I couldn’t even walk.

The dark-light guy got to the dogs and waded through them.
He grabbed Decker with one hand, and with the other he ripped open the clothing room door.

“Leave me be!” Decker yelled. He beat against the dark-light guy, and I tried to clear my thoughts, because at Lincoln Psychiatric we didn’t lay hands on patients except to provide care, and whoever this jerk with the coat and dogs might be, I couldn’t let him hurt some helpless sick person.

“Stop!” I shouted, stumbling away from the canteen door. “You with the dogs. Knock it off!”

The dark-light guy was in the clothing room now, dragging Decker after him. The dogs streamed inside along with the goose shadows, and the bells kept ringing and ringing.

“Hey! Guy in the duster. I’m talking to you!” I picked up speed and reached the clothing room just as Decker’s feet went sliding across the threshold.

I pitched myself forward and got a grip on his ankles. I expected to get pulled inside and eaten by a thousand dog teeth, but Decker stopped sliding like he’d hit a solid wall.

From inside the clothing room came the sound of a body hitting the floor and noises of surprise—dog and goose and human, too. I didn’t stop to think about it. I kept my stranglehold on Decker’s ankles, struggled to my knees, then leaned back and used my body weight to haul him out of the clothing room. He came without fighting, eyes wide, mouth hanging open in shock.

Dark-light guy came with him, still holding Decker’s arms until he saw me and turned loose.

I’d had hours of training on separating patients who were fighting, so I risked letting go of Decker long enough to scramble
past his legs and shoulders until I could force my body between the two people. As they stood I straightened up with them, straddling the entrance to the clothing room. My left hand rested on Decker’s chest, and my right stretched toward dark-light guy.

Dizziness made me blink, and my head swam like I’d been punched—but at least the bells stopped ringing. Lights flickered back to life. The dogs and the goose shadows vanished, and the walls weren’t made of stardust anymore. Dark-light guy looked like an escapee from a vampire-movie casting call, and he really was wearing black jeans and a black shirt with long sleeves, but he didn’t have any wings.

Man, did he look pissed.

He stepped forward, his chest meeting my palm with force. Lightning shocks made my arm jerk as he bounced backward from the contact. Rainbows shot through my vision, and I winced at the sharp scent of mothballs and dusty old clothes. The room felt cold and weird and ... wrong, and it didn’t help when dark-light guy growled like one of his dogs. I widened my stance, ready for him to come at me again, but he reeled back like I’d hit him with a cattle prod.

“Don’t let him out of that room,” Decker whispered. “Please!”

My breath echoed in my ears, but this was getting easier. A pissed guy, a scared guy—but no dogs, no geese, no bells, no glowing crap. Things were making more sense, and I knew what to do. “Mr. Decker, which ward are you from?”

Decker gazed at me, slack-jawed. He had dark, curly hair trimmed close to his head, flawless skin, and an attractive face,
but his eyes were wide and scared like a lot of the psychotic patients I’d worked with before. I figured he was about thirty, maybe older. His jeans and white T-shirt were filthy. Who let him out after hours—and who on earth hadn’t given the man a shower and helped him put on clean clothes?

He didn’t answer me about the ward. Maybe he didn’t know.

As for the guy in the clothing room, I needed to figure out where he belonged, too. I glanced in his direction. “What’s your name?”

He was younger than Decker, maybe not much older than me, and wickedly handsome. He didn’t seem psychotic, but he had his hand pressed against the spot on his chest where he’d made contact with my palm, and he acted like he was in pain.

“Levi,” he said, as though my question tore the word right out of him. Southern accent, but he so didn’t look like a Never farm boy.

He blinked in surprise, as if he hadn’t meant to answer me. Then his eyes narrowed, and he seemed to be cataloging everything about me, from my curly hair to my shaking hands to my rowan bracelet.

I knew enough to treat patients with respect, and I recognized fear when I saw it, even when it was painted over to look like anger. “I usually work on the geriatric ward, mostly second shift. That’s why you don’t know me. I promise I’ll take good care of both of you.”

“Sure you will,” Levi murmured, fixated on my face with an intensity that made me nervous.

“I need to get you back to your wards,” I told them both. “It’s
late, and there’s a lot going on tonight. You need some rest, up where it’s safe.”

Neither guy said anything.

I let out a breath I hadn’t known I was holding. “Come on,” I said. “Let’s go. Now.”

When I risked lowering my hands, Levi turned, walked a few steps farther into the clothing room, and vanished.

Like,
poof
. Just—
poof
!

I stared at the place where he’d been, not believing what I had just seen.

Then Decker started to cry.

When I turned toward him, he dropped to his knees, like he was bowing before me.

“Hey, look. It’s okay.” I shoved away the image of Levi vanishing and got down next to Decker to put my hand on his shoulder. Too much weirdness. Too much not-realness.

I was at work. I had to keep working. I needed to take care of crying guy first, then ... there was no way Levi had just disappeared. He had to be in that room somewhere.

“Mr. Decker, come with me to the switchboard, and we’ll figure out where you belong.”

He kept his head bowed like he was terrified to look at me.

“Mr. Decker—”

“Do you know what he was?” Decker looked up so suddenly I almost fell backward, but I held it together, at least until he asked, “Do you know what
you
are?”

That question struck me like a fist to the chin, and I sank back, staring at him, taking in his perfect skin and his powerful
build, and his now-clean clothes. Not jeans anymore, but overalls. Pressed, maybe even new. His shirt was clean.

He looked familiar. Was he—

No.
“Do you know what you can do?” he whispered, keeping his eyes fixed on mine—eyes I had seen earlier this evening, gazing up at me from a picture I held in the palm of my hand.

I was talking to the man in Miss Sally’s photograph.

Chapter Three

“An hour.” Arleen pretended to sound sad for me as she wrote me up for being late from my meal break. “A whole hour, Forest!”

Tears prickled in my eyes. I was still breathing hard from running from the clothing room all the way back to the geriatric ward. I didn’t think I was late—I just wanted to get away from ... whatever had happened. Get back to the real world.

But I hadn’t found the real world at all. Just more craziness.

No way was I late coming back, not one minute, not five minutes. I should have been early, but Arleen and the clock said I was an hour past my report time. I’d been working since I was fifteen—odd jobs, then fast food, then stocking shelves at a grocery store, then here, and I’d never been written up. I couldn’t comprehend why it was happening now.

Arleen had her back to me as she filled out the disciplinary action slip, but Decker Greenway was facing me in his clean shirt
and overalls, smelling like new denim, grinning and being friendly.

Arleen couldn’t see him.

“You’re losing time because of the thin spot,” he explained. “That’s what they call them, Levi and his grandmother. Lincoln ain’t nothing but a giant thin spot between our world and the other side, and places in this hospital get even thinner due to all the sadness it sees. Time can’t help moving funny around thin spots.”

Arleen was talking about “youth” and “irresponsibility” and “maturity.” Decker Greenway was talking about madness.

All-over shaking made my teeth chatter until I set my jaw. I didn’t want the tears to escape my eyes, but they did. I wiped them away quickly. “It was a mistake,” I told Arleen and my hallucination. “I—I guess I fell asleep. I won’t be careless again.”

“If you were still on probation, you’d be fired for this.” She turned and waved the yellow slip at me. “Even as a full-time employee, a second time AWOL from assigned duty and you’ll be terminated.” She smiled, all teeth and no heart.

I said nothing, because what could I say? I was due back at 2:00 a.m. It was now 3:15 a.m. How had an hour passed? It couldn’t have been that long.

“It’s because you got too close to a thin spot,” Decker insisted. “You really don’t know what you are, do you?”

I kept my eyes on Arleen. Maybe if I didn’t look at him, didn’t pay any attention to the weirdness, it would go away.

Arleen made a few shaming noises, and heat rose to my
cheeks as she deposited the yellow slip in the wall box, where the director of nursing would collect it tomorrow, dock my pay for the hour, and enter the disciplinary action on my record.

“You’re distracted tonight,” Arleen said. Then her tone swapped to sickly sweet. “Doubles are hard. I know. I’ve worked a million of them.”