David wasn’t sure if he could watch one more episode of
Cheers
with his aunt. It was a ME-TV marathon, and they’d been listening to canned laughter since dinner. He didn’t mind the first half an hour, but after that, sitcoms really got on his nerves. It was almost as if they inserted the laugh tracks to tell the sheep watching the programs what was funny. He could hear the studio executives editing the programs: “Here, laugh, dipshits. It’s funny. Trust me.”
His gaze began to wander around the room, resting on old photos chronicling Elsie’s life, from a recent one of her neighbor’s chubby kids wearing Santa hats last Christmas to a faded one of his late uncle Bill holding what looked to be at least a twenty-pound fish on a line. Over on the table near the front door, a more recent photo showed a woman with chestnut hair on her tiptoes, exaggerating a kiss with a man whose mouth was curled up in a stifled laugh. David remembered when that photo had been taken, not long before the fire. His eyes grew wet at the memory of his parents, and he forced his gaze away to the pile of mail on the catchall table. He saw the
People
magazine and a handful of catalogs stacked there, beneath what looked to be a couple of bills and an invitation of some kind. She’d opened that and in simple red block letters the card’s front read
YOU’RE INVITED
. He wondered
whose yard party he’d be dragged to. On the TV, Norm put up his hands when Sam answered the phone and said, “It’s Vera.” “No way, Sammy,” the rotund barfly hissed and pushed his empty mug forward across the bar. “I’ll need at least two more of these before I can go
there.
”
David rolled his eyes as he brought his attention back to the television. That settled it. He put a fist to his mouth and exaggerated a yawn. “Think I’m going to turn in,” he said.
“But it’s not even ten o’clock,” Elsie said.
“Yeah, but…”
His excuse was cut off by the doorbell.
“Now who could that be?” Elsie said, and started to pry herself out of the easy chair.
“I’ll get it,” he said, and motioned for her to stay in her seat. When he opened the door, and saw who stood on the stoop, he could only think of one thing to say.
“You again!”
Christy Sorensen brushed a moth from fluttering in front of her face, and smiled grimly. “Yeah, I knew you’d be having withdrawal by now, so I decided to stop by.”
She was wearing worn, faded blue jeans, and a black T-shirt with the logo of a bar called Red-Eyed Fly. Instead of the police squad, there was an old boat of a car parked on the curb. Clearly this wasn’t an official visit. “You want to come in?” he asked.
Christy peered around him and saw Elsie craning from her chair to see who was at the door. “Why don’t you come out?” she countered. “And bring that key you were bragging about this afternoon.”
David grinned. “Give me three minutes.”
“So what changed your mind?” he asked, as the car pulled away from the curb. He’d pulled on his other
jeans, grabbed his keys and told Elsie he had to help a friend. Christy already had the engine running when he came out.
“I shouldn’t tell you, because it’s police business,” she hesitated. “But I suppose it doesn’t matter since if we get caught I’m going to be fired anyway.”
She pulled to a stop at the light on Main, and caught David again in that look. Instead of feeling uncomfortable this time though, he decided he liked it. Liked her, actually. She might be a cop, but she was all right. Didn’t hurt that she was a total fox either. He almost laughed out loud at that thought.
“Look,” she said, staring hard at him, as if it was very important that he understood what she was about to say implicitly. “The chief has had a hunch that something was going on out there at the old hotel since the day these asylum people moved in. I was out there trying to figure it out, but you blew my cover. Still, I got inside one night and got a glimpse at some of the patients, and I found out that most of them are missing persons.”
“So they’re not crazy at all,” David interjected.
She shrugged, and then looked back at the road as the light changed. “I don’t know, but I’d bet against it. I saw some of the doc’s stuff on the walls and in his exam room, and none of it talks about him being a head doctor. He’s some kind of big-shot genetic scientist. I don’t think he’s worried about whether they’re schizoid, I think he’s doing some kind of experiments on them.”
“It’s worse than that,” David said. “I told you what I saw yesterday. The guy’s doing some kind of rituals in the basement using these women.”
“Jury’s out on that,” she said. “But he’s doing something there that he doesn’t want the world to find out about. And here’s how I know for sure.”
She told him about the blackmail note she’d found
with the picture of the chief’s daughter. David whistled.
“So that’s why we’re going out here on our own tonight,” she concluded. “The department isn’t going to get a warrant. And something’s going on there
now;
they wouldn’t grab the chief’s daughter to hold indefinitely.”
David nodded. “Just so they don’t grab us.”
Christy pulled the Olds off the road just before the cutoff to the old hotel. When they got out of the car, the cricket song was loud as locusts. Stars lit the ground with a steady glow; it was a warm, clear night.
“Nice out,” David said.
“Yeah,” Christy said. “Not sure that’s a good thing. We don’t want to be seen out here.”
“Just stay close to the tree line,” he suggested and stepped off the gravel road and into the brush. She followed, and a few minutes later he led her across the back patio to the rear entrance of the asylum.
“Think they’ve got a night alarm?” he asked, only half joking as he pulled out the key. Christy held the screen door.
“Shit,” she said. “If they do, you better be as fast on your feet as you are on that bike.”
He turned the key in the lock and it clicked. The door whispered open, the light from the summer sky illuminating the dark foyer just inside in long shadows. Christy put her hand on David’s chest and eased past him, taking a flat stance against the hallway wall and slowly easing her way forward.
All she’s missing is the gun,
David thought, admiring her precision steps. He carefully pulled the screen and inside doors shut, and tiptoed after her.
In moments they had crept down the hallway to the main reception area. Just as the last time
they’d each been here, the main floor was silent, and empty. When they reached the second floor, Christy grabbed David by the arm and pulled him against the wall near room one. For just a second, his pulse quickened as he thought she was about to kiss him. But instead, she dug a hand into her jeans pocket and slid out a photo of a pretty young woman, golden-haired and freckled. She handed it to David.
“I got this from Oak Falls PD today,” she whispered. “She was reported missing yesterday, and was last seen at the bar where Amy Lynn was picked up. Name’s Mary Jane McCarthy. I’m betting she’s the girl who was passed out in the front seat of the Mustang. The girl they brought here after they dropped Amy Lynn off at the shack.”
David tried to commit the photo to memory, and nodded. Christy took it back, and reached out to try the doorknob of the first room. It opened easily, but the pounding in David’s chest as she pushed it open was for naught.
The room was empty. Just a bed and a dresser.
The same as the next room. And the next.
When they pulled the door shut on an also-empty room five, David hissed, “I thought they had patients in this whole wing.”
Christy’s lips turned down. The creases at the corner of her eyes betrayed her concern. “They did,” she said.
Finally, when she pushed open the door to room six, their luck changed. Christy held up her hand to caution him as soon as the door let light into the room and she saw the sleeping form on the bed. They slipped inside and closed the door. “Is this Brenda?” Christy whispered in his ear. He shook his head no, and she pulled him back out to the hall.
“I didn’t bring the mug shots of all the patients I saw here last time, because it doesn’t matter at this point. I know they were here, and as the Law, I can’t do anything about it at the moment. But if we see Brenda, or can confirm this other girl…”
There were women in rooms seven through ten, all of them sleeping deeply. Several were obviously pregnant. None of them stirred as they slipped in and out of their rooms.
“This is creepy,” David whispered as they left room ten. “It’s like they’re dead.”
“Sleeping with Prince Valium,” Christy said. “I recognize a couple of them from the missing persons mugs. And I’m pretty sure the Terror Twins brought them here.”
Christy turned the knob on room eleven as she talked to David, and pushed open the door, expecting another dark room with a sleeping woman inside.
While that’s exactly what she opened the door into, she hadn’t expected David’s reaction. He pushed past her, running to the bedside of the sleeping patient inside.
“Oh my God,” he cried, and put his hand on the woman’s cheek. “It’s you. It’s really you. Brenda? Brenda, wake up, please.”
Christy stepped up softly behind him and put her hand on his shoulder as he pleaded with the unconscious woman. “David,” she said. “She’s drugged. She’s not going to wake up right now.”
Brenda certainly didn’t look likely to wake. She lay flat on her back beneath dull white sheets, dark hair mussed over her left eye, a strand of hot pink spread like anemone on the pillow. But David wouldn’t give up so easily. He took the sleeping girl by the shoulders and shook her, and then bent to hiss in her ear, “Wake up, Brenda, wake up!”
He shook her again by the shoulders, harder this time, and Christy pulled him back. “Stop it,” she commanded.
When he turned to her, his eyes glistened. “It’s my fault she’s here,” he said. “We have to get her up.”
Christy nodded. “We will. But she’s probably not going on her own power.”
David shrugged off her hands and returned to the bed. He folded down the blanket and reached an arm beneath Brenda’s head. He lifted her to a sitting position, and her face promptly slumped forward, hair hanging across the faded blue hospital gown like a shield.
Somewhere in the asylum, a woman screamed.
David jumped, nearly pushing the poor girl off the bed. Christy reached out and caught her, and the two of them laid Brenda back to the pillow.
The scream came again, this time more faint, yet somehow, more bloodcurdling.
“We’ve gotta get out of here,” David whispered.
“No,” Christy answered. “Someone needs our help.”
“Yeah,” he said. “Brenda.”
Christy shook her head. “She’s not going anywhere. We’ll come back for her. But right now, somebody is in pain.”
She walked away from the bed and opened the door. “You can stay here until I come back if you want. That’s probably best.”
The door closed and David stared down at Brenda’s face. She was beautiful still, lit only by the faint light of the moon through the window. He ran the back of his hand up the side of her face. Her skin was velvety smooth and warm. Her body seemed to respond, taking in a deep breath and then settling heavily into the mattress.
Again, a horrible shriek echoed into the room.
David bet that it came through the ventilation ducts, and he knew where Christy would have to go to find its source.
“Shit,” he moaned, and bent forward to kiss Brenda’s forehead. A strand of pink hair caught on his lip. “I’ll be back in a little while,” he promised.
Christy closed the door to room eleven and slid silently down the long hall past the patient rooms they had already looked into. Then she tiptoed down the wide staircase to the main floor. The scream came again, and the hair on the back of her neck stood up. Someone was being filleted alive, or so it sounded.
She stepped carefully across the carpet at the base of the stairs. The floor was quiet. Too quiet. A light shone from the front office just down the hall, but the rest of the place was cloaked in shadow. It seemed far more like an abandoned hotel at midnight than a fledgling medical institution. Who was on hand to watch over the patients?
The door to the basement was not hard to find. She rounded a corner, and there it was, the red
X.
As if on cue, another scream sounded from someplace not so far away. This time though, it didn’t just end, but sort of quavered and quivered and lingered in the air, as if someone was having their intestines slowly reeled out from inside, one foot at a time.
Christy flinched from the mental image, and just then, someone grabbed her by the shoulders.
“Wait,” came a familiar whisper. “I’ll go with you.”
She turned to face David, whose eyes betrayed a glint of both concern…and fear.
“I told you I’d come back for you.”
“And I told Brenda the same thing. I couldn’t let you do this alone.”
“Then let’s get it done.” She grinned and started
to turn away. But David put a hand on her shoulder to stop her.
“Wait,” he said. “Do you have a gun?”
“I’m off duty,” she hissed and pulled away.
“Great,” he mumbled, following her to the door. “Just great.”
The stairs creaked as Christy stepped down them, and David took in a deep breath as he followed. Dead. They were dead meat here. The doc and his dominatrix butchered pregnant women down here…What the hell were a chick cop with no ammo and a college kid going to do to stop them? He waited for the screams to echo painfully through the narrow stairwell, but there was no sound. Just the labored breath of their fear.
Christy reached the bottom first, and he grabbed her arm as she started forward. “Wait, they’ll see you.”
She slowed but didn’t stop. Instead, she moved to the entryway and cautiously peered around the corner at the room beyond. David could see she was trying to flatten her body so as not to be seen, but in the end, it didn’t matter.
“There’s no one down here,” she whispered.
David slipped around her and stepped into the long basement room. The fluorescent lights overhead flickered occasionally, but outside of that, everything seemed quiet.