The Monster?
She must have had a name once before, when she was some other girl with real parents and a real sister.
She searched her memory for a name, for some flash of an image of that past life, but nothing came.
Only darkness.
It didn’t matter. Not really.
She wasn’t that girl anymore.
Nor was she Violet Hildreth.
She was someone—something—else altogether.
The folder was fully engulfed now, the edges of the flames burning her fingers. Pain pulled her back into her own body.
Whose body, though?
She dropped the burning folder onto the other papers on the desk. Then she gathered more files, more papers, and added those to the little pyre.
Iris came closer. “Stop! What are you doing?” Vi pushed Iris away, ordered her to stay back.
Smoke and ash and blackened curls of burned paper drifted up, then fell to the floor, burning on the carpet, sending up a hideous chemical stink.
She threw the broken chair parts onto the flames.
Let it burn.
Let it all burn.
The desk itself had caught fire now, and the flames shot up, up to the low drop ceiling. The plastic cover over the flickering fluorescent lights was melting from the heat. The bulbs exploded. The room went dark.
Iris screamed.
And the monster laughed.
She laughed and laughed until she was choking, the thick plastic-scented smoke filling her throat and lungs.
Iris was coughing, choking.
The room was so thick with smoke that Vi could hardly see her there, a pale figure standing just behind her. Her shadow, her doppelg?nger.
Vi took her hand, and Iris fought against her, tried to pull away. But Vi held tight, tugged her away from the fire toward the door.
Lizzy
August 21, 2019
TOO LATE, TOO late, I was thinking as I got to the crumbling front steps.
I touched the outside of the door, feeling for heat.
The door was cool and wet.
I put my hand on the knob.
Please open. Don’t be locked.
I could feel Skink behind me, hear him breathing fast.
The knob turned in my hand.
I took a deep breath, stepped in, and let out a relieved sigh.
Candles.
Candles were lit around the main reception area: two on the floor on either side of the door and three more farther in. The flickering light made a path that led to the basement door.
The building smelled like mildew, rotten wood, wet plaster, and smoke.
“Guess she’s expecting you,” Skink whispered, stepping into the room.
I nodded, pulled out my gun, and moved slowly forward, following the candlelit path to the basement stairs.
The floor was covered in chunks of fallen plaster, the mildewed remains of rugs, pieces of broken furniture. The floor gave a little beneath my feet. In places there was no floor at all: just burned-through timbers.
I turned back and whispered to Skink, “Careful where you step.”
He nodded, cautiously moving forward. “So do you have a plan, or what?”
I didn’t answer.
What was the plan?
I had to stop the monster. Save the girl.
Would I kill the monster?
That was how it worked in all the movies and what we’d written in our book: The monster had to die.
Beneath the raincoat, a slick sweat covered my body. The gun felt heavy and cold in my hand.
I paused at the top of the basement stairs. The door stood open, and candles lit the stairway.
I had the feeling I was walking right into a trap. I’d been led here. My sister was down there waiting.
I remembered the old hospital beds, the restraints, the ECT machine.
I started down the stairs, slowly.
Skink followed. “I don’t like this,” he whispered.
Me neither, I thought. But what choice did I have?
The only person I’d ever truly felt kinship with was waiting for me down in the basement.
My sister.
“Quiet,” I told Skink. “Get behind me.”
The walls and ceiling down here were intact, but had been spray-painted by vandals. Smashed beer bottles littered the floor, along with empty bags of chips and fast food cartons. I spied a condom wrapper and shivered—what a strange place to have sex.
Someone had outlined a pentagram with red spray paint on the steel door leading to B West. And written beneath it: The Devil Lived Here.
True enough, I thought.
Holding the gun in my right hand, I pushed the door open with my left.
More candles lined the green cement hallway. The walls were stained black from smoke and mildew. The place smelled like rot and ruin with a tinge of smoke like a ghost, even after all these years.
“I’ve got a bad feeling about this,” Skink whispered. He stopped walking. I flapped my left hand back at him: You stay here.
I crept slowly down the hallway, trying to keep my feet from crunching too loudly on more broken glass, crumbled cement, bits of charred wood and plaster, melted plastic.
I heard voices. A shriek.
A girl in pain?
My heart jackhammered.
I wasn’t too late! Lauren was alive!
There was still time to save her.
I wanted to run but knew I had to move slowly, carefully.
I passed the first door on the left, spinning to look inside it, gun out in front of me like some TV show cop.
The room was empty, dark.
But the door to the procedure room, the room where Gran’s body had been found strapped to the bed, was open, candlelight flickering inside.
It’s a trap, it’s a trap, screamed a voice in the back of my brain. Run! Get out while you can!
My feet froze, not wanting to go any farther, not wanting to know what awaited me.
“Hold still,” a woman’s voice ordered from inside the room. “Or I’ll cut you.”
I took a deep breath and stepped into the room, gun raised and held steady with both hands.
The room was full of candles, their flames flickering, dancing. An old camping lantern was set on an overturned table, emitting a bright glow, throwing huge shadows on the wall.
The girl was sitting in a chair with a sheet wrapped around her so that all I could really see was the back of her head.
And there was the monster: my long-ago sister, standing by the girl’s side, the glint of a blade flashing in her right hand.
Vi
July 28, 1978
THE BUILDING WAS in flames behind them.
The fire alarm was ringing, the bells deafening. The sprinkler system had gone off. They were both soaked. Soaked from the sprinklers inside the building and soaked from the rain that was pounding down on them.
Iris was sitting up, leaning against a tree. The back of her head was bleeding, the rain mixing with the blood, making it run down her neck. Her face was pale, and her lips had a bluish tinge. Her hat was gone, and Vi could see the scar that ran along the front of her head under her stubbly hair.
From somewhere around the front of the building they could hear Miss Evelyn screaming, “Where is Dr. Hildreth?” as the thunder boomed. Patty and Sal were there, by the side of the building, counting the patients, who were half-asleep, medicated, staggering around in their hospital gowns, the rain pelting them.
Miss Evelyn kept yelling for Dr. Hildreth, her voice more and more shrill, more and more frantic, but no one seemed to be able to answer.
“What have you done?” Iris asked, looking past Vi to the Inn—the smoke pouring out of it, flames now visible from some of the lower-story windows.
Vi thought she could make out shapes in the smoke writhing and twisting as it rose: the ghosts escaping. Ghosts that had been there all along.
“I did what needed to be done.”
“The records, the files—” Iris said.
“Are all gone now.”
Iris looked as though she might start crying again.
“I’m sorry,” Vi said. “If there was anything in there about who you were, who you used to be, it’s gone.”
And she was sorry. She’d broken her promise: She never had found out who Iris was, where she’d come from. And now she never would.