Chapter 19
CHAPTER
NINETEEN
“Do you want to talk?” Nigel asked softly, as they made their way toward the tent with their cots.
Weariness dragged at Oscar, and a part of him wanted only to pass out on his pillow and not think for several hours. But he came to a halt and let everyone else go by, before taking Nigel’s hand. The two of them walked away from the tents and asylum both, past the van, and a little way down the crumbling driveway.
Nigel’s breath wheezed in his nose, and Oscar winced. “Forget looking for records tomorrow. I’ll take you to the urgent care in Weston.”
“No.” Nigel took both of Oscar’s hands in his own. “I’ll be fine for one more day. As you pointed out, this is our only chance to get this done.”
A weight seemed to settle over Oscar’s shoulders. The weight of expectation, of heritage, of responsibility. “I haven’t done what Mamaw would have wanted.”
Nigel’s fingers tightened on his. “You never met her in life, and only glimpsed her in death. You don’t know what she would have wanted.”
In his mind’s eye, Oscar could still see the short films that were all that remained of Barbara Fox. She’d been so vibrant, so alive. A part of her community, helping both the living and the dead. Carrying on the traditions of their family, loving her husband and her child.
And ended her life here. His mind spun a dozen different possibilities: the nurse had terrorized her, the chute ghost’s banging had echoed in her head, Mariah had kept her from bathing. Until the living nurses grew tired of her seeing things they couldn’t, and injected her with the massive doses of drugs used to keep patients quiet back in the day. Which would have rendered her even more helpless to keep away the angry dead, her body leaden, unable to react while they screamed into her ears…
“I have to fix this,” he said. “But I think you and Chris should go to Weston tomorrow. Go to the doctor, then check into a hotel. Tina should be okay, she won’t come inside, but?—”
“Stop it.” Nigel let go of his hands and wrapped his arms around Oscar. Oscar hugged him back, burying his face in Nigel’s hair. Breathing in the scent of the dry shampoo they’d all been using to stay clean, feeling his slight form.
“I love you, and I’m not leaving you. I’m going to help you find records tomorrow,” Nigel went on, words muffled against Oscar’s chest. “If we can figure out some way of laying the spirits to rest that won’t get us killed, then I’m going to lend a hand. And if we can’t, then we all leave at sundown. Together. Deal?”
Mamaw wouldn’t have run. Abandoned the dead to linger in torment.
Oscar sighed heavily. “Deal.”
Thanks to his congestion making it difficult to breathe, Nigel woke early. Sitting up in his cot, he saw Tina and Adrienne were both gone, but everyone else still slept soundly. One of the women had brewed coffee, so he poured himself a cup and headed for the command center. Tina had already set up in front of her monitors, scrubbing through the footage from the static cams overnight. Adrienne was doing the same on her laptop.
“Morning,” Tina said. “You’re up early.”
“I wanted to get a head start,” he answered, which wasn’t quite a lie. “Mind if I borrow some more meds from your first aid kit?”
She turned back to the monitor. “That’s what they’re there for.”
He dosed himself with everything in Tina’s bag that might possibly help control the congestion and coughing, not wanting to give Oscar any more reason to argue about whether or not he should go to the doctor instead of back into the asylum.
This was so important to Oscar. There had to be some way to safely get the ghosts to move on. Maybe if they found out any details of their lives, why they were still trapped here, Oscar could talk them into crossing the veil to the other side.
Picking up the heavy binders of death records they’d taken from the asylum, he settled in to read. Scanning lists of names and causes of death was tedious at best, made more so by the sleepy side effects of the meds. The coffee helped a bit, and he was able to focus long enough to find what he was searching for.
Eventually, everyone else trooped into the command center. “What’s up?” Oscar asked, glancing from Nigel to Tina.
“Everything quieted down after you all left the building last night,” Tina reported. “Or shortly thereafter.”
“The spirits who attacked you expended massive amounts of energy.” Dr. Lawson went to look over Tina’s shoulder. “Likely they didn’t have anything left.”
“We heard a lot of banging when we were leaving last night,” Nigel said, tucking his finger into the binder to mark his place. “Was any of that caught on tape?”
“Yep.” Tina brought up the clips. Both the fourth and first floor cameras caught doors opening, one at a time. As if something was searching the rooms. Once all the doors had been opened, everything fell silent.
Oscar frowned. “Anything on the children’s ward?”
“Like the PolterPal vowing to come kill us in our sleep?” Chris added.
“No, thankfully.” Tina sat back. “Your best friend the PolterPal stayed quiet all night, in fact.”
Zeek took off his cap and combed his hair with his fingers. “The kids are probably hiding. I mean, I would be.”
Oscar’s frown deepened, and Nigel knew he was thinking about the ghost children, spending their afterlives in the institution they’d been born or consigned to. But they couldn’t free the kids with the more dangerous ghosts prowling around.
“Adrienne?” Zeek asked.
“Nothing more on our cams, either.” She sat back. “Although we caught what happened when the creeper was chasing us, so at least we have some good footage for the show.”
“Nigel?” Oscar asked, looking at him. “You’ve been looking through the death records?”
“Yes, and I found two of our ghosts.” He pushed his glasses higher on his nose and flipped back to a spot he’d marked with a scrap of paper. “Mariah Hartford. Age 23. Died February 14, 1926, supposedly of pneumonia.”
Oscar seemed nonplussed. “I thought she died from hypothermia, but maybe it led to pneumonia?”
“Or they didn’t want to admit a patient died during one of their so-called treatments,” Dr. Lawson said grimly. “They wouldn’t be the first institution to cover up wrongdoing.”
“Especially since many of the patients ended up buried on the property,” Nigel added. “Without the families to ask questions, they could put down any cause of death they wanted. If we can find her actual patient file, we might learn more.”
“Right.” Oscar sat down heavily on one of the chairs. “Okay, who else did you find?”
Nigel cleared his throat. “Ruby Baker, died October 12, 1931. Cause of death: suffocated inside a laundry chute while trying to escape.”
“Oh no.” Tina put a hand to her mouth. “She was trying to get out and got trapped instead…what an awful way to die.”
“Agreed.” Morbidly, Nigel couldn’t help but wonder how long she’d been in the chute. If she’d been able to make any noise to alert the staff of her predicament, or if they’d only noticed when the dirty laundry backed up.
“Good work, Taylor,” Dr. Lawson said, and even after all this time her praise warmed him. “Patient records next, then?”
Oscar nodded. “Tina, you stay here and keep an eye on the cameras. If anything moves, let us know right away. Everyone else, let’s see what we can find.” He stood up. “But first, arm yourself with as much salt as you can carry. We’re not going to leave ourselves vulnerable again.”
The asylum seemed quiet when they entered through the main doors, but Oscar could feel unseen eyes on them. Hopefully the sunlight struggling through the grimy windows would be enough to keep the ghosts at bay, but he tightened his hand around the salt canister he held just in case.
The moldy splotch on the wall loomed large, far bigger than it had been when they first arrived. Most of the wallpaper had slumped to the floor, and the rococo decoration on the plaster arches looked oddly wet. A trace of rot hung on the air, as if something had died in one of the many rooms.
“I don’t have a good feeling about any of this,” he said.
Dr. Lawson looked around, her lips pressed together in a tight line. “I didn’t care for it over the cameras, and I like it even less now in person. Let’s get in and out as quickly as we can.”
They turned into the women’s ward and followed the long hall. Silence reigned, but it felt fraught, as if the asylum held its breath. No sounds emerged from the laundry chute, and Oscar found himself glad the ghost inside hadn’t inflicted the sensations of her death on him the way Mariah had. How desperate must she have been to escape this place, that she would have taken such a risk?
The first ward let out onto the second, and then finally to the storage area whose original use remained unclear. To reach the filing cabinets, they pushed aside wheelchairs, old tables, and all the other furniture and implements that had been abandoned here in the decades before and after the asylum’s closure.
The newer filing cabinets were made from steel and slowly rusting into the floor, while older ones were of solid wood that had held up surprisingly well over the years. “We’re looking for files from the twenties and thirties,” Nigel said. “So concentrate on the wooden cabinets. Hopefully the drawers are labeled.”
Oscar hesitated. His mamaw’s file might be here, in one of the metal cabinets. Seeing his look, Nigel said, “Let the rest of us search the older files. You find Barbara.”
Some of the cabinets were labeled with dates, but many weren’t. Most were locked, but Zeek had brought a tool bag from their car that included a drill, which he used to drill through the flimsy locks. Oscar hated to see anything damaged—the first rule of urbex was to leave everything as you found it. But the circumstances here were anything but normal, and they had to put the possibility of laying human ghosts to rest over damage to mere objects.
Everyone got to work: pulling out files, squinting at bad handwriting, frowning at page after page of medications and treatments. It took Oscar a while to locate the files for the late seventies, but eventually he found them. They’d been packed into a drawer so tightly it was hard to thumb through them to see the patient names, but at length he saw her name neatly typed on one of the tabs: Fox, Barbara.
“I found her,” he said, and wrestled it out. The other files relaxed slightly, as if glad for the relief from the pressure.
The file was surprisingly thin, given how long she’d been there. Had the doctors simply warehoused her here, trying a new therapy now and again but mainly content to leave her in a medicated haze? His heart pounded, and he longed to flip open the folder and start reading immediately.
But no—that could wait. She wasn’t one of the spirits lingering in these walls. He’d look over her file at leisure, once they were away from here. Ask his dad if he wanted a look at it, too.
Tucking it under his arm, he turned to help the others. Nigel sat cross-legged on the floor, a thick folder in his lap, brows drawn together in a frown.
“What’ve you got there, babe?” Oscar asked.
“I found some old staff files.” Nigel carefully turned over what appeared to be a newspaper clipping, gone fragile with age. “This one belonged to Dr. Herbert Wilkes.”
Adrienne looked up from her own search. “The doctor I saw in the mirror? The one who died in the fire with the nurse?”
“I still think she killed him, and got caught in it herself by accident,” Zeek said. He had a streak of dust on his forehead.
“Perhaps,” Nigel said, distracted. “What I’m seeing in these files is…not great.”
A chill ran down Oscar’s spine. “What is it?”
“If you recall, the newspaper article on the deaths said he was a pioneer in biological psychiatry.” Nigel adjusted his glasses, his dark gray eyes unhappy behind the lenses. “It wasn’t a term I was familiar with, but his file has plenty of information on it. Apparently, it was a theory that held mental illness was caused by bacterial infection. Which, I hasten to add, has modern support in some cases, especially in pediatric psychiatry. However, his approach predated antibiotics, and…well, the mildest treatment he performed was to remove all of a patient’s teeth.”
“All of them?” Adrienne asked.
“Whether they appeared healthy or not, yes. And without consent.”
Chris met Oscar’s horrified gaze. “The ghost in the cemetery—her teeth disappeared, remember?”
Oscar’s heart plummeted. “And then other parts of her followed.”
Nigel took a deep breath, or tried to through his stuffy nose. As if stiffening himself against what came next. “If pulling out all their teeth didn’t cure them, he would move on to tonsils. The spleen. Ovaries. Parts of the colon. Anything and everything he could remove or lop off without the patient dying outright.”
Oppressive silence followed his words. After a long moment, Dr. Lawson shook her head. “The annals of medicine are filled with horror…but good god, this is terrible.”
“The patients were already stuck in the asylum.” Oscar could imagine it all too easily. “Condemned as insane. No one to stand up for them against the ‘brilliant’ doctor who had them at his mercy.”
Nigel nodded. “No one listens to cries for help if they come from people labeled as crazy. Especially when Dr. Wilkes reported an eighty-five percent cure rate.”
“Impossible,” Dr. Lawson said flatly. “As Taylor said, this was an era before antibiotics, and he was performing invasive surgeries on people who probably weren’t in the greatest health to begin with.”
“I assume he was very selective in the cases he included in his reports, if not downright dishonest.” Nigel took out a fragile piece of paper that looked to have been typed on the asylum’s letterhead. “No one questioned him, at least not outside the asylum. But there is a letter of complaint included in the file, addressed to the asylum’s governing board. In it, a nurse alleges that Dr. Wilkes isn’t curing anyone. That any patients who get better don’t owe their success to his methods, and also that he’s vastly underreporting the number of deaths, or attributing them to other causes.” He paused. “The letter is signed by the asylum’s head nurse at the time. Della Young.”