Chapter 48
CHAPTER 48
CLOVER
I n the hills at the foot of a plum mountain peak
Lies a sleepy old town where the dead never sleep.
The craggy stone tunnel felt endless—a dark, mildewy, cramped purgatory that closed around me a little more with every labored step I took.
The villagers know to stay out of the wood.
That’s where the spirits are up to no good.
It was hard to tell how long I’d been down there, hard to block out the intrusive thoughts telling me I was lost, or worthless, or too bleeding late.
Especially one, they confess with a shiver.
Born with the Devil inside him, they whisper.
The voices seemed to bounce off the walls and echo along the low, arched ceiling, taunting me, making me shiver.
Eyes gray as smoke, hair like black flames.
He killed the town priest and died with him that day.
But I did my best to block them out, putting one soggy runner in front of the other and repeating a poem about finding a boy that I knew I could never truly lose.
Damned for eternity, refusing to burn,
He waits in the woods for his love to return.
All the lads had left behind was a handgun with no bullets, a satellite phone that I didn’t know how to operate, and a Russian laptop that couldn’t be unlocked without a fingerprint or a password.
But the screen made a decent torch down in the Poddle.
Out where the bluebells grow high as your knee
And the clover and moss blanket every tree
I clutched the open computer to my chest as I waded through the knee-high water, thankful that I hadn’t come across any intersections or forks yet. I didn’t actually know where I was going.
Lies a ring made of stone where no fairies dare tread.
That’s where you’ll find him, the ghost of the glen.
I had just restarted Darby’s poem for the hundredth time when I noticed a dozen streaks of light piercing the ceiling up ahead. Relief washed over me as I sloshed over to the spot where the light danced on the water, finding a rusty metal ladder bolted to the wall and a manhole up above.
There was no gunfire that I could hear outside, no explosions or buzzing drone blades, so with a deep breath, I climbed up, slid the metal cover off, and found myself face-to-face with a massive stone wall that I’d hoped to never see again.
It felt apocalyptic, emerging from the darkness into the sunlit center of Steeven's Lane. No cars to be seen. No people. No sounds. Just the squish of my sopping wet shoes on the pavement as I crossed the street and passed through the open gates of St. Patrick’s Psychiatric Hospital.
Where I stood and stared with my mouth hanging open.
The entire right side of the building was just a pile of rubble. I’d washed the ash and plaster dust out of my hair at Kate and Jack’s after catching a glimpse of myself in a mirror. I’d looked exactly like someone who’d been buried in rubble. And now, I knew why.
I’d been trapped in that .
My heart began to pound as I approached the landslide that had once been Eamonn’s room. Nothing was distinguishable from anything else. It was just destruction—a mountain of it—but as I stared at the pile, picturing Damien digging through the wreckage to find me, day suddenly turned into night.
Bricks turned to stucco.
And I was the one doing the digging.
“Odie!” I coughed harder. “Da! Sheila!”
Wooden beams as long as my arm went sailing across the yard as I attacked the pile, choking on smoke and ash and my own unspoken fears.
“Da, answer me! I know you’re in there!”
Lifting half of our once-yellow door with both hands, I hurled it to the side and found my answer lying just beneath it.
A woman’s arm, severed at the elbow.
With my da’s key ring still dangling from its finger.
Stumbling backward, night turned back to day, and Sheila’s arm withered and morphed into a liver-spotted, wrinkled limb hanging from the edge of Eamonn’s bed.
I screamed and ran for the hospital doors, glancing over my shoulder in case a nearby drone had heard me.
As soon as the automatic glass doors slid shut behind me, I turned and locked them. Then, spinning toward the front desk, I came face-to-face with a lobby full of shuffling, muttering bodies, all dressed in the same blue shirt and pants that Damien had been wearing.
A man with wild eyes and days’ worth of stubble suddenly rushed at me, pinning my back against the doors as he peered through the glass over my shoulder.
“Did they see ya?” he asked, his breath rancid and hands crushing. “Did they?”
I shook my head, pleading with my eyes for the other patients to help but most were completely oblivious. One woman made eye contact with me, then immediately curled into a ball in a waiting room chair and covered her head with both hands.
A large male patient seated at the front desk also noticed what was happening, but the extent of his help was banging a coffee mug on the polished wooden surface as if it were a gavel and shouting, “You’re fired!”
“They want our mindssss,” the man pressing my back to the door hissed, jamming his forehead into my temple. “They want what’s in here.”
A scream lodged in my throat as his breathing changed, as his tongue extended from his putrid mouth and slithered its way across my cheek and into my ear.
“Hey!”
I looked up just in time to see a coffee mug hurtling through the air toward my head. Pulling away at the last second, I heard three awful sounds in rapid succession—porcelain hitting bone, porcelain shattering on tile, and a desk being cleared as my attacker launched himself at the man who’d come to my defense. By the time I looked up, the two men were gone, rolling on the floor behind the desk as pained screams and shrieks filled the lobby.
Running past the desk and taking a left, I noticed that red lights were flashing down the length of the hallway, and every single door was wide open. Someone must have tripped an alarm that would free the patients in case of emergency.
I clutched the warm laptop tighter to my chest and broke into a jog as the entire spectrum of human emotion filtered through those open doors, blending together in a laughing, crying, singing, screaming, moaning, snarling riot of sound.
A man leaped from his bed and barked at me until I ran past his door. Another stood naked in his doorway, furiously masturbating. A woman charged at me in the hallway, screaming that I was a man-stealing whore. But I sprinted past all of them, searching, scanning, praying that I found what I was looking for in time.
Turning a corner, I yelped as a hand reached out and grabbed me, pulling me into an unseen room.
“Shh …” The voice was female, and the woman it belonged to released me immediately.
“You’re not a doctor,” she said, tapping her wrist against the side of her head. “Not a doctor, not a doctor.”
“No, I’m sorry.”
“Shoes.” She gestured at my sopping wet runners. “Doctors wear shoes.”
I glanced down at her socked feet and understood.
“Do you need a doctor?”
“The voices.” She cringed, tapping harder and harder. “They’re too loud. They’re too loud!”
My heart broke for her. I was sure no one had been there to administer her meds since the shoot-out.
“What’s your name?” I asked, steering her away from the open door and over to the bed, but she was too anxious to sit.
“Hemina,” she replied, tapping her wrists against one another now.
“Hemina, this is gonna be over soon. But first, I need to know where the dead soldiers are. There was a shootout here yesterday. Where are the bodies?”
Staring at the floor, Hemina hesitated for several seconds. Then, she took me by the hand and led me out the door. With her as my escort, the other patients left me alone, but they glared and hissed at my feet as we passed.
Doctors wear shoes.
Up a flight of stairs Hemina led me, shushing herself and tapping her head, until we emerged at the end of a long hallway.
That was littered with bodies.
I should have been elated—one of those soldiers might have what I needed—but all I could see, all I could feel , were their heavy, bleeding bodies lying on top of mine.
The flashing red lights brightened to white fluorescents, and the hallway narrowed to the size of the space behind the Howth fish market counter. I was no longer dressed and upright; I was naked on the floor, surrounded by a pile of men that Damien had just killed, terrified that, at any second, the unit of living crewmen who’d just walked in would notice me and finish what their comrades had started.
“Shh …”
A gentle tapping on my temple brought me back into my body.
Blinking at the woman standing beside me, I realized that Hemina was soothing me the way she’d soothed herself.
“Too loud,” she whispered, her deep brown eyes full of understanding.
It hadn’t been a question. She knew.
I’d been trying my whole life to convince myself and everyone else that I wasn’t crazy, but what if I was?
What if crazy was just a word that meant something inside of you hurt really, really badly?
What if the only crazy thing about any of us was the lengths we had to go to cope with the pain?
Tears blurred my vision as I held her knowing stare and nodded my head.
Yeah, I thought. Too fucking loud.
Looking down, I realized that Hemina and I had continued walking during my flashback, all the way to the pile of bodies. But this time, when I looked at them, the red lights stayed red. The hallway stayed a hallway. And the past stayed in the past. I wasn’t lying beneath them, naked and afraid. I was standing over them, living and breathing, all because Damien had come for me when I’d needed him.
And now, it was my turn to return the favor.