Chapter 4 #3
“Are you going to feel silly walking around with blue lips on your forehead?” he asked while I refreshed my knowledge of Cornwall Cove, the light of my phone causing a small twinge of a headache to surface.
It would get much worse, I feared. The aura of the land where the sanitarium sat was steeped in suffering.
The impact would be similar to that of nearing Lake Killikee before the cleansing.
Not that I had set out to send a soul over, but often, once a phantom has found resolution of some sort for a crime committed against it, that energy can leave this realm for the next.
The next realm being whatever a person imagined it to be—Heaven, Gan Eden, Elysium, Valhalla, Fields of Aaru, Nirvana, Jannah, or the imaginings of a personal afterlife.
Maybe one of the destitute dead buried behind the hospital could be aided in finding peace.
That seemed a worthy goal for the descendant of Kee Houng.
There were no firm guidelines in that old, crusty book about ghosts that said every one of them had to be eradicated.
Maybe we could just ease them to their next plateau of spiritual enlightenment by righting a wrong committed against them.
It was a nice thought that felt good to me, anyway.
“Not really. Maybe we’ll start a new trend. Pharch Haint Blue Waters Lip Paint. Available at all fine beauty salons in the greater New England area.”
Phil snorted. “Pharch. That’s so silly but kind of cool.” He glanced my way as we crossed the county line. “When I asked you to tutor me, I kind of hoped that someday we’d have a ship name.”
“Really? I never imagined being so out that people would ship me with anyone,” I confessed as we trundled along winding back roads, the heater blowing in our faces. “I guess I never thought I’d find a guy who was so popular.”
“I’m not all that. It’s you, and it’s me. It’s us as a pair. People see us and can feel how much we love each other, and that makes them all swoony.”
Oh shit. Now I was swoony. I lifted his rough knuckles to my lips to kiss each one. “You’re giving me a boner.”
I snorted/wheezed all the way to the rusted gates of Cornwall Cove Lunatic Asylum.
Idling in front of the tall gates, chained shut years ago but reopened by someone with bolt cutters, all the joy inside the cab seemed to shrivel and die.
The night was a cold one, clear as a bell, as Monique was known to say, and the massive structure sat in the bold white moonlight.
I swallowed my trepidation before looking at Phil.
He seemed transfixed by the once glorious testament to treating the poor and misunderstood of yesteryear.
“Holy shit,” he whispered, arms dangling over the steering wheel.
I could only nod. I’d seen images of the huge hospital during my research.
I’d even dug up the architect’s floor plans as well as early daguerreotypes, tintypes, and paper prints spanning the grand opening in the 1840s through the early 1950s.
Now it was a gray, despicable, rotting place that stared out at us through dozens of shattered windows. “That place makes my ass pucker.”
“Mine too, babe,” I replied as my sight skipped to the large oaks, bare now, long limbs stretching out to grab at the moon overhead.
I hated this place already, and we’d not even crossed over onto private property.
In the late ’90s, a rich real estate tycoon bought the land and building with the intent to refurbish it and turn it into a hotel.
Anyone who has read The Shining could have told them that was a really bad idea. Guess his advisors weren’t readers.
After a few visits to the newly purchased institute, the owner and his then fiancée threw themselves out of one of the third-floor windows of the asylum and died a few hours later at a nearby hospital.
The families were too grief-stricken to even consider looking at the sanitarium, and so it has sat idle, fallow some would say, growing more decrepit with each passing year.
My phone pinged with an incoming text. Ripping my sight from the asylum, I looked down. “It’s Roxie wondering if we’re on site yet.”
“Tell her this place is scary as fuck,” he coughed out, then inched forward, using the dented bumper of his truck to shove the gates open.
They ground and dragged on the fractured cement drive, making a sound like that of a tormented soul being tortured.
Bracing myself, I held my phone to my chest as we eased onto the grounds.
The moment we crossed the property line, a flash of pain exploded behind my eyes, causing me to groan.
Phil hit the brakes. I motioned for him to drive on, the thudding in my head easing just a bit as we made a looping right.
I dabbed at my nose but found no blood. The pain was duller now, still there, like a persistent ice cream headache, but not the blinding agony I’d felt when dealing with Aradia at the lake.
“You okay?” Phil asked, easing forward, top speed of maybe ten miles per hour. “You’re pale as a sheet.”
“Good, no, I’m good. I just got a psychic introduction to the grounds.
There are restless spirits here, quite a few.
” I slid my fingers under my glasses to wipe at my eyes.
I could make out glowing forms in the overgrown gardens.
They probably sensed me just as I had picked them up.
The ghosts here were not chatting redcoats or milkmen or lonely poets.
Those phantoms caused me no pain. FIAs didn’t require a warning bell.
Unfriendly interactive apparitions—UFIs—now they needed a claxon loud enough to wake…
well, you know. “It’s easing up already.
As long as we keep our distance from the graveyard, we should be good. ”
I forced a trembling smile that did not fool my boyfriend at all. “Okay, but the first time your eyeballs roll back or your nose starts to gush, we are out. I’m not risking you, Arch.”
I gently bobbed my head. I had no great urge to risk either of us. “Once more into the breach, dear friends,” I joked as I pointed a shaky finger at Cornwall Cove leering down at us.
“I wish I were at the beach.”
I truly did love this man of mine.