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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.
