Dark Places: State of Mind

Part Two

“I’m sure I’m going to regret this,” Honey muttered early the next morning. “Are you sure we have to do it?”

“Yes, I’m sure. And it will be just fine. Come on. We don’t want to be late.”

They walked together to the meeting place that Trixie had arranged, finding their guide already waiting for them. He was a tall, thin man, perhaps a few years older than them. He nodded a greeting and waved them forward.

“Call me Spike,” he murmured, but prevented them from giving their names. “The less we know about each other, the better.”

Honey leaned closer to Trixie and whispered in her ear, “If he’d called himself Slim, I would have been gone by now.”

Trixie grinned and turned to the man.

“This way,” he told them, in a low voice. “Keep to the shadows while we get inside.”

He guided them through a gap in a fence and they walked alongside it for some time, hidden from sight by the unkempt bushes on the other side. Reaching a corner, they turned and soon found themselves facing a high brick wall. The man pointed to a place where a foothold could be gained and, with a little effort, the three had soon scaled it and climbed down the other side.

From here, they could see the old building, dark and of sinister appearance in the early morning light. Their guide indicated the rear of the property and they walked together through the overgrown garden to a place where a door stood open. Trixie gave an appreciative shiver as they entered.

Inside, the building was dim and dirty and smelly. Honey wrinkled her nose in disgust as she picked her way along the hallway they had entered. A short distance ahead, a heavy metal door stood ajar. Spike went up to it and looked through before opening it wide enough to admit them. It revealed an open area with corridors extending from it in two directions and a stairwell rising upwards.

“Up here,” he indicated, leading the way to the stairs. “All the really interesting stuff is up here.”

He led them through another corridor at the top of the flight, passing multiple doors, only some of them open. Right at the end, he ushered them into a room. It was situated in the corner of the building, with a long, narrow window in two of the walls. They were each guarded by thick bars and coated in dirt. On one wall, a mess of metalwork was still attached, its significance unclear.

“This is the one you’re interested in,” he explained. “They call this the death room.”

Honey drew a breath. “Why?”

He grinned. “Well, it’s got a lot of stories attached to it and most of them are about death, so I guess it’s kind of apt. For example, there’s one story about a psychiatrist who got very attached to one of the patients… used to take him on outings and bring him treats, or sit and chat with him; that kind of thing. The patient was a man who’d seemed quite sane, but had killed another man with his bare hands for no reason. The doctor thought that the medication he’d put the patient on was enough to keep him under control. Then, one day, the patient went wild and attacked the doctor in this very room and killed him. They had to sedate him using a tranquilliser gun to retrieve the body.”

“I wonder if that was the man we were talking about,” Trixie mused, glancing at her best friend. “Though, from what I’ve heard, he wasn’t actually killed here, but very badly injured. He died later.”

“That’s the way it was told to me,” Spike answered with a shrug. “There was another case where an orderly was restraining a patient in this room and the patient tried to strangle the orderly. He raised the alarm, but had to fight the patient off while it was coming. By the time help came, the patient was dead and the orderly was unconscious. They tried to revive him, but it couldn’t be done. No one ever could explain how they both ended up dead.”

“I don’t think I like this room at all,” Honey declared, trying, without success, to peek out through one of the barred windows. “This is a creepy-enough place, even without the stories. With them, it’s just horrible.”

“You don’t want me to stop, do you?” their guide asked. “I was saving the best for last – the man who bled to death when there was no blade in the room. They never found how he had been injured and no one could explain–”

“No,” Honey interrupted. “I don’t think I do want to hear about that, actually. Can we go somewhere else, please? Like, for example, back outside and onto the street?”

“Well, let’s take a look in a few other places,” the man suggested. “There’s still some medical equipment in some of the rooms that’s kind of cool.”

Honey cringed, but followed along as they explored the rest of the building. As they went, their guide regaled them with stories of long-ago tragedies and disasters, stories of the people who had lived and worked in that building and particularly those who had died within its walls. Trixie was fascinated, but Honey became more withdrawn with every step.

At last, the time came when they would have to leave. They left the building, keeping close to it as they walked to the way out. They paused often, looking for anyone who might observe their progress. They reached their starting-point without incident and parted ways. Spike slipped away into the shelter of thick bushes in a nearby vacant lot, while Trixie and Honey walked back to the place they had left their car, a few blocks away.

“Now that that’s over,” Honey told her friend, “I never want to hear another story about that place, okay? I’m finished with it!”

At once, Trixie began to look guilty. Honey stopped short and stared.

“You’ve planned something else, haven’t you?” she accused. “Trixie! How could you?”

“Well, I didn’t know you were going to feel this way, did I? I had it planned yesterday, before you said that you didn’t want to go in there. You hadn’t told me, then, how you felt, so how was I supposed to know?”

“You could have taken a guess,” Honey grumbled. “Honestly, Trix, couldn’t you have talked to me before you made all these plans? I just want to go home and forget I ever came to this horrible place.”

A cheeky grin sprang up on Trixie’s face. “If I’d told you, you might have objected. I thought my way would be more… expedient.”

Honey shook her head and got into the car. “I already regret agreeing to come here with you. Next time, take someone else!”

“You love it; really, you do.”

Her friend shook her head. “So, who is it that we’re going to see?”

“I’m glad you asked,” Trixie answered. “I think you might like this woman. She was a nurse at the mental hospital at the same time Di’s grandfather worked there. She’s very, very old now, but her memory is as good as ever. She can probably tell us all about those stories the man told us when we were inside.”

“I thought I told you I didn’t want to hear any more.”

“Well, if you really feel that way, I could drop you somewhere and you could wait for me there – how about that diner over there?”

Honey shuddered. “No, thank you. It looks dingy and run-down and awful. I’ll come with you.”

“Whatever you say,” Trixie answered, grinning.

Some time later, they pulled up in front of a small house with flowers growing in well-weeded beds that bordered onto an immaculate lawn. They walked together up the path to the door and rang the bell. It was answered by a stout older woman. The stern expression she wore gave way to a pleasant smile on recognising Trixie.

“Oh, you’re here. And this must be the friend you mentioned. Come in.” She held the door wide and waved them into the sitting room. “Please, take a seat. Call me Catherine.”

Trixie introduced her friend and launched into her enquiry about the old mental hospital.

“Yes, of course,” Catherine replied. “I worked there for many years. I saw a lot of things there that I’ll never forget for as long as I live. A terrible place, really. People wouldn’t stand for those kinds of things, now. But then, psychiatric wards are terrible places still today. Now, you mentioned something about one of the doctors. Which was it again?”

“His name was Dr. Wilson,” Trixie answered. “Lawrence H. Wilson. I understand from my friend that he was injured at work and later died, with his wife, in a car accident. My friend’s mother – his daughter – was only a baby at the time, though, so I’m not sure how true that is.”

The older lady nodded. “I remember Dr. Wilson, and what you’ve said tallies with what I remember. It was all very sad.” She paused, eyes half-closed. “Dr. Wilson was very interested in patients who had suffered some kind of head injury and weren’t right in the head afterwards. There was one patient that he was fascinated by. As a boy, he’d been knocked off his bike and been badly enough injured that they thought he was going to die. He pulled through, but something wasn’t right with him ever after. As a teenager, he flew into a rage one day and killed the man next door, who had always been kind to him. I think it might have gone to court, but they ruled he wasn’t fit to stand trial and sent him to a mental hospital, instead of to jail.”

“What happened next?” Trixie prompted.

“Oh, the usual thing for a while. He responded quite well to treatment, I recall, and Dr. Wilson took a very close interest in him. He was a sweet boy, most of the time, but very troubled. I suppose the doctor let his guard down a little too much. One day, he did something that displeased the boy and got beaten around the head for his trouble. I never saw him again after that. At first, I think, he was subject to the most terrible headaches. Just as he was getting better and talking about returning to the hospital, he was killed in the accident.”

“What happened to the boy who hurt Dr. Wilson?” Honey asked. “Do you know?”

Catherine nodded. “He spent the rest of his life in that hospital. He tried to kill an orderly a few years after Dr. Wilson died and he, himself, died in the attempt.”

Honey’s eyes widened. “Like in the story that man told us!”

The older lady shook her head in disgust. “You haven’t been listening to that young hooligan, have you? Fairy tales! I’ll bet he’s told you all about the so-called death room, hasn’t he?”

Both girls nodded.

“It’s a load of bull. He hasn’t the slightest idea of what he’s talking about.” She bristled in disgust. “The room that he shows people, as far as I can tell, probably never saw a death. It’s the one on the top floor, in the corner, isn’t it? The room with a big metal frame on the wall.”

Trixie agreed. “He told us a couple of stories while we were there. He never did explain what that was for, though.”

The old lady laughed. “That’s because it used to hold the urn in the staff coffee area.” Her smile faded. “The real room is a lot less picturesque. It’s downstairs, just a plain room with no distinguishing features. It has one tiny window, high up, and a door; nothing else. There’s nothing to show that it’s any different from any other room. I doubt I could ever tell which one it was, if I went there. It was the site of the attack on Dr. Wilson, though, and also the attack on the orderly. The inmate immediately previous to that young man killed himself in that room. The one immediately afterwards died horribly in an accident, also in that room.”

“So, there really was a death room, then?” Honey asked.

Catherine shook her head. “Not really. It was just a nasty coincidence. These things happen in hospitals, especially the kind of mental facility that houses violent and unstable people. The sad reality is that violent people often meet with violent ends. And you also need to consider the fact that these people weren’t going to be cured; either they died there, or they were transferred and died in another institution. A lot of rooms had several people die in them. That’s just how it is.”

“And these cases were just a bit more… attention-getting than usual?” Trixie asked.

“Exactly,” the old lady answered. “They drew attention. The room itself is nothing out of the ordinary, but the stories are easily embellished. Why, I’ll bet that scoundrel told you all kinds of things about mysterious causes of deaths and missing weapons. It’s not true, none of it. They were all perfectly explainable and there weren’t as many deaths as he likes to say – none of the staff died there, to the best of my knowledge.”

“It does rather sound like he embellished the stories,” Honey agreed. “I like your versions much better. It all seems more real and less…”

“Mysterious,” Trixie added, with a wry grin. “There’s one other thing I was wondering. Can you remember the name of the man who attacked Dr. Wilson?”

The old lady frowned, thinking. “No, I can’t recall it. I’m sorry; it’s been too long and there were too many patients.”

The conversation wrapped up after that and Trixie thanked Catherine profusely for her time and information. The two visitors went outside to Trixie’s car and got in.

“What I’d really like to do now is find out about the man who hurt Di’s grandfather,” Trixie mused, as she pulled away from the curb. “I wonder if I could find something about him in the newspaper, or something?”

Honey groaned. “But we don’t even know his name!”

“Well, that’s the first thing I’d need,” her friend answered. “If I can find that, maybe I’ll be able to find out where the bike accident happened, so I’d know where he was from, and then we could find out all sorts of things about him.”

“Why?”

Trixie rolled her eyes. “Why not?”

“Because we’re supposed to be finding out about Di’s family, not about someone who once injured her grandfather. She doesn’t want to know, remember?”

Trixie grinned. “But I want to know. I have a feeling about this.”

Honey groaned.

“I’m pretty sure there’s a library around here,” Trixie continued, as if she had heard nothing. “Let’s go and see if they’ve got anything that could help us.”

They found the library without trouble and had soon parked the car and gone inside. To Trixie’s delight, it held a copy of a book about the hospital among its local history collection. She grinned as she pulled it off the shelf and dragged Honey to a nearby table. She frowned a little as she scanned through the index, looking for any relevant references. Honey let out a squeak and pointed to an entry that read ‘Death Room.’

“Quick! Page seventy-three,” she gasped.

Trixie flicked through the pages and found the passage in question. She skimmed it rapidly, pumping a fist when she found some of the information she was after. According to the book, the local legend of the death room had sprung up after a series of unfortunate incidents in one single room. It was not, as popularly supposed, the scene of several murders, but of the deaths of three consecutive patients. The first had committed suicide, the second had suffered a stroke while being restrained and the third had been accidentally killed. Contrary to the claims in the story, no other deaths were known to have occurred there.

However, it was also the scene of an attack on a doctor by the second of the three patients and the book gave a date for this attack, some forty-five years before. It also mentioned the doctor’s later death and the medical opinion of the time that cited the attack as a contributing factor in his demise. It went on to describe the patient’s history in very much the same way that Catherine had related it, adding the name of the man’s hometown and implying a slight connection between him and the doctor.

Trixie gasped when she read the last part. “What do you think this means?” she wondered. “Catherine told us he was interested because of the brain injury, but do you think there might have been another reason?”

Honey shrugged. “It almost sounds that way.”

“Well, now that we have a date for the attack, we can probably find it in the newspaper. I wonder whether there’s any way we can find something on the original accident.” She glanced over the passage again and jotted down some notes. “I wonder whether Di’s grandfather had an obituary, too. It doesn’t give a date for his death, but I know around about when it was. I wonder whether there was a local newspaper around here that might have run something.”

“He sounds like he was well-known,” Honey mused, “so, it’s likely he would have had something, if there was a local paper. Do you think we could ask at the desk?”

Trixie nodded and raced off to enquire. She returned a few minutes later with some more information. There was, indeed a local paper. She had obtained the address of the place which held the archives and the call number of a book published by the town’s historical society. Without delay, Trixie found the book in question and returned with it to the table.

“What is it?” Honey asked, frowning over the beige cardboard cover and black binding of the self-published book.

“It’s extracts of local significance taken from the newspaper and compiled together with other information on the same topics for the paper’s hundredth birthday,” Trixie explained. “When I told her what I was after, the librarian thought I might find something in here.”

She flipped it open to the contents page and located the chapter on the hospital. Both girls shivered to see the eerie photograph of the hospital on the chapter’s opening page. They turned the pages together, soon finding an article on the accident which had claimed the lives of Di’s grandparents.

“Now, we have a date,” Trixie crowed, not bothering to keep her voice down. “This will make it so much easier.”

Honey gave an absent nod, still staring at the story. “It’s so tragic, though. Both of them killed and Di’s mother just a little baby. And it says that he was getting so much better after his troubles.”

Trixie leaned over to read the rest of the article. “This is strange, though: it says that they were on their way to see Jennifer Greengage at the time of the accident and that she was the mother of the ‘unfortunate youth who had caused the trouble.’ Isn’t that the name from the back of the photo? What do you think that means?”

“Was he visiting the mother of the man who’d hit him? And was he the boy in the photo?” Honey guessed. “It must be it, mustn’t it?”

“But why would he do that?” Trixie wondered. “If someone had hit me over the head so badly that I couldn’t work, I don’t think I’d go out of my way to visit his mother.”

“But it wasn’t really the boy’s fault, was it? He’d had a brain injury. He wasn’t really responsible for his actions. That’s the whole reason why he lived in that awful hospital and not outside somewhere, being free like everyone else.” Her eyes filled with sympathetic tears. “It must have been terrible for that mother, having her son locked up and never being able to have him home, ever again. I suppose she must have visited him often and gotten to know the doctor quite well.”

“That doesn’t really explain why he would go to visit, or why she would send him a photo of her son.” Trixie frowned in confusion. “Doctors don’t usually visit the parents of their former patients, do they? Or keep their photos?”

Honey shook her head. “I don’t think so. Maybe he was just an exception to the rule. She might have been a very lovely lady, who was troubled by the tragedy of her son’s life.”

“If it wasn’t for the fact that his wife was with him, I might have put another interpretation on it,” Trixie admitted, causing her friend to gasp in shock. “But, as it is, I’d have to say that there’s another reason that we don’t know about yet and that we need to keep digging for it.”

“Di is not going to be happy about this.”

Trixie shrugged. “What Di doesn’t know won’t hurt her. I’m not going to tell.”

“So, how are we going to find out more?” Honey asked.

Trixie thought for a moment. “Leave it with me for a few days and I’ll see what I can come up with. Unless you want to trawl through old newspapers with me?”

Honey shook her head. “I thought I’d made it clear that I didn’t want anything to do with this.”

“But you always have a part in my investigations,” Trixie answered, smiling. “You love it and you don’t want to miss anything.”

Honey sighed. “I do love investigating with you, Trixie, but I’m developing a distinct fear of the dark.”

“I love the dark,” Trixie answered. “And you’re passing up the part of the investigation that takes place in well-lit and, above all, safe libraries and places like that, you know.”

“Okay, then,” Honey decided, without much enthusiasm. “Let’s get to it. The sooner we find this out, the sooner we can leave the creepy old hospital alone forever.”

They found a number of newspaper articles from both the town where the hospital had been and the one where the boy had lived. They learned that his first name was Stephen and that he had been ten at the time of his accident. A short time before Dr. Wilson was attacked, the boy’s father had died suddenly. Both girls wondered whether that circumstance might have been a trigger for the attack, but could uncover no evidence to support the theory.

After returning to Sleepyside on the Saturday afternoon, they also spent some time trawling through the items they had retrieved from the attic, checking to see whether there was anything else of relevance. When they were almost certain that there was nothing else, Trixie left Honey to it and went off on her own. Honey cringed at the look her friend gave her as they parted, but offered no objection.

Early the next Saturday morning, Trixie dragged Honey back to the derelict hospital, very much against her will. The whole way there, she had kept up a steady stream of platitudes. As they passed through the grounds to a different entrance from the one they had previously used, Trixie increased the frequency of her assurances.

“It’s all right. You don’t need to worry. We’re safe here. No one’s going to bother us.”

Honey made an angry sound. “No, it’s not all right. You need to tell me why we’re here. I’m not going a step further until you do.”

Trixie shook her head and grasped Honey’s arm. In spite of her words, she allowed herself to be led onward.

“It’s going to be okay, Hon. We’re just going inside for a little bit. I’ve been told that there’s something here that I need to see and then I think it should all make sense.”

“Told? By whom?”

“By someone who knows what’s down there, who had a good idea of what I’d find and whose identity I promised to protect.” She paused a moment. “It’s really okay, Hon. We’re just going down into the basement for a little while.”

“Trixie!” her friend chastised. “I thought I told you I never wanted to do this ever, ever, ever again?”

“You probably did.” Trixie grinned. “Lucky for me, I wasn’t paying attention.”

“I can’t believe I’m doing this,” Honey grumbled.

Her friend ignored the comment and kept moving. “It’s not too much further. Come on!”

Honey shook her head in defeat and did as she was told. They emerged into a small clearing, the ground littered with fallen leaves. At one edge, the side of the building could be seen and in it was set a door. Trixie hurried over and pushed it open.

“Through here,” she urged. “Quick!”

“What if someone’s in here already?” Honey asked, in a faint whisper.

“What, indeed?” greeted a male voice, deep and hoarse.

Continue to part 3.