Page 8 of Insane Obsession

“Abandoned, remember?” Lea rubs my upper arms. “You, out of all people, should know. How many times have you come out here to draw the place?”

“I’ve lost count.” I give her a shaky smile.

“Exactly. Now, let’s leave this dirty restroom and go down.” Lea squeezes my arm. “Get your camera out. Let’s nail this project.”

She’s right. Somehow, the nerves have gotten the better of me.

The Laura DiSanti massacre has been a passion of mine for a long time, perhaps because I live so close to where it happened. Maybe because she has been used as an example of a psychopath in the world of psychology.

I put the camera back in front of my glasses. “Alright, we’re heading down to the basement.” However, as we leave the restrooms, I can’t help but look over my shoulder toward the large windows.

There’s no one there.

Still, the vision won’t leave me alone. Blond hair and dark eyes. A guy around my age. Could he have been a squatter? A junkie?

“The basement is where the isolation rooms are, according to old newspaper clips. Although we don’t know for sure where Laura gave birth, it’s highly plausible that she was dragged down these stairs, down to that room of horror.” I film the stairs as we go down. The old wood creaks and the walls are dirty. “I wonder if she screamed. If she fought and cried and begged them to let her be with her baby.”

“Here we are,” Lea says when we reach the basement. She looks straight into the camera. “Our teacher, Professor Mathews, challenged us to look back and learn how psychology was applied in earlier times. Finn knew about this abandoned asylum and the killings that took place here, and we started digging.” She turns back, flashlight shining against the walls, revealing torn-down wallpaper and dirty, smeared floors filled with litter.

“Today is December sixteen,” I continue. “Seventy years ago, Laura DiSanti was released from the isolation room around this time. She was allegedly sent back to her room. We don’t know if she ever got there. What we do know is that she forged a weapon from a glass shard and went on a hunt to kill six people—four nurses and two other patients—before she took her own life.”

“Look,” Levi whispers.

It’s a crooked frame of all the inhabitants and nurses, and the photograph was taken at the front entrance. I let the camera linger while trying to gauge their expressions. “What would it be like to live here?” I ask myself and my future audience. “What would it be like to be sent here by someone you trusted, only to realize there was no way out?” The patients look serious, the nurses stern. “Let’s see if we can find Laura DiSanti…” I search through the group of strange faces. “There.” My finger halts on a petite woman with light hair and dark eyes. “Is this the face of a psychopath? Or was she simply broken after everything she has been through?”

“Who was the father of the baby anyway?” Levi asks.

“A mystery,” Lea answers for me. She points her chin toward the dark corridor ahead of us. “Come on, you two. We’re close, I feel it.”

“There. Fucking hell, I found it.” Levi shines his light further down the corridor. “The isolation room.”

My heart throbs as I follow behind. “We found it,” I mutter, mostly to calm my nerves. “Let’s see what kind of place Laura DiSanti was locked into for six months. Although official reports don’t confirm this, I personally think that she was the last person to be held here before the facility closed down.”

In front of me, reaching the threshold, Lea falters. “Fuck. Me.”

I first notice how low the ceilings are here compared to the rest of the building. I even need to bend a little, and I’m notoverly tall at six feet. Now completely open, the door is thick and made of concrete with a little window with bars. Inside, the room can’t be much bigger than a storage room.

Our lights flood the room as we cram into the small space. There’s a bed, narrow and rumpled, and a simple sink.

“Look at the walls,” I choke out.

Words. They are everywhere. Accusations written in pointy, grotesque letters that scream at us from the dead.

“I think these words are written with blood,” I whisper. Laura DiSanti’s blood.

“Welcome to hell,” Levi reads. ‘I hate you.”

“You made me crazy,” Lea reads from the other side.

I flick the camera all over the room, capturing everything we see.

“I will haunt you for this,” Lea murmurs. She turns to face me, eyes wet with tears. “Fuck me. This is…”

“Let’s get out of here,” Levi says, ushering us out of the isolation room. “Come on. I think we’ve had enough.”

“Wait.”

“No, Lea, we need to leave.” Still, Levi, who’s already headed back for the stairs, halts.

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