Page 1 of Into the Dark

CHAPTER

ONE

Howlston Lunatic Asylum,Howlston, WV. 1979

Barbara Fox didn’t have much time left.

She knew it: urgently when she could avoid the drugs, distantly when she couldn’t. Some nurses checked more thoroughly than others. And there had been a stretch of time…one year? two?…when the doctor ordered the whole ward lined up once a day and given injections of Prolixin to render them pliable, no matter what their initial diagnosis.

That had been…bad. She tried not to remember the screaming faces of the dead, crowding around her, desperate to be heard. The drugs slowed her thoughts, made it impossible to concentrate. Impossible to guard herself against their sorrow and pain.

If only that had been the worst of it.

Her tongue spasmed involuntarily, and her hands tightened on the smooth wooden banister running along the wall between rooms. It was meant to help steady patients, and she both hated she needed to use it and was grateful for its presence.

She glanced around, using the curtain of her hair—once her pride, now hanging in lank strings—to hide her gaze. No nursesnearby, so she shuffled a few more feet, closer to the locked door at the end of the ward. Other women wandered the hall along with her, made restless by Haldol or their own minds.

“Get out,”whispered a voice from no living mouth.

If only she could. Barbara didn’t have the strength left to block out the voices of the dead. There was nothing she could do to help them anymore. But maybe, maybe, she could help the living.

They’d finally taken Suzette to the medical ward, once her deep, wracking coughs became too frequent for even the overworked nurses to ignore. She’d gotten sick the night Barbara heard the voice of a dead man talking to her in the next room over. Over time, what had been a light cough attributable to the dust and pollen changed into something wet and gurgling as her lungs began to rot.

She wasn’t the first to go this way. If Barbara didn’t act, she wouldn’t be the last, either.

Gritting her teeth, Barbara shuffled closer to the door. The ward was a quiet one, most of its inhabitants drugged to the point of somnolence. Sometimes the nurses got sloppy, forgot to lock a door. She just needed to get lucky.

Lucky. A bitter laugh bubbled somewhere deep inside, then died before reaching her lips.Luckydidn’t tangle with a murderous ghost, get possessed—however briefly—and end up here.

They said the ghosts weren’t real. Said she was schizophrenic, then gave her drugs that made everything so much worse.

She wasn’t getting out of here alive. Scott, her baby boy, was almost a man now. She’d never dance at his wedding, never hold a grandbaby, never…

Tears threatened; she squeezed her eyes shut to keep them in. No use worrying about things she couldn’t change, that waswhat her mamaw always said. What happened outside these walls was beyond her reach forever.

But in here…

A rot infected the heart of this place. She could smell it sometimes, during the night when the ghostly creak of gurney wheels rolled past her door. A stink of gangrene and pus, a wound so infected and so deep it sickened everything around it. Turned orderlies mean, depressed nurses, and twisted the minds of the poor souls who’d come here needing help and found only overcrowded halls and electro-shock. In the worse cases, it crept into bodies and corrupted them, drowning lungs or inflaming organs.

Her defenses were paper-thin, torn apart by the drugs, but she was still a spirit-worker like her mamaw. Put on this earth to help bring peace to the dead, and thus to the living they haunted.

There were so, so many dead here who needed help she could no longer give them. But maybe, if she could burn out the rotten core, she could save the living like Suzette. With luck, cauterizing the wound would let the harmless dead move along as well.

Not much farther. She was almost at the door. Barbara glanced around again, saw no nurses, and reached for it.

The handle turned. They’d forgotten to lock it.

Moving as quickly as she was able these days, she swung it open—and stopped in her tracks.

A big woman loomed in front of her, dressed in a nurse’s uniform, the trailing skirt and frilled cap long out of date. Her eyes locked with Barbara’s, blazing with fury. Her mouth opened, stretched wider and wider, far past any human limit.

“Get back!”The words roared from the hollow cavern of her ghastly mouth, accompanied by a frigid blast that stank of freezer-burned meat.

Caught off guard, Barbara cried out and staggered away. Her twitching muscles betrayed her; she fell heavily to the floor, banging one elbow.

Within seconds, living nurses hurried into the hall, drawn by the sound. “Damn it, Deirdre, you left the door unlocked again!” one of them shouted. She walked toward the door, oblivious to the dead woman.

“Stop!” Barbara yelled at the ghost. “I can help you! Why couldn’t you have just let me through?”

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