Page 53 of Into the Dark

The moldy splotch on the wall loomed large, far bigger than it had been when they first arrived. Most of the wallpaper had slumped to the floor, and the rococo decoration on the plaster arches looked oddly wet. A trace of rot hung on the air, as if something had died in one of the many rooms.

“I don’t have a good feeling about any of this,” he said.

Dr. Lawson looked around, her lips pressed together in a tight line. “I didn’t care for it over the cameras, and I like it even less now in person. Let’s get in and out as quickly as we can.”

They turned into the women’s ward and followed the long hall. Silence reigned, but it felt fraught, as if the asylum held its breath. No sounds emerged from the laundry chute, and Oscar found himself glad the ghost inside hadn’t inflicted the sensations of her death on him the way Mariah had. How desperate must she have been to escape this place, that she would have taken such a risk?

The first ward let out onto the second, and then finally to the storage area whose original use remained unclear. To reach the filing cabinets, they pushed aside wheelchairs, old tables, and all the other furniture and implements that had been abandoned here in the decades before and after the asylum’s closure.

The newer filing cabinets were made from steel and slowly rusting into the floor, while older ones were of solid wood that had held up surprisingly well over the years. “We’re looking for files from the twenties and thirties,” Nigel said. “So concentrate on the wooden cabinets. Hopefully the drawers are labeled.”

Oscar hesitated. His mamaw’s file might be here, in one of the metal cabinets. Seeing his look, Nigel said, “Let the rest of us search the older files. You find Barbara.”

Some of the cabinets were labeled with dates, but many weren’t. Most were locked, but Zeek had brought a tool bag from their car that included a drill, which he used to drill through the flimsy locks. Oscar hated to see anything damaged—the first rule of urbex was to leave everything as you found it. But the circumstances here were anything but normal, and they had to put the possibility of laying human ghosts to rest over damage to mere objects.

Everyone got to work: pulling out files, squinting at bad handwriting, frowning at page after page of medications and treatments. It took Oscar a while to locate the files for the late seventies, but eventually he found them. They’d been packed into a drawer so tightly it was hard to thumb through them to see the patient names, but at length he saw her name neatly typed on one of the tabs:Fox, Barbara.

“I found her,” he said, and wrestled it out. The other files relaxed slightly, as if glad for the relief from the pressure.

The file was surprisingly thin, given how long she’d been there. Had the doctors simply warehoused her here, trying a new therapy now and again but mainly content to leave her in a medicated haze? His heart pounded, and he longed to flip open the folder and start reading immediately.

But no—that could wait. She wasn’t one of the spirits lingering in these walls. He’d look over her file at leisure, once they were away from here. Ask his dad if he wanted a look at it, too.

Tucking it under his arm, he turned to help the others. Nigel sat cross-legged on the floor, a thick folder in his lap, brows drawn together in a frown.

“What’ve you got there, babe?” Oscar asked.

“I found some old staff files.” Nigel carefully turned over what appeared to be a newspaper clipping, gone fragile with age. “This one belonged to Dr. Herbert Wilkes.”

Adrienne looked up from her own search. “The doctor I saw in the mirror? The one who died in the fire with the nurse?”

“I still think she killed him, and got caught in it herself by accident,” Zeek said. He had a streak of dust on his forehead.

“Perhaps,” Nigel said, distracted. “What I’m seeing in these files is…not great.”

A chill ran down Oscar’s spine. “What is it?”

“If you recall, the newspaper article on the deaths said he was a pioneer in biological psychiatry.” Nigel adjusted his glasses, his dark gray eyes unhappy behind the lenses. “It wasn’t a term I was familiar with, but his file has plenty of information on it. Apparently, it was a theory that held mental illness was caused by bacterial infection. Which, I hasten to add, has modern support in some cases, especially in pediatric psychiatry. However, his approach predated antibiotics, and…well, the mildest treatment he performed was to remove all of a patient’s teeth.”

“All of them?” Adrienne asked.

“Whether they appeared healthy or not, yes. And without consent.”

Chris met Oscar’s horrified gaze. “The ghost in the cemetery—her teeth disappeared, remember?”

Oscar’s heart plummeted. “And then other parts of her followed.”

Nigel took a deep breath, or tried to through his stuffy nose. As if stiffening himself against what came next. “If pulling out all their teeth didn’t cure them, he would move on to tonsils. The spleen. Ovaries. Parts of the colon. Anything and everything he could remove or lop off without the patient dying outright.”

Oppressive silence followed his words. After a long moment, Dr. Lawson shook her head. “The annals of medicine are filled with horror…but good god, this is terrible.”

“The patients were already stuck in the asylum.” Oscar could imagine it all too easily. “Condemned as insane. No one to stand up for them against the ‘brilliant’ doctor who had them at his mercy.”

Nigel nodded. “No one listens to cries for help if they come from people labeled as crazy. Especially when Dr. Wilkes reported an eighty-five percent cure rate.”

“Impossible,” Dr. Lawson said flatly. “As Taylor said, this was an era before antibiotics, and he was performing invasive surgeries on people who probably weren’t in the greatest health to begin with.”

“I assume he was very selective in the cases he included in his reports, if not downright dishonest.” Nigel took out a fragile piece of paper that looked to have been typed on the asylum’s letterhead. “No one questioned him, at least not outside the asylum. But there is a letter of complaint included in the file, addressed to the asylum’s governing board. In it, a nurse alleges that Dr. Wilkes isn’t curing anyone. That any patients who get better don’t owe their success to his methods, and also that he’s vastly underreporting the number of deaths, or attributing them to other causes.” He paused. “The letter is signed by the asylum’s head nurse at the time. Della Young.”

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