Page 60 of Into the Dark

Oscar shook his head. “Don’t blame yourself.” The fault lay solely with him. He loved Nigel so much it hurt. It was his job to look out for his partner, to take care of him when he needed to. He was the one who had failed.

What if they couldn’t find Nigel? What if Oscar never saw him again?

What if he was dead?

Fear tightened his throat. If he lost Nigel, the way it sounded like Montague and Lawson had lost Robin…

Was Nigel hurt somewhere? Suffering? He wanted to run back into the asylum, take it apart stone by stone. But the place was too big, too sprawling.

Tina approached with a bowl of ramen. “You should eat.”

“I’m not hungry.” He stood up. “I need to go back in. Maybe the ghosts can tell me where he is. Ruby seems aware of what was going on in the building. She might know what happened.”

“Not by yourself,” Chris said firmly. They held their own bowl of ramen, slurping up the noodles quickly with a pair of chopsticks. “I’m going with you, armed with every salt canister we have.”

Adrienne ducked inside, followed by Zeek. “We’re going, too. We’ll search every inch of the building. And if we don’t find him in a couple of hours, I’m driving to where I can get a cell signal and calling the police for help.”

“What are the cops going to do?” Oscar asked bitterly. “Shoot the creeper? Tase Ruby?”

Zeek sat down by Oscar. “I know you’re worried,” he said. “We’re all doing our best, okay? Getting some calories in us, gearing up, everything to make our chances of finding Nigel better.”

A part of Oscar—the part that was angry with himself—wanted to lash out. But that would be pointless, so he said, “Thanks. I just…fuck.”

“We’ll get him back, Fox.” Dr. Lawson leaned over and touched the back of his hand. “One way or another.”

“Okay. Just…hurry it up.”

Zeek stood. “We’ll get our gear now. Everything in our car that might possibly help.”

“I’ll keep an eye on the cams,” Tina said, slipping into her chair. “Just in case he goes past one of them.”

That seemed wildly unlikely, but Oscar appreciated the effort. As she settled in, Tina pushed aside an age-spotted folder.

Right—his mamaw’s file. He’d left it on the table at some point.

Desperate for something to do, he picked it up. The first sheet was the diagnosis that had brought her here to begin with. Paranoid schizophrenia with aural and visual hallucinations, marked by violent outbursts.

None of that was true. She’d been like him, a medium. Her downfall had been an accidental possession, and in a just world she would have been released once the ghost lost its hold on her. But once a person was marked as crazy, it was almost impossible to be seen as sane.

He flipped through the fragile pages. Lists of treatments, various medications. A write-up for attacking a nurse, which had seen her moved to the fourth floor ward not long before her death.

At the very back, haphazardly stuffed into the file, was a small stack of drawings. No doubt she’d made them in the arts and crafts wing that Zeek and Adrienne had investigated.

Oscar took them out one at a time. They’d been done in crayon—the asylum probably didn’t allow patients to have anything as sharp as a pencil. Whatever else Barbara Fox had accomplished in life, she hadn’t been much of an artist. The human figures were awkward, the trees lollipops topped with green.

Most of the drawings showed the things she likely missed in here. A smiling family, labeled “Richard, me, and Scott.” Mountains in fall colors. A peaceful graveyard.

Near the bottom of the stack was a drawing that seemed set in the asylum, however. What looked like a woman in a nurse’s outfit was holding her hand out, as if warding off a mustachioed man in surgeon’s gown. All around him hung a black aura, colored in roughly by the crayon. The words“Let me help!!!”had been scrawled so forcefully beneath it looked as though the tip of the crayon had broken off at one point.

He stared at the drawing for a long moment, only looking up when Adrienne and Zeek returned.

“Okay, we’re as ready as we’re going to be,” Adrienne said.

“Yeah.” Oscar held out the paper. “About that. I think I found something.”

Nigel bolted up the center of the room.

A door flew open, and freezing air accompanied by fog poured out. Then another opened, and another, all of them banging wildly back and forth. He weaved to avoid them, and something that felt like fingers grabbed him by the hair, wrenching his head back.

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