On the Day I Died (7 page)

I recognized the quote. It was the inscription at the entrance to Hell from Dante’s
Divine Comedy
. I had to grin. Who would have thought I’d actually use something I learned in AP English?

Stoked, I snapped a couple of pictures, then glanced farther upward. Something was there, watching me. A face. Peeking out from beneath the eaves. I froze, then
relaxed. It was just a gargoyle, the icy, unsettling face of a gargoyle. Its fanged mouth gaped open in a malevolent grin, its wicked eyes bulging with rage.

Awesome.

Mindless of the strengthening wind that tugged at me, I clicked off some shots. I could almost hear Mr. Adair saying, “That’s one for your college portfolio, Scott. The admissions officers at the Art Institute are going to love it.”

After I left Aidan’s that night, I went home and did a little online research. And let me tell you, Chicago State Asylum had a crazy history—no pun intended:

Fact #1: In 1851, Cook County thought the still-rural northwest side of the city would be the perfect place for an insane asylum. So the county bought forty acres of farmland, built a creepy hospital that looked like a castle and started packing in the crazies. It was easy to do. Back in the day, lots of people—especially women and children—were declared insane when the county didn’t know what else to do with them. Eventually the place became a dump for orphans, unwed mothers, kids with Down syndrome or autism, sick war vets, old folks and lots of other people society cast off.

Fact #2: By the 1880s the place had more than two thousand patients crowded onto its three floors. With that many people, living conditions were bound to suck. Chicago State was notorious for bleeding, freezing and
shackling its patients. Ghostlike inmates wandered aimlessly through the wards. They went without clothes, starving and sleeping in filth-strewn hallways. And still, every day more and more patients arrived. Most came by railway, in a specially built car complete with chains and leather restraints, known around those parts as the crazy train.

Fact #3: Chicago State was constantly making headlines. My favorites?
PATIENT BOILED TO DEATH IN BATHTUB; CHILD IMPALED ON HOSPITAL FENCE WHILE TRYING TO ESCAPE;
or best of all—
HOSPITAL’S BEAUTY PARLOR CLOSED AFTER HEADLESS BODY FOUND
.

I planned on using the headlines as captions for my photographs. See? I told you so … epic!

Thunder crashed even louder than before, and lightning forked across the asylum’s steeply pitched roof, leaping from tower to tower like a special effect in a Frankenstein movie. The sky had turned into an ugly purple bruise. Raindrops, cold and hard as marbles, pelted my back, soaking my T-shirt. Clicking off one last shot of the gargoyle, I pushed open the heavy door and plunged into the asylum’s main hall.

Inside, the darkness was total, as if the place was holding blackness within itself. As I stood there, catching my breath and hoping my eyes would adjust, the door behind me swung shut. A deathly cold crept down the bleak corridors, wrapping itself around me. From deep
inside the asylum came the sound of something like iron doors clanking against their frames.

I lifted my camera and took a few careful steps forward.

Lightning flashed, illuminating the place in both darkness
and
whiteness, like a photograph—one of
my
photographs. In that instant I made out fallen plaster and peeling walls. An old-fashioned cane-back wheelchair sat at the foot of a narrow staircase. Then all went black again, and stupid as it sounds, I had the weird feeling that someone was watching me.

“Like who, Annabelle?” I said aloud just so I could hear my own voice.

My words echoed in the darkness. I touched the camera hanging around my neck. Reassurance. A reminder of why I was there.

Outside, lightning flashed again, brightening the room.

Was it my imagination, or … had that wheelchair moved?

I took another tentative step, my knees weak.

It’s funny how your imagination can work on you: forcing your mind down paths your logical self would never have taken; filling your head with thoughts you know are crazy. Thoughts like—Did I just hear a footstep upstairs? Or, Who is that standing in that corner? Even if there are no ghosts, the mind creates them.

More lightning.

Another cautious step.

A moaning squeak, like a rusted wheel turning, whispered somewhere in the room. A high-pitched laugh gurgled down the staircase. I felt something moving—just
barely
moving—around me. The wind?

I stopped.

What are you, an idiot, or something? You saw the TV show. You heard the stories. Are you really going to explore a supposedly haunted asylum all by yourself in the middle of a thunderstorm?

NO WAY!

Whirling, I ran back to the door, grasped the knob, pulled.

“Bye-bye, Annabelle!” I shouted.

The door opened without resistance. Why was I surprised? Had I expected something else?

I paused beneath the arch of the doorway and took a deep breath. Outside, a curtain of rain bowed the trees and flooded the streets. Thunder growled across the storm-tossed sky. But that didn’t stop me. Senior exhibition or no senior exhibition, no way was I going back inside. Tucking my camera under my shirt to protect it from the downpour, I stepped away from the Chicago State Asylum for the Insane.

There was an explosion of thunder. A skull-clutching crack. Like a strobe at a nightclub, lightning flashed. And flashed. And flashed again. Above me, the gargoyle tipped, rocked, seemed to lean from the eaves. Then its grinning face fell … no,
leaped
at me.

Pain sliced through my head. I crumpled, my blood mingling with the rainwater, turning the puddles red. Beside me, the gargoyle lay with a stony smirk. I heard gurgling laughter, the sound of a squeaking wheel. “Don’t leave me.” Then, from beneath my twitching body, I felt my camera click.

My final photograph.

Overhead, the moon cleared the trees, creating a white circle of light directly in front of Carol Anne’s grave.

It’s like a spotlight, thought Mike, like a spotlight on a stage. In it, he could see the camera’s bent frame, its smashed lens.

“I’m sorry,” he said at last, wishing he could think of something—
anything
—better to say. After all, it had to be painful reliving your own death.

Scott shrugged. “Yeah … well …”

“Sorry?” exclaimed Johnnie with a snort. “It’s hilarious! Clocked by a stone gargoyle! Who woulda believed it?”

“Me.” A kid sporting a crew cut moved into the circle of light. “After what happened to me, I’d believe anything.” He cleared his throat, waited until everyone was looking at him before continuing. “Have you ever seen that movie
The Blob
, or maybe
Attack of the Crab Monsters
? I bet you thought they were pure fiction, right, Mike?”

“Aren’t they?” asked Mike.

“Nope,” said the kid. “Those movies were based on
fact
, and the truth is that when I was alive, aliens from outer space were crashing in the New Mexican desert; radiation was seeping into everyone’s water, creating mutant creatures; and in my town of Rolling Meadows, Illinois, something stranger than any movie happened. I swear.”

“I
’VE SAVED A WHOLE dollar,” my kid sister, Toni, said on that fateful August day. She was perched on one of our pink kitchen countertops, licking pimento cheese off a celery stick and scanning the advertisements at the back of her
Crypt of Terror
comic book. “Now all I have to do is decide what to buy.”

“Save your money,” I replied. “All that stuff is junk.”

“Junk?” squealed Toni. “Are you kidding?” She started to read. “ ‘Hypno-Coin! Amaze your friends with fascinating hypnotic tricks of memory and mezmerization.’ ” She giggled. “Wouldn’t that be swell at Lori Beth’s next sleepover?”

In answer, I rolled my eyes and took a bite of my own celery.

Toni read on. “ ‘Defend the future with your very own Captain Gizmo Atomic Ray Gun. Use the patented
destructive sparking action to foil Martians and monsters.’ ”

I snorted. “Yeah,
that’s
real.”

She looked up from her magazine. “When did you turn into such a sour-faced old grandpa?”

“Since I got stuck babysitting you.”

“Waaaa!”
She rubbed her eyes, pretending to cry. “Poor Davey-wavey has to stay home with me instead of making time with Barbara Petersen over at Moe’s Drive-In.
Waaaa!
”

I felt my temper rise. Why, I asked myself for the umpteenth time, did Mom and Dad’s wedding anniversary have to be
this
weekend? And why did they have to take off in Dad’s brand-new Bel Air for some fancy resort in Michigan? Couldn’t they have just gone out to dinner like other parents?

I narrowed my eyes at my sister. “You’re a brat.”

“Sticks and stones,” she said. She stuck out her tongue, then went back to reading. “Onion-flavored gum … shrunken heads … Insta-Pets.” She paused, and I could see her lips moving as she read the ad to herself. Then she looked up, her dark eyes twinkling with excitement. “Listen to this! ‘Enter the amazing world of man-made life with Insta-Pets—the real, live pets you grow yourself. Fun and fascinating. Just add water.’ ”

“Like what? Insta-poodles? Insta-hamsters?” I laughed mean-spiritedly.

“Well, I saved up my allowance, and I’m going to find out,” said Toni. Hopping off the counter, she picked up her magazine and pushed through the swinging kitchen door.

“It’s a stupid waste of money,” I called after her.

Her bedroom door slammed.

Early the next morning, just as the sun was rising, the doorbell rang. Still sleepy-eyed and wearing my pajamas, I answered. A bright red box sat on the stoop. It was addressed to Antoinette Turlo.

“They’re here! They’re here!” Slipping past me, she swooped up the box.

“What’s here?” I asked. “What is that?”

“My Insta-Pets,” she replied. “I ordered them yesterday.”

I shook my head. “That’s impossible. There’s no way they could have gotten here so quickly.”

Toni shrugged and held up the box. “But they did! See?”

She tapped the package’s return address.

“How’d that package get to us overnight?” I asked. “And who delivered it?”

Toni shrugged again. “Who cares? All that matters
is it’s here! It’s here!” She danced off to the kitchen, the red box clutched to her chest.

Perplexed, I stepped out onto the front porch and looked up and down our wide, tree-lined street. Everything looked normal—lawn sprinklers and station wagons and pastel ranch houses standing neatly in a row. A whiff of burning charcoal from last night’s barbecue grills still hung on the morning air. It mingled with the scent of fresh-mown grass and well-tended flower beds, becoming what Mom liked to call “the sweet smell of the suburbs.”

A summer calm laid its hand over me. I spied Mr. Kopecky bringing in his newspaper, and Mrs. Neary taking Muffin, her nasty-tempered Pekingese, out for a walk. It all seemed like a typically cheerful, unchangingly bright morning in Rolling Meadows, except … there wasn’t any sign of a mailman. No sign of a delivery truck, either.