Insane Read online

  Insane

  by

  H.G. Lynch

  The right of H.G. Lynch to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him/her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the author, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it was published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Edited by

  Elizabeth A. Lance

  Cover Design by

  Swaggin’ Author Services

  Copyright© 2014

  All rights reserved

  H.G. Lynch

  www.authorhglynch.com

  For my parents. Thank you for putting up with all my craziness.

  Chapter One

  ** Callie **

  “Let me go! Let go of me! I’m not crazy! I’m not fucking crazy!” I screamed, thrashing against the guards as they half-dragged and half-carried me down the pale, sterile hallway. I bit fingers and kicked shins and scratched arms, I spat and snarled and cursed, I screamed so loud I hurt my own ears and scared the hell out of half the other patients in the building. And still, the guards thrust me into a dark little room and slammed the metal door behind me, locking me in…

  Again.

  It wasn’t the first time I’d tried to escape, nor the first time I’d been caught. But this time was the closest I’d gotten to freedom, and to be thrown back into the tiny, dull, lifeless room I’d been inhabiting for nearly three months, to be ten feet from fresh air and grass and a world without bars on the windows and a schedule for every moment outside my room, and then be forced back into a prison – it was maddening.

  But then, that was the thing about the Montgomery Psychiatric Hospital; if you weren’t already mad when you went in, you sure would be after a few months.

  I slumped onto the floor and stared at the door, not sure whether to cry or try to rip the door off its hinges. I forced my mind to go blank, because at least if I didn’t think about how painfully close I’d come to finally getting out of here, I could perhaps retain what was left of my dwindling sanity. If I thought about how I’d been close enough to see the huge, wrought iron gates at the end of the gravel driveway through the glass doors, I’d probably lose it for good, and then I’d actually deserve to be here.

  For now, I was sane.

  It was just that nobody believed me.

  They said I was crazy. That I was a danger to myself and possibly to others. That I was delusional, paranoid, disturbed. That I heard voices.

  Well. That much was true. I did hear voices. Actually, only one voice.

  “Failed again, sweetheart. Nice try, though,” said the voice that nobody else could hear. It was a voice I knew all too well – a voice I’d known since I was seven years old.

  I tore my gaze off the door, and turned to see him. He was sitting on the bed, looking as real as he had the day he’d died. Silky brown curls, pouty lips, and hazel eyes. Silver hoop earring in one ear, ragged jeans with holes in the knees, and a sleeveless dark blue shirt that exposed the pentagram tattoo on his left bicep. Overall, gorgeous. And absolutely, unequivocally dead as a doornail.

  I sighed and grimaced at the ghost of my dead best friend. “Shut up, Chester.”

  He folded his hands over his heart, pretending to be injured – which would have been a lot funnier if his heart was still beating. “Aw, don’t be like that, Cal. I’m sure you’ll make it next time.”

  “You said that last time.”

  “Did I?” He frowned and scratched the back of his head. “Well, I guess I was wrong then.”

  I snorted. “Yeah, that’s really reassuring.”

  He just smiled, shrugging one shoulder, and I felt some of my anger and disappointment leak away. He still had the same smile he’d had the first day we met in Primary Four, when he’d found me sitting alone in the playground at lunch, sat down beside me, and said, “Do you like Pokemon?” He’d pulled out a deck of Pokemon cards, and we played. He wiped me out with his Pikachu against my Psyduck. The next day, we played again. And the next day. And the next. And just like that, we became best friends.

  And ten years later, he died.

  Now he was haunting me.

  It was funny how the thing that got me put in the asylum in the first place was the same thing that kept me from going crazy.

  I stood up and glared at him. “Get off my bed.”

  He yawned and lay back, stretching out on the flimsy mattress. “Make me,” he challenged, grinning.

  I took a step toward the bed. “Move, or I’ll just lie down on you,” I warned half-heartedly. Even though I knew he wasn’t corporeal, that I couldn’t touch him, he looked real – if I tried hard enough, sometimes I could pretend he was still alive. It was easier to pretend if I didn’t try to touch him.

  His eyes brightened. “Oh, Callie, don’t tease me like that. You know I love it.” He winked, and I felt a smile curl my lips. He was always such a flirt, but he didn’t mean a word of it.

  I opened my mouth to say something very not nice, but before I could, I heard the door open behind me with a groan of hinges. I turned, already knowing who it would be. Doctor Jillian Moore closed the door as she stepped into my tiny prison cell. Her brown hair was tied up in a scruffy bun, and she was wearing the same plain white blouse and brown trousers as always. She was holding a clipboard and pen.

  She smiled her benign smile at me, and I glanced at Chester before I could stop myself. Since I was determined to escape this place one way or the other, I tried to pretend I didn’t see my best friend’s ghost anymore. But that was easier when he wasn’t lying on my bed, grinning at me. Asshole.

  “Hello, Callie,” Dr. Moore said quietly. She always spoke quietly, like she thought she might frighten me if she made any loud noises or sudden movements. I supposed most of the patients here were more sensitive to that sort of thing than I was. I just thought she was annoying, constantly whispering and moving like a turtle in a minefield.

  I grunted at her and sat down on the edge of my bed – careful to look casual and not to touch Chester at the same time. Dr. Moore closed the door and stood as far away from me as she could in the ten-by-fifteen cell. “How are you today, Callie?” she asked softly.

  I stared at her. How was I? I’d just tried to escape for the fourth time, been hauled back and tossed into my room once again, and she was asking how I was. “Just freakin’ peachy,” I said, deadpan.

  She frowned and scribbled something on her clipboard. I’d gotten used to that, but it still bugged me. What was she writing – Subject A showing signs of sarcasm? She looked up at me again. “You tried to escape again. Last time we spoke, you said you were doing better. You promised me you wouldn’t try that again.”

  Yeah, I had promised that. It wasn’t my fault she was stupid enough to believe it.

  I shrugged. She scribbled something on her clipboard again. I gritted my teeth. Chester chuckled behind me, and I resisted the urge to tell him to shut up. Talking to people nobody else could see would make a wonderful note on Dr. Moore’s magic clipboard.

  “So, Callie, what made you decide to try and escape again, after you promised me you wouldn’t? Did something change?”

  I shrugged again. She pursed her lips.

  “Did the voice tell you to do it?”

  I shook my head, no. She wrote another note.

  “Are you still hearing the voice? Is he talking to you right now?” she asked, peering at me more intently. She asked me that every time, and my answer was always the same, but she never seemed to believe me.

  “No, I’m not hearing any voices, Dr.
Moore. Not anymore,” I answered evenly, trying to ignore Chester, who had started singing ‘Itsy Bitsy Spider’ just to screw with me. I clenched my jaw harder.

  Dr. Moore’s eyes narrowed and she leaned forward slightly, staring at me. “Are you sure about that, Callie?”

  “…climbed up the water spout. Then down came the rain…” Chester sang on, and I curled my hands into fists on my thighs.

  I nodded, my lips pressed together. Dr. Moore didn’t look convinced. She finally tore her probing gaze off me to write another note. Then she asked, “Are you feeling suicidal right now?”

  “No.”

  “Do you feel like hurting someone else?”

  “…out came the sun and dried up all the rain…”

  I glanced at Chester. Yes. I definitely felt like hurting someone else. I said, “No.”

  “Are you–”

  I lost my patience. “Look, I’m pretty tired, so could we save this for another day? I’d like to go to sleep now.”

  The doctor looked at me for a moment, and I struggled to keep my face blank as Chester moved on to singing ‘Twinkle, Twinkle Little Star’ in a terrible, warbling voice. But then she nodded and scribbled one more note on her clipboard before clicking her pen and tucking it into the breast pocket of her blouse. “Of course. Tomorrow, then. And Callie? I suggest you don’t try to escape again in the meantime. There are guards set outside your room, and I have convinced the nurses that you don’t need to be sedated. But, if you try this again, you will be moved to a more secure room and be put under daily sedation. Just so you are fairly warned.”

  With that cheery message, she turned and knocked on the door to signal the guards to let her out. It swung open and she slid out. Once she was gone, I turned to glare at Chester. “I hate you.”

  He smiled lazily. “You love me,” he countered. I shot him the finger and then reached for the edge of the blanket. He frowned, sitting up. “You’re really going to sleep?”

  “Yes. I’m tired.”

  He twitched as I pulled back the blanket. He got off the bed in an eerily fluid movement that nobody with a corporeal body could achieve, and watched me crawl into it. I tugged the blanket up to my neck and sighed. Chester folded himself on the floor across the room, picking at a loose thread in the knee of his jeans. I closed my eyes.

  “Callie?” he murmured.

  I didn’t bother opening my eyes. “Yeah?”

  He was quiet for a long moment, so long that I cracked an eyelid to make sure he was still there. Sometimes he just…disappeared. He didn’t always mean to – he said that sometimes it was like he just fainted, and it could be minutes or days before he woke up and reappeared. But he was still there, sitting on the floor, looking despondent and thoughtful. Looking at his knees, he said, “I’m sorry you didn’t escape this time.”

  A bone-deep weariness flooded me and I sighed again, curling into a ball on my side. “Yeah,” I muttered, “So am I.”

  It was a few days before I was allowed out of my room again. Dr. Moore visited every day to assess me. Chester stayed quiet while she was there – mostly. When she decided I was no longer a flight risk, I got to re-join the rest of the patients on my floor in the common room. Whoopee.

  It was a large, blue-walled room with a handful of tables, and lumpy padded chairs scattered around in clusters. I think the setup was designed to try and encourage socialising, but I tended to avoid everyone because, well, it was hard to have a real conversation with any of them for more than five minutes. It was easier if I just left them alone and played I-Spy with Chester.

  I sank into a chair next to one of the huge bay windows, and tucked my legs under me. Chester sat in the window seat. I looked around to see who of my fellow patients was in the room today. Most of them were my age or a little older, because the floors were arranged by age and how dangerous we were. The real nasty crazies – the psychopaths and sociopaths and schizophrenics and such – were on the Fifth Floor.

  We were the Third Floor. We were the young and only really dangerous to ourselves kind of crazy.

  The Fourth Floor was the older and mostly dangerous to themselves and occasionally other people kind of crazy. I had never been to the higher floors, but I’d started my stint here on the Second Floor, in a nice room with a normal, wooden door, when the doctors had thought I was just damaged after Chester’s death. They thought my seeing him everywhere would go away with some therapy and a drug regime.

  After I tried to escape the first time, they moved me to the Third Floor, and into a more secure room, claiming I was more broken than they’d thought and that I would need a longer stay. Of course, my father agreed and signed the appropriate papers to shift me to the new floor, and I joined a new bunch of crazies.

  I spent a lot of time hating my dad. It was him who put me in here in the first place. He said he couldn’t handle me being crazy on top of everything else – everything else being Chester’s death and losing his job as a plastic surgeon last year because of several client complaints, and my mother leaving him five years ago, which he still wasn’t over. In my opinion, good riddance to her. I never liked her.

  People that say you have to love your parents no matter what, just because they’re blood, are wrong. She took half of everything with her in the divorce. She was never my biggest fan. Might have had something to do with the fact that when I was seven, I took all of her expensive, fancy clothes from her wardrobe and cut them to shreds to make clothes for our pet Pomeranian, Molly.

  My mother – Karen, but I liked to call her Killer because she always wore pointy high heels she could stab someone to death with – was furious, and had my dad get rid of Molly to punish me. Dad did whatever she wanted, when she wanted. My younger brother, Evan, did too. I thought they were both idiots.

  Anyway, yeah, my dad stuck me in here after I started talking to an invisible friend and claiming it was Chester. Telling him probably hadn’t been my smartest move ever, but I’d been sort of excited to have my best friend back – even if he was a ghost. Dad threw a fit and nearly had a total breakdown, screaming at me that it wasn’t funny to joke about Chester’s death. Chester had been like a second son to him sometimes. Before he died he’d always been over at the house, often had dinner with us, helped Evan with homework – Evan liked my best friend more than he liked me. But then, everyone liked Chester. He was just one of those people.

  When my dad realised I wasn’t joking about seeing Chester’s ghost all the time, he decided I was crazy and signed me in to Elizabeth Montgomery Psychiatric Hospital – or, as everyone in town called it, Montgomery Psycho Home. MPH for short – and you know the rest.

  “I spy with my little eye…something beginning with H,” Chester said, beginning our usual game of I-Spy. There really wasn’t much to spy in a mostly-bare room full of crazies. Sometimes we spied out the windows instead, but so close after my last failed escape, I couldn’t stand to see the outside world.

  I searched the room for something beginning with H. There were only a handful of people in the room today – the guy with the dyed black hair and scars on his arms, the girl about my age with the shaved head who was always staring at the ceiling and whispering to angels, the dark-haired woman in her early twenties who never let go of her ragged pink teddy bear. The bear was missing an eye, and looked like it had been drowned in a river a few times, but the nurses let her keep it because the one time they’d tried to take it from her, she’d nearly clawed the nurse’s eyes out.

  Today, Crazy Teddy Lady was chattering incessantly about her bear to someone – a guy, sitting in a chair with his back to me. I couldn’t see his face, but I didn’t think I recognized him. Judging by the way his shoulders strained against the pale green fabric of the asylum uniform we all had to wear – I missed my ratty jeans and band t-shirts more than anything some days – he was buff, though. Must have been a new guy. I wondered what he was in for.

  From the set of his broad shoulders, he was tense, probably annoyed by the Tedd
y Woman. His fingers gripped the chair arm, and I felt a little sorry for him. Once Teddy Woman got going, she could be at it for hours – I knew because my first day on this floor, she’d cornered me and talked for nearly an hour and a half before I could escape.

  I slid my gaze on past the blonde nurse at the back of the room who was meant to be watching us to make sure we didn’t start trying to kill each other or ourselves. Then I sighed and turned back to Chester. He lounged casually in the window seat, one foot up on the seat, one arm leaning on his knee. He glanced at me, a flash of hazel eyes under his long curls. “Give up?”

  I bit my lip and swept my gaze round the room once more. Then I nodded. I couldn’t see anything that began with H. Chester grinned and pointed to the back of the room where the nurse was standing with her arms crossed, looking supremely bored. “Hot nurse,” he said.

  I rolled my eyes. “You’re an idiot. And she’s not hot.”

  “Hey, if I was alive, I’d totally be hitting on her.”

  “If you were alive, you wouldn’t be here, and neither would I,” I pointed out.

  He tipped his head in acknowledgment. “True.”

  Suddenly, someone got angry. “Dammit, I hate this place. I don’t freakin’ belong here!” It was a guy’s voice, I swung around to see who was getting all pissy. Nice to know I wasn’t the only one who wanted out. But I couldn’t see anyone talking, except the bald girl muttering to herself, and Teddy Woman chattering away. The guy she was talking to – talking at – still had his back to me, but I figured he was the one bitching.

  The voice came again, from his direction. “Bloody hell, would you piss off already! I don’t give a damn about your ugly teddy, you lunatic,” the boy snapped. Still, Teddy Woman rambled on, speaking right over him like she hadn’t heard a word he’d said. I watched the boy’s grip on the arms of the chair getting tighter and tighter until his knuckles turned white. He was not a happy camper.