Part IX

 

Over 20 minutes had gone by and Will was still not back yet. Amy had begun to really panic at this point. She’d gone from wild speculations, to gently calming herself, to outright hysterics, all the way back down to numbing silence in that time. Now, she sat meekly on the bench, like a torpefied mouse, and silently prayed for Will to come back to her.

She thought of her father, and all the things he’d said to her mother before he’d walked out. Was Will the same? Everyone she’d ever known had abandoned her. A few cold sentences that served as a goodbye and then they all vanished into blackness, never to be seen again. No wonder she was so insecure and timid. It seemed no one had any interest in her. Now, more than ever, sitting in the damp darkness, she felt truly alone. Everything about her life had seemingly culminated in this one moment.

Amy began to sob again. As she closed her eyes, she thought of the night her father left.

Her mother had been drinking and arguing with him all night. He’d come home from work, tired and hungry, and she chased him from room to room and shouted at him. Amy laid on her bed in the dark and listened to it all:

‘You never do anything for me!’ Her mother bellowed.

‘Please, let me clean up and we’ll talk?’

‘Screw you! I don’t need ya!’

‘I pay for everything! You wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for—‘

‘You’re nothing! I hate you! Oh, good for you. That’s it! Pack your fucking bags and dive. Go on, leave! Like you always do!’

She could tell by the sound of her mother’s voice that she’d been drinking all day.

‘Yeah, go on ya sonofabitch! You’re just like your father! A worthless bum! So easy for you ain’t it? To just pick up and leave like that.’

After an hour or so, Amy had finally plucked up the courage to get up and open the door from her bedroom, only to see her father standing in the front doorway with an overnight bag slung over his right shoulder. He never looked back. He didn’t know Amy was standing right there. He never looked back, and he just left. It was a dark and snowy night and with one swift motion her father disappeared into the blizzard and she never saw him again.

For years Amy had tormented herself about why he never said goodbye to her. Was it something she’d done?

She was always a shy child and an under-performer at school. She wasn’t particularly talented, nor did she have any definable skills. As she tracked down the inventory of her personality she briefly wondered whether she had something to do with her father leaving. Was he disappointed in her? Was she too much like her mother? Amy knew that her mother drank too much and had been unfaithful at least once during their marriage. Yet, Amy couldn’t help but blame herself for her father leaving. If only she’d had the stomach to fight for him. If only she had the nerve to tell him how much he’d meant to her. Maybe then he wouldn’t have left? If she wasn’t so young and meek, she’d have run after him and clutched his leg like a desperate kitten, and begged that he’d take her with him. Wherever he was going, it didn’t matter. She just wanted to stay with him.

When he left, her mother soon retreated to her own bedroom—as she always would do in those kinds of arguments—and she played The Cranberries on the vinyl player, and listened to it over and over, crying into her pillow like some yelping dog, crying her heart out. The noise of the song reverberated into Amy’s bedroom, plaguing her with the sound. Her mother would lock the door and demand no one try to enter except her father. And at some point, her father would return and they would reconcile. Her mother expected it. It was almost a predictable pantomime now.

But that night was different. Because he never did return.

Amy went back to her bed and laid there in the dark and sucked her thumb.

Why did she say those things if she didn’t want him to leave? Amy thought. Why did she let him leave if she loved him? I don’t understand.

The song had burned into Amy’s memories as if it were branded in with a hot iron. It was the last anchor of her father, the last memory of him, and she never wanted to forget it. I love you, daddy. I’m sorry…

 

 

Amy slowly opened her eyes again and found herself still in the middle of Denbigh Asylum. The memories faded and it was quiet once more. She sighed and sat there for a while, all alone. Then she started humming that song again in a faint effort to reassure herself.

“Oooooh, Is that the way we stand? Were you lying all the time? Was it just a game to you? But I'm in so deeeeep. You know I'm such a fool for youuu. You got me wrapped around your finger. Do you have to let it linger? Do ya have to?” She sang quietly then soon stopped. The words didn’t feel right now. They felt disingenuous.

Then a wave of sheer terror hit her and she gasped. From further down the hallway, she heard the same song echoing through the rooms back to her. It was low and alien at first, and it had picked up at the exact spot where she’d stopped singing at.

“Do you have to, do you have to, do you have to let it linger?” The song called back from somewhere. “Oh, I thought the world of you. I thought nothing could go wrong. But I was wrong, I was wroooong…”

Amy bolted upright and shone her torchlight down the hallways in all directions. Her heart thundered in her chest and her hands trembled.

“Who’s there?” She was barely able to ask. Her sagging cheeks quivered and she’d just about managed to collect enough saliva to ask the question.

“If you, if you could get by. Trying not to lie. Things wouldn't be so confused. And I wouldn't feel so used,” the song continued somewhere in the ambience. “But you always really knew. I just want to be with you… And I’m in so deeeeep—”

Then, without announcement, the song cut into a thick silence. And once more, Amy was left standing in the stygian dinginess alone, and just the eerie widening stillness behind kept any semblance of company, only now she wasn’t alone.

Her skin was clammy and her eyes went wide as she looked around. She heard her panting loud against herself. Her left hand fluttered towards her lap, where she kept the flick knife in her pocket, but it soon lost itself on its journey and fell by her side instead.

“Hello? Is someone there?” She muttered sheepishly, scanning in all directions.

But, as she came back around with the light in an arc, it fell upon a figure at the far end of the hallway; something tall standing there, not moving. And she stopped dead.

It was a person, a silhouette, stark and lurid against the twilight blue backdrop. She gasped, harder this time, and her phone almost fell from her instantly disabled grip. There was something in its aspects that Amy recognised instantly.

“Dad?” She asked and almost took a step forward. “Is that you?”

All fear had drained from her at the prospect of being reunited with her father once more.

She took a step closer. When she did, her torchlight dipped for an instant and the shadow in front of her rushed towards her with deadly speed.

“Dad!” she shouted but was met with no response.

She suddenly felt the ghostly chill of a presence flow across her exposed skin. She yelled in startled horror as a great loping black shadow swept by her in a rush of wind. But it was gone so swiftly that she was only left pondering whether it had been a dream or a hallucination.

“Oh, god…” she whispered in shock and stepped back until she found herself against the wall. She stood quietly against the abrasive brickwork and tried to calm herself.

But it wasn’t working. She stood there for what seemed like an hour, just trying to steady her breathing but in reality, it was merely a few seconds. She wasn’t alone, and she knew that now. She wanted Will back by her side. At least then there was some form of comfort in not being so exposed. And, as if on cue, just as she was regaining control of herself once more, a voice came from below.

“Amy?” Will called from the darkness below and Amy froze. “I think I’ve found it, but my phone is dead,” his flat voice drifted up towards her. “Can you come down here?”

Amy took a reluctant step towards the doorway and stood at the top of the stairs. “Will, is that you?” She called down.

“Yeah,” his voice echoed from the bottom of the stairwell. “Can you come down here?” He said and his voice didn’t sound quite right.

“Will?”

“It’s me… Come down here.”

She took another weary step towards the entrance of the basement. “What’s going on?”

“Come down here and I’ll show you…”

Too captivated by the chance of seeing him again, she began edging down into the basement. She gripped the handrail tightly, even though the cold iron was gnawing into her palms.

“Will?” She asked as she stumbled slightly down the rotten stairs. “Will, please. Where are you?”

At the base of the stairs she came into a vast domed chamber— like a cave—and the yawning darkness all around swallowed up what little torchlight she had. The basement was long and narrow. It smelt of ash and arsenic and all the particles of dust would dance around in her torchlight like moths to a flame as she scuttled through it all.

“Will? Hello?”

Down there were rows of washing machines and generators. Old laundry trolleys were scattered across the empty walkways as if abandoned in a hurry. Some of them still had dirty linens in them. But that was only the laundry room. There were other rooms. She made her way through the storerooms and into another area. More than that, there was an entire sprawl of dingy hallways and tunnels that seemed to slink off in every direction. Below the asylum, there was a whole network of service tunnels and cubbyholes that gave Amy the impression of a rabbit’s warren. All of it a blur in her torch light. The corners and corridors seemed to have no aspect to them, instead, it all just slid off into unrelenting darkness.

“Will! Where are you? Please, call out!” Amy shouted desperately as she navigated the infinite shroud.

Feeling the panic rise within her again, Amy paced down the lengths much faster now and checked behind every edge of the units. She surveyed every cubbyhole and burrow in the pit, desperate to find him hiding behind one of them with that same wry grin he always had. Her heart fluttered in her chest and she began to wonder where Will actually was. It had sounded like he’d called from the base of the stairs, but he couldn’t have. Otherwise, she’d have bumped right into him.

After some time going forward through the interminable gloom, she then came to him. Near the end of the basement, where the water tanks were, there was a sheer empty wall at the back. And that’s where she found him.

Amy froze in her steps. Sitting prostrate on the floor was Will, topless and bloodied, praying to something. He sat there on his knees, hands clasped together in obedient prayer, head bowed down. He rocked back and forth on his joints like a pendulum gone mad.

“Oh god! Will! What has happened to you?”

He did not answer. He simply sat on the cold wet floor before the mural, panting and sweating; just like patient 457. He stared at the mural intensely with wide black eyes. The sight had him.

“Will! Please, answer me,” she bayed.

Amy came to his side and tried to hug him in condolence, but it went unregistered. Instead, her arms slipped off Will’s pulsing rhythmic body. His skin was hot to the touch and sweat rolled down his back like a waterfall. She wrapped her hands around his chin and pulled his face up to hers. There was nothing in his eyes anymore. Just these two black discs staring back at her absently.

“There is something here with us. It just attacked me. Do you understand that? We need to leave!” She said. But, she looked into his vacant doe cow eyes and saw nothing of the person she knew. Her comments went unacknowledged. His body was nothing but a shell now. She recoiled in terror.

“Will! Please! Wake up!” She begged. “Please!”

“I’ve seen it,” Will slurred as a response. “I understand now…” he said as he looked up to her, poisoned by something, enslaved by something. He seemed delirious, yet completely paralysed. “This reality is a lie. The human spine liquefied. We believe, so endlessly… We will stay here forever. We can never leave…”

“What?” Amy shrieked as she held his head in her palms.

“Your father is here. They are all here. He told me to tell you he’s sorry…” Will said and smiled menacingly. The whites of his teeth glinted in Amy’s torchlight.

Amy reeled back and dropped her grip from his chin.

“What the hell do you mean?” She asked. “You don’t know my dad.”

“We are all here,” he said. “This realm is not the only. It’s all connected.”

Amy stared into his eyes, and as she did, something whispered to her quietly that it was not Will talking anymore. It was something else. She gazed down into his empty face—and it flashed between the memories of her past: her drunk mother, her father’s face: all of it interchangeable, and she realised that Will was possessed by something.

Amy looked up and saw what Will was praying to. Behind them both was a giant wall of stone that was completely devoid of anything that belonged to humans. Instead, there, on the back wall was a mural—a painting of an entity or some kind of abstract being. The torchlight barely lite-up the scene before her, but she recognised the glyph all the same.

She screamed when she saw it fully. Painted in a thick black ichor against the stark white wall was the thing from the files. The paint was made of blood. The four-armed pale humanoid of days of old sat poised, cross-legged, on the wall in front of her like an ancient king slumbering atop his mouldering throne of skulls. It was sitting above the crematorium chute where the ashes of its sacrifices lay forever. Around it, the wall was covered in esoteric symbols so ancient and hideous that they made her skin crawl. They were the same ghastly runes from the wooden feathered effigies hanging from the ceilings earlier.

Amy cried out horrifically at the sight. She reeled back in utter panic and screamed louder; this chilling shrill that echoed through the low-ceilinged basement. Her baying soon morphed into hysterical crying and all she could do was stand there before him and illuminate his form in front of the tableau.

Will was right. They had to let the world know what had happen in that gruesome asylum. They had to escape. She reached down and hooked her arms around his slippery torso and tried to pick him up, but he was much heavier than how he appeared. She heaved and tugged but Will refused to move. He sat on the floor like a giant sandbag and Amy realised she could not lift him to his feet.

She came to face him and lifted his head to hers. “I’m going to try and find something to pull you out with,” she said as she held his chin up. “Okay?”

Will did not reply. He stared back at her with empty obsidian eyes, like he was looking straight through her body and at something else entirely.

Amy left him and went scrabbling around in the basement to try and find some rope or maybe even a trolley to pull Will away from that awful mural on the wall. She had to get him out. She had to hurry.

Amy felt around in the dark in search of something but there was nothing. She then decided to look back upstairs. There must be something around here I can use?

When Amy came to the stairs, she moved up them cautiously, expecting to see that same shadowy apparition standing at the top of them, waiting for her. It was a lonely and terrifying climb. She clambered skittishly up the stairs like a nervous child and she eventually came to the doorway at the top. But, when she came to that doorway, her heart dropped. Something had changed. Utterly surprised, she reached out in the dark where there should’ve been emptiness and touched only freezing sticky stone now. Amy gasped and her hand reeled back in astonishment. It had sealed shut somehow.

“What? This was clear before,” she shrieked. “No, no, no, no. This doesn’t make any sense!” She said as she patted the wall franticly. Her slapping of the wall soon turned into maniacal fist-pounding against the monolithic slab of stone, yet it would not move.

“No! This wasn’t here before!” She shouted as she punched the rock. “No! This was how I came down here. I know it!” Then, she whispered once more in defeat. “But, this wasn’t here before…” she sobbed.

Feeling the despair burn upward within her, she sank to her knees at the top of the stairs and cried. “Oh, christ. What is going on?”

She sat there and pulled her knees up to her chest. She leaned her head against the cold wet stone and wept. The whole ordeal was making a mockery of her will. It seemed that everything was against her and she realised she was lacking the strength to fight it anymore. She curled up and buried her head in her arms. Please let us escape, please let us go…

Amy sat there drenched in sorrow and thought of everything that had led her to this moment. She tried to think of ways to escape, but nothing was coming to her, so she went motionless once more and stared off at the concrete wall in front of her.

About ten minutes went by when she first heard the sound.

“Amy, come back here…” Will’s wounded voice called up to her from the pit. “Please. It hurts so much. Where are you?”

“Will?” Amy replied in bewilderment. She craned her ear to the staircase so she could hear it better. He’s back. He’s alive. He’s going to be okay!

“Please, come down here. I need you,” Will crowed.

Amy rose with a jolt of energy at hearing his voice again and descended the staircase once more. After everything, she could not leave him. He was the only person left in the world who’d ever cared for her. No one else ever did. She could not leave him.

He’s going to be okay!

“I’m coming. Hang on. I’m right here,” she called out.

Her torch shone into the thick blackness and each step downward felt to her like stepping off a cliff’s edge. “Will? Can you hear me?” She gasped. “Are you okay?”

Just like with Will, Amy stepped down into wafts of smoke that were drifting up from the bottom of the staircase. They became thicker with each step. She didn’t notice. She moved down through waves of milky fog eagerly. The air about her vibrated like the rhythm of a heartbeat, and she didn’t notice.

“Will, I’m almost there. Just hang on,” she said as she continued pacing through the endlessly folding fog. She held her hand outstretched, touching the rough stone contours of the stairwell, feeling her way through the wet swirling air all about her. When she reached the bottom, she stumbled and stepped down into something thick and sludgy below her feet. It felt like tar seeping in over her socks. Her shoe became ensnared by its gross black ichor, but Will’s voice was still calling out to her from somewhere ahead; somewhere beyond the endless black mire. So she continued wadding through it in search of him.

“Where have you gone?” She screamed but heard no response.

Amy trudged and stepped through the thick marshes. The swamp all around was enveloping and before she knew it, the water was up to her chest and Amy was swimming through thick salty liquid. It was thick and heavy all around her.

“Where are you?” She bellowed before the waterline went over her head and she went under. She felt herself sinking into cold wet darkness. The pressure against her body made her feel weightless as she drifted down to the bottom.

At some point, Amy opened her eyes and then found herself in the living room of her childhood home. It was identical. Her mind swirled and she looked around with bemusement. It was snowing outside. The icy flakes fell against the bay windows with practised precision. The fireplace roared. It was all the same as that night when he left. She remembered it completely. The high ceilings. The Victorian townhouse. The thick dirty rugs at her feet. The smell of the fireplace and the unmistakable stench of gin and brandy radiating off the curtains and the chairs and the carpets. A lifetime of cleaning could never remove that stench. The front door was closed. It must have been a few hours after he’d left. Where am I? She wondered. This isn’t real…

Her head swam and she reached out to grab hold of something, but there was nothing to grab hold of. She stumbled forward and found herself standing above her mother. Her mother was passed out and rolling around in delirium in front of Amy like someone taken with a fever. Anything to garner sympathy. The booze had gotten into her and she writhed around in delirium pathetically. Her mother groaned and shook in the cashmere sheets like a pantomime. Amy looked on. She was smaller than how she imagined herself. Her eye-line barely scraped the top of the sofa. She imagined herself as a child now. The same little child who had watched her father leave. Amy waited by her mother’s side and tugged lightly at her dressing gown until she groaned.

‘Mummy, can you hear me?’ Amy asked. ‘Daddy is gone…’

Her mother rolled over and her bloodshot eyes blinked open for the first in hours. ‘There you are, little Amy,’ her mother said and flashed a vampiric smile. ‘Where is your father?’

‘He left,’ Juvenile little Amy replied.

‘Excuse me, dear?’  Her mother was always a socialite and a performer. Even in her dullest moments, she projected an image of authenticity and sophistication that most bought. But, not Amy. It was as if her mother couldn’t even remember the altercation that had just happened not two hours earlier. Maybe she chose not to remember it. She lived moment to moment, riding upon the crests of interaction; pure reactions only; like a great mass of kelp being coerced along by the tides.

‘You told him to leave. And now he’s gone…’ Amy said. ‘For years I trusted you. I looked up to you. But you took away the only thing that really helped me and meant anything to me. My father.'

‘Oh, my daughter, it’s a little late for this, isn’t it? May you pass me my glass?’

‘…You pushed him away. He was my dad. And you took him away from me.’

Her mother scoffed and reached out for the last of the martini on the table beside her. She clutched it like medicine and gulped the dregs of it.

‘You stupid girl. You were always too much like your father.’ She announced.‘Too weak. Too passive. I swear I married a jellyfish because he didn’t have a backbone!’ Her mother slurred. ‘Forget him. He was a nobody. We’ll be fine,’ she said and waved Amy away. ‘You’ll see in the morning. Once I clear my head…’

Now, standing next to her mother, that statement burned like white-hot coals in Amy’s gut. The memory came back to her and made her feel sick. Her mother had destroyed her life so erroneously, with such indifference, that it polluted Amy’s thoughts. She trembled with hatred.

‘You bitch! You stupid bitch… he left because of you!’ Amy screamed as she lunged and started punching her mother repeatedly. ‘You ruined my life, you drunk bitch! You ruined our lives!’

Amy climbed up and straddled her mother’s intoxicated corpse and exploded. Amy thumped and hit her mother furiously, each punch filled with more force than the last. ‘It was you!’ Amy growled. She smashed her fist into her mother’s face over and over until her mother stopped moving altogether. Amy’s arm ached and sweat ran from her brow. ‘YOU let him leave! You stupid bitch. You were supposed to be my mother. YOU did this!’

Eventually, Amy stopped and she sucked in a long hard gulp of air. Laying between her legs was her mother. Her vacant flat aqua-blue eyes looked upward at nothing in particular. They orientated in opposite directions, maybe towards the doorway, maybe towards the mini-bar, and she looked like a mannequin with a forehead smashed in down the middle. But there was something wrong. Amy reeled back in astonishment. Her mother’s eyes weren’t blue… they were green.

As Amy breathed the fire out of her lungs, she came to her senses once more. When she did come around again she found herself sitting on Will’s chest in the dark, a rough red brick in her right hand poised above her head. He laid there sprawled and motionless. She was squatting over him in front of the mural where she’d found him. The blood spread out across the floor around him like some gawky finger painting in the dimness.

Amy reeled back and the brick in her hand dropped with a deaf clang against the concrete floor.

“Oh, God…” Amy heaved as she gazed down in desperation at what she’d done. “Oh no! Will? Please! Will, answer me! I’m sorry!”

She shuddered and tried to push his skull back together, but it wouldn’t stay. Something hot and acidic lurched up through her throat.

“No, no, no, no!” Amy said over and over as she tried to smooth back the cracks in Will’s face and force his glassy lifeless eyes to look at her. “Oh, no! Will, please don’t be gone… Please!” She cried and buried her head in his chest. “Please! Don’t be gone…”

But he was. And she did it.

She heard her mother’s voice in her mind for one last time. ‘Oh, Amy… what have you done?’

She closed her eyes and cried. Amy was so completely overwrought that all she could do was slump down next to Will on the cold damp concrete floor and lay with him. She wrapped her arm over his body and sunk her face into his shoulder, hugging him to her and crying deeply into his shirt. Then both of them laid there for a while and everything was quiet.

“Will, I’m so sorry… Don’t hate me. Please. I’m sorry…” she whispered into his ear. “I will never leave you. I will never leave. I’ve always loved you.”

How could I do that? How could I do that to him?

She’d been so subdued for so long that she didn’t even think she had that kind of anger within her. Amy always assumed that it was simply something missing from her psyche. Never, in a thousand lifetimes, did Amy think she was capable of committing such a senseless and horrific act… unless it wasn’t her that had done it…

She sat up and looked at the pale man on the wall. From where Amy was sitting, its hollow face appeared to be looking down at the whole thing.

“You…” Amy snarled, facing the grotesque painting head-on. “You made me come back down here. You made him come to you. You made me…”

She stared trance-like at the dreadfully dark painting as if captivated by its aspects.

“Answer me!”

The wall spoke. The wall said she was weaker than Will was. The wall told her she was easier.

Amy stood up and faced the mural fully. “… Why?”

The wall said it wanted her.

“What do you want?”

The wall wanted to help her. The wall said she belonged here with Will.

“What are you?”

The wall asked for Will’s body.

“He’s dead now. You can’t have him,” Amy sobbed, slathered in the thick clumpy blood from Will’s opened head. “YOU made me do it!” She shouted with anguish.

The wall sympathised. The wall described Amy’s situation.

“No! His body can’t stay here. I must get him out.”

The wall disagreed. The wall asked for his body once more.

“You can’t!” Amy bellowed and cried into her hands, slick with blood.

The wall said he can bring him back, make him be with her.

“No! His family must know. I will get him out.”

The wall disregarded her choice. The wall said it was foolish to focus on such sentimental things. The wall demanded his body.

“You can’t have him! You deceived all the others too, didn’t you?”

The wall smirked.

“You destroyed their lives. You won’t have ours.”

The wall said Will can never come back. The wall said neither will she ever leave. They belonged to it now, as do all the others.

Amy rubbed her furrowed brow and looked down at Will’s body. Amy realised it was the wall that stopped them from leaving. It was the wall all along. From the moment they had stepped into its domain, it had corrupted, plagued their minds and deceived them; like a disease. The great yawing power of the malevolent unknown force was all around her and she knew there would be no escape. But she didn’t have to concede defeat. She would not go on in this world alone. If Will was gone forever, then so shall she. She stood up and stared definitely at its unmoving aspects. The great ancient deity sniggered at her efforts. If escape was not possible, she would deprive the wall of what it wanted. Her body tingled with the strength of what she was about to do. What better way to go out?

“Then I will join him. In death there is love…” she said and raised her arms prostrate in front of the dark energy.

Amy then took her flick knife out and slashed feverishly at her own wrists. The wall watched gleefully as the blade slid deep up her forearms. The blood spurted out in thick purple geysers and Amy soon began to feel faint. Once it was done, she stood and glared at the mural like a champion, defiant until the end, right before her vision faded. As the vitality drained from her, all those memories and thoughts faded too. Her head slumped and she looked down at Will’s bashed-in face and soon collapsed on top of his body. She laid there and felt the wave of contentment wash over her. It’s done. Her whole life had been nothing but an internal battle locked within the room of her own mind. No more. She would be free now.

Everything went dark. Amy breathed out long laboured breaths as she laid on top of his corpse. Pools of crimson spilt out from her slit arms and flooded the pair and Amy’s blood merged in with Will’s. Amy almost smiled to herself as the light dimmed and her senses began to leave her. Her head laid in the seem of his neck and she draped her gushing arm over his chest for the last time.

“I love you. I’m so sorry,” were her last words.

Then she shut her eyes and everything went quiet.

 

 

Part X

 

Much later and she awoke somehow. It was somewhere indistinct. The smell of freshly cut grass crawled up her nose. She smelt Lavender too. Crisp clean air all around. Birds chirped in the trees. She was laying on her back. She knew that much. The grass tickled her skin. Drafts of sunlight filtered into her eyes. Amy squinted and awoke in a daze and looked upward to an endless blue sky, like an upside-down ocean.

She felt warm.

Amy looked around stunned. She was in the courtyard of the asylum. It was spring. The flowers were budding. There were people all around in white pyjamas mowing the lawns and reading books. There were hundreds of them. All of them smiling and attending to various tasks. One woman in her forties was pruning roses and sniffing the petals contently. A tall man with a shaven head was reading lines from a theatre play to himself. He was acting it all out and would pause every now and then and then re-run his lines.

“Good morning, sleepy head,” Will said.

Amy rolled and looked to her right and saw Will laying next to her. He was wearing that same sardonic grin he always did. His head was propped up in his hand as he watched her contently.

“Will? You’re okay?” Amy asked with bewilderment. “I thought…”

“I’m fine. How are you?” He grinned.

Amy looked around in puzzlement. “Where am I?”

Her head felt light and she had the sensation she was floating somehow.

“The courtyard of the Denbigh Asylum. This is the garden,” Will said as he gestured to the view.

Amy looked at Will. He was transparent. A river of blood trickled down the side of his head.

“Will, your head is bleeding…”

“I know,” he winked.

Amy bolted up. “This isn’t real? Is this a dream? I mean, any moment now I’m going to wake up in that fucking basement with that bloody painting in front of me? Right?”

“No,” Will replied calmly.

Amy stared down at his chest. “Why can I see through you?”

Will could only afford a morbid smile as an acknowledgement. He stood up too and came to her.

Amy looked around at all the other people. They were all wearing those same white robes. They were all patients.

Amy looked back at Will. Her eyes went wide with the realisation. “Will, are we… are we dead?”

Will didn’t answer at first. He simply pouted and took Amy’s hands in his own. He looked at her with those same exuberant blue eyes and exhaled deeply.

“Well… it’s kind of hard to explain, so maybe I should just show you,” he said. With that, he then slowly turned her palms over to reveal her lacerated wrists. Rows and rows of deep wide-open cuts all up her forearms still seeping with dark purple blood.

Amy looked up at Will’s transparent face, completely aghast; as if she couldn’t remember what she’d just done. The colour ran from her face and she almost stumbled back.

“We both died down in that basement, Amy,” Will said frankly. “We can never leave here.”

“Jesus fucking Christ…” Amy said as she staggered away from him. “No, no, no, I just wanted to die, I didn’t want to end up here. I just wanted it to end, I didn’t want to be here.”

“It’s okay. We’re okay,” Will reassured as he came closer and rested his hands on her shoulders. “We’ll be together now.”

Amy calmed and faced him once more. “What do you mean?”

“It’s where all of them have ended up.”

She looked around at all the happy patients in the garden. “So, so we’ll be here forever?” She asked.

“Yes. In death there is love, right?” Will smiled. “Don’t worry. Everything is alright now…”

“Oh God, I don’t understand.”

“Let me show you. Come on, we might as well meet the others…”

He wrapped his arm around her and led her further into the courtyard to join all the other souls that had perished within the walls. All of them who would never leave its confines, yet the sun would shine eternally upon them all and they would all live forever in the dusty memories of the asylum’s masonry walls. The monstrous hugging entity that was Denbigh Asylum wanted them to stay. It needed them to stay. With their presence there was power. The rain may fall and the thunder may brood, but the asylum will stand firm for eternity and all those spirits it has absorbed shall live within its ward for infinity. The silent dance of eternal death continued on.

It was four days later when the local hostel reported Amy and Will’s absence. Some of their possessions had still been left in the room, and no one had seen the pair come-nor-go in that time. After a few hours of organising, the local police launched a search investigation of the surrounding area, but found nothing. It was soon concluded that the pair had fled the area and no more action was taken. Little did the police know, they never left. But the locals knew exactly what had happened. A few of the residents had spotted the couple heading up that forbidden track days earlier and they all knew what fate they’d walked into.

Amy and Will’s disappearance was only added to the ever-growing list of vague hauntings and sightings of apparitions and spectres that supposedly navigated the hallways of Denbigh Asylum when the sun goes down. They were not the first, and for as long as the building sat up there on that gloomy hill, they would not be the last.

Back at the asylum, Will’s ghostly apparition stood content in the atrium. He looked out through the cracks in the wall and admired the view. Beautiful. It was raining, but the sun was rising, etching the tops of the trees all around with hints of gold. Behind him, Amy waited, humming her favourite song to herself. She watched him with a playful snigger.

“Will, are you coming or what?” She eventually said.

Will turned and grinned wryly. “Of course. I wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

Amy held her hand out to Will and he took it and both spectres then turned and faded into the ether.

Together forever. My arms, your hearse.