No. 11:11

The Asylum, Part II

The ethereal quality of so many of my childhood and adolescent experiences has always led me to question whether the dream like aspects of those times is due to the provisional quality of youth or if those experiences are really real, realer than the adult world that we are trained to inhabit over the years. Maybe as we age, we grow duller towards reality, towards what’s really there, blind or at lease asleep in profound ways.

We returned to the old asylum the next year and took our girlfriends and some others with us after a football game, piling into Kurt’s mom’s wagon with a gibbous moon rising low through clouds. A dumb move for a lot of reasons. Word had gotten out at school about the place and some of the more reckless of our peers showed up wanting to check out these tunnels. A kid named Dominique (all names have been changed) driving a mini-truck had a few kids riding in the back as Kurt pulled up at the Center Street stoplight.

We drove without headlights to the back of the institute, its pale bricks soot stained covered in shadows for the streetlights that ran its perimeter. We parked on a darkened street to walk in. We saw more kids coming across the wide lawn where low birch trees edged the buildings of the asylum. We crossed on foot and met at the wide depression where bolted doors led to the tunnels.

At the cement stairs we slipped over the chain link. More than a dozen of us went in that night and the noise was ridiculous. As for me and Kurt and Clint, truth is we felt careless. We’d never seen a soul on the grounds, no kind of security or staff, only that pair of eyes burning at us through the narrow window.

That night the lights in the tunnels were out, unaccountably. We’d brought down a dozen kids to have a look at the place for shits and it’s black as a mine.

There's some lights up further, said Clint. You bring flashlight?

Let's go down a ways and see. Feel along the walls.

We made our way in, steps echoing, the slap of sneakers on the smooth paving loud as hell and it got my heart racing for some reason. A few of the others stayed back at the wide doors that led to the surface, Kurt's little sister and her friends and this kid Raoul who for fear of the dark took some loose papers and trash he found and with his lighter made a torch and as we left up the passage, I saw him wadding papers together upon the ground by the entrance and lighting them so a small fire burned, illuminating the hatch and surrounding passage.

After a time, we reached a bulb shinning brown. The tunnels held a muted glow. Kurt led with Clint and Devon behind. Weird there's no lights, Kurt said. A red bulb flickered in a small grate, an emergency light we hadn’t seen. A sulfurous smell began to permeate the cloistered air.

We reached the turn, bringing us beneath the road and we were met by a darkness so complete it seemed to breath, not a speck of light in the oily blackness stretching before us. Let's go back, someone said.

You guys been in there? said Devon.

Plenty times. Usually lights all the way.

Let's go back.

We could see up through the purple glass panes, some were cracked and opened onto the sky where few stars shone, and a dim glow enervated the passage. I paced up ahead and let myself walk into the blackness, gauging my steps, hoping my eyes would adjust. A draft like hot breath from a cave met me and I could feel something different that night, something wrong, like the fabric of our adventure and the restless wanderings of our minds in that thinning town had run up against something rotten. A malevolent reek like coarse burning hair seemed to surround me as I crept into the black tunnel and I imagined the gates of Hades flickering some distance off, its false light a thing of flames barely glimpsed, like a portal to the underworld. I crept on, one foot before the other, hands out to the walls on either side, walking blind.

Kurt followed and I could feel him behind, hear his breathing. The rest, their shapes discernible in the weak light did not come after us.

Dumb to come down here, Kurt said. Shouldn't have.

A turn in the corridor snuffed out the remaining light from the passage.

We stopped and Kurt said, Shouldn't have brought all them. His voice filling the dark between us. Should have kept it to ourselves.

We stood listening. You smell that?

Like burning tire.

Kurt flicked on his lighter and I could just see his face. Smells getting stronger. The air held smoke. One of the girls called to us.

Kurt shook his head, Let them fret, he sneered.

I laughed and turned to head back.

An alarm went off. A buzzing that sounded through the corridor. We bolted down the tunnel, running hard in retreat. The tunnels held thick smoke. Raoul's trash fire. These passages had drawn in the smoke like a creature inhaling. He’d drawn together the offal of the tunnel, trash and asbestos and papers and made the passage into a nightmare and us sprinting to the end wondering who might find us, who might appear now that alarms sounded. This last dash from the tunnels is my final memory of that place.

We reached the bolted doors at the tunnel's end and saw them swung wide; bolts undone. Dom had his truck backed down into the corridor. No fire shone but the smoke still hung thin near its origin, a black mark on the ground and ashes kicked apart. Kids were jumping into the back of the truck as it pulled away. We stood the edge of the incline leading out of the passage to catch our breath. The alarm still sounded and looking from the large double doors we saw two men running along the walk under the overhang, lit from above. They wore white, faces indistinct. One called out. Everyone ran but me and Kurt. They scattered in the darkness as in dream across the field of tall grass at the back of the institute. I remember watching them from behind, and Devon and Clint as they raced away, the two men in pursuit.

Kurt and I hung back, below the level of the ground to see if anyone else would appear but no one did.

We circled the buildings, moving in the shadows cast by the crumbling structures. We saw no one as we made our way across the edge of the field to the road and to the wagon parked in gravel. Better find the girls and Dev and Clint.

Where you think they went?

Not far.

We drove the wagon out to the street and headed up Center. The girls stood at a corner under a streetlight.

Piling in Casey said, Where'd you guys go?

Nowhere.

Clint went down to the trees, and Devon I don't know where he went.

You get a look at those two in white?

Not really. Just took off. I got scared.

Never seen anybody around here.

Casey sat up, We gotta get Devon and Clint.

They'll be alright. They can catch a ride.

Maybe Dom grabbed them.

We gotta go back, she said. You know Dom wouldn't stop.

Kurt swung the wagon across the gravel, She's right.

We drove down Center Street along a field of brown grass with old cars piled up around a mound of gravel for no reason, the lights of the asylum shinning across the field. Driving the abandoned back roads of the institute we peered into the darkness hoping to see one of them and then Kurt killed the lights. I could see someone walking ahead. Clint’s wiry frame. Getting in back he said, Ran like the devil out there. You seen Dev? He headed down to the tree line where the creek cuts west.

I can't drive down in there, sure ain't walking in there.

Two figures loomed before us as we turned onto the dirt road that ran to the trees. Kurt flipped his lights on. Two men in white stood watching into the glare of the headlights. Kurt quickly killed the lights again gunning it in reverse. The men rushed toward us as we rocketed back, kicking up gravel. Arm on the back of the seat, Kurt guided us away and then bringing the front around hard gunned it back the way we came. He flicked the lights back. There was Devon at the side of the road. Kurt braked on the gravel; Devon got in as the two men reached us on the road.

One came up alongside the wagon where I had the window down. The face seemed blank, like a man in a dream who isn't a man but only a faceless, nameless phantom. Someone cried out as the man reached for the window, but Kurt let the wagon peel and then it dug in and we shot away.

You see that face? I said as we pulled onto Center Street in the dim glow of streetlights.

They better not have got the plate number, said Kurt.

They didn't. Not with headlights in their eyes.

I wasn’t sure if anyone else saw what I saw. I kept quiet, but to this day I still see in my mind's eye that face that's no face at all, only a pale rubbery mask reaching a hand through the window.