The Mind's Eyes

"The cabin in the woods had been abandoned for years, but one night, a candle burned in the window."

I read the line I had written. I read it again. I sighed. I was a writer of chilling horror fiction—just maybe not a writer of good chilling horror fiction. I sighed again.

The waning sunlight streamed in through all three of the large windows in my office. I closed my eyes and swiveled my chair until I could feel the warmth of the sunlight on my eyelids.

God, I was tired. I wanted to believe that the past five years of hell were finally turning a corner. I wanted to believe it. I wanted to believe it desperately. It was December 15th, what would have been our fifth wedding anniversary. My ex-wife Jane was in prison. Our four year-old daughter was probably on her way from preschool to a birthday party at a neighbor's house. The divorce had been final for less than a week when Jane violated the last restraining order and tried to take our little Nell from her preschool. Apparently, her attack on the arresting officers was so vicious that they had finally questioned her mental stability. Because the state hospital could not safely maintain her, and because she posed such a significant escape risk, she was very quickly transferred to the Secure Psychiatric Unit of the State Prison.

I had a flask tucked into the inside pocket of my coat for the really bad times I tried to convince myself. I uncapped it and I took a long, slow pull on it now to celebrate a good moment. I was hoping to catch up on some new writing with Nellie at the neighbor's for the night. I thought it was ironic that my deranged ex-wife had been admitted involuntarily to the new state hospital across the office park before being transferred to the state prison. My writing office was in the old state hospital. It was a huge, old building shaped like a flying "H" that had once housed thousands of the state's mentally ill patients for over one hundred and fifty years. It was closed to patients twenty years ago in favor of a much smaller acute psychiatric facility and a web of community programs. Progress.

"Isn't it ironic," sang Alanis Morissette in my head as I pondered the thought that this building was no longer acceptable for thousands of the allegedly mentally ill, but was perfectly acceptable office accommodations for lawyers, accountants, insurance agents, and possibly adequate writers of chilling horror fiction. The rent was cheap. My eyes closed.

I heard the creak of someone on the stairs and quickly capped the flask and tucked it back into my coat. I swiveled my chair away from the sun and looked over my desk towards the door. A moment later Mary rushed into the office, out of breath. Mary was the secretary for the suite of offices nearest mine.

"There was an escape from the prison, Richard!" she said,  "I got a notification on my phone."

I sat there in stunned silence. 

"Three people," said Mary, "two men and a woman."

Mary was usually a pleasant-looking woman with short, brown hair and a wide, honest face. That face was stricken with worry now.

"Do you really think it's her?" I asked.

Mary's face was ashen. My voice wavered. We both knew what Jane could do when she was angry. Jane was likely to be very angry today.

Our marriage started off like so many others, we were very much in love. Jane was a raven-haired beauty with deep emerald eyes. She was very passionate about me, about everything in life. We married very quickly, before I had a good look at her temper. While she was pregnant with our daughter, Nell, she started to suspect that I was seeing every woman in the office complex. Jane became obsessed with the notion that I was cheating on her. Her charming demeanor turned to brooding silence punctuated with screaming outbursts. Mary had once been the target of such a fit, as had so many other women in the building. Jane's intensity was frightening. Her green eyes would burn with a hatred that seemed beyond this world. 

"Dick!" she would scream. Jane was the only person who still called me that. "Who is she?"

Nothing I could say would dissuade her. Finally, when our little Nellie was three and Jane began to direct her black mood and more frequent ravings towards our daughter, I decided I had to make the break. When I told Jane I was leaving and was taking Nell, she slipped completely beyond the realm of normalcy. She screamed, she ranted and she raved. I had confirmed her every suspicion. 

Jane's eyes turned a darker shade of green than I had ever seen and blazed brighter than was possible at the same time. Her face twisted into a hideous grimace and she leapt at me. At 240 pounds I was at least twice her weight, but still she knocked me over in our living room and we shattered the glass coffee table as we went down, with her on top of me, kicking and screaming. I was bleeding from the back of my head onto the broken glass and our plush, cream-colored carpet. Jane picked up a large, bloody shard of glass cutting her own hand in the process and tried to stab it into my eye.

That was a year ago. It had been a frustrating year of courts and lawyers, threats and stalking, and fear. Police officers moved through our lives in an endless stream of blue. No one takes a man complaining of domestic violence very seriously, especially a large man complaining about a small, intensely beautiful woman. 

I thought Jane's Involuntary Emergency Admission into the state mental health system might be the beginning of the end of this nightmare. I had been fervently hoping this was true just moments ago. The authorities take the kidnapping and endangerment of a child, by anyone, very seriously. When Jane tried to nab our Nellie, I thought she did Nell and I a big favor. They finally put Jane away.

Was she out again?

"Do you really think it's her?" I asked again more desperately.

Mary looked at me in wide-eyed terror. My heart sank into my ample stomach, sending a backwash of bile into my throat. I could taste it in my mouth. I looked down and stared hard at my desk.

"I am going to call building security, you should go home!" There was a sense of urgency in Mary's voice. 

She left my office. I heard the stairs creak as she made her way back down to the second floor landing.

I swiveled my chair around again and looked out the windows. It was getting darker, matching my mood and the sense of foreboding that had suddenly descended on me. It looked cold outside and the wind was rising, buffeting the old windows, starting to scream and howl through the courtyards of the large, brick edifice. I rose heavily from my chair and began to gather my things together. I moved like I was wading through molasses with lead weights on my wrists and ankles. My chin was buried in my chest. I already felt beaten.

I was reaching for the phone to call and warn my neighbor when I heard the scream. I froze. It was a blood-curdling scream just like they described in all those dime store horror comics I read as a kid. I swear my blood actually curdled. At least it drained from my face. I dropped the phone and then my jaw. 

"She's here!" I whimpered.

I was worrying about little Nell at the neighbor's party and forgot to worry about me. The image of Jane trying to plunge a bloody shard of glass into my eye flashed into my mind and then it settled in for a long winter's stay. I had to get out of here. I moved quickly to the door of my office and looked down the stairs. 

"Mary?" I called out, too quietly.

No answer. The lump in my throat was starting to close off my air supply.  My voice sounded weak and full of fear. I heard the stairs creak and my knees started to buckle.

Was that her? I looked around wildly.

The hallway outside my office went towards the stairs in one direction and into the old chapel in the other. My office might have been the priest's office when this was a working asylum. I had never been upstairs. I didn't know the layout of the floors above me. There were medical and dental offices on the floor above my office and I had the idea that there might be a lot of locked doors up there. I felt my terror rising. 

I cowardly resisted the instinct to go down the steps to investigate the scream. I was looking at my watch when I heard another step creak with what I was sure was Jane's weight and I fled down the dark hall and into the old chapel. It was a large room in much disrepair. It hadn't been used much in the past twenty years. There were buckets and garbage cans here and there to catch the water that leaked in when it rained. The ceiling was high and the weak sunlight cast long shadows in the darkening room.

Maybe I should take my chances on the stairs?

This building was creepy. I had tried to spend the night in my office once a few years back, when I just could not face returning home. It was about 11:30 pm when I closed my door, turned out the light, and settled onto my reading couch. Lying there in the dark I could hear every sound the old building made; the sound of the wind outside the three, large windows; the sound of my heart beating too fast. My mind had raced through one hundred and fifty years of history of the mentally deranged being imprisoned here. I could hear their moans and their screams on the wind outside and in the settling noises of the old building. The building seemed alive to me that night. It was telling me I didn't belong there. I made it home by midnight and it was a twenty-five minute drive.

I heard another creak on the stairs and my insides turned to water. I imagined Jane creeping up the stairs. Her black, shiny hair pulled back; setting off those crazed, green eyes that I was sure were blazing with hatred for me. A large knife clenched in her upraised hand. I tucked that image in next to the bloody shard attack and ran towards the back of the chapel.

There was a small room behind the back wall of the larger room. I ran in there and pressed my back against the wall. My chest and belly heaved. Regular exercise and good eating habits had given way to sleepless nights and too much drinking. The fifty pounds I had gained during our marriage were working against me now. I strained to hear above the sound of my own labored breathing. I could hear the wind howling outside and the building creaking and groaning in here. My heart was pounding like a jackhammer.

Was she moving out there? Was she on the stairs? In my office? 

In the chapel?

I closed my eyes and I could see her slipping into the chapel. Knife held low in front of her, eyes glowing in the darkness. I swear I could smell the sickly sweetness of her perfume. Shalimar. Only Jane would remember to bring her perfume to prison, and find a way to keep it. I stood there for a long time, unable to move and praying I was wrong.

I finally opened my eyes and looked through the gloom. There was an old door that led to a dark stairway at the back of the small room. I moved as quietly as I could away from the wall, across the small room, through the door and down the stairs. I had to feel my way along the walls as I wound down the circular stairs to the floor below. Another door led to a long hallway. I moved quickly down the hall, past unlit offices on both sides. 

It had rapidly become Friday evening and apparently most tenants had departed for the day. They probably had families to go home to or holiday shopping to do. I looked back down the hallway in the direction I had come and saw the door moving. I could hear it groaning as it moved. I slipped through another door at the end of the hallway and quickly descended another musty, old staircase. I was now in the basement of the huge, old asylum. The ceiling was very low and the doors were all metal. There was no way to the outside from down here. 

I remembered a short, unofficial tour when I started renting an office here years ago. I had the vague memory that this passageway led to an abandoned part of the building. I thought I remembered where the key was hidden. There were broken windows in the unused wings and I thought I might be able to climb out near the parking lot and get to my car. Feeling a little bit better now that I had a plan I ran down the dimly lit narrow hallway. 

It seemed more like a tunnel, really. I could smell that underground dampness as I sucked wind from my exertion. The floor curved up to meet the walls like it had been carved out of the earth itself. It was wet in places along the floor, where water was dripping from the bundle of pipes above. I got to the end of the passage and opened a rickety door that lead to another small, dark room. There was another ancient, circular stairway here and I felt my way back up to the first floor. 

At the top of the stair I felt with my hand for a small shelf. I groped under the shelf for the skeleton key that should have been hanging there. It was missing! I heard a puddle splash below me, in the basement passage I had just come through. I turned the old handle and heaved my bulk against the old door. I grunted as I struck the door, but it didn't budge. I grabbed the small shelf to balance myself and my hand landed on the key and knocked it to the floor. I bent over and groped around in the darkness until my hand closed around the heavy key. 

I stabbed at the lock of the door that led to the condemned wings of the old asylum, fumbling around making a lot of noise until I finally got the key in and turned it hard. The lock screamed with disuse and the door creaked open. I stopped moving and listened. I could still hear some sort of shuffling noise at the bottom of the stairs. A door creaked and I jumped. I slammed the small door that I still held and jammed the key back into the lock from this side. I turned the key in the lock once more and slumped against the door.

I was in one of the old abandoned wards. I looked down another hallway with small rooms on either side. I remembered thinking on the tour that these rooms looked more like cells than did their counterparts in the hallways that we now occupied in the rest of the building. It was very cold in here. I listened at the door a moment longer and then crept down the dirty linoleum hallway. 

I could see that some of the windows to the outside were broken, but they were too small and too high for me to get out. Parts of the ceiling had fallen on the floor and the debris crunched under my feet. I could hear pigeons cooing and flapping somewhere down the hall. The streetlights had come on outside and I could just make out a bird skeleton that I remembered seeing on the floor during my tour.

This had been a children's ward. The paint on the walls was peeling and it gave them an eerie uneven texture. Here and there were paintings and murals on the walls that were marred by the peeling paint. A huge, yellow happy face smiled at me from one wall as I passed. Snoopy danced joyously on another wall. 

Many of the heavy, metal doors had very small, barred windows in them. This was where some of the most disturbed children in the state had grown up. Someone had told me on the tour that a young Charles Schultz had painted the Snoopy mural himself many years ago when he was attending an academy in the area. The cartoon character's gleeful pose seemed out of place here in the gloom amidst the reminders of imprisonment and pain. 

I heard a loud bang behind me and I dropped the key I was still holding and ran blindly down the hall. My lips went dry and my bowels moved. My mind was sheer blackness and panic as I raced down the hall into the darkness. I ran right into a small room at the other end of the hall, where the hall turned and made an “L”.

I would have run blindly into the back wall of this tiny room if my suit coat had not caught on the edge of the door as I rushed past it. My momentum and my coat spun me around and I fell backwards as the door slammed and my coat tore. I landed on my ass and banged the back of my head on the hard floor. The wind whooshed out of my lungs and I struggled to breathe. I closed my eyes and everything went black.

When I regained consciousness it was still very dark. For a moment, I did not remember where I was. I lay there listening, trying to remember what had happened. I felt for shards of glass and carpet beneath me and felt nothing but cold, hard floor. 

"A prison break…" I remembered Mary saying.

My mad jaunt through the maze of this old building came back to me, along with the pain in my head. I wasn't sure how long I had been out.

A minute? An hour? Longer?

My tailbone stabbed at me and the back of my head screamed. I tried to rub my head, but pain lanced through my back and shoulder when I raised my arm from the floor. I grimaced and closed my eyes again. The image of Jane kneeling over me with a bloody shard of glass raised above my eye joined the pain in my head when my eyes closed. It was enough to force me to struggle to my knees and finally to my feet despite the excruciating pain in my back and head. 

This small room must have been an old holding cell for kids who could not control themselves.

My head pounded and my whole body ached. The room crowded around me as I reached for the wall to steady myself. I pushed against the door, but it didn't budge. I peered out of the small, barred window in the door down the dark, abandoned hallway. My vision blurred. As my eyes focused I could see two gleaming orbs of fiery green moving down the hall towards me.

I squeezed my eyes shut and screamed...

They told me that I was still screaming on Monday morning when the building super and local police found me. Apparently, there had been a search over the weekend. They assured me that Jane had never left custody. She would be in prison for a long time, they said. 

Still, when I close my eyes at night I see those blazing green orbs staring down at me, green fire reflecting off a bloody piece of glass pointed at my eye. I wake up screaming most nights.

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