House of the Angels

Dylan did everything in his power to keep himself occupied, whether it was studying or just trying to find something to keep his hands busy. The chalk he had used to create a star chart on the blackboard in his room had been reduced to nothing more than a stub, but the work he had created was brilliant. Each of the planets correlated with the ten circles of heaven and the stars were all in the right place, just as they were in the cantos of Paradiso.

Dylan stepped back to admire his own handiwork. For the last two days he had made star charts both on the blackboard and in his sleep, his brain ticking like a time bomb about to explode. He hated when things got to this level of boredom because it meant one thing and one thing only. It meant that he needed to get out.

A knock at the bedroom door caught his attention, breaking his concentration away from his studies. Alex stood in the door, shirtless and in a pair of sage green fatigues and sandals, looking like a Norse god with his rock hard muscles.

“Hey.”

“What’s up?” Dylan asked.

“Sybilla wants us to do a little recon.” Alex explained. “You, me and Grey.”

“Recon on what?”

“She wants us to see if we can find out what brimstone breath and her minions are up to.” Alex told him. “We need to do a burn later.”

Dylan didn’t need to ask any more questions. A burn was only saved for the occasion when an angel lost its wings and was due to grow another set. The old pair would be offered up to God, a Catholic saint or a loa for favors or for gratitude for their help.

“So where are we going?” Dylan asked.

“Wherever we can.” Alex answered. “We’ll sniff her out if we have to.”

“Can you do me a favor first?” Dylan enquired.

“Depends on what it is.” Alex answered.

“Put a goddamn shirt on.” Dylan told him. “The last thing we need is for Eden to get jealous.”

“That’s because other girls can’t contain themselves when they see this six pack.” Alex retorted.

Dylan rolled his eyes and put away his study materials. As soon as Grey was ready and Alex had thrown on a t-shirt, the three of them left the house.

The afternoon was surprisingly pleasant, even for the middle weeks of July. The tantalizing scent of streetside barbecue was everywhere and the liquor stores and bars were busier than ever. The three of them wished they could take in the hustle and bustle of St Augustine Street, but there would be time for that later. There was work to be done.

“Grey you said Sally leaves the house every day with Hillary and the others right?” Alex enquired as they made their way down the street.

“Every day.” Grey answered.

“Do you have any idea where she goes?”

“No.” Grey replied. “She never said where she went during the day. All I know was that it had to be some place where no one would find her.”

“So think of all the hidden areas on the bayou.” Alex told him. “There’s plenty of places she could go, backwoods shacks, groves, places like that.”

Grey, Alex and Dylan continued their search, making note of all the places the Caulfields could possibly go during the day, whether it was Belle’s Grove or even the St Mary’s Cemetery. The cemetery, however, had turned up completely fruitless. There were no signs that any of them had been there, no scratch marks, no bloodstains on the ground or on the tombs and mausoleums, nothing. Just the remains of offerings people left for the faithfully departed and their loved ones.

“I think it’s safe to say that our efforts aren’t turning anything up at this point.” Alex remarked, looking up at the trees in Belle’s Grove.

“Maybe we should go home.” Said Dylan. “What’s the use if we can’t find anything?”

A very odd intuitive thought seemed to be nagging at Grey from the inside. Something seemed to be telling him that they were going about the search all wrong. All afternoon they had searched every hideaway, grove and out of the way place in Bayou St Therese, but maybe, just maybe, they had missed something.

While Dylan and Alex shot the shit back and forth, mulling over their gatherings, Grey began climbing high up into the knotty cypress trees until he rested himself on one of the bent out tree branches. He peered off into the distance, opening his ears and eyes to their fullest extent and keeping his concentration on one thought and one thought only.

“Where are you hiding?” he whispered dangerously.

He kept his concentration on that one thought and in no time at all, visions of a dark and terrible place began to fill his head. A place filled with dark spaces, despair and a multitude of voices crying out to him “We’re trapped…..help us….save us….Save us now!!”

Grey broke away from his concentration and climbed back down from the trees. “We’re looking in the wrong place.” He said to Alex and Dylan.

“You sure?” Alex asked.

“I’m sure.” Grey answered. “Wherever the Caulfields go, it’s someplace really dark.”

“Like a place with no light sort of dark?” Dylan enquired.

“Yes, there’s that.” Grey replied. “But I think it’s also dark in the sense that bad things happened too.”

Alex scratched his chin and pondered the thought. A place with no light…..and a dark past……he mused. No light…..bad past. “What else did you see Grey?” he asked.

“A lot of despair.” Grey said. “Sadness, feeling as though there’s no way out.”

A thought hit Alex like a deer slug. Why the hell had he been stupid not to have seen it before? There were very few places in the entire state where spirits often stayed trapped instead of entering the afterlife.

“I have an idea.” He said. “There’s a few abandoned hospitals in the area right?”

“Yeah, why wouldn’t there be?” Dylan questioned.

“We’ll need to look into them.” Alex replied. “I have a hunch that that’s where we’ll find her. But we’ll have to check them out first.”

“We can go to the archives.” Grey informed him. “I’m sure they’ll have something there.”

The three of them set out towards the Bayou St Therese library on Chambord Street, a red brick building with square pillars and wide windows to let in the sun and a courtyard for patrons to sit outside and read.

The cool air inside washed away the heat and sticky humidity the moment the three of them stepped inside. Alex and Dylan branched off to two sections of the archive wing while Grey headed up the two short flights of stairs to the second level.

“So here is where you’ll find local history, recent, past or whatever it is you’re looking for.” Explained the librarian. “If you need anything just come and ask me at the front desk.

“I can’t check anything out can I?” Grey asked.

“No but I’ll be more than happy to make copies for you if you find something of interest.”

“Thank you ma’am.” Grey said before she left.

Looking around at the shelves and cabinets, Grey was unsure about where to start. So many books, manila folders and envelopes full of documents were there for him to rifle through. No worries….He thought. Better start at the beginning…..

He started in section A and worked his way down the line in alphabetical order. Occasionally he became distracted by an interesting little tidbit of information that snagged his eye, but quickly he threw his distraction aside and kept looking until he began a new section.

When he came to section L, Grey came across a worn leather bound book, a huge drawing pad containing blueprints and a box full of all sorts of odds and ends on the lowest shelf. He took the book, the blueprints and the box to the long table in front of the window to further examine his findings.

The book’s covering was black and its pages beginning to yellow but the handwriting was neat with hardly any crooked or unintelligible handwriting. On the cover was a small piece of binding with the name “Donella McFaye” written upon it in gold tooling. The black ink hadn’t faded with time, in fact it looked almost brand new. Grey opened up to the very first page and began to read the first entry.

June 8th, in the year of our Lord, Nineteen Hundred and One,

My search has brought me here to Bayou St Therese, to expose the horrors behind the closed doors of the Lafayette Sanitarium. My colleagues tell me that it is a place where sane lives are often made a living hell by those who are locked away behind its walls. If indeed only a handful of these claims and rumors are true, then I shall know that they too are not insane.

Grey flipped through page after page of notes that Donella McFaye had written in her diary those one hundred and sixteen years ago. The first few pages were only about her journey. Very little to no use at all in a situation like this. But by the sixth page things started to make him pay attention.

June 23rd, 1901

As I walk on with Sister Eunice, I am now witness to what can only be described as a place as seemingly mad as many of the patients. Sister is the only kind soul in the whole building, the rest being doctors and nurses who have no regard for their charges. She is my guide through such a place of abject madness and horror that has only ever come about in a man’s worst nightmare.

The more benign patients are locked away on the first floor, men, women and children who do not at all show any outward signs of madness at all. The second floor is dedicated to those who suffer from the abuse of substances, the third for those with physical and mental deficiencies.

I come through the fourth floor with Sister Eunice and must be careful of where I tread. Here is where those suffering from delusions, hallucinations and hysterics are treated. They are locked away in cold cells with only a small barred window for air. I can see in their wide frightened eyes a plea for help and for deliverance from this place.

The fifth floor houses those who often wail and moan during the night and who suffer from compulsions. They fidget and cannot sit still, others are given to arranging things a certain way while a few become angry and sulk if anything is out of order. Walking on through the sixth floor, I can hear people who speak in tongues and some who can only communicate through numbers.

The seventh floor is full of inmates who often must be kept away from others for they do not know their own strength. The eighth floor is where the violent are chained and put into strait jackets when they have outbursts. And now I come to the ninth floor…..the darkest of them all.

Sister Eunice guides me to the lowest level of the Lafayette Sanitarium, the ninth floor…..where the criminals are locked away from the rest of the world. Killers, sociopaths and a whole colorful array of other wretches live down here in the deepest level of the building. It is in the basement, cold and damp with a putrid stench of mildew lingering all around us. Their whispers and laughs are terrifying to listen to. For now I must try and forget these nightmarish scenes, but I know it will be impossible.

Grey read on and on through each and every one of Donella McFaye’s journal entries, each one describing in great detail the horrors inflicted upon the patients of the Lafayette sanitarium. Physical and verbal abuse, electro-shock therapy and even illegal experiments took place within the walls of that building.

On the very last page in the back of the diary was a strange list of names each with a number next to them. Names like John, Tom, Hank, Cecilia, Eunice and Bernadette. What had happened to these people no one knew, but Grey was determined to put the pieces of the puzzle together and figure it out.