THE DEAD GIRL STANK.

Lester stood beside her.

“Jesus, she can’t be over twenty years old.” Charlie Hill, a summer intern working nights at Sentinel State Mental Hospital, took a knee beside his lumbering colleague, Lester. This was Charlie’s first night on the ward.

“Don’t care how old she was. Bitch stinks. They all stink.” Lester put a meaty hand in front of his face and wafted the air in front of him as if waving away the permeating smell of feces and fungus. She had been dead a while. Gnats and bloated, fat flies crawled across her body, wriggling and buzzing around her mouth and ears, exploring the filth and the death that she had been reduced to in this place.

“Well, you could do something about that.” Charlie stood, looked around from his vantage point in the center of the room. The walls were cold, gray concrete block, stained and smeared with the remnants of neglect spread out across the slow decades. Crude chalk drawings on torn squares of yellowed paper were stuck sporadically to the walls with wadded-up balls of toilet tissue. (Charlie shuddered at the thought of what, exactly, the would-be artists had used for adhesive.) Some pictures hung above the bed, a few more next to the iron-grated window set high off the floor, almost reaching the ceiling, where she—the captive who now lay dead—had only been able to see people’s ankles as they walked along the grass at the rear of the hospital. The floor of her tiny room comprised a layer of urine-stained linoleum caked in the same grime that covered the walls.

He peered at the steel door. Its interior was padded with a thick layer of foam that had once been eggshell but was now the color of rotten almonds. The door, he knew, locked from the outside. He shivered as he pictured her tearing at that stuffing with fingernails, broken and bloody.

“How’s that?” Lester said, but he appeared disinterested and did not wait for an answer. “It’s what they deserved. Just a bunch of crazy, retarded, dirty monkeys that didn’t have the goddamn common decency to just hurry up and die.”

“You could do your job,” Charlie said, feeling defiant and a bit self-righteous. This was clearly not acceptable. Not at all. “You could bathe them and help keep their clothes clean. Disinfect their rooms. For starters, anyway.”

Lester huffed. “Monkeys don’t need clean clothes. Or baths. They just need a hose every now and then. Fuck these people, man. They just come here to die, and they don’t do that fast enough. Ain’t nobody ever cared what happens to them when they get here, college boy. That’s why they’re down here. So, don’t go thinking you can change things just because you don’t like how they look when they’re dead.” He retreated to the hallway and pulled the gurney into the room, his massive girth dwarfing the doorway. Charlie thought he had the look of a circus strongman, minus the charisma and handlebar mustache, and the short sleeves of his white orderly shirt strained against his bulging biceps, daring them to flex and split the fabric apart. As Lester guided the gurney to the body, the wheels squeaked with age and screeched against the rust in their casters. They wrapped the body in the same piss-stained sheets she had slept on and hoisted her off the bed—the big man lifting her under her arms, the boy grasping her bare feet.

As they laid her on the gurney, Charlie looked at the body under the sheet, the slight form making small mounds beneath the rust-colored shroud. There was barely enough of her to make a silhouette. He wondered how long it had taken, how forgotten she had to be down here, for her to shrivel to her present emaciated state. Bony hips protruded from a collapsed pelvic region, and her midriff sank in like a deflated balloon. Her ribs, visible through the cloth, gave him the mental image of a bizarre xylophone.

Lester let go of his end a little too early, and the body flopped onto the gurney. “I wonder if her pussy goes sideways.”

“What the hell does that mean?” Charlie asked, incredulous. He stepped away from the gurney. What kind of shit had he gotten himself into? First day on the ward and he was loading up a dead body. The administrators had warned him that some of the patients were severely unbalanced and the hospital, being grossly understaffed couldn’t, by any reasonable expectation, continually keep an eye on all of them—especially at night, when the staff was reduced to a veritable skeleton crew. What they hadn’t told him was that the employees were bat-shit crazy. At least, Lester was. This patient’s condition didn’t simply border on neglect—this was neglect, outright and unadulterated. There was something wrong with Lester. Something festering beneath the surface. Not apathy, but something more sinister, as if he wanted to punish these people for being ill. For being here, under his care.

Charlie decided that once this shift was over, he would file a complaint.

“Well, I ain’t never had me one of these,” Lester explained, “but they say a chink’s pussy goes sideways, like their eyes. You never hear that?”

“Never,” Charlie exhorted, “and that’s ridiculous.” Repulsed, Charlie fought the urge to run, out of that room, up the stairs and out the double doors into the sunlight. What stopped him was the thought of leaving the body here with Lester. God knew what he’d do to her. “Let’s just get her down to the morgue, okay?”

“Careful college boy.” Lester’s mitts clenched into fists at his sides. “I’m already taking one stiff little bitch to the morgue. I can stack you on top of this brokedown chink, lickity split. Feel me?”

“Yeah, man, I feel you. Let’s just get this done. Cool?” Charlie stepped forward, put both hands on the front of the gurney, and pushed it outside into the hall. He didn’t want this fight, not right now. He lowered his head, his crewcut making him feel like the raw recruit he was, awaiting orders from a superior he had never seen down here in the old section of the hospital. He wondered if any other staff members came over to this part, or if Lester had the dilapidated wing all to himself to do God-knew-what in the long hours of the night.

“Yeah. We’re cool.” Lester replied, not at all convincingly. But he made no more threats. Instead he walked alongside the gurney, his left hand caressing the dead girl’s shin through the sheet. He didn’t help push the body.

2.

“We lost Miss Hitachi sometime in the last twenty-four, Director.” Mr. Keening said, standing in the doorway to the office of his supervisor, upstairs in the old hospital’s administrative wing.

Mr. Voble sat behind his cherry wood desk, angrily punching keys on his typewriter. “Where did we lose her?”

“She succumbed to her ailments, sir,” Keening replied, looking in, but not directly at, his boss, who already appeared overly agitated with the day-to-day operations of the facility—not to mention that of his looming underling. “I have two orderlies taking her down to the morgue as we speak so the coroner can declare TOD.”

Budget cuts, reduced staff, parts of the hospital had already been vacated, deserted now for months, equipment and resources collecting dust and withering, like the facility itself. The remaining wards were to be closed as well in anticipation of a full-scale shutdown to take place in the coming months. The patients to be transferred to more modern facilities throughout the state. If there were any patients to be transferred when the time came, that was.

“So, what are you still doing here?” Voble shot back, never looking up from his typewriter. “Get down there and make sure Dr. Nesbaum signs the certificate and files the paperwork. I want a copy on my desk within the hour.” Keening nodded and shuffled down the dimly lit service hall, leaving his supervisor to stab at the typewriter keys like a man angered by its very existence, a man with high blood pressure and pit stains under his blue dress shirt, his gray and white striped tie loosened, his teeth clenched. Keening was not entirely unsympathetic to his boss. Administrative work was all about bureaucracy—in triplicate. Privately he knew that Voble prayed for release from these menial duties, these melancholy miseries. But Sentinel State was not the place where prayers were answered. There was no longer a god to hear the screams echoing off the cinderblocks, spilling anguish down the corridors like a river of pain. Not even the chug and burp of the neglected boilers penetrated the cold concrete of the walls that housed the insane, the sick, and the recently deceased.

Voble listened for Keening’s mewling voice to offer a meager, “Yes sir.” Only when his deputy scurried away did Voble look up. He pictured a warm slab of crusty cheddar cheese somewhere out there, in the bowels of the asylum, suspended by a thin piece of twine, perhaps in a janitor’s closet or in one of the shower rooms—dangling above a clogged drain so foul that only the rancid stench of fecal matter wafted through the pipes and vents. Voble pictured Keening twitching his pointy little nose in the air, ferreting out the prize, raising up on his tiptoes over the shit-clogged drain and biting into the cheddar, sinking in his teeth and pulling it down, twine and all, inspecting it with his black, beady, little eyes.

Voble smiled, just for a moment, before shaking the image from his head. There was too much paperwork to be distracted by the likes of Keening. He was just hopeful that his dim-brained assistant could at least take care of the Hitachi situation without screwing things up. No more mistakes. Voble needed Keening to help him get this place ready for the shutdown. Just do your job, he thought. Fucking rat. A nut case like the rest of them. Couldn’t find his head if it wasn’t attached to his shoulders.

3.

Charlie wheeled the gurney down a hallway choked with trays and ancient exam tables. Lester followed alongside, still fondling the dead woman’s leg. They passed several rooms that, to Charlie’s shock and disgust, housed living patients. If they weren’t mad when they came in here, they’re surely insane now, he thought. Darkness can do that to a person. The cold, the isolation, the desperate need for contact. And when it comes, late at night, creeping into your room and holding you down, your face buried in the pillows—well, if you hadn’t already suffered from that disconnect, you’d soon wish you had. And then they store you down in the sub-levels of hell to let it happen all over again, night after interminable night, at the mercies of the likes of Lester.

Back in the dead woman’s room, Charlie had decided to report Lester to management. Now, passing through this hellscape, he understood that old Lester the Molester might just be the tip of the iceberg. This…human carnage couldn’t happen without the higher-ups knowing about it.

The cops, Charlie thought. He’d deliver the body to the morgue then hightail it out of there and go directly to the police. Do not pass go. Do not collect two-hundred dollars.

The morgue was empty when they arrived. Charlie wheeled the gurney to the far wall, to a bank of refrigerated units with four compartments. Lester, still entranced by the dead woman’s matchstick of a leg, offered no help. Charlie opened each compartment, one after the other. Each contained a roll-out tray, and each tray held a body sealed in black plastic with a stainless steel zipper running the length of it. They were all out of room at the Sentinel State morgue.

“Isn’t the doctor supposed to be here?” Charlie asked, and felt a sharp twist in his intestines, an involuntary reflex, his body clenching against the energy of this place. This amphitheater of the dead.

Lester looked away from the sheeted corpse of Miss Hitachi and toward Charlie. His fingers tracing little figure eights on her covered thigh. His hand getting ever closer to her crotch. “Nesbaum will be here shortly,” he said. “What’s the matter, college boy? You scared?”

“No. Me? No. I just want to get this over with. This isn’t what I signed on for, ya know? I’m just supposed to change bedpans and help get the remaining patients ready to be transferred out of here. I mean, that’s the job description. Thought it would look good on my transcripts.” As the words flowed out, Charlie cringed at how petulant, how whiny he sounded. He shuffled back and forth, chewing on his lower lip, trying to stay away from anything the dead may have touched—the whole time acutely aware of something stirring within Lester. A change in the older man’s voice, his demeanor. Yeah, the guy was a racist dick, a thug, off his gourd. But Charlie sensed something else, something bubbling just beneath the surface. Lester’s face sketched a roadmap to the darkness that lay beneath, a lustful, hateful hunger that festered in the corners of his eyes.

Lester’s fingers and thumb pinched a corner of the sheet. “You wanna see?”

“I really don’t.” Charlie said, stepping backward. He had never seen a vagina up close before, and he would be damned if this was going to be his first time. He backed into the door and reached for the latch.

“Don’t you fucking move, college boy.”

Charlie froze.

The lights went out.

4.

The red glow of the emergency lights cast the room in shadows as thick as blood clots. The generator groaned to life, and the motor that powered the ancient refrigeration units sputtered and kicked back on. Charlie stared at Lester, who stood next to Miss Hitachi’s corpse, his right hand ripped off just below the elbow. She sat up, smiled, and tossed the severed limb across the room. It landed at Charlie’s feet with a whispered wet thwap.

One by one, the compartments opened and the drawers rolled out, black bags writhing on the steel trays. Lester collapsed to the floor, clutching his bloody stump, his body an ashen gray shell. Miss Hitachi swung her feet over the side. The sheet that moments before served as her shroud fluttered to the concrete next to the thing that used to be Lester. A fly buzzed inside her grinning mouth, climbing out on needle-thin legs. A maggot squirmed in the corner of her left eye, burrowing itself into her tear duct.

Hitachi’s feet planted on the floor, and she took a moment to straighten her body, stiff from the time on the cart. And from being dead, Charlie thought as he choked out a muffled scream. She lurched toward the refrigeration unit and stood before the four bodies as they struggled to free themselves from the zippered bags. “Hurry up,” she croaked, then turned to Charlie.

5.

Keening broke into a sprint when he heard the scream coming from the end of the hall. No telling what those two idiots had done to make the power go out. Lester probably short-circuited everything on the basement level by playing with Nesbaum’s equipment. Maybe even electrocuted himself in the process. And as for Nesbaum, what the hell was he thinking, letting that moron around expensive hospital property? The guy was a thug, strong as an ox and an intimidating deterrent to the deranged who sought to act out their violent fantasies on the ward, but an imbecile, nonetheless. Turning dials and messing with switches was well beyond his pay grade.

Keening was halfway down the darkened hall when the sounds of laughter chilled the blood in his veins. He nearly toppled over trying to stop from a full sprint, and his chestnut brown suit jacket swirled around him as he spun to locate the source of the noise. It sounded…Inhuman, he thought.

His gaze fell upon a faint red glow at the end of the hall, flashing on and off like a turn signal. Two figures loomed, awash in the red, blinking light, their forms blackened. One shape was small, feminine. The other, tall, thick, like a grown man. Both hulked side by side in the shadows at the far end of the corridor. Though he could make out no distinct features, he felt sure they must be patients. Of one thing Keening was certain—they were looking right at him.

The laughter rang out again, this time from behind him, back down the hall, toward the morgue. It was a sinister, malicious laugh, full of pain, cruelty, and intent.

Keening turned slowly toward the morgue, hesitant to take his eyes off the forms at the end of the hall. He knew he was not a brave man. When a member of the staff or, on occasion, an unruly patient required discipline, he delegated the onerous task to his subordinates—underlings who were now, at this very moment, safe and sound on the third floor, babysitting the less violent patients. Now, with no one around to do his dirty work, he cursed Voble for bullying him into coming down here. He never asked too many questions, always assuming the undesirables were sent to this all-but-abandoned wing for a reason. Besides, it lessened the case file, and that meant less work for everyone, except maybe Nesbaum. Fuck him.

As he turned, Keening’s gaze fell on Nesbaum, sitting crossed-legged on the floor, an expression of innocent amazement on his aging face. Nestled in his lap was Voble’s disembodied head. He held it in the palms of his bloodied hands, his thumbs plunged to their knuckles into his former boss’s eye sockets. Nesbaum screeched and laughed, immersed in his play.

The last thing Keening felt in his miserable life were gargantuan, hair covered hands squeezing either side of his head. Effluent splattered Nesbaum in the face as he sat on the floor, grinning delightedly in his pursuits.

6.

Charlie stared at Miss Hitachi, cowering with his back to the door, considering his next move. If he ran blindly into the darkness, he wouldn’t make it out of the basement alive. Hitachi’s marble gray body slinked across the floor like a sack of wet sand. Her feet dragged behind her, and her shoulders slouched and rose and fell with each labored step. Yet her head remained lifted, cocked slightly to the left, steadfastly focused on Charlie.

Charlie closed his eyes against her approach. He could smell her gown, reeking of feces and urine, could hear her steps sliding across the concrete. He held his breath as she reached him and, with a cold, blue hand, raised his chin to the chill of the room. The red lights blinked on and off, on and off. She bent over him and turned his head toward the bank of refrigerators, where the four cadavers stood naked and pale beside their trays, body bags slack at their bare feet.

“Do you see?” Hitachi hissed. “Do you see what they have done to us? How they have treated us as the filth and the disease itself? As animals and worse?”

“Oh God, please. It’s my first day. I didn’t do any of this. Please don’t hurt me,” he begged, knees grinding into the concrete, his chin in Hitachi’s cold, dead hand, his eyes fixated on the dead standing solemnly at attention.

“God is not prescribed here. Only darkness and pain. We are his forgotten. But they will remember our names when we ascend.”

Charlie wept, managed a pathetic, “please.” Tears flowed down his dusty cheeks leaving small rivulets. “I don’t want to die.”

“Neither did we,” Hitachi croaked. Charlie was still begging for his life when she broke his neck.

7.

Dr. Nesbaum unlocked the freight elevator at the back of the morgue. Hitachi and her four companions entered, followed by Nesbaum and his two playmates. The doctor pulled the wooden door down with a thunderous boom. He pushed the button leading to the third floor of Sentinel State Mental Hospital, where the living awaited. All the way up, he laughed maniacally.

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