My Probation Consists of Guarding an Abandoned Asylum | Part 13

 

Part 12 | Part 14

Well, at least now with the chaplain/morgue technician defeated, there’s no more reason to keep the spiritual area locked. Yet, the almost-charcoal benches worried me about a possible fire, and the extinguishers surely were empty again.

Of course they were. The first three were devoid of content. I went to Wing C, looking for the last one, and finally found out why the perpetual need to refill them.

It was a malnourished skeletal ghost rolled around the fire extinguisher, hugging it. Its big eyes, once-human features, bony extremities and almost-translucent skin made him resemble a fire-extinguisher-desiring Gollum. He was using all the force of his lips and diaphragm to suck the content out of the red tank’s hoe.

Fucking junkies! Not even dead stop draining others.

“Hey! Quit that shit!” I yelled at the ghoul.

He compelled. Drop the cylinder and threw himself against me. Shit.

I ran away from him, taking cover on the closest office. The management one.

I placed my weight against the door. The junky phantom pounded it from behind. I’ve been here before.

***

Almost ten years ago I was in my sister-in-law’s place. Her parents, Lisa and I were making her an intervention for her (as they called it) “heroin consumption issue.” It was an understatement naming her addiction an “issue.”

“You don’t understand me!” The junky young girl screamed at us.

Her parents and sister tried to convince her she was right. That they were trying to make sense of it and help her. I had a more direct approach.

“Just quit that shit! You ungrateful and irresponsible bitch!”

After my intervention, my sister-in-law started crying. Her parents looked at me with their usual disapproval, and Lisa forced me out of the apartment.

“What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” She confronted me.

“I’m sorry, love.” I replied as I rested on the door. “But someone had to tell her the truth, and none of you seemed to be inclined to do it.”

Screams and thumps were coming from the inside of the apartment.

“I brought you here to support me and your political family, not this shit…”

***

The management office’s door was ripped apart under the strong drive of the white anti-fire substance junky that had trapped me there. His boney hands grabbed my head. With a headbang, he made another hole to the right of my face. His long cold tongue licked me.

I almost puked in disgust. The pull from the creature outside of the room countered my gag.

The wooden plank and me fall over the junky in the middle of Wing C’s hallway.

He let me go for a second, enough for me to break free.

I found a new hiding place in the records room. It’s equally moonlight-less, cold, ventilated through the broken window and dirty as my previous one. Yet, it was preferrable over the fucking junky with the force of an elephant and the drive of a football player already damaged for so many concussions.

I received a call on my mobile phone.

Weird. There is no signal on the island. I can just send messages to Alex or Russel through satellite internet at one specific hour every day, and that hour had to be also used to post this bullshit and/or research through the web.

Of course it was an unknown number.

I answered the vibrating device.

“Hey! I managed to learn how to intervene other communication devices,” an excited and familiar voice let me know.

“Luke?!”

“Of course, my horse,” the more we interact, the odder he gets. “Look under ‘Matthews.’”

With my phone on speaker, I searched under the M drawer.

Main, Martyr (such a strange last name), Masters. Aha! Matthews.

I took the record out of its once-yellow folder prison. Skimmed through it with my phone’s flashlight.

“Thirty-seven-years-old. Wing C. Dr. Young oversaw his care. Room 37,” I mumbled to Luke as I inspected the file. “Okay, got something.” I changed to a clearer voice. “He got interned because of his addiction to heroin, cocaine, opioids and the list go on. Shit! This guy was a serious case.”

“Focus, you unempathetic asshole. What’s the cause of dead?”

Even if I didn’t like his tone, he had brought me back in track to the important stuff.

“He swallowed the content of a fire extinguisher after breaking his room’s lock during an abstinence episode,” I read out loud.

This fucking guy. I just expressed that for myself.

“Okay, Luke,” continued with my interlocutor. “So we need to keep him in place until he gets detoxicated. How do we do that?”

“We ghosts are vulnerable to electricity,” he advised.

I got a very dumb idea.

***

“Hey! Ugly bastard. Come and get me!” I screamed at the junky spirit.

I had recovered an empty extinguisher from Wing B and waved it in front of the sucker trying to convince him it was full. He bit the bait.

I fled away from the four-leg runner that wanted what I didn’t have. I cross the Bachman Asylum all the way to Wing A. My muscles were burning from the weight and the strain.

The Tolkienesque creature kept getting closer to me.

“Friendly electric ghost!” I screamed at the empty hallway. “I can really use your help now.”

She had helped me before unsolicited. I hoped if I asked her nicely, she would have done it again. I hoped wrong.

The growl of the junky specter was angrier and more desperate.

“Fuck it!” I mumbled as I let go of the fire extinguisher.

It rolled into the acid-made hole I caused a week ago. The creature jumped into it. Unfortunately, it was no Mountain Doom.

Take out my phone from my pocket as it started ringing. I headed to the end of the corridor, to the janitor’s closet.

“What now?!” I yelled at Luke.

The creature figured out that the red container I offered him was empty.

“There’s another thing...”

Luke’s paradoxically optimistic and chilling voice was interrupted when the fucker jumped over me.

I dropped my phone.

Me and the addict ghoul rolled down the long stone stairway that led to the underground lab.

My physical body made me roll further in the moisty ground than my supposedly intangible junky foe.

A weird chill, like a tingling, assaulted my back. I shook expecting something over me. Nothing. It was just the purple electric dainty fingers of the Tesla coil. It was on again. It wasn’t my doing. Yet, I was grateful for the new aid as I had lost communication with my longtime collaborator.

I crawled to the opposite side of the coil.

“Hey!” I yelled again to the extinguishers sniffing bastard. “Come and get me, bitch!”

He swirled swiftly through the uneven floor as he approached the coil. He roared with his damaged vocal cords.

“Don’t stop, useless junky!”

As if I commanded him the opposite, he suddenly stopped. Just at enough distance to be outside of the coil’s electric field. Shit!

“Motherfucker!”

He didn’t move. His wide froggy eyes lowered. A tear tumbled out of the left one.

Shit...

I left the safety of the coil’s center cylinder and approached the creature that had hunted me through the night. I could still feel the static on my nape.

“Hey,” I said gently to get his attention.

He lifted his enormous eyes that instead of blood-lusting were begging.

“I know you need help,” I said to him. “I can help you. I’ll come frequently and make sure you don’t need anything. But is important for you to be kept away from the delicious extinguishers.”

I extended my right hand to him.

He stared at it for almost a minute.

Finally, he placed his own flimsy palm over mine.

Gently, I led him close to the coil. The powerful electric appendages of the Tesla machine attached to his ectoplasmic body and pulled him. He failed to free himself from the magnetic power.

***

He is still there. Stuck in the machine, unable to leave. But it will help him to get better. He just needs time and care.

Also, with that issue solved, I wrote a satisfaction-filled message to Alex in regard of his next delivery trip. “Please bring the last fire extinguishers refill.” I even took the time to ask him to also bring me something for Luke.

After that, I located my task list. The set of instructions that I was given on my first day had become obsolete. There was no reason to keep on following any of those. I turned the small piece of paper to its clean back. I redacted: “1. Check on the junky in the basement.”