My Probation Consists of Guarding an Abandoned Asylum | Part 18

 

Part 17 | Part 19

I couldn’t sleep yesterday. That fucking creature that escaped the cliff’s cave and spent last night howling was coming back. I felt it on my broken shinbone. That tingling that irradiated my left leg pushed me into preparing.

I stashed the golden coin I had retrieved from the pirate treasure in the only drawer my office had. In retrospect, it wasn’t my best idea.

With a kitchen knife, I carved a spear out of a wooden mop robbed from the janitor’s closet. From Dr. Young’s office I retrieved his wooden desk and the old spring-exposed hypnosis couch to build a barricade. Some rotten planks that were leaving their place reinforced the construction. The utensils from the cafeteria and the gardening tools buried under the wrecked shed would have to be enough as defense spikes in the castle I’d erected on top of Wing A’s tower.

As the last sunray hid under the west tides, that frightening roar shook the whole island.

From the questionable safety of my blockade, I skimmed all around the building. I had a 360-degree view of everything surrounding the building, but the new moon’s pitch-black night prevented anything from being discernable more than a couple yards away.

As I discerned some movement on a slope south of the building, something heavy smashed a Wing J’s wall.

My lantern just illuminated debris.

Shit, it was in.

Thump. Thump. Thump! THUMP!

The banging steps approached my base of operations. A growl flooded the Bachman Asylum’s abandoned hallways. A burning explosion assaulted my leg, as if my shinbone had health with loud-noise-activated gunpowder.

Scratches, blows and roars made its way up the tower until the feral creature was just a couple feet away from me.

Intimidation mode on. I screamed at the malnourished humanoid thing as if I was trying to scare it.

It did a more compelling job when avalanching towards me.

I extended my spear and punctured its abdomen.

A talon cut my cheek.

With all my strength, muscles ripping themselves, lifted my long living kebab and slammed it against the hardware I had around me as defense. Crimson fluid sprouted from the creature as half a dozen house-maintenance blades perforated the almost translucent skin. An agony shriek came out of its one-foot-wide jaws filled with sharp fangs as the boney body swirled to free itself.

Pointed my handmade weapon against the recovering monster.

Its opposing thumbs did the job of taking out of its muscle-less thorax the small shovel that had turned his ribcage into a red waterfall.

I backed a little, but I was at the edge, almost in the window frame.

With a cracking noise, the flesh rearranged itself to close the inflicted wounds.

Shit.

The hairless monster jumped at me.

I failed to defend myself on time.

I flew over the once-medical facility.

The victorious cry of the mute beast from the top of the tower engulfed the whole island. It rumbled through my eardrums all the way to my brain at the time it got shocked against the rocky ground.

The breaking pain became everything.

I rolled down the hill into a circle conformed of stacked stones.

My spine impacted on a rock.

The pebbles were shot out of their place.

My vertebras probably did too.

I couldn’t move nor feel. I laid on the island cold and unfertile land, watching the stary sky.

The tumbled stones exuded a glowing, burning-grass-smelling green vapor. It floated still in the air as it smushed itself into a human form. I don’t know anything about Native tribes, but that ghost surely was an important member of one.

Sorry for your rocks, I thought in between pain stings, as I was unable to speak.

“Don’t worry,” the shaman soul answered me comprehensively. “Now is your turn to protect this island from greed and its wendigo guarding spirit.”

Motherfucker disappeared as flames levitating into the dark sky.

My wounds went away with him.

Good as new. I went back to the Asylum.

***

Carefully evaluating every corner with my spear high in front of me, I got to my little office without any encounter. I snatched back the coin out of the drawer.

A growl behind me froze me in place. Slowly turned while lifting my weapon into a defensive position.

The freak’s teeth shine against the lone lightbulb and its recently made scars appeared as a malignant tumor on its dry flesh.

I ran against the creature and stabbed it with my spear.

An uncomfortable grunt came out of the drooling lipless mouth.

I nailed the weapon with nature’s forgotten creation to a wall.

I continued my way to Wing B.

I didn’t turn back to corroborate how the monstrosity with a new hole in its apparent organ-lacking belly freed itself. Yet, it managed by, crawling on its four limbs, get up to me.

I tossed the golden coin to the end of the hallway. I docked.

The beast jumped over me and grasped the golden coin with its long nails as if it was the one ring.

Shut myself inside the management office.

***

The bangs on the door were disturbing at first, but I got used to them after blocking the entrance with two full cabinets and the manager’s desk. It wasn’t safe though. That God-ignoring thing could smash through walls. It just didn’t feel like finishing me quickly.

Stopped questioning the unnatural motives of the brainless creature and searched for a solution. All cabinets were useless, just files about long-gone employees, now-death patients and other irrelevant shit. Yet, at the bottom of the lower left drawer of the working table, below more unreadable documents, I found an envelope.

Bang!

A stronger door blast. I was getting to something.

It was marked as been sent from “Mark N.” to “Dr. Weiss.” Inside there was a handwritten letter. My eyeballs quickly checked for key points.

Bang!

Bang!

It wasn’t trying to get in, but the rusty hinges may have disagreed.

The epistle explained that the writer was sick and not knowing how much time he had left. The agreement with Dr. Weiss still stood effective. His family was going to get the Bachman Asylum back. More crap until the last idea.

Bang!

“If something is to happen to me before it’s done, the island and the Asylum must be given to my son, Russel.”

Oh, shit.

BANG!

The wall broke open thanks to the unyielding force of the wendigo that was after me.

I rolled out of harm’s way. The envelope felt kind of heavy.

A grunt from the sniffing quadruplet monstrosity was the last I heard before its cracking phalanges squeezed my throat.

Something rolled inside the creased paper envelope, that I still held in between my fingers.

The creature straightened itself up to its towering eight feet high with me on its grasp.

I was choking. Air wasn’t flowing in anymore. Everything blurred. The howling furthered away. Any strain left abandoned all my muscles.

Clink.

Something metallic inside the envelope.

The beast dropped me.

The impact with the floor activated my diaphragm again.

The wendigo teared the yellowish paper that was used to transport a final will and a golden pirate coin.

With glowing, giant eyes, the thing scrutinized its finding. It engraved the metal into its skin’s folds. The shiny souvenir disappeared inside the paranormal physiognomy.

My body retrieved its ability to breathe once the creature had already approached me in a less violent way. Almost like a curious puppy without a purpose nor instinct left. His long, arthritic fingers slid towards me the letter I had just read.

I took a fast glance at the letter before returning my vision directly at the monstruous-looking organism. I expected it to snap out of its trance and use is gargantuan claws and fangs to pierce my dermis and bleed me to death for being too “greedy” and having accidentally stolen a single golden coin that I wouldn’t have been able to spend anyway because I was trapped in this island as it was.

“I understand,” I verbally talked to the mute and hopefully understanding creature. “I’ll make sure they don’t get the island.”

The wendigo, over me with its two-inch-thick arms and legs trapping me, kind of revered. It exited the building through the already smashed window.

It ran nonstop back to the hellish cave from where it had emerged.

I allowed my body to give up and lay on the floor through the remaining of the night and the next day. I had something to plan.