November 1968

Billie Dean sat in the hard wooden chair, straight-backed and alert, under the influence of only the mildest of sedatives. The powder blue skirt of her asylum-issue dress stretched over her knees, giving her folded hands a comfortable place to rest.

"What would you have me say to him?" Dr. Thredson prompted gently.

He looked across the desk through the cigarette smoke haze at his prim patient. The overhead lamp cast harsh shadows across her face, emphasizing her pallor. The medium had abandoned all attempts at maintaining a nice hairdo in the hospital and had taken to pulling her blonde hair back in a ponytail. It was less likely for another patient to grab her hair like that. Her time in the asylum had taken its toll in many ways.

"Tell him what I just told you," she insisted. "Heather is being 'ridden' by a spirit. He'll understand."

It took all of the doctor's self control to keep his expression neutral. He prescribed to the ideal that a therapist should offer open acceptance to whatever a patient put forth. To do otherwise might cause the patient to lose trust in their confidant and shut down. "What do you hope to accomplish if he'll agree to see you?"

One of her hands went up and fluttered near her temple but never quite settled. Finally she folded her hands again. "I suppose I'd ask him how we could get the spirit out of her."

"You're hoping he'll perform an exorcism on her?" Thredson paraphrased.

Billie Dean tipped her head. "I know it sounds crazy," she admitted. She smiled self-consciously. "I didn't even want to say anything because I know how it sounds." Her smile faltered as worry crowded in. "But I'm afraid Sara might make Heather do something—What I mean is.. Sara doesn't understand this time. Or people like Sister Jude."

Oliver was fascinated. He jotted down a note about looking into Heather's case. He would have to see about getting some time with her; she'd been assigned to Dr. Freeman and Thredson had only recently met him. He was curious to know if the other patient shared the delusion or if it was something Billie Dean had invented herself.

Thredson regretted not spending more time researching Ms. Howard's background and made another note to dig into that further. He excused himself the lapse due to having so many other things going on. He knew she was cousin to the Monsignor and suspected he might find the priest a handy shortcut into Billie Dean's history.

"I'll see what I can do about getting some time with the Monsignor," he told Billie Dean. "He's a very busy man and has a lot going on right now."

"He'll make time for me," Billie Dean responded with a small but confident smile. She knew her cousin must be up to his ears in all the blowback from Halloween. She had a feeling he might even welcome a familiar, friendly face.

—

Things didn't happen quite as quicky as Billie Dean would have liked but, in the end, the Reverend Monsignor found time near the end of the day to see her. He had a deep-set sense of weariness to him when the orderly dropped her off at his office. He looked older; ill-slept. Thinner. Her heart went out to him.

"You look like I feel," she said, trying for levity.

He rallied with a weak smile. "It's been a trying time." He got up and came around his desk to close the distance between them.

"That's an understatement," Billie Dean couldn't help observing. She held her hands out to him. "Are you all right?"

He hesitated only a fraction of an instant before taking her hands. Her touch was gentle and imparted a faint sense of calm the priest was grateful for. "I've seen better days," he said vaguely. "Briarcliff's lost so many patients in the past few weeks..." He trailed off because he didn't want to tell her about how he'd resorted to hiding the disappearances completely; all of them.

She didn't need to hear it. She wasn't ignorant. "I'm sorry, Timothy. I know how stressful that must be. But if security—"

He pulled away from her then. "We can't afford more security." He paced over to the window to look out over the grounds. His eyes inevitably found the mill.

"I'm sorry," Billie Dean repeated. And she was.

He sighed and his shoulders dropped an inch. He forced himself to put back on a neutral face then turned back toward her. "You didn't come here to discuss my problems. What is it you need?"

She wavered, wanting to console him further but knowing the futility of it, decided to get back on track. "It's Heather. She's—There's a ghost inside her. She's being possessed by a little girl who died here in the asylum."

The Monsignor frowned, overwhelmed by the strange story. "What... makes you say that?"

Billie Dean massaged the area between her brows. "I was conducting the séance when the girl's spirit entered Heather. She won't let her go now."

"You held a séance in here?" The priest was outraged. "This is holy ground. You had no right to—"

"I had every right!" Billie Dean interrupted. For the moment she forgot their respective roles and reverted back to family. "That little girl's ghost sought me out. Repeatedly! I had to see if I could help her. She's just a little girl! She can't be more than ten!"

The Monsignor didn't want to hear it. "Witchcraft has no place on church grounds!"

The medium stared at him and an awkward moment grew between them, allowing the man time to cool down enough to regret the accusation. But he was too proud and too stressed out to back down.

"I need your help, Timothy," Billie Dean said, her voice trembling with the effort not to yell at him. "Please. Heather needs you and so does Sara."

The priest rubbed his eyes. "Fine," he said after a moment. "I'll speak with her. But this is the last I want to hear of the matter—and of you using the dark arts. I won't have it here."

Her mouth tightened but she forced herself to focus on the fact that he said that he would help her. "Thank you, Monsignor."

...

Violet was growing concerned. She hadn't seen Rosemary since the day after the blackout. Violet had spent the most of the chaotic night with Tate, until an orderly finally looked in around four in the morning. The bald man had made her go back to her room and her roommate had already been in bed when she got there. The other girl had been awake and she recognized Violet, which was becoming a touch-and-go thing anymore.

At breakfast, Rosemary was subdued but everyone was a little off that morning. Many were under the influence of things they'd only recently been injected with. Tate was finally up and moving around again but even he had been sluggish when she'd tried to talk to him about the show and riot.

The day ground slowly on. Violet worked in the bakery, but she was too drained to be very productive. The nuns overseeing the patients weren't in any better moods. They snapped and shoved and, in one man's case, sent him back to the ward after he dropped his rolling pin for a third time.

Violet didn't see Rosemary at lunch. That was somewhat unusual but not unprecedented. The young woman's memory for her surroundings had gotten steadily more erratic, so her visits to the padded isolation cell had increased. She wasn't to be found in the common room after lunch, either. When Violet suggested Rosemary was in the quiet room, John told her he'd had cleaning duty in the isolation cells that morning. Every cell was full, but Rosemary wasn't in one of them.

That's when Violet started to worry for her friend. Tate tried to reassure her, but he knew doctors like Heath lurked in the asylum and that knowledge undermined his ability to sell the comfort convincingly. He had told her some of the horrors he'd witnessed in the man's private ward and they both knew there was a chance Rosemary had ended up there—or someplace worse.

No one said anything about Rosemary's absence at dinner. It was like any other disappearance in Briarcliff: Either the missing person would turn up or they wouldn't. Until then there wasn't anything anyone could do.

After dinner, Violet went with Tate back to his room where she read to him from a book of short stories her dad had sent her. The anthology was a collection of faerie tales, the oldest versions of the classics. The first couple were pretty straight-forward but the story of Beauty and the Beast was much darker than the version Violet was familiar with, involving blood magic. She read the story aloud to Tate, crowded into his cot with him, till staff came to run her out for the night.

She ignored Carl's warning about getting too friendly with the 'resident psycho killer' when he took her back to her room. Rosemary was still absent when they got there. Violet curled up on the mattress on the floor that she called her bed and started in on an equally morbid rendition of Rapunzel, to keep her mind occupied by something other than her roommate. She was soon engrossed, oblivious the sounds of Briarcliff. Which was the whole point behind reading: To escape.

The scrape of the door's hinges brought the teen up out of the dark faerie tale and she looked up with a welcoming smile for her roommate. Only the person who shuffled in wasn't her roommate. It was one of the male patients, one she'd seen around but didn't know his name. He was an older man with wild salt-and-pepper hair. He wore a wrinkled pair of asylum-issue pants and stained button-down shirt. His whiskers had grown in over the day, making him look even more unkempt. He looked at Violet with a dull, glazed expression.

"That's a book," he mumbled.

Violet could tell he wasn't talking to her. She closed the book and kept both hands on it. "You're not supposed to be in here. Get out."

The man glanced at her then looked back at the book she was holding. He shuffled closer.

Violet thought about warning him again but she had no patience for such shit after spending the past couple of days stressed to the max. In a blink she was on her feet. "Get OUT!"

She raised the book then and slapped the man upside the face with it. He was too drugged or crazy to duck; the hardcover connected solidly and audibly. He stepped back, stunned. Violet immediately pressed the attack, hitting him again, harder. He stumbled back toward the door, numbly lifting an arm in a weak attempt to shield himself from the additional whacks the girl delivered with the book.

"Security!" Violet bellowed as she drove the man back out into the hall with a violent rain of blows.

Each time she hit him, she felt a surge of satisfaction followed by an instant bloom of renewed rage. Her anger fed on the violence. It was rewarded when red started to flow from the staggering man's nose.

She would have kept battering him but three orderlies were suddenly there. Even though she'd hollered for them, their arrival surprised her. Time had slowed for her; calling for help felt like an eternity ago. Allain and Byron grabbed the man. Patrick was there as well and he took hold of one of Violet's arms. She could tell he was ready to give her the full bear hug if she didn't settle down so she played it cool, even though she was still amped up with the urge to assault the patient more.

"Thanks," she said and offered a shaky smile to the tall orderly. "He just barged in. Scared the hell out of me."

She was exaggerating—she had been mad, not afraid—but it was close enough to the truth that it worked. Patrick's expression relaxed some and he let go of her.

"Don't worry. He won't bother you again tonight," he said. "He'll have a nice, long nap in solitary."

Indeed, the other two staff members were hustling the intruder away, down the hall.

Violet looked at Patrick curiously. "I thought the quiet rooms were all full."

The orderly arched a brow at her. "Where'd you hear that?"

She didn't want to name her source but she knew how the information game at Briarcliff worked. You didn't get something for nothing, and she would only hurt herself by alienating the orderly by being evasive. "John was on cleaning duty today. He said Rosemary wasn't in any of the quiet rooms."

Pat rubbed the back of his neck and shot an uncomfortable glance down the hall, in the direction his coworkers had gone. "There are other places patients can be kept." He looked back down at the teen girl. "Rosemary's not in any of them. You need to get back to your room now. It's lights out."

Violet stared at him. "You can't just drop that and then send me to bed."

"Yes," he said. He took her by the upper arm and steered her toward her cell. "I can. It's lights out."

She went but she wasn't happy. Especially since he kept his hand on her the whole time. "Where is she? At least tell me that."

Patrick released her once she was fully in the small room then immediately turned to leave. She watched him go, outrage building as the opportunity for him to help her slipped further away with each step he took.

"Don't be a dick!" she flared.

She regretted it instantly but he surprised her when he paused at the door and looked back. His expression was strained. "She's gone."

"Gone?" Violet crowded after him but he stepped outside and pulled the iron door shut. So she crowded up to the little barred window set into the door instead. "Wait! What do you mean, gone? Did she escape?"

The orderly leaned in close to the window and when he spoke, his voice was low. Meant for her only. "She didn't escape. Sister Jude's got this place locked up tighter than Fort Knox after what happened on Halloween. The Monsignor's sending a team out early tomorrow to drag the mill pond."

The teen blinked rapidly, digesting that. Then she registered the look on his face and, to cut short any regret he might have about telling her, she said: "Jewel's been stealing Play-doh from the arts-and-crafts room, to eat in her room at night. She stashes it under her boobs."

The man snorted a soft laugh. "Max can have the honors of that BCS." Pat got serious then. "Be careful. All right?"

The buzzer sounded and the doors all locked. The lights popped off and the twilight lights in the hall came on, washing everything sickly blue.

"Yeah. You too," Violet told Patrick's shadowy outline.

She moved away from the door and went back over to her mattress. She burrowed under the blanket and lay there in the customary lump she'd taken to assuming in order to fight off the cold. It dawned on her that she could sleep on the bed, at least until Rosemary came back.

Looking over at the cot as her eyes grew accustomed to the dark, she found she didn't want to move to the bed. It felt disrespectful. Wrong. Like she was acknowledging the possibility that her roommate might genuinely be gone, possibly dead, and not just locked away in some secret ward.

Either outcome was too awful to think about at the moment. It was too cold, too dark, and the encounter with the strange man too recent. She permitted herself use of her friend's blanket simply because it was so frosty on the floor. She was sure Rosemary would understand the borrowing. Violet would give it right back if the other girl came back to their room. It would be nice and warm for her, even.

That thought helped Violet sleep.

...

Author's Note:

Talk about armed with knowledge.

We've heard from the girls. Next time, it's the boys' turn.