Burt opened his eyes once again to the darkness. He looked at his watch and saw that it was late Friday night. He had been in the cell for four days. His stomach started holding food yesterday, but the previous trauma had left him too weak to work on chipping away more bricks. He did manage to rip down enough of the padding to make use of it on the floor to keep the chill off his injured hip. He was also tearing long strips of the wall covering and braiding them into stronger strips with the hope of making enough rope to help him escape from the cell when he was able. The material was mostly rotted, so he didn’t hold much hope in the endeavor.
He did his best to dispose of his waste so that disease would not spread into his cold prison. He was running low on water but estimated he had two days before it would become a problem. There was liquid in the soups he had emptied in the two large thermoses thinking he would be feeding himself and Mike.
Burt reran the last tape he recorded. The most he could record was forty-five minutes at a time. But still, it kept him occupied. Sitting in the dark was hard. He felt eyes bearing down on him. The employment of monitoring the content of these tapes helped him to keep his sanity. He knew better than to run his flashlights. He would reserve them for an emergency or to save them to try to attract someone to the window when he heard the cross-country bikes again in the valley below.
The last tape didn’t have anything on it, so he set it up to tape again. Burt rued that this was not the age of digital recorders. There was a lot of technology out there in 1998, but for Burt, it was cost prohibitive. He was a high school senior with a paltry allowance and a part-time job at the grain elevator. He was always short on cash. Burt had always invested in his hobby that would become his career. Even after his team of amateurs had broken through into cable television with the help of Mia Cooper, there wasn’t much income. New equipment was the second priority, the first was resting lost souls and rescuing frightened homeowners.
“Rule number one, never investigate alone,” Burt said. He put in the first tape he had made in the cell at night. He kept this tape because there was a voice on it. The voice was male and angry. Burt could not make out all the words, but bash, skull, and fungi came out very clearly. Tonight, Burt was going to work on deciphering the other words.
A series of pings echoing in the building stopped Burt from pressing play. The pings and pops seemed to be coming closer. He kept an eye on the broken ceiling and the open hatch in the door. The room above lit up, and a multitude of glowing orbs swept down from above and bounced off the protected space the salt line gave him. The orbs regrouped and came at Burt en masse. They bounced off. This went on for ten more minutes. The intensity of the lights fell off with every attack. Soon they drifted out of the room via the open hatch.
“Fabulous light show. Reminds me of little space ships.” He grabbed for a tape he had prepared for his observations and pressed record. “Just been visited by orbs. Ted, you’re so quick to discount orbs as dust particles and insects getting picked up in our night-vision recorders and flashes from our cameras. But I just witnessed what looked like…” he gave his report and sat back. There was a distant rumble. Could it be the gurney that periodically rolled back and forth down the hall? It wasn’t as steady as he had heard before, but energy was at a premium here at the asylum. A flash of light outside gave Burt another explanation. A spring thunderstorm was on its way.
He was prepared. He got to his feet and took the tiny, flexible, plastic window he’d made out of the bag he was given when he purchased the batteries and pieces of wood that he splintered off the two-by-four. He jammed it in the space between the layers of bricks and adjusted the salt line. The last thing Burt needed was for a ghost to come in from the outside into his circle while he slept.
This activity tired him out. He switched his tapes around and pressed record. He then did one sweep of the cell with his light before he extinguished it and let sleep take him.
~
Mia was nervous, and her body reacted accordingly, making her bladder wake her up in the middle of the night. She slipped out of bed and opened her door a crack. There was no one about, so she walked quickly to the bathroom. She took her time appreciating the soft lines of color Glenda had added to the old farmhouse’s bathroom. She washed her hands and extinguished the light before she opened the door.
A flash of light blinded her, and she stumbled. Another brought her to her knees. The rumble of thunder shook the house. Mia slid down the wall, bringing her knees to her chest. She put her head down and squeezed her eyes tightly shut.
Cid was in the tiny bath upstairs, so Ted slid down the banister and headed for the second-floor bathroom. Lightning flashed through the high windows over the front door, momentarily blinding him. He would have tripped over Mia had he not heard the small whimper. He looked down to see the little ball made up of pajamas and white hair.
Ted dropped to his knees. “Minnie mouse, what’s all this?” he asked.
Mia sniffed and lifted her head. “Nothing good comes from lightning.”
“True,
