Harry stopped and glanced at Sanders for a second then kept on going without looking back at me, “I had to! She wouldn’t tell me where you were! I had to! And, oh fuck. Oh fuck! What have I done?” His skinny legs paced the ground and I ran past the dead body and tried to keep up as he ran past the dark silhouette of the building on our right and along its wall, a dark wood on our left,
“Wait! Harry, wait!” I shouted.
“I CAN’T! C’MON!”
He ran towards and past another dark abandoned outbuilding, and then another, like we were in some derelict old part of a city. We cut through four of five of them till eventually an orange streetlight appeared and lighted the road. And I smelled the smoke first before I heard the commotion and the crackling and the smashing and felt the energy in the air. We came around the main building's front to see the left half of it ablaze with giant forked flames that were engulfing it all and flickering up into the starless night. Patients were pouring out in droves from the front door and the car park was half-full of the many who had already escaped and were watching the building burning quickly, their faces lit up with the glow. People in groups and by themselves were crying, few others were laughing or dancing manically, or huddled together horrified, and a window exploded from the centre and flames burst out from it. And I looked up and along to the left at our old ward and it’s many empty windows now filled with orange and red and blue and yellow when just then a man screamed and leapt out from one of the fourth-floor windows and dropped down like from the sky and smashed into the ground. Some people ran towards his unmoving body at the building's edge, others ran away, and then I spotted Dale’s Pete Townsend face looking on with horror along with five of the patients from our ward. There was Larry, there was Sandy, and three others I’d seen before, but my attention was diverted by Harry moving forward. “I HAVE TO GO IN!” he screeched, “I HAVE TO HELP THEM! I DID THIS!”
And it all happened so quick, and I’m still trying to process it, but then at the open blue doors of the main entrance, Kev appeared with a concussed man draped over his shoulder. He laid him down outside and turned and ran back in, and Harry sprinted towards him and was almost at the doors. That’s when I saw the building explode, and the fire engines and police cars speeding up the hill.
Epilogue
I t has been almost eighteen months since it happened. Eighty-two people died in the fire. Fifty-six straight away, and twenty-six in the following weeks and months. Harry was one of them. With his third-degree burns he hung on until March, then he went. Before he passed, he told me what happened; about the crash, and the police, and following me down to the hospital, then breaking in and his mind snapping and torching the place.
When Alex crashed the car, the police had arrived two minutes later. Harry saw them pull up on the road, and crawled out from the back seat and watched from behind a tree, as the police pulled Alex out, and then me, both of us unconscious. But Alex was the only one that went to hospital. Harry said he went to the hospital in Inverness afterwards, and found him lying in bed, but I wasn’t there, and he couldn’t find me anywhere as much as he hunted around. He was terrified for me, he said, said he knew someone had got me, and he stole a car and hotwired it and drove all the way down to Sleepyhillock, the only place he could think that I would be. But he didn’t know what he could do when he got there, so he stopped at a petrol station on the way and bought a jerry can and two glass bottles of coke and a pack of cloths. He filled the jerry can up with the petrol then poured it into the coke bottles and doused two of the cloths and stuffed them inside the tops. Then he drove to the hospital and entered, went straight up to the ward and demanded to know where I was, but Sanders wouldn’t tell him, until he threw the first bomb into the common room and pulled her out by the hair with a knife at her throat. He said she kicked and screamed all the way as he dragged her down the stairs and all the way around the back where she eventually pointed him to the basement where I was being held, then he slit her throat. She had set it up- me and the inspector. And after me and Harry were out, and all of that happened, Kev died in the explosion too. All the gas canisters underground that powered that old hospital. All the wood paneling and old paper-filled walls. The whole building’s structure was about as flammable as you could get.
It was one of the last of the asylums. There are
