Horrorscopes: Twelve Tales of the Macabre

The Needing

Whitaker ducked into Quiet Room 3 and dropped to his knees, knotting his fingers into his hair and pulling. He hoped the pain would drown out the sound of the maniacs shrieking in the darkness, moaning like cannibals at a fresh kill as they wandered the shadowy halls of Gin Mills Sanitarium. Their calls rose up to uncanny levels, the already mad timbre of their collective voices made all the more eerie by the echoic stone hallways.

The padded door to the quiet room stood ajar and these cries were not muffled by the thick plush walls, but oddly enhanced by the steel jamb, adding to the cadence of catcalls a warbling quality which made Whitaker’s teeth grind. Still, he didn’t dare shut that door behind him, knowing full well that if he did, he would be trapped in here until someone came for him. And he didn’t know if anyone ever would.

The few staff members who were on shift when the storm came were likely dead already. The power had been out for hours; it had struck just before the night’s lockdown and most of the patients were out in the halls or pacing hectic circles in the day room. When the power went out, the madhouse became a roiling pit of terror and aggression; mental patients stand perpetually on the brink of emotional collapse and, when you turn the lights out on them, they often revert to a semi-primordial state, acting on vicious instincts and behaving as if every irrational thought, every paranoid notion, was their only tether to another moment’s survival. The volatile components of fear and insanity had, tonight, clashed horribly together and this was the explosion which ensued.

Whitaker had seen an orderly killed already. Dennis Wheeler, no more than twenty five, had been dragged down by two patients and beaten horribly. Whitaker had witnessed this from within the shadows beneath the bolt-down contour chairs in the day room, watching intermittently during spats of bright lightning outside the windows. Each flash of brilliance brought a grislier scene than the last and Whitaker had found himself unbelievingly wishing that the darkness would remain constant and spare him the sight of Dennis’s wriggling mass as two patients pounded him erratically and ferociously. Even the distant, reverberating wails from the other patients could not dowse the wet crack of Dennis’s head cracking beneath the force of a particularly ghastly blow.

Whitaker had held together pretty well until that moment. He had deliberately lied to himself over and over again, whispering that this was only the medication, only the medication. That he was strapped to a gurney somewhere in the wake of too much Lithium and a particularly vivid hallucination. By the time his eager whispers had escalated to obsessive whines, he almost believed it. But after watching the young orderly smashed to death by the fell fists of lunatics, Whitaker’s inconsiderable will to remain steady had crumbled like stale biscuits.

He was in full-episode now. The screaming of his fellow madmen was a discordant chorus in his head, edging higher and higher until it became as shrill as a whistle. He could feel tiny, crawly sensations on his skin, as if spiders were tickling at him and then disappearing when he reached out to swat them. The frequent lightning flashes were tinged with cold colors and the floors seemed to move beneath his hunched frame. And one sensation, insatiable yet appetizing, was beginning to grow from a dull ache to an inexorable agony, from a hunger to a feral state of starvation, and the soggy splat of Dennis’s skull crushing resounded in Whitaker’s mind again and again and again.

He needed to kill. He needed it like he needed sunlight on his face in the morning. Needed it like he needed air in his lungs after a deep plunge into cold water. He needed to kill someone, anyone, and his body wasn’t going to give him peace until he had satisfied that need.

He rose from his crouch and stepped out of the quiet room, no longer registering the tittering shrieks of the lunatics. One hand slid along the smooth stone walls while the other pattered at his left hip as if searching for his keys while under the grips of an overtly adrenal drug.