I had another painful, mini vision as Dr. Hatch led us into the facility.
This one involved Max's Mom, transforming into Vecna, as well as the chiming of the grandfather clock again.
"You've broken everything. Your time is almost at an end."
I didn't get much else other than that, followed by yet another splitting headache and bleeding nose, which I concealed with the package of tissues that I had brought with me just for this very purpose.
"You good?" Nancy whispered, looping her arm through mine. I nodded.
"Yeah," I said quietly, "But we need to hurry. I think we're running out of time."
"These are our gardens," Dr. Hatch introduced, ignoring our whispers, "Aren't they beautiful? We allow them two hours of outside time a day."
"Can't they just escape?" Robin asked, gesturing at the ungated yard.
"They could. But the vast majority choose to be here. They like it here."
"I really admire the environment that you've created, "I told him honestly, "There is such stigma and mistreatment surrounding the mentally ill, so its refreshing to see an Asylum that makes the patients feel at home."
"That was in fact the goal, thank you for noticing." He agreed, leading us into the building again. "This is one of our more popular areas, the listening room. We find that music has a particularly calming effect on the broken mind. The right song, particularly one which holds some personal meaning, can prove a salient stimulus. But, there are those who are beyond a cure."
We all shared a look as he escorted us downstairs to the criminal ward.
"Um, Dr. Hatch, do you think it might be possible for us to speak to Victor...alone?" Nancy questioned. Both he and the guard in front of the door stared at her with suspicious disbelief.
"Alone?" He repeated.
"I-I think that we would just love the challenge of speaking with Victor without the safety net of an expert such as yourself." Robin explained. "Then we could really rub it in Professor Bradley's face when we got back to-"
"Professor Bradley? I don't believe I know a Professor Bradley."
"Brantley!" Nancy and I corrected in unison. We shared a look and I just laughed uncomfortably, shooting Dr. Hatch my most charming smile.
"She meant to say Brantley." Nancy explained.
"Didn't I say Brantley? What did I say?"
"Bradley is Professor Brantley's teaching assistant. Its difficult for us not to get them confused." I lied easily. "But yes, it would mean a great deal to us if we could speak to Victor on our own. Having the opportunity to converse with such a high profile case with nothing but our own learned phycological knowledge would give myself and my friends here a great sense of accomplishment, and being just the start of our future careers, we would like to get them started on the right foot."
He smiled back, but I had a bad feeling that he had just caught us in a lie, and was believing our story less and less by the minute.
"Yes. Why not? You've caught me in a rebellious mood." We all chuckled. "And there's something rather urgent I need to check on anyway, so..." He looked down at his watch. "Sure. Keep a close eye on them."
He's definitely going to check us out.
"We're blown, definitely running on borrowed time. " I whispered to Nancy through my teeth.
"Yeah, I figured." She agreed as Dr. Hatch walked past us to the stairs.
"Thank you so much, Dr. Hatch."
"Thank you."
The guard unlocked the key to the Criminal ward, which was a cold, dark, and dingy place much different than the facilities upstairs.
"Do not startle him," The guard said, leading us to the end of the hallway, "Do not touch him. Do not pass him anything. Stand five feet away from the bars at all times. Is that clear?"
"Yes, sir." We all agreed as he took out his night stick and ran it along the bars of the last cell in the ward.
"Victor!" He called in a very condescending tone. "Today's your lucky day! You got visitors."
The man in the cell was sitting at a desk against the wall, his back facing us. All we could really see of him was the white cardigan he had on, no doubt to protect him from the cold conditions of the basement. As soon as the words left the guards mouth he began clawing at the desk, leaving grooves in it with his fingernails.
"Must be in one of his moods. Have fun." The guard walked off, leaving us alone, but I didn't look away from the man. The hair on my neck stood on end, and I suddenly got a very overwhelming feeling that this man had definitely had contact with Vecna in some way.
"Victor?" Nancy began. "My name's Nancy. Nancy Wheeler. And this is..."
"Robin Buckley." Robin said. I walked up to the bars, lightly placing my hands on them despite the guard's direct orders.
"I'm Riley Hopper." He stopped scratching then.
"We've got some questions-" Nancy started.
"I don't talk to reporters. Hatch knows that."
"We're not reporters."
"Victor," I said gently, "We came here because we know what really happened to you and your family, and whoever or whatever the true culprit was...its back."
He slowly turned around to face us, revealing that his eyes were gouged out, covered in scars, and had pus leaking our from beneath his eyelids.
"What's happened?" He asked.
"Two teenagers," I told him, "It started with nosebleeds, nightmares and headaches...then hallucinations-visions of horrifying things tied to traumas from their pasts and then...they floated up into the air. Their bones snapped and their eyes were removed from the inside. Its happened twice already, one of our friends is experiencing the symptoms right now."
He didn't respond to this, turning sideways in his chair and pressing his hands together.
"When he attacks, our friend described it as a trance," Nancy continued, "Like, a waking nightmare. That's why we think he's coming for her next. Does any of this, anything we've told you, sound like what happened to your family?
He let out a shaky breath.
"Victor...I know this is hard-"
"You don't KNOW anything!" He exclaimed.
"But we do Victor," I assured him, "These people he's killed, I've seen them. I've watched them day, I've seen and experienced their visions, I know exactly how they feel, every single emotion. But there's still gaps missing in our knowledge of this monster, and that is why we are here, because as far as we know, you are the only person to have survived his attack."
"Survived?" He asked, laughing in disbelief as he stood up from his chair. "Is that what you call this? Did I survive? No, I assure you," He stepped up to the bars, prompting Nancy and Robin to step back, but I didn't move, "I am still very much in hell."
He put his hand on the bar, and because he was blind, he mistakenly laid his on top of mine on the crossbar, and as soon as his skin made contact with mine, the scene around me completely changed.
I was suddenly outside of a gigantic house, watching an old teal, vintage car roll up the driveway and park behind a big yellow moving truck.
"I had been back from the war some 14 years," Victor explained, his voice leaking through the vision just as the others' had during my vision of Fred.
The doors opened, and a 50s styled family, consisting of a dad, a beautiful blonde Mom, and two young children, a boy and a girl, got out of the car and stood in a clump, staring up at their new home with suitcases in their hands.
"Her great-uncle had died, leaving us a small fortune. Enough to buy a new home...a new life."
The family walked up the stairs of the front porch, and I followed them, pausing on the steps as the father, who I assumed was a young Victor Creel, pushed open the front door, which had a beautiful Rose stained glass window on it.
"What'd I tell ya?" He asked as I maneuvered around them so that I could watch them as they came though the door.
"Wow." His wife replied.
"This is amazing," The little girl said, walking to the middle of the entryway and spinning around to look at it, "It looks like a fairy tale! A dream!" She took off running up the stairs.
"Alice, no running!' Her mother called.
"Its so big!"
"This is nice." Victor agreed, wrapping an arm around his wife's shoulders. I couldn't help but notice that the little boy stood in the corner, his eyes trained on the floor. He seemed very strange...out of place among the picture-perfect family.
"It was a magnificent home. Alice said it looked like it was from a fairy tale."
"Alice," Nancy asked, "Was this your daughter?"
"Mhm. Yeah. But Henry, my...my boy. He was a sensitive child..."
The scene shifted again and I was suddenly standing in front of Henry, who was sitting at a table on the floor with paper and crayons sprawled out in front of him. He looked around suspiciously as the lights in the house flickered.
"...and I could see he felt something was wrong. We had one month of peace in that house...and then it began."
There was a small playground across from the house with a slide that was shaped like a rocket. Alice slid down it, playing happily in her yellow dress, with her blonde hair braided into pigtails. She reminded me of an older version of Sara...until her face morphed into one of pure terror as she laid eyes on the dead, mangled rabbit that lay just a few feet away.
"Dead animals, mutilated, tortured, began to appear new our home."
Alice took off running across the street back to the house.
"Rabbits, squirrels, chickens, even dogs. The police chief blamed the attacks on a wildcat. This..." He laughed as his younger self sat on the porch at night, a shotgun held tightly in his hands, "This was no wildcat. This was an evil, an evil neither animal nor human. This was a spawn of Satan. A demon. And it was even closer than I realized."
His wife was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, dressed in a lavish pink robe. She turned the knobs that affected the water, but nothing came out of the faucet. Spider's began crawling up from the drain, and she screamed, running down the stairs as she screamed Victor's name.
"My family began to have encounters conjured by this demon. Nightmares. Waking, living nightmares."
I waited in the bathroom, watching as Victor came back up to find a bathtub full of water without a single spider in sight.
"This demon, it seemed to take pleasure in tormenting us. Even poor, innocent Alice."
She bolted up in her bed, screaming, which prompted her parents to run into the room and turn on the lights.
"Alice!" Her mother called, running over to her, "Its ok, sweetie. Its ok, come here."
"It wasn't long before I bean to have encounters of my own."
I stood in the corner of their living room, next to the fireplace now. Victor sat in an armchair with a book in his lap, when all of a sudden, the sound of a crying baby filled the room. I furrowed my eyebrows, looking around for it until I spotted that the fire in the fireplace had been replaced with a rocking baby bassinet. There were flames inside of it, and it was only now that I realized the sounds were the baby being burned alive inside of its bed. I put a hand over my mouth, feeling nauseous. Victor watched it was wide fearful eyes.
"I suppose...all evil must have a home."
The next thing I saw was Victor standing in the dark, staring suspiciously at the open attic door. He walked through it, climbing up the stairs, and I slowly followed after him, pausing in the doorway as he pulled the string to turn on the lightbulb.
"...and though i had not a rational explanation for it, I could sense this demon always close. I became convinced it was hiding, nesting, somewhere in the shadows of our home."
Despite the fact that the attic door was open, no one was there. It was an empty room, with the exception of the personal possessions the creels had stored there, which all cast creepy shadows on the floor as the lightbulb swung from its wire in the center of the room. I got the sudden urge to walk up to Victor and put my hand on his shoulder, wondering if I could touch him like I had been able to with Max and Chrissy.
My hand sank through his shoulder as if he were made of liquid, telling me that whatever it was I was seeing, it was not like what I had previously experienced.
"It had cursed our town...it had cursed our home...it had cursed us."
The scene shifted once more, and I was standing beside the family dinner table, which they were all seated around eating. It was only now, at this moment that I realized I recognized the house...it was the same one that Chrissy was in when she died. I recognized the very same dinner set up that had been left to rot in the wreckage of Chrissy's mind.
The radio on the table next to me crackled, and Dream a little Deam Of Me by Ella Fitzgerald began to play of its own accord.
Victor rose from his seat, glancing at his family as he approached it, only for it to begin rifling through the channels all on its own. He reached out to turn it off and the lights followed, beginning to flicker rapidly.
Within seconds his wife was in the air, floating above the dining room table.
The vision ended there as Victor took his hand off of mine, sitting down on the bed. I took a step back from the bars, my vision blurring as I unexpectedly was yanked back into the real world.
"It took Virinia first," He told us, "I tried to get the children out...to save them...but I was back to France, back in the war. It...it was a memory."
My head shot up at the word memory. Is that what I had just experienced? Had I somehow been able to see and experience Victor Creel's memories?
"I had thought German soldiers were inside. I ordered its shelling. I was wrong." He put his hands over his ears, and I squeezed my eyes closed, suddenly beginning to feel lightheaded. "This demon, it was taunting me, and I was sure it would take me just as he'd taken my Virginia. But then...I heard...another voice."
Dream a little Dream of Me began echoing in my head again and my hands flew to my ears at the sheer volume of it. Both Nancy and Robin were too enraptured with Creel to notice what was happening.
"At first I believed it was an angel, and I...I followed her, only to find myself...in a nightmare far worse. While I was away, the demon took my children. Henry slipped into a coma shortly after that. A week later, he died. I tried to join them. I tried!"
He put his fists over his eyes as he began to sob.
"Hatch stopped the bleeding. He wouldn't let me join them." He laid down on his cot.
"This angel you followed," Nancy asked, "Who was she?"
Instead of answering, he just bean to rock back and forth, humming dream a little dream. I stumbled, putting a hand on the wall to steady myself as the door slammed open and Dr. Hatch came back with two guards following in his wake.
"Is he everything you hoped he would be?!" He asked. "I just had a very interesting conversation with Professor Brantley, and-"
He stopped talking, looking at me. His eyes morphed from anger to one of deep concern.
"Young lady? Are you alright?"
Nancy and Robin turned to look at me now, and it was only now that I felt the blood dripping from both sides of my nose. I reached up a hand, touching it and pulling my fingers out to look at it before meeting his eyes again.
"Music..." I said, turning to look at Nancy and Robin, "He followed the music."
That was the last thing I managed before my vision went black and I felt myself falling to the ground.