If you are new to my Reluctant Psychic series, please consider starting from the beginning. The story, characters and events in this chapter will make more sense when given context from the preceding chapters. If you're returning, welcome back and I hope you enjoy the story.
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As the girls slowly filtered through the cemetery and back to the waiting limos, I headed in a different direction. It had been years since I'd last been to the cemetery and I felt obligated to make a few visits while I was here. The cemetery isn't large, but it is old, with a number of rolling hills and shade trees which naturally divide it.
I walked towards one of the older sections where some families had buried over a dozen generations. My family had only buried four. My great-grandfather had helped turned the town into a city and earned the right to be buried here with his wife. His wife was three decades younger than he was, but died a week after his passing. There were rumors she'd committed suicide, others said she died of grief, but I know better.
I next walked to my grandmother's grave. Miss Oklahoma 1942 had been doing USO shows when she met my grandfather. He was a newly minted army lieutenant on a two week furlough between tours on the German front. They were married the next day, and when my grandfather finally came home from the war they made the perfect couple. He was the son of privilege who still answered the call of duty and came home a hero; she was a beauty queen who turned Rosie the Rivoter during the war, and demurely became a housewife when the war was over.
That all ended when she was killed in a store robbery, my dad was thirteen. The grief didn't kill my grandfather, but it broke something inside of him and he started fading into the shadows. My father barely remembers those years, in fact few people who knew my grandfather during that time remember much. But they all remember the trial.
It took a few years, but the police arrested one of the men for an unrelated crime and found the gun that had killed my grandmother. In return for leniency, the man had turned on his three friends. Even with the testimony the charges would only land the men in jail for a dozen years. There was public outrage, and my grandfather's picture ended up on the front page of the local paper a dozen times as the face of the maligned public.
On the last day of the trial, the jury convened for barely half an hour before coming back with a guilty verdict and a recommendation of the maximum sentence. The furor erupted when the judge set aside the verdict, except for the minor included offenses, and set the sentence to time already served. A hundred cameras were popping as my grandfather stood up, pulled out his service knife and attacked.
My father never talked about what happened next, but I've heard, and seen, the story from other people who were there. People were shocked when the first of the men died and there was pandemonium when the second man died. The bailiffs were so scared they couldn't even draw their weapons to try to stop my grandfather. Everyone was gibbering in horror as my grandfather killed the third man. The fourth man, the one who actually shot my grandmother, tried to run. They said he was too frightened to work the doorknob, since he was clawing frantically at the door when my grandfather killed him.
With insanity burning in his eyes my grandfather turned on the judge, stalking across the courtroom. No one could move except for my father. He stood in front of my grandfather and yelled, "Stop!" They stared each other down the middle of the courtroom. No one was quite sure how long the impasse lasted, but they were both drenched in sweat and shaking when one of the bailiffs finally shook off his terror and clubbed my grandfather from behind.
A jury found my grandfather insane, and locked him up in an asylum. Every few months he would escape and my father would drag him back. He showed up at the house a few times when I was young, dressed in a new suit with a nurse on either arm. The nurses would end up in my father's clinic, I would end up with a migraine and my grandfather would return to the asylum.
My grandfather's powers are stronger than my father's powers were, but he lacked the will or possibility the sanity to overcome my father. When my father died, my grandfather stopped breaking out of the asylum, he'd lost the will.
"Thinking about your parents?" I heard a voice ask. I turned to see Melodie standing beside me. "I know it's an obvious sort of question to ask, but I've been standing here for ten minutes and you didn't seem to notice."
"Actually, I was thinking of my grandfather," I said. Wondering how I could have missed her approach. I'd been missing a lot of things recently.
"Is he buried here as well?"
"Actually, he's still alive," I replied.
I felt hurt emanating from her. I also felt how hard she was trying not to let the hurt through when she asked, "Why haven't I heard about him?"
"It isn't a very comfortable topic. He's in the Met." Most of the other girls would have needed an explanation, but Melodie knew that the Met was what the residents of the Metzger Memorial Psychiatric Hospital call it, at least the ones who know where they are. I felt her anger fading, although it didn't disappear entirely.
"So that's who you go visit every couple of months," she said. She thought briefly of the person she believed I had been visiting and felt some relief that it wasn't her. "Why don't you let any of us come with you?" She especially included herself in that group. She knew the stigma of having a relative in the Met, since her mother had been one of my father's patients.
"It's too dangerous." I said before I could think of a lie.
* * *
When I'd had to leave Betsy alone because of my inability to control my powers, I was in a very dark place. I seemed to destroy everyone I touched. I thought of living as a hermit in the middle of the woods, I even thought briefly of suicide.
As I drove out of town, I saw a small sign for the Metzger Memorial Psychiatric Hospital. On instinct I turned in. My father had occasionally referred patients to the Met when they were too dangerous, or suicidal to be left alone. I had even served a semester internship there before I dropped out of college. This time I was thinking of something on the other side of the padded doors.
The long drive winds through the woods so that the hospital is not visible from the road, only a relatively small discrete sign. As I made it through the trees and caught sight of the hospital, I felt a migraine coming on. The pain seemed to increase as I approached the building, and I desperately wanted to turn around and leave.
I left my car in front of the main entrance and walked toward the lobby. I was holding my head in both hands by the time I got to the doors. The electric eye triggered the doors to open, and I heard bedlam pouring out. I walked in to find a scene from a mad house, or at least what most people imagine them to be. Toilet paper was strewn everywhere, along with broken furniture and the occasional item of clothing. There was also a lot of noise, which I followed until I found people.
In the middle of the courtyard there were a hundred madly cavorting people. Occasionally they would grab a handful of detritus and throw it in the air. They were all dancing to the music produced by a man with a pair of ladles banging on a tree, two men playing air guitar and a woman playing air violin. My headache flared and for a moment I could actually hear the music. The music was manic, loud and tragic, but with a beat you could dance too.
I shook my head to clear the music and stared at the crowd of people again. I realized the crowd held doctors and staff as well as the patients. Toward the middle of the group, I saw a circle of naked women, doing a much slower dance. Some of the women I recognized as nurses from the days of my internship, but their minds were nearly vacant. The other women were patients and seemed to be enjoying the party more than the nurses, although the moaning issued from all the women.
I used my powers to clear a path in front of me, and walked towards the circle. It was much more difficult to get the people to move themselves than it should have been. Their thoughts were along the lines of, "I can dance wherever I want!" Eventually I resorted to encouraging them to dance over there, rather than telling them not to dance over here.
The circle of naked women parted as I approached, and seated on a marble bench, dressed in purple curtains, was my grandfather. It had been nearly ten years since I'd last seen him and he looked much the same as I remembered, except for the robes.
When he saw me there was no recognition in his eyes, or his mind. He waved a hand at me and said, "Dance!" I felt a strange compulsion to do just that, my leg began twitching to the ladles' beat. My grandfather stared at me and said, "If you won't dance, then leave!" This time I felt the compulsion coming, radiating from my grandfather.
I pushed back. He tilted his head to the side, as if listening to a distant sound. As his head leveled his eyes bored into me. "They told me you were dead!" I felt another wave pushing against me, this time it was just minding numbing power. I pushed back, my head pounding with the heavy thudding of my heart. I pushed harder and area around me grew silent. The nurses and some of the patients collapsed to the ground sobbing. The other patients began yelling.
I struggled to contain my grandfather's will and use my powers against him. But unlike my father, or my grandfather, I had a second power, inherited from my mother. I could read minds as well as influence them. I used my mother's gift and searched my grandfather's mind for something to use for leverage against him.
Deep inside his memories, I found the image of my grandmother. She was a near perfect beauty and everything a man could want. In fact, she was everything my grandfather had ever wanted, in large part because he had made her that way. The irony was that he fell in love with all the foibles and quirks she'd had before he'd slowly remade her.
I triggered those memories, and dragged them to the front of his mind. I showed him how he'd tainted the thing he'd loved most in the world, even before she was taken from him. His attack wavered, and I thrust the image into his mind's eye again. He fell to the ground crying.
I pushed with brute force to collapse his power, but there was no fight left in him. I spent the time to reach into his mind and find the source of his power. I couldn't turn it off, but I could reroute his thoughts so he couldn't access them.
"I didn't mean to do it, Son," he said. He rambled and sobbed, calling me by my father's name. When he started to claw at his chest, I reached into his mind once more and put him to sleep. I looked around at the circle of naked women, and the writhing mass of people outside the circle, and put them all to sleep.
It took me two days to return sanity to the hospital staff. My father had never been able to return their minds to normal, since he couldn't see what was actually broken or what the changes he made actually did. I remembered all the nurses that my father had to check into facilities like this one because my grandfather's insanity had infected their minds.
