Bellamy

“Hello, Bellamy,” Leanne whispered and turned off her car. As the engine’s rumbling faded, she began to hear the crickets and creaking trees filtering through the early evening.

The cloistered building waited ahead. It sprawled between the trees, seeming to absorb the entire horizon. The failing sun painted its edges a bloody red as endless black windows watched the empty courtyard.

The exterior was flat and grim, more like a warehouse than a home. But Leanne knew, inside, Bellamy Children’s Asylum was far from orderly. A nest of discordant passageways and connecting rooms created maddening patterns. Nothing fit the way it was intended. What should have been right angles weren’t, and floors and ceilings that should have been flat were bent. Even after living in the home for eight months, Leanne still didn’t know where some of the passageways led.

Why did you leave me, Leanne?

She pressed her eyes closed, hands tight on the wheel, and waited for the painful sensation in her chest to fade. Thirty years should have been long enough to forget the home. Thirty years should have been long enough for the dreams to stop.

Her car door whined as she opened it. The car wasn’t old, but it seemed to resent the twelve-hour drive. Leanne flexed her shoulders as she stepped onto the pebbles of the parking area. Once, those pebbles had been like a white carpet spread before the building. Now, they were a deep, angry grey, buried under the residue of generations of weeds.

Leanne and Henry had been some of the last children brought into Bellamy. Since then, times had changed. Children’s asylums had lost favour, and foster homes had replaced them. Two years after Leanne left the home, it had closed its doors for the last time. Evidently, no one had been interested in purchasing it. The building was dirtier and held more cracks than Leanne remembered, but otherwise, it looked exactly as she remembered.

I waited for you, Leanne.

She took a slow breath, removed the flashlight from her pocket, and climbed towards the front door. It had been left ajar, perhaps by human error, or age and wind had forced it open. Leanne tried to push the gap wider, but the wood was frozen in place. The gap was just large enough to squeeze through. She turned her body sideways and slipped inside.

Leanne paused, waiting to see if her eyes would adjust. Tinted daylight came through the door’s gap, creating a streak that ran across the floor before fading into the gloom. But not before it caught on two wide eyes.

Her pulse leapt. She raised the torch, fingers turning sweaty as she pressed the button. The corner of the room came into relief. The eyes vanished, resolving into a brass fixture. That was all.