The Asylum

By Darryl Matter

The Rothchild Asylum for the Criminally Insane, established in 1857, closed in the 1970s. Dark secrets regarding criminal activity remain hidden within the asylum. Retired detective Phil Sawyer and his friend Lorelei Crawford search for that evidence--and discover that someone yet today will kill to keep those secrets.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Darryl Matter
• Release date: Jun 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463450246

Darryl Matter

Hello,I'm an ancient, long-retired college professor who likes to write stories. My educational background is somewhat varied. I first earned a B.S. Degree in Mechanical Engineering with a Management Option. The industrial management and psychology classes interested me in human behavior, and I eventually earned a Ph.D. in Human Development. In addition to writing stories, my interests include reading and stamp collecting.I grew up in a rural Kansas community, and I now live with my wife in a retirement community. I appreciate each of my readers, and I thank you for reading my stories. Furthermore, I encourage each of you to write something of interest to you and then publish it--to share with the world.Being the antique person that I am, the tech-side of publishing doesn't come easily to me and I appreciate the support staff at Smashwords.Again thank you for your interest in my stories.Sincerely,Darryl Matter

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The Asylum

A Phil Sawyer and Lorelei Crawford Mystery

By Darryl Matter

Smashwords Edition

Copyright 2019 by Darryl Matter

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The Asylum

A Phil Sawyer and Lorelei Crawford Mystery

This is a work of fiction. The characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

* * * * *

Chapter 1

I crouched on my haunches, leaned back against the rough concrete wall of the long-abandoned storm sewer, and played my flashlight beam up on the underside of the rusty iron grate positioned in the stone floor about eighteen or twenty inches above our heads. If the old maps we'd studied were accurate and if we'd calculated our movements correctly that night, my friend, Lorelei Crawford, and I now were directly under the massive stone structure known as the Rothchild Asylum for the Criminally Insane. More specifically to the point of this particular underground exploration, we were directly under the old Asylum's sub-basement, a reportedly cavernous room said to have been referred to in hushed whispers by the earlier inmates as the dungeon because of the horrible things that had regularly happened there.

The Rothchild Asylum for the Criminally Insane, an institution established in the early- to mid-1800s, had been closed during the late 1970s, its last inmates having been transferred to more modern institutions at that time. The dungeon directly above us, however, had officially been sealed off and abandoned in 1940, almost forty years before the institution itself closed. Lorelei and I were there to explore the old sub-basement, partly because exploring the underground passageways and abandoned structures of the city is our passionate hobby--and partly because there was a chance that the old dungeon might yet reveal secrets to a bizarre unsolved mystery from the late 1930s involving an inmate at the asylum named Benny Cole.

Whether the dungeon still held any secrets regarding the Benny Cole incidents, and whether Lorelei and I might decipher them if it did, remained to be seen, of course. At any rate, the rusty iron grate above our heads that had been installed in the dungeon's floor as a drain into the storm sewer now hopefully would serve as our unique entrance to the long-sealed room.

The grate itself appeared to be approximately 18 inches by 18 inches in size and was constructed of sturdy iron bars measuring perhaps an inch across and set at spaced intervals in the rugged frame. Its removal should certainly leave an opening large enough for us to climb through.

Lifting that floor drain so that we could push it aside and climb through the opening and into the dungeon was not going to be an easy task. From the looks of the iron grillwork, that grate would prove to be extremely heavy. Furthermore, it likely was held in place with countless years of rust, debris, and eroding stone. Nevertheless, we'd tackled similar obstacles in the past, and I'd bet we could master it. We'd certainly give it our best shot.

We're really here, aren't we, Phil! Lorelei's whispered excitement broke through my thoughts. We didn't have to whisper, of course, because there weren't any other people around to hear us, or at least we didn't think there were, but we almost always whispered when we were exploring the underground.

I think so. If we calculated correctly, this is it, I replied, whispering as she had, as I continued to examine the underside of the grate that was revealed in the flashlight's incandescent beam.

We made good time, Phil. It's only ten o'clock, Lorelei continued, whispering in hushed tones, as she eased herself close to me, put her hand on my arm, and carefully studied the iron grate above our heads with me. I could tell from her voice that she was just as excited to be there as I was. We'd been planning this venture for some time, and now it was happening.

Although I couldn't see Lorelei clearly in the semi-darkness, I caught the scent of her perfume as she came near. Even though she was dressed for exploration in rugged blue jeans, a heavy denim shirt, and sturdy trail shoes, and now was covered with dust from our underground hike, that fragrance avowed what I already knew: Lorelei was every inch a lady!

Right. We did made good time.

Indeed, we had. We'd entered the storm sewer several miles away about seven o'clock, three hours ago, being extremely careful to avoid detection. And on our way to the asylum, we'd taken our time to explore the entrances to several interesting underground passageways accessible from that sewer, passageways that we would want to explore further in the near future.

Our travel inside the abandoned sewer had not been especially easy that night. The ancient concrete was cracked and broken or actually crumbling in several locations, and we had to carefully pick our way over those treacherous spots. Then, too, several tree roots had broken through the concrete, and we'd had to cut through one of the larger ones in order to continue on our way. Never mind those problems now, however. We'd reached our destination.

Lorelei's been my constant companion in exploring the city's underground for almost five years now, and she's the best companion that anyone could ever hope for. Maybe I should say that I've been her companion for almost five years now, because it was, in fact, she who encouraged me to join her in exploring the storm sewers and tunnels and other underground structures that criss-cross the belly of the city after she'd learned of my experiences as a tunnel-rat in Vietnam.

I grinned at Lorelei and handed the flashlight to her. Let's take a closer look-see at this grate.

Yes, let's! Lorelei's eyes danced excitedly in the semi-darkness as she smiled back. She knew exactly where we were as well as I did, of course, having studied the maps with me. Furthermore, she'd checked off the landmarks on our maps as we'd made our way along the old storm sewer. There was no doubt in my mind that Lorelei could navigate the city's underground as well as I could, or even better because of her uncanny sense of direction.

Neither Lorelei or I had any idea of exactly what was up beyond that ancient grate, and we weren't going to take any chances. While Lorelei held the flashlight steadily focused on the iron grillwork, I carefully ran my fingers through and along the bars, cautiously feeling for any trip-wires that might have been attached.

Although it's been almost thirty years since I was in Vietnam, I've never forgotten the lessons I learned there. Whenever I'm confronted with a gate or a doorway of any kind to a new passageway, the first thing I do is check for obvious booby traps. You can bet that I'm paranoid, have been for many years, and that paranoia kept me alive in some exceedingly scary situations, both in Vietnam and in my more recent employ as a cop.

Once I was satisfied that there were no obvious trip wires fastened to the grate, I tested its resistance by pushing up against it with both hands. That heavy iron grate didn't budge.

Reaching into my tool kit, I extracted a lightweight but extra-strong titanium pry bar, wedged it between the grate and the stonework, and slowly worked it back and forth. Flecks of rust and crumbling stone drifted down around us as I worked the pry bar around the edges of the old floor drain until it began to shift ever so slightly in its stone recess.

I kept working with the pry bar, freeing the grate from the stone until I could move it a little in each direction. Then, shifting ends of my pry bar so that the curved end now was wedged between the stonework and the iron grate, I shoved hard--and was able to lift the grate ever so slightly in its opening. It was beginning to work loose, but it wasn't ready to be lifted out of its opening just yet.

Once again, I worked the pry bar around the grate, this time lifting the grate against the dirt and debris that had settled against it over the past who knows how many years. Before long, I had dislodged quite a bit of the debris and was able to shift the grate a noticeable amount each way. Our doorway into the dungeon was almost ours.

Ready for me to help you lift that grate out of there? Lorelei whispered her question. She'd been watching me work on the grate and knew that it was almost loose. We'd worked these kind of grates loose before.

Yes. I think it's loose enough. Let's try it.

Okay. Lorelei placed the flashlight down on the storm sewer floor and angled the beam up at the grate. Then she and I crouched under the iron grate side by side, ready to lift the floor drain if we could. We've worked together on obstacles such as this one many times, and each of us knew how to best coordinate our efforts.

While I pried up on one edge of the grate using my pry bar, all the time pushing up at the grate for all I was worth with my free hand, Lorelei shoved upward against the grate with all her strength. Rust particles, debris, and crumbling stone rained down on us, bouncing against our boonie hats and spilling off onto the floor, as we managed to shove the stubborn grate high enough to push it completely out of its recess, then slide it sideways and onto the stone floor above us. We'd done it. Ready access to the long-sealed dungeon of the Rothchild Asylum for the Criminally Insane was ours!

Once we'd pushed the grate aside, I cautiously beamed my flashlight up through the opening, wanting to make sure that nothing was poised to fall down on our heads when we attempted to enter the dungeon. There didn't appear to be, but I had to be sure. The stonework that was visible in the flashlight's beam appeared to be solid, and the area around the floor drain appeared to be clear.

Is the entryway clear? Does everything look solid, Phil? Lorelei anxiously whispered her questions. She, too, was excited about exploring the dungeon, but she also was cautious.

I think so.

Lorelei grinned up at me, her big brown eyes twinkling in the dim light. Can I have the very first look? She already had her palm-sized night-vision monocular in her hand. It would illuminate distances better than the flashlight, and although we really had no need for secrecy in this setting, the monocular didn't give us away like the flashlight's bright beam surely would.

Sure, Lorelei. Go ahead and look just as soon as I set up the lantern.

Lorelei's monocular is an excellent device for viewing in darkness. Still, in the near total darkness we expected to encounter in the dungeon, a little extra light would be most helpful, even with the monocular--and we were prepared to provide that light. While Lorelei waited, I retrieved our battery-powered florescent lantern from my tool kit, switched it on, raised it through the opening above us, and placed it on the floor of the dungeon.

Lorelei switched on her monocular's infrared illuminator as she straightened up and cautiously raised her head through the opening we'd just cleared. Slowly she scanned the entire room above us while I waited and kept watch in both directions in the tunnel-like storm sewer through which we'd traveled. Not that we were expecting company, but then you never know.

Very, very interesting, Lorelei mused as she finished her scan and settled back down beside me on the floor of the abandoned storm sewer.

See anything especially intriguing, Lorelei? I knew from the way she summarized her initial view of the dungeon that she had seen something intriguing, but I asked anyway.

I sure did. It's going to take us awhile to look things over the way we want to, Phil, much longer than we originally thought, and . . . . She hesitated. I knew by the tone of her voice that she had something important to tell me.

What is it, Lorelei?

You'll see. It's all over the east wall. And it's all over the floor, too. Lorelei looked up at me. It's your turn, Phil.

Okay, I'll take a look.

Phil?

Yes?

Tell me it isn't what I think it is. Lorelei handed me her night-vision monocular. Her voice was almost hard, strained. I had a good idea of what she'd seen.

Hmmm? Okay. I'll take a look. I straightened up, switched on the monocular's infrared illuminator, and while Lorelei kept watch in the sewer, began to visually explore the room above us.

The room known as the dungeon was not all that large, certainly not as large as my imagination had led me to believe it was. I judged it to be perhaps twelve by twenty feet in size, north-south being the longer dimension, with a ceiling I estimated to be about eight feet above the floor. Our floor-drain entrance was centered close to the south end of the room, and the floor did appear to slope ever so slightly in that direction.

Scanning first toward the east side of the room, I saw the original door that opened into the room. It appeared to have been constructed of heavy steel plate and set in a thick steel frame within the massive stone wall. When the room had been sealed off many years ago, that steel door had been welded to the frame and its tiny window covered with a plate of steel. Somebody had wanted that door sealed once and for all to judge from the way they'd welded it shut. Lorelei and I would check out that doorway more thoroughly once we were inside the room to see what it would take to open it again.

And I did wonder just what might be on the other side of that old entrance door. Had the stairway leading to that door been filled in with rubble? Never mind that for now, however. There would be time to find the answer to that question later if we decided gaining full and easy access to the room warranted it.

Along the east wall, from the doorway nearly to the opposite end of the room, was positioned a heavy stone bench. Sturdy leg irons with heavy chains embedded in the stone at regular intervals along the bench now rested askew on the floor, and chains that may once have held arm cuffs or some such restraint dangled from the wall above and behind the bench. In the old days, of course, they'd kept the mentally ill prisoners locked up in such restraints.

At the north end of the room sat a heavy wooden table. Two legs on one end had been broken off and the table now rested at an approximately thirty-degree angle, its west end with the broken legs resting on the floor while the east end stood tall on its original legs. The broken legs were visible under the table, as if someone had simply tossed them there.

Behind the table was an overturned chair, its back resting on top of an overturned file cabinet. Several large cardboard boxes were stacked in a haphazard manner along the north wall of the room, and miscellaneous papers littered the floor around them.

The west and south walls of the dungeon were mostly bare. An occasional chain was fastened to the east wall near the ceiling and I could only guess that the chains, like the leg irons fastened to the stone bench, were at one time used to restrain inmates.

Heavy wooden beams placed at regular intervals supported the ceiling of the dungeon, while the ceiling itself appeared to be constructed of well-fitted stone slabs. I had no way of knowing just how far the dungeon was built below the basement of the asylum, but my guess was that the stones above us formed the under-floor of the asylum's regular basement.

Two other things about the dungeon caught my attention. The first was what appeared to be a vent of some sort, an air-shaft constructed through the ceiling at the north-west corner of the room. Perhaps this vent system accounted for the fact that the air in the dungeon did not seem particularly stale, as one might expect the air to be in a semi-sealed dungeon room.

The second thing that caught my attention was the arrangement that had been made for lighting the sub-basement room. That room had been fitted with electric lights and the old-fashioned fixtures were secured on the east wall. One fixture was located near the entry door, the second located at the north end of the room. I could make out small, old-fashioned bulbs in each fixture. There was no way they could have provided a great deal of light in the dungeon. I couldn't help but wonder what they had used for light in the room before electricity. Lanterns or candles, perhaps?

Of course, I had no way of knowing if there was more than one dungeon or, more correctly, perhaps, more than one sub-basement room similar to this one. Another sub-basement dungeon might easily be located under another part of the asylum. After all, the asylum was, and is, a massive structure, capable of holding many similar rooms well below ground level that never would be visited by outsiders.

Lorelei and I had carefully searched the abandoned storm sewer under the asylum, and we hadn't found any other floor drains that looked as if they drained from a similar sub-basement room. That didn't mean there wasn't another dungeon, of course. It just meant that there wasn't a visible floor drain connected from that hypothetical room into the abandoned storm sewer. Other sub-basement rooms might not have a drain of any kind.

Lorelei and I did find another drain connection to the sewer that once collected water from somewhere in the building or, more likely, from the asylum's roof drains. It appeared to be badly choked with weeds and debris, an indication that it had not been maintained.

That drainage system would have been abandoned when a new storm sewer was installed, probably in the 1950s. Exploration of that drain connection might prove interesting, of course, but would have to wait until later, and perhaps we'd have a chance to check out the drain entrance above ground once we gained entrance to the asylum grounds--not an easy task considering the sturdy fence with locked gates that surrounded the complex. But then, even the most secure fences can be breached. Lorelei and I have managed to find a way through a variety of such impassible obstacles.

During my years of service in Vietnam and later as a homicide cop, I've seen my share of massive bloodstains. Lorelei had implied that I should pay particular attention to the east wall, and there was no mistaking the splashed blood that had dried on that wall and on the stone bench below it. Not only that, but there appeared to be a virtual pool of dried blood in a slight depression on the stone floor.

To judge from the amount of blood that had been splashed around, someone had most likely lost his or her life in that room. Without immediate medical attention, it's highly likely that anyone losing that much blood would have died there. My guess was that someone had.

Withdrawing my head from the opening, I hunkered down next to confer with Lorelei in the storm sewer. It's dried blood, all right, I whispered to her.

I knew it. It's sickening. There's been a whole lot of blood splashed around in there, hasn't there? Lorelei whispered back. She has seen her share of bloodstained rooms before, and it was more of a statement of fact than a question.

There sure has been a lot of blood splashed around in there. I reaffirmed her statement as I automatically reached into my tool kit and checked to be sure that the evidence bags I always carry were there. We'd take a sample of the blood with us when we left. Not that it would likely tell us a great deal because the person I suspected of dying there had been cremated over 50 years ago, long before DNA information was available. Furthermore, what medical information existed on this particular individual had been destroyed, accidentally or deliberately, I could not yet say. But then, perhaps not to my surprise, I'd also discovered that many if not most of the asylum's general records were now missing from the archives of the state office where they'd been placed when the asylum closed!

But then again, you never know. Maybe an analysis of those blood stains would provide at least a clue to our mystery. And, at this stage in our investigation, any factual information would be much better than what we had now. (As my old Police Academy Instructor once said: 'Crime scenes don't lie; it's the witnesses who lie.'")

Furthermore, it's often possible to determine a number of details about a violent crime by examining the way in which blood has been splashed around. For example, you often can determine the size and sex of the individuals involved and the type of weapon used. We'd certainly take some photographs of those bloodstains once we were in the room.

Seeing that dried blood may have answered a question that had been on my mind: Why would someone have installed a large floor drain in that room, anyway? Or maybe seeing how that floor sloped toward the drain raised even more questions. Could it be that the drain facilitated cleaning that room? I could imagine buckets of soapy water swishing across the floor, but cleaning away what? Blood? Bath water from cleaning up earlier inmates? I did not have an answer. At any rate, no one had bothered to clean up the blood now staining the floor and wall--and I wondered why. Had they simply welded the door shut instead of cleaning the room?

That blood-stained sub-basement room was beginning to resemble a regular crime scene in my mind. With any luck, we might even find some recognizable fingerprints, although most of them left in that room so many years ago would have completely disintegrated by now. Even so, I had my fingerprint kit with me, just in case.

Are you ready to go inside that room and look around, Phil? Lorelei whispered, a tingle of excitement rising in her voice as she gently prodded me out of my throughts.

Just one more thing to do before we go in, I replied.

Lorelei nodded. She knew what I had to do before we entered the dungeon.

While Lorelei rocked back on her heels and watched, I retrieved a tiny dual-purpose transmitter from my tool kit, a bug as it's often called in popular detective fiction, and placed it in a niche where the concrete was broken out on the wall of the abandoned storm sewer in which we'd been working. That transmitter would pick up any sounds or motion activity in the storm sewer and alert us once we were in the room above. If the receiver on my belt vibrated, we'd know instantly that someone or something was in the storm sewer and we could prepare for visitors.

Neither Lorelei or I had any reason to suspect that anyone had followed us or was especially interested in what we were doing that night. Still, I'd been cautioned to be extremely careful if I went poking around in the Benny Cole affair, and I've always heeded such warnings. Maybe that's what has kept me alive.

All set, Phil? Lorelei whispered, after I tested the transmitter to be sure it was working.

Sure thing, Lorelei. It's working. Let's go in.

Chapter 2

Before Lorelei and I take you into the asylum's dungeon, let me interrupt our exploration to tell you Benny Cole's story and what brought us underground to investigate that sub-basement room.

As I mentioned earlier, exploring the city's underground is a hobby with Lorelei and me. Exploring underground passages isn't exactly new to me, and I'd like to tell you about my background as well as my interest in Benny Cole.

I spent twelve years of my life in Vietnam, from the early-1960s until 1975. Although I was with a special forces unit, when we discovered the networks of tunnels constructed by the Vietcong in our area, my commanding officer asked for volunteers to go into those tunnels--and I elected to be a tunnel-rat.

The people who constructed those tunnels are somewhat smaller than the typical American, and at five-eleven and 175 pounds I was too tall and thick to fit comfortable in those narrow passageways--but somebody had to attempt it, and I did it. Of course, there were some tunnels I couldn't begin to navigate because they were simply too