The locals all agreed on one thing about Briarwood Asylum, it wasn’t haunted.

   No one claimed to have seen ghosts wandering its halls or shadowy figures staring from broken windows. There were no stories about phantom footsteps or disembodied voices drifting through the darkness. Every account, no matter who told it, always returned to the same unsettling detail.

   The buzzing of the flies never stopped.

   Winter, Spring, Summer or Fall, the abandoned institution hummed with the sound of countless flies. On certain nights, hunters claim to have heard them through the treeline. Teenagers had tales of hearing them while daring each other to step foot onto the property. Utility workers refused contracts after two men abandoned their equipment and drove away without explanation. Whatever occupied Briarwood didn’t hide its presence. It announced itself with a sound so common that most people convinced themselves they didn’t hear it at all.

   That was why Cameron Mercer accepted the investigation.

   His team had grown a modest following debunking haunted locations across Southwestern Pennsylvania. More often than not, they found deteriorating plumbing, loose windows, settling foundations and overactive imaginations. Briarwood was different. No one offered an explanation, the building had stood empty for over three decades yet the buzzing had never ceased.

   As they unloaded cameras, lights and recorders from the van, the low vibration drifted across the parking lot. It wasn’t especially loud, but it seemed to settle in the chest more than the ears. It was as if the sound was trying to burrow itself beneath the skin instead of floating in the air.

   The building looked exhausted. Ivy swallowed much of the brick facade and dozens of broken windows stared down over the parking lot like hollow eye sockets. Even after decades of abandonment, Briarwood retained the unmistakable shape of a place where people had come hoping for recovery and too many had failed. The low hum drifting through the air only deepened that impression, filling the silence between the investigators until it was too much to ignore.

   Melissa followed Cameron’s gaze toward the building. “I’ve never heard insects this loud before.”

   “They’ve had thirty years to multiply,” Ethan replied with a shrug. “Maybe there’s a nest inside the walls the size of a pickup truck.”

   Jordan shook his head. “No, listen to it.”

   The others fell silent.

   Once he pointed it out, the difference became obvious. A normal swarm rose and fell as thousands of insects changed direction but this sound never varied. It held a perfect steady pitch, almost like an electrical transformer humming somewhere in the distance. The longer they listened, the stranger it became, until Cameron wondered if they were hearing insects at all.

   He pushed the thought aside and shouldered his camera. “Let’s see what all the fuss is about.”

   The rusted front doors resisted at first before finally groaning inward on neglected hinges. The instant the four investigators crossed the threshold, the buzzing disappeared.

   There was no fading echo. No gradual silence. One moment it surrounded them, the next it simply ceased. No one spoke for several seconds.

   Jordan was the first to react. Without saying a word he stepped backward onto the front steps.

   The buzzing returned immediately. He looked at the others, frowned and stepped back inside.

   Silence.

   Jordan repeated the experiment again and again with exactly the same result. The moment one foot stepped out over the threshold, the buzzing returned. The instant he stepped back inside, it vanished as completely as if it never existed. He stood in the doorway for several seconds, staring at the empty parking lot while the others waited for an explanation he clearly didn’t have. Finally, he eased the heavy doors shut and listened as the latches clicked into place. Once again the silence fell over the asylum like a heavy blanket.

   “I’ve got nothing,” he admitted, shaking his head. “Just doesn’t make any sense.”

   “It doesn’t have to,” Cameron said, adjusting his camera. “We’re here to document, not to explain.”

   They moved deeper into the building, their footsteps muffled by decades of dust. The silence inside Briarwood was almost as unsettling as the buzzing outside. Every abandoned building had its own language of settling beams, rattling windows and distant creaks but Briarwood refused to make a sound. The investigators heard only their breathing and the soft scape of their boots as they passed empty patient rooms whose doors hung open like dark mouths.

   The nurse’s station occupied the center of the first floor. Patient charts lay scattered across the counter. Cameron recorded as Melissa carefully separated one file after another, laying them out wherever the ink remained dry enough to read. They documented medications, blood pressure, fevers, oxygen levels, telling the ordinary story of psychiatric care.

   Then the tone changed.

   Melissa stopped reading midway. “This patient complained about hearing flies every night. The nurses searched…twice and not one insect was found.”

   Jordan opened another file and frowned. “Mine says almost exactly the same thing. The patient insisted somebody was talking behind the walls.”

   Ethan thumbed through several more records. “Listen to this one. ‘Patient claims the buzzing grows louder when the lights are turned off.”

   The further they searched, the stranger the entries became. Patients described waking with the sensation of being watched. Several insisted that a figure stood silently beside their beds until dawn before vanishing. One woman claimed the insects weren’t flying, they were waiting. A nurse had circled that comment in red ink and wrote single word – Delusional.

   Cameron wasn’t so sure.

   He reached beneath the remaining stacks and found a folder unlike any other. It contained no medical information, only handwritten notes scrawled from different pens by different people. Some pages listed room numbers. Other repeated names, over and over again until they trailed off the page. The final sheet bore only one sentence written in large block letters.

   DO NOT LET THEM GATHER

   No one spoke for several seconds. Cameron turned the page over, expecting another physician’s note but the back was blank.

   A faint buzzing drifted through the hallway. It lasted only a heartbeat then it faded. Melissa looked toward the corridor. “It’s inside now.”

   “No.” Jordan replied quietly as he checked the thermal camera. “It’s below us.”

   The display showed an unusual patch of warmth spreading beneath the floorboards, extending well beyond the walls of the nurse’s station. It wasn’t the sharp outline of a furnace or broken steam pipe. The heat pulsed slowly, almost rhythmically, as though something enormous slumbered under the building.

   The floor plan Cameron had photographed on their way in identified only one room below.

   Basement Isolation Ward.

   “Let’s check it out,” Jordan said enthusiastically.

   A narrow concrete stairwell waited behind a rusted service door. The moment Cameron pushed it open, the smell rolled over them.

   It wasn’t decay. It was sickness.

   The sour odor of sweat-soaked sheets, spoiled medicine, stagnant water and something older that defied description. Every instinct urged them to turn and leave but the buzzing had returned. It rose steadily from the darkness below like a distant chant.

   The stairs ended before a corridor lined with heavy steel doors. Each bore scratches on the inside, as though desperate hands had clawed the metal from within. Faded quarantine symbols remained visible through peeling paint.

   “This wasn’t always an asylum, was it?” Melissa whispered.

   “It became one.” Cameron answered.

   The buzzing grew louder with every step until the investigators reached a set of massive iron doors standing slightly ajar at the end of the hallway. Hundreds of flies clung to the walls surrounding them, perfectly motionless, their wings folded as if waiting for permission to move.

  Jordan reached for one with a gloved finger. Before he could touch it, every fly turned toward him. Hundreds of tiny heads moved at once. The buzzing stopped.

   A slow breath rose from the darkness beyond the doors. It carried with it the unmistakable sound of wet lungs drawing air for the first time in decades.

   No shape emerged. No face appeared.

   Instead, an overwhelming certainty settled over the four investigators, so absolute none of them questioned it. What had been confined in Briarwood was not a patient.

   It was Pestilence itself.

   The flies were never its servants, they were the first symptom.

   The iron doors shuddered once beneath the weight of something vast moving on the opposite side. Rust drifted from the hinges as another breath filled the corridor, warm and damp enough to carry the stench of fever into the investigator’s lungs. Behind them every fly in the basement lifted from the walls in perfect silence.

   Melissa began to cough uncontrollably as the buzzing returned.

∼ Kathleen McCluskey

© Copyright Kathleen McCluskey. All Rights Reserved.