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.

The sinkhole opened up under the excavator right after noon.

   One moment the machine was chewing through asphalt on Route 15. The next, the earth gave way beneath it with a crack that sounded like thunder. The excavator vanished nose first into darkness, dragging tons of stone and dirt with it.

   The crew scattered when the ground began to give way.

   When the dust settled, a hole nearly forty feet wide gaped in the middle of the road. Foreman Rick Dawson approached the edge first. “What the hell…”

   The beam of his flashlight disappeared into the darkness. But something reflected the light.

   Thousands of things.

   Bones.

   The entire cavern was filled with them.

   Animal skeletons. Dear antlers.  Cow skulls. Human ribs. Femurs. Vertebrae. Piles upon piles stretching beyond the reach of the flashlight.

   The Pennsylvania state police arrived an hour later. By sunset, a recovery team was ready to descend.

   Rick hated every second of it. The place smelled wrong. Not rotten. Too dry. Like an old grave left open for centuries.

   The recovery team consisted of Rick, two workers named Dale and Hector and one deputy that seemed more annoyed than concerned.

   They descended by rope. The deeper they went the colder it became. Their boots landed on a floor made entirely of bones.

   The sound was sickening.

   Crunch.

   Crunch.

   Crunch. 

   Hector’s flashlight swept across the cavern and the color drained from his face. “Jesus Christ…”

   At first Rick thought it was just another collapse of bone, another impossible drift of white piled against stone. But the center of the chamber wasn’t a pile. It had depth like something had pressed downward and left a shallow, unnatural basin.

   A man lay inside of it.

   Half buried. Half exposed. His body sunk waist deep in the skeletons. He was emaciated, his skin stretched tight over his frame, his ribs sharply defined beneath it. His entire body was reduced to something skeletal and fragile.

   The deputy moved first. “Sir? Can you hear me?”

   The man’s eyes opened slowly. It looked like it cost him everything just to focus. When he finally saw them, panic flared across his face so violently it almost broke into relief.

   “Don’t…don’t come any closer,” he rasped.

   Rick frowned. “We’re here to get you out.”

   The man shook his head in one small, desperate motion. “No…you can’t stand on it.” He said. “It hears you when you step on it.”

   The bones beneath him shifted. Not a collapse. Not settling. A response.

   A slight ripple moved through the skeletal field around his hips, like something underneath was waking. A femur slid a few inches. A skull rotated slightly, teeth scraping bone.

   The man’s breath hitched. “No,” he whispered. “No…don’t…”

   The surface around him changed. The bones didn’t simply move aside. They opened. A section of the field depressed inward in a slow, controlled motion. The man’s body jerked downward. 

   Then something rose. It came up through the bone field without breaking it in a clean burst. The skeletons simply shifted apart just enough to allow it through. What emerged was pale and slick, almost eel like but wrong in its construction. It wasn’t one body. It looked layered, segmented as if multiple thick, corded forms were braided together. Two more slid to the surface, the tendrils flexed independently, each ending in something like a circular jaw. Teeth lined those openings in tight, rotating rings, clicking softly as they adjusted to the air.

   The man saw it and made a sound that didn’t fully develop into a scream. “It’s under us! It’s under all of it!”

   The thing did not hesitate. One of the appendages shot forward.

   It didn’t strike him like an animal hunting prey. It moved with intent. Precise and immediate as though it understood exactly where he was anchored in the sea of bone. The circular jaw clamped down onto his torso just beneath the ribs.

   The man’s body jerked upward. The bone field around him shifted. The skeletons that had been holding him adjusted all at once, not breaking free but releasing their grip in sequence. It felt coordinated, like the entire bone bed was part of the same organism.

   The man screamed.

   The sound was cut short as the second tendril locked around his shoulder. Another snapping into place around his waist. Not tearing him apart, just securing him, positioning him.

   Then the pull began. His body dropped first then sank. Then was taken completely as the bones beneath him parted like a mouth swallowing. His upper half vanished into the field while his arms flailed once, desperately, uselessly, before disappearing as well.

   For a few seconds nobody moved. The place where the man had been was empty. The bones had already settled back into place, erasing any evidence that a living human being had been there moments before.

   The deputy was the first to find his voice. “What the fuck was that?”

   No one answered. Rick wasn’t sure he could.

   The movement was so subtle at first that he didn’t even notice it. Nearby a ribcage shifted a few inches through the pile. Then a different section stirred. The disturbance spread outward in widening circles. Soon the entire chamber felt alive with motion. Hector slowly swept his flashlight across the cavern floor. The beam traveled over thousands upon thousands of bones before stopping on the far wall. Whatever color remained of his face had vanished.

   Rick followed his beam.

   At first his brain didn’t register what he was looking at. Pale tentacles were rising from the skeletons. The shapes emerged slowly, displacing bones as they ascended.  

   Rick’s stomach tightened.

   The thing that had dragged the man under the bones seemed large enough at the time. Standing here now, looking across the cavern, he had realized that they had seen only a small portion of whatever lived below. The appendages were surfacing everywhere. Some rose from the center of the chamber. Others appeared near the walls. One emerged less than twenty feet away, lifting itself from the skeletons with unsettling ease before swaying gently from side to side.

   The deputy took an involuntary step back. His boot crushed a human skull. The crack echoed through the chamber.

   Instantly every appendage stopped moving.

   The appendages remained perfectly still for another heartbeat before slowly turning in unison toward the source of the noise. Toward them.

   A deep vibration rolled through the bone field beneath their feet. The skeletons rattled violently. The piles near them collapsed inward as something vast shifted below. For the briefest moment, Rick saw something enormous moving beneath the bones, a pale shape passing under the camber floor like a shark gliding in dark water.

   Then the tendrils struck.

∼ Kathleen McCluskey

© Copyright Kathleen McCluskey. All Rights Reserved.