Fear Games

12. Call Me Crazy

Daisy stepped further into the room, swinging a knife in her hand like she was bored. She walked over to the machine that Damien was hooked up to and said, "Hey there, little bro. How's it going up there?"

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" I demanded. "That's your brother up there!"

"Oh, don't worry," Daisy said. "I'm not going to hurt him. In fact, I don't want to hurt him at all. That choice is going to be completely up to you." She pointed the knife at me, smiling. "I'm sure you have a lot of questions, which I'll be very happy to answer."

A million thoughts were racing through my mind, but the one thing that never occurred to me in all of this was that Daisy could be the killer. She seemed so sad that her brother was missing, and all this time she had him? I couldn't understand what was happening, but I did have my first question.

"Why?" I asked. "Why would you do all of this?"

Daisy scraped the knife across the machine and the noise made me cringe, like nails on a chalkboard. "That's a bit of an interesting tale, actually. One that I think you'll be very happy to hear and may clear up some confusion." 

She turned to face us and smiled wickedly. "Ever since I was a little kid, I was a bit disturbed, so to speak. I got pleasure out of killing things. It started with bugs. God, you should have seem my mother's face the first day I squashed a spider with my very own hands. It was hysterical." A sick laugh escaped her throat. "I enjoyed the feeling of death under my hands. It was fantastic. It made me feel powerful. It later turned to animals. When Damien was around three, my parents decided to get a cat. We had the cat for about a day before it died."

"You killed a cat?" Eden asked.

Daisy shrugged. "That little shit was annoying, let me tell you. She didn't like me very much, either, but all I heard was meow this, meow that. I snapped it's neck after tossing it around the room a few times. Mom and Dad tried to act like it was an accident, like I didn't mean to do it, but deep down I think they always knew. We didn't have a pet for a little while, but we eventually got another one a few years later. It was a ferret, actually. I sorta drowned it in the bathtub."

She said it so casually, and it was then that I realized she was a psychopath. She didn't care about anything. Daisy had no feelings or regard to anyone around her. And that was the deepest kind of sick.

"Killing animals wasn't that fun, though," Daisy said. "I mean, it was, but whatever. A couple years later, I 'accidentally'"--she made sure to use air quotes--"pushed Damien down the stairs. I thought for sure he was dead, but when I realized he wasn't, it was very clear that I could continue to do whatever I wanted to him. Mom and Dad wouldn't stop me."

"Except...they...did," Damien said from the machine.

Daisy laughed. "Oh please, they didn't stop me. They tried to, anyway. They had to admitted here, to the wonderful St. Paul's."

"Why here?" I asked.

"This used to be an emergency room," Daisy went on. "This hospital and St. Mary's were run by the same company, which in theory was good. Only problem was, they didn't take enough precaution when I came here, I sort of attacked a nurse, and they had me restrained. I was admitted to St. Mary's for a few months, but ended up coming back and pretended I was this wonderful, lovely, changed person."

"So what happened to this place?" I asked. "Why's it completely vacant?"

"It may seem like a simple answer, but it's not a difficult question. The truth is, the company didn't have enough resources to keep the hospital open. They originally built this place specifically for people with mental health issues to get psychiatric evaluations in cases of emergency. When they weren't making enough of a profit, things started going to shit, because people were using hospitals closer to their areas. Eventually, this hospital closed down, but another opened up."