The Lost and the Damned by Dennis Liggio Read Free Book Online

him. He gave them reluctantly, but at this point he seemed to not care what happened to me. I got in my car and followed the roads, taking them slow. I didn’t want to crash when I was so close. Eventually I found the sign on the side of the road: Sommersfield, population 237.
    The sign was rather well maintained, sticking out from brush and trees. But if I hadn’t been driving slow, I would have missed the rest of it. Below the sign, there was scraggily brush, overgrown and uncared for. I could just make out something sticking out of the brush. I pulled the car over to the side and got out. The ground dropped off sharply on the edge of the road. My footing was uneasy, but it was enough to get a handful of branches. With effort, I pulled it back revealing a second, older sign. The sign was dark and aged, but I was able to read it well enough: Sommersfield Mental Hospital.
    The plot thickens.
    I let the brush go, the branch scraping some skin off my hand. I got back into the car and I followed the road until the trees opened, revealing a very small town. It looked to me just a short main street and a few houses on roads off the main street. From here I could see a road leading out the other end of town, through trees and up a hill. On the top of that hill there was a monstrosity of architecture, a nightmare of bricks and mortar. Slouched upon that hill was Sommersfield Mental Hospital.
    Just looking at it gave me a chill. There was something that definitely wasn’t right about it, even at a distance. It was old architecture weathered by time and washed with dirt. It stretched out over the entire hill, a huge complex of wings and windows. It looked out over the town and dwarfed it. The hospital must have been bigger than all the buildings in town put together. There seemed to a disproportion between the size of the hospital and the size of the town.
    I drove down the main street and parked in front of the diner, a red cursive neon sign declaring it Lorraine’s. I got out and looked over the street. A grocery/pharmacy, a post office, a motel, and Lorraine’s. Nothing more. That was a very small main street, not much of a walk, not much of anything. Just the bare essentials needed to even be a town. I turned and entered the diner, a bell ringing as the door opened.
    The diner looked like a fugitive from a retro-truck-stop revival. The counter had round leather stools on silver bases, while silver mirrors gleamed from behind the counter. Pies and cakes on stands with glass tops were displayed across the counter. Comfortable red leather booths ringed the restaurant while small square formica tables with requisite Heinz 57 bottles filled the center of the restaurant. I looked around the diner and found it mostly empty, unsurprising for three o’clock in the afternoon. I took a seat at the counter, where I was greeted by the waitress. She had a warm smile and dark red hair, dyed and tied back. She was pretty and did her makeup as if she were in her early thirties, which was still quite flattering. The lines on her face showed she was older than she let on, causing me to place her in her early fifties. I knew she had a friendly way by the way she greeted me with, “Afternoon, sugar.”
    “Afternoon,” I responded. I peered at the nametag on her apron, which said LORRAINE. “Are you the Lorraine?”
    “Sure am,” she said with a smile, “Owner, proprietor, head waitress, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.” With how she spoke, that last part sounded instead like excedera, excedera, excedera.
    “That’s an impressive list of titles.”
    “Not really, just enough to make me happy,” she said. “They mean jack and squat to be truthful. I have to keep this place running and it doesn’t matter what they call me. If there’s something to be done and there’s no one doing it, I have to get it done.
    “But here, I’m talking about myself, that’s not the hospitality I was taught to give. What about you? You obviously