Chapter 4
CHAPTER
FOUR
Nigel waited impatiently for Oscar and Chris to come back from filming. As soon as they did, he grabbed Oscar’s arm, guided him away from the others, and told him about the call with Lawson in a low voice.
Oscar frowned. “Someone investigated here before? When?”
“I don’t know.”
“It didn’t show up in your research?”
“Obviously not, or I would have mentioned it.” Nigel winced at his own sharpness. “Sorry. I’m just concerned. If Dr. Lawson has her facts right, I should have come across some record.”
“Maybe, maybe not.” Oscar shrugged. “Not everyone documents their investigations, or at least does so in a way that leaves a public record. Dr. Lawson might have heard about it from a friend of a friend.”
He had a point. The field of parapsychology overlapped with that of ghost hunting, but they weren’t the same. Even though Nigel’s focus of study was the survival of personality after death, he was expected to report his findings and apply a scientific lens to them. Paranormal investigators sometimes did the former, and occasionally the latter, but there was no standard they had to follow.
“True,” he allowed.
“We could ask Ms. Montague,” Oscar suggested.
“No.” Of that, Nigel was certain. “I don’t know the details about her relationship with Dr. Lawson back in the day, but it’s clear they parted on bad terms after the medium they worked with died.”
“Robin.”
“Yes. Not to mention, we’ve never been sure what Montague’s motives truly are. She showers us with money, but in return she wants all of our raw footage. What is she looking for?” He glanced at Zeek and Adrienne, strolling back from the front of the asylum. “Who else is she working with?”
Oscar rubbed his chin with the back of his hand. “Good point, babe. Maybe tomorrow we can take the van somewhere closer to civilization and you can try calling Dr. Lawson again. For now, we just keep going as usual.”
“Okay.” Nigel stood on tiptoe to kiss him.
Zeek whistled loudly. “Hell yeah, love is love!” he yelled and pumped his fist into the air. Adrienne shot Zeek a withering look.
Nigel’s cheeks heated, but Oscar grinned. “I’m a lucky man,” he proclaimed, slinging his arm over Nigel’s shoulders, which made him blush even harder.
“We only have a few hours of daylight left,” Adrienne announced, folding her arms. “Zeek, let’s grab our gear and head inside while we can still see.”
Oscar let his arm fall. “We should do the same.”
Nigel didn’t have much to do for the preliminary sweep, except carry the bags of equipment Chris passed him. The head cams and other gear would come later; this was just a foray inside to find places to set up their various static cams, both of the night vision and thermal varieties. They’d also use it to plan the areas they wanted to investigate first.
Oscar and Chris were the ones in charge of the sweep; he was just there as a pack mule. Not that he couldn’t offer suggestions, but they were the experts when it came to this part: Oscar because he could sense spirit energy, and Chris because he knew how to capture the best angles.
The two teams, minus Tina back in front of the monitors, ended up walking up to the front door at the same time. As they did so, Zeek turned around to walk backward, facing Oscar. “Hey bro, I heard a little bit of the intro you were filming. If you’d like some pointers, I’m happy to help.”
Nigel bristled, but before he could say anything, Chris cut in. “Thanks bro, but I think we’re fine.”
“No offense,” Zeek said, holding up his hands. “It’s all about the views, you know?”
“I know,” Oscar said, a thread of unhappiness in his voice. “Thanks for the offer.”
“Sure thing.” Zeek shot finger-guns at him, then turned around to walk normally.
Nigel seethed quietly as they climbed up the wide stone steps. How dare Zeek criticize Oscar’s performance. Worse, it seemed like his words had actually gotten to Oscar.
If he’d had a free hand, he would have taken Oscar’s. Instead, he made a mental note to reassure him later, once they had a moment alone.
Adrienne paused at the door, her hand resting on the knob. “We need to set some ground rules. Number one: no interfering with each other’s equipment in any way.”
“No shit,” Chris snapped. “What kind of assholes do you think we are?”
“The kind without over twenty million views.”
Nigel ground his teeth. “We aren’t doing this for views.”
“You’re not?” Zeek asked, looking confused. “That’s wild, bro.”
“We’re serious investigators! This is for science!”
Oscar cleared his throat. “Agreed, Adrienne. What else?”
“We go our separate ways. If possible, we stay on different levels and in different wings.”
Oscar nodded. “That makes sense—there’s less chance of accidental interference with the results. I’d like—that is, we’d like—to start in the southern wing, first floor.”
“So we’ll begin with the northern wing, fourth floor,” Adrienne agreed.
Zeek brightened. “Isn’t that where the creeper is?”
Chris glanced at Oscar. “Creeper?”
“A shadow person!” Zeek exclaimed. Did the man ever say anything with a normal level of volume and enthusiasm? “But the kind that crawls around on the floor or the walls, not, you know, a hat man or something.”
Shadow people hadn’t yet been properly investigated, at least not to Nigel’s standards. They were probably incorporeal personal agencies of some kind, most likely human ghosts. But he’d read some theories suggesting they could be of inhuman origin.
That, he doubted. No one had ever proven the existence of any sort of inhuman paranormal entity. There’d been reports of ghost dogs and the like over the years, but they were almost certainly living animals mistaken for ghosts. Shadow people were probably just ghosts able to gather enough energy to manifest, but not enough to be seen as anything more than a silhouette by non-mediums.
“Sounds good,” Oscar said. “The creeper is all yours.”
“Then, with that out of the way…” Adrienne opened the door “…let’s get to work.”
Oscar braced himself as the door swung wide, its rusty hinges shrieking a protest.
Had his mamaw come through this door? Or were patients admitted through a more discreet entrance? Maybe it depended on whether they arrived voluntarily with their families or were brought forcibly by ambulance.
Which had it been for her? The latter, probably. She’d been declared a danger to herself and others.
Bands tightened around his chest; grief for a woman he’d never known. By all rights, she would have trained him up just as she’d been trained by her grandmother. Instead, he’d wasted years in shame, afraid he was crazy and seeing things, suppressing his gift as much as he could.
Adrienne went inside first, followed by Zeek. Oscar followed them into a wide, airy entryway, the plaster arches decorated with stylized flowers. Light filtered through the twin windows to either side of the door and the transom above it, dimmed by years of accumulated grime. A reception area greeted them on the left; on the right was a room marked SECRETARY and another labeled DIRECTOR.
This had once been a beautiful place, but years of neglect had taken their toll. The dark wood of the floors bore deep scratch marks, and the paint flaked from the walls. A thick layer of dust covered the receptionist’s desk and the old 1990s-era computer that sat on it.
Oscar stepped around the desk and tugged on a drawer. It opened reluctantly, wood swollen and spongy from humid summers and wet winters. Inside rested the typical office supplies, from sticky notes to pens and a stapler.
“I’m always amazed at what gets left behind,” he said. “So many of the abandoned places we go, people just walked away and never came back.”
Nigel glanced at him. “I wonder if any records are still here.”
Mamaw’s records, he meant. Oscar didn’t know if it would be better or worse to find out the details of what happened to her here.
“If you want to rummage through dusty old files, be our guest,” Adrienne said, flapping a dismissive hand at them. “We’ll be doing what we actually came here for.”
“Get to it, then,” Chris shot back.
She rolled her eyes, then made for the wide, curving stairs at the end of the hall. Zeek gave them a thumbs-up and trotted after.
Once they were gone, Nigel said, “Are you all right, Oscar?”
“I’m fine.” He took out the map of the asylum they’d printed off before coming here. “Okay, the center of the building where we are now was for administration and staff. Doctors and nurses lived on site—back in the early days, the doctors’ families did as well. The northern wing is where men were kept, and the southern was for women and children.”
Chris’s golden skin went sallow. “Children? There were kids here?”
“Unfortunately.” Nigel shifted into what Oscar thought of as his lecturer mode. “Some were born to patients here, and were simply…kept. Others were brought by their families, for example if they had epilepsy.”
Chris’s mouth gaped. “Epilepsy?”
Nigel spread his hands apart in a helpless gesture. “It seems bizarre to us now, but it was a common reason for people to be institutionalized in so-called lunatic asylums, even if the person had no psychological problems. Even if they were children.”
“Jesus.” Chris shook their head.
“We’ll check out the kid’s ward later,” Oscar decided. “For now, I wanted to start on the first floor. The patients who were trusted not to hurt themselves or anyone else were kept there. Every floor up, security increased, with the most violent wards on the fourth floor.”
“Where the creeper is.” Chris grimaced.
“Yes.”
They started down the wide hall, past the offices. At the very end, a pair of staircases spiraled up to either side, their oak banisters still beautiful even with a covering of dust and cobwebs. Between them was a grand old elevator, the metal housing its shaft decorated with curls of iron that recalled the gate outside.
“The elevator was added in the early nineteen-hundreds—I’d have to check my notes for the exact date,” Nigel said. “I imagine it made moving patients from one floor to another far easier.”
Chris panned the camera slowly over it. “These old-timey elevators are so cool. I’m definitely coming back and taking some photos of this during the day.”
They turned away from the elevator. Just before the stairs, heavy double-doors to either side led to the north and south wings respectively.
“So what have we got, ghost-wise?” Chris asked as they turned to the left to enter the southern wing.
A long, wide hall stretched before them, lined with wooden doors to either side. Some stood open, others closed. The remnants of yellow paint scabbed the plaster, and grit crunched beneath their boots as they entered.
“Nigel?” Oscar prompted. He’d done the most research, since he was the best at it.
Nigel cleared his throat. “Nurses who worked here reported the shadow person on the fourth floor, disembodied voices warning them to go away, figures disappearing into rooms with no other exits, and a ghost girl playing in the second-floor classroom. Presumably the patients heard and saw things as well, but…”
“But no one believed the crazy people,” Oscar finished. His heart was a stone in his chest. This was why he’d been told he was imagining things, taught to keep what he heard and saw to himself. Dad had been terrified he’d end up here like Mamaw, long after the place had been shut down and treatments improved.
Now, having seen the asylum in person, he could understand why Dad was so traumatized by his visits. The sheer size of the place was overwhelming to an adult; it must have been terrifying to a child. Combined with the seventies-era drugs Mamaw had been dosed with, every visit must have been a nightmare.
The ward they were on now would have been the one Mamaw was held on. Women’s wing, home to patients who didn’t cause too much trouble, at least once they were dosed with enough Thorazine to keep them quiet.
She’d been here. Walked the same hall he was now walking.
He stopped at the first room and peered inside. Beyond lay a small cell with a single barred window. Three metal cot beds crowded inside, mattresses nothing more than bundles of rotted cloth and ancient mouse nests.
“The rooms were originally meant for only one person at a time, with windows and transoms to give plenty of air and light,” Nigel said from behind him. “The transoms had to be blocked off, though. Too many patients used the bars to hang themselves.”
Oscar took a deep breath, smelled only dust and a faint whiff of mold. What must it have been like to be in this cell, not when everything was fresh and new, but during the decades of overcrowding and underfunding? Had his mamaw ever slept here, in this very room?
He stilled his mind and grounded himself. If there were any ghosts in this ward…
A loud bang sounded from in the hall.