Chapter 14
CHAPTER
FOURTEEN
Howlston was even more depressing away from the main thoroughfare they’d driven on the way in. Faded signs, boarded-up storefronts, and sagging roofs lined the dilapidated streets of what had once been a thriving downtown. An old shopping cart lay on its side in the road; Chris steered the van carefully around it.
The library was on the outskirts, at the edge of a neighborhood of once-beautiful homes gone to ruin. When they got out of the van, the only sounds were those of nature: bird song, wind, the distant chatter of squirrels.
“Crazy how this place just dried up after the asylum shut down,” Chris said, pausing to snap a picture of some crumbling brick on the front of the library. “Though I guess it was already in the process once the mine closed.”
“Boom and bust,” Nigel agreed. “How do we get inside?”
Someone had boarded up the front doors, but Chris led the way around the back of the small, two-story building. Blackberry brambles clutched at their jeans, as if begging them not to go inside. The service door in the back was unlocked, and opened with a squeal of rusty hinges when Chris pushed on it.
They found themselves in a small office, complete with old computer, fax machine, and copier. A door on the other wall let them out into the library proper.
As Chris had mentioned before, everything had been left in place. Books lined the shelves, some in relatively good shape. But the roof had sprung leaks, and everything beneath them had become a solid mass of pulp and mildew. Between the damage and the tell-tale smell of mice filling the air, Nigel’s heart sank.
“I don’t know if we’re going to find anything,” he said unhappily.
Chris took a series of pictures of some book spines mottled with rot. “The archives in the basement are in better shape, or at least they looked like it at a cursory glance. I didn’t go through them, though.”
Nigel sighed. “Well, let’s hope.”
They found the stairway leading to the basement, and Chris hit the light switch. Fluorescents flickered, stuttered, and finally came to life.
“I still can’t believe the power is on,” Nigel said, descending the concrete stairs. “But Oscar said that happens more than you’d think?”
Chris ducked beneath a curtain of spiderwebs. “I wouldn’t call it common, but it’s not the first time we’ve found power in an abandoned building, yeah.”
The basement was indeed drier than the upper floors. The brickwork ceiling formed thick vaults, as if this had been an important storage area when the building was constructed—though what had originally been kept here, Nigel couldn’t guess. Metal shelves crowded the space, the books on them plainly bound volumes of compiled magazines, court proceedings, and town records.
Near the back, they hit the jackpot: shelves upon shelves of oversized tomes that turned out to be newspapers bound together. At one end were bundles of loose papers, which must have been waiting to be bound when the library closed for good.
“The photograph was from 1932,” he said, scanning the spines as he worked back further in time. “We’ll start there—you go forward in time, and I’ll go back.”
Chris took down the heavy volumes for 1932 and 1933 with a grunt. “So I just scan for any headlines referring to the asylum? That’s going to take forever.”
“I know, but we don’t have a choice, since it doesn’t seem they digitized anything before shutting down.” A shame all of this had been abandoned to rot. If he had the amount of money Montague seemed to, he’d spend it on saving archives like this. How many other lonely, abandoned places held the final traces of the people who’d once called them home? Names, dates, and events being slowly lost to the inevitable creep of decay?
To be fair, it was no different than most of human history. Only the tiniest sliver of memory existed of events a hundred years ago, let alone the dim reaches of a hundred thousand .
And this wasn’t a helpful line of thinking. Pulling down the weighty volume labeled 1931, he got to work.
“Your grandmother was a nurse who died at the asylum?” Zeek asked as they entered Trey Nelson’s small house. The front door opened onto a short hallway, cluttered with old boots and stacks of newspapers waiting to be recycled. The overhead lights were dim, ancient incandescent bulbs still hanging on to dear life. Or maybe the dimness came from a layer of nicotine; the entire place reeked of cigarette smoke.
“No, she was a patient,” Oscar said, and caught a look of surprise on Zeek’s face. “I’ll tell you all about it on the way back.”
Trey’s living room was as depressing as the entry hall. An ashtray overflowed with cigarette butts, and empty beer cans crowded the coffee table. The seventies-era shag carpet was stiff beneath their shoes, as if it hadn’t been vacuumed in many a year.
“Can I get y’all anything?” Trey looked around, as if seeing the living room through new eyes. “I have, uh, tap water and Miller Light.”
“No, thank you.” Dr. Lawson perched on the edge of a sagging couch. Oscar sat beside her, trying not to imagine the layers of grime on the cushion. Zeek took what looked like a dining room chair that had been brought in to sit near the oversized television, while Trey settled into a recliner angled for optimum viewing.
“So what do you want to know?” Trey directed the question at Oscar.
Apparently he was taking the lead. “Anything you can tell us about what happened that night would be helpful.”
Zeek leaned forward and held out the old camera to Trey. “We found this—it belonged to your group.”
Trey’s eyes widened, and he took the camera, turning it over and over in his hands. “This was mine. I was going to take a picture of a ghost, sell it to the newspapers…we were going to be famous.”
Too bad it wasn’t that easy. But this had been back in 2006, well before the proliferation of ghost hunting shows and channels. A more innocent time, in some ways. “What happened to cause you to drop it?”
Trey reached for a beer he’d clearly been working on when they pulled in, and took a long swig before crushing the can. “I was always interested in the paranormal, you know? Even as a kid, I loved ghost stories. When I was a teen, I went into the local abandoned house that was supposed to be haunted. Heard some creaks that might have been nothing, but I was sure were made by the old witch who supposedly died there. It was scary, sure, but thrilling too.”
He shook his head, as if in wonder at his young, na?ve self. “When I got older, I started hanging out in forums online. Talking about ghosts, psychic stuff, anything paranormal. That’s where I met the other guys. Joey, Mike, and K-Kyle.”
He trailed off, as if all he could see was those long-ago days. Dr. Lawson cleared her throat. “So you decided to meet up and hunt ghosts?” she asked.
“Yeah. We went to a couple of locations, got some hits on the EMF, what might have been an EVP. Spooked ourselves plenty, but it was fun, too.” He glanced at Zeek. “You said you have a show. Seeking the Unknown.”
“Zeeking the Unknown,” Zeek corrected helpfully. “My friend Adrienne and I look for ghosts—she’s really smart, and?—”
“Thank you,” Dr. Lawson cut in. “We get the picture.”
“You understand, then,” Trey said. “The adrenaline, the feeling you’re brave enough to go places other people won’t, the excitement when you think you’ve seen or heard something…”
Oscar nodded. Before he’d realized he was a medium, he’d been drawn to ghost hunting for all the reasons Trey mentioned. Curiosity, excitement, the sense of touching some part of the past that still lingered…it was part and parcel with the decision to explore abandoned locations in the search for ghosts.
“Yeah,” Zeek said. “I get what you’re saying. But something went wrong at the asylum?”
Trey stood up and fetched a half-full whiskey bottle from the forest of empties crowding the TV table. “You could say that. Right from the first, we felt like something was watching us.” He took a swig straight from the bottle as he sat back down. “The EMF readings we got were erratic—there and then gone. We tried to capture some EVP, but we never listened back to the recorder, after…well. Not a lot seemed to be happening, to be honest. Just enough to keep us curious. Then we got to the fourth floor.”
He drank again, as though wanting to forget the words even before he could speak them. “You might think I’m a liar for what I’m about to tell you, but I don’t care.”
“We believe you,” Oscar said. “Trust me, all of us have seen things.”
Trey’s throat worked. “We’d heard there was a shadow person on the fourth floor. Staff who worked the night shift saw it crawling along on the floor.”
Zeek shuddered. “Yeah, I saw it last night. Super creepy.”
“You did?” Trey stared incredulously. “You’re not going back inside after that, are you?”
Zeek looked taken aback. “It’s sort of my job?”
“What about you?” Oscar asked, before they could get sidetracked with a discussion about the questionable wisdom of their choices. “Did you see it?”
“Yeah.” Trey idly began to pick at the label on the bottle in his hands. “It crawled on the floor, like it couldn’t stand up, but it had a head and arms and legs like a person. We were at the far end of the corridor, and we could see it coming closer, just at the very edge of the light. I about shit myself, but Joey yelled at me to take a picture. I brought up the camera, but it disappeared before I could click the shutter. That’s when…that’s when she came.”
He shivered and closed his eyes, as if that might keep the memory from playing out in front of them. “She looked like maybe she’d been a nurse. I could see right through her, but she was there . She was like a cold wind, and she came right at us, screaming to get out…”
He fell silent. After a long moment, Dr. Lawson prompted, “What happened then?”
Trey snorted. “Are you kidding? We ran for our lives. I don’t know if she followed us—at the time I was convinced she was hot on our heels, but looking back I’m not so sure. We reached the stairs and started down, and Kyle…” His voice caught, and he blinked rapidly. “He fell. Landed bad at the bottom of the stairs on the third floor. Everyone else kept running, but I…he was my best friend. We’d been meeting up outside the regular group. There wasn’t a day gone by that we didn’t call or chat online. I couldn’t leave him.”
Poor Trey. Dr. Lawson looked uncomfortable with the display of emotion, so Oscar shifted forward and gently put a hand on Trey’s forearm. “I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine how terrible it was for you.”
“Yeah.” Trey sniffled, not looking up. “He was gasping for air, and the way he was laying…he was all messed up. And the others kept running, and I was the only one there. I wanted to help, but I was scared to touch him in case I made things worse. Then my light went out.”
The fine hairs on the back of Oscar’s neck tried to stand up. Sitting in the pitch black dark beside a dying man, surrounded by ghosts…Trey had been through a living nightmare.
“I don’t know how long I was there, listening to his breaths get fainter.” Trey rocked back and forth in his chair. “It was so fucking dark…I just knew the shadow person was crawling down the stairs, getting closer and closer, and I couldn’t see it.” He took a deep, shuddering breath. “Then, finally, I heard sirens. The others had abandoned us, but at least they called the police as soon as they could find a cell signal. Rescuers found me still sitting there, beside Kyle. He was already going cold.”
Damn. “I’m sorry,” Oscar said again. “I know that’s an incredibly inadequate thing to say.”
“I appreciate the sentiment.” Trey poured the last of the whiskey down his throat. “I never talked to Joey or Mike again. Those fuckers left us behind to die. I tried to move on, not to think about what happened, but…”
“It’s a heavy weight to carry,” Oscar said, when he left the sentence hanging. “Thank you for talking to us.”
“Are you going back inside?” Trey asked.
“Yeah,” Zeek said. “And my partner and I are going to trap the nurse, so she can’t hurt anyone ever again.”
Trey looked at him for a long minute, then nodded. “Good. I hope you send her straight to hell.”