Chapter 20
CHAPTER
TWENTY
More silence followed Nigel’s final pronouncement, until at last Zeek said, “Wait. That’s the nurse we caught in the Devil’s Toy Box, right?”
“Exactly,” Adrienne said grimly. “But what the fuck does it mean?”
Nigel started to shake his head, then stopped when it made him woozy. He’d been feeling worse and worse throughout the day, but was determined not to let it show. “I don’t know. Maybe she’s angry no one believed her about the doctor when she was alive. The letter is dated less than a month before their deaths.”
“It feels like there’s more to it,” Oscar said slowly. “I’m not sure. Nigel, what happened to the body parts that Wilkes amputated?”
“It doesn’t say. Nowadays, they’d probably be burned as medical waste. Back then, I’d guess they might have been buried?”
“Separately from the patients.” Chris swallowed audibly. “The ghost in the cemetery is looking for her missing body parts.”
“Jesus.” Zeek shuddered. “Can we help her? How would we even begin?”
Oscar ran a tired hand over his face. “I don’t know. Maybe she can be convinced to let go of her attachment to her body and move on. If not…I don’t see how we could even find whatever pit they were buried in, let alone where the rest of her body is.”
“That’s a worry for later.” Dr. Lawson turned back to the cabinet she’d been thumbing through. “Come on—let’s find the other files we were looking for.”
It didn’t take long. Chris located Mariah Hartford first. “Her parents brought her here, just like she said on the spirit box,” they said as they scanned the yellowing pages. “Diagnosed with depression, which apparently meant she needed part of her small colon and half her liver removed. Then she gets labeled as ‘psychotic’ and ‘difficult’ and ends up on the third floor. And, oh look, it says here she died from hypothermia.”
“She fought back and they were trying to either punish or control her with the cold water bath,” Dr. Lawson said grimly.
“Why not both?” Adrienne asked. “Shit. I’d be pissed as hell if I were her, too.”
Nigel frowned. “That doesn’t excuse trying to drown Oscar. He was trying to help her.”
“Sure—and the doctor and everyone else probably said they were trying to help her, too.”
Ruby Baker’s file, uncovered by Zeek, was much the same story. Diagnosed with dementia praecox—what would later be called schizophrenia—she first had her teeth pulled. Then her tonsils removed. Ovaries. Uterus. Part of the abdominal wall.
No wonder she’d risked trying to crawl down a laundry chute to get away.
“This is fucked up.” Zeek blinked and rubbed at his eyes, as if clearing away tears. “And look at how many files there are—how many people did this guy do his crazy experiments on?”
Nigel leaned heavily against the nearest cabinet. He hadn’t bothered with breakfast, but found he had no appetite. His head pounded like a drum, and he worried a fever was starting.
Damn it, he couldn’t actually get sick, not now.
“Do you think we can use any of this information to help them?” he asked Oscar. “Mariah and Ruby, I mean. They don’t deserve to be trapped here.”
“Um, quick reminder, we saw the doctor here, too.” Zeek glanced around nervously. “I really don’t want to run into that guy.”
A faint knocking echoed from the wards.
Oscar stiffened at the distant noise, which repeated, then repeated again. It sounded like something banging against metal…
That couldn’t be Ruby—the chute where she’d died was too far away. Unless the chutes in the different wards were somehow connected, allowing the sound to carry.
Or allowing her to crawl through them from place to place.
Making sure his mamaw’s file was still tucked under his arm, he started for the door. “Nigel, grab the doctor’s file and bring it with us,” he called over his shoulder.
Everyone followed, back through the southernmost ward to the one where Ruby still haunted the site of her death. An almost constant banging came from inside the laundry chute. Either the sunlight wasn’t bothering her, or she was protected from it within her steel prison.
“Ruby?” he called as they came up. “That’s your name, isn’t it?”
There was a pause, then: Knock, knock.
Two knocks for yes. “Are you trying to tell us something?”
Two more knocks, a pause—then a flurry of knocks, broken up by short pauses. Oscar frowned. “I don’t understand.”
“I think I do.” Dr. Lawson took a pencil and notebook out of her pocket. “She’s tapping out the alphabet. One for the letter A, two for B.”
Knock, knock!
“I assume that’s a yes.” Oscar said. “All right, Ruby. We’re listening.”
The knocks erupted in a long flurry, followed by a pause, followed by more knocks. Dr. Lawson listened intently, the tip of her tongue slightly protruding as she concentrated. At the end of every series of knocks, she’d write something on her notepad.
At last, the rapping fell silent. Lawson tore off the piece of paper and held it up for them all to see.
L-O-O-K-I-N-T-H-E-D-O-C-T-O-R-S-C-L-O-S-E-T
“Look in the doctor’s closet,” Nigel read. “What does that mean?”
“The staff quarters on the second floor?” Adrienne guessed. “That’s where the superintendent lived. The other doctors were on the third floor, so I guess we could look in the closets there, too.”
“Is that right, Ruby?” Oscar asked in the direction of the chute. When there was no answer, he tried, “Should we go to the second or third floors?”
Nothing. “She’s probably used what energy she had,” Nigel said.
“Then it’s up to us to figure it out.” Zeek gestured to the end of the ward. “I say we poke around and see what we can find.”
They headed to the central section of the building, to where the grand staircases curved around the elevator. As they climbed, the elevator cables creaked within their iron shaft, as though the old machine longed to lurch into motion. Oscar took out his EMF reader; it blipped and flashed in jagged spikes, then settled back to baseline.
Which meant he could worry about the old elevator later. Zeek had already reached the second floor and was waiting on the landing, not quite foolhardy enough to race ahead. When they’d all gathered, Nigel bringing up the rear, he opened the door.
The second floor quarters, where the superintendent and senior doctors had lived, were far more opulent than anything else in the asylum, even given their years of deterioration. The small common room the door opened onto contained a piano, slowly collapsing to the ground, the rat-chewed remains of a Persian carpet, and sagging couches and chairs that looked to have lasted since the Victorian era. A grandfather clock stood silent against one wall, and crystal decanters, their contents long evaporated, waited on a sideboard. A billiards table rounded out the scene, its green felt leopard-spotted with mold.
Two doors led to the rear of the building, both standing open to reveal what must have been small sitting rooms. The single door toward the front was shut; beside it was a small brass plaque that read Superintendent’s Suite.
“I say we try that one first,” Oscar said with a nod to the door.
Zeek pushed it cautiously open, the rest crowding behind him. The door let onto a spacious sitting room, complete with a fireplace set in a marble surround. Carpets that must have once held all the colors of spring lay in tatters on the wooden floor, and wing-backed chairs were drawn up near the fireplace. Sunlight leaked through windows that in the asylum’s heyday would have a beautiful view of the rolling lawns and the mountains beyond.
To the right was an arch decorated with rococo designs, opening onto a dining room. The long table was dull from years of dust, but must once have gleamed beneath the chandelier hanging overhead. A china cabinet still held a few plates and cups, abandoned by whoever had last lived in this space.
To the left were three doors. The first Zeek tried opened onto a bathroom complete with a claw-footed tub disturbingly similar to the one Mariah had died in. The second had a twin bed, but clearly had been used as a storage space for some time, with random pieces of furniture shoved inside.
“Let’s hope this isn’t it, or we’ll be moving furniture all day,” Zeek said, and shut the door again.
Dr. Lawson strode to the final door and flung it open. Inside was what had no doubt been the master bedroom. An antique bed dominated the space, thin curtains still sagging around it. One end of the room seemed shorter than it had been in the other two rooms, as if a wall had been added at some point. The door set into it was cracked open just enough for Oscar to hear a faint buzzing coming from it.
He’d almost forgotten he was holding the EMF reader until it came to life, beeping urgently and flashing to yellow.
“That must be the closet,” Dr. Lawson said, hanging back. “Probably added later, since closets really didn’t come into vogue until a decade after the asylum was built.”
“So what’s inside?” Adrienne asked, looking to the reader in Oscar’s hand.
“Whatever Ruby wanted us to find.” He took a breath, centering himself, then crossed the room and opened the door.
He braced himself for a ghost, or a shadow person, or whatever else might be lurking inside this dusty, forgotten place. What he actually saw shocked him far more than any ghost.
A large battery sat to one side, connected to a motor, which in turn led to a metal tube. Atop the tube sat a large metal sphere. The hum grew louder, coming from somewhere inside the device. Not a speck of dust had accrued to any of it; the machine had been put here recently.
“What the fuck?” he said, confused.
Dr. Lawson pushed him aside. “It’s a Van de Graaf generator.”
“And what’s that in English?” Zeek asked. Chris rolled their eyes behind him.
“It generates static electricity,” Nigel said from the doorway to the room. Oscar turned and saw him leaning against the frame, eyes grim behind the protective lenses of his glasses. “Back in the nineteenth century, paranormal investigators would sometimes use a similar device, called a Wimshurst Machine. Like the Van de Graaf, it would generate static electricity, thus giving any nearby ghosts a power source to draw from, so they could be contacted more clearly.”
He paused, then met Oscar’s gaze. “We wondered why the spirits were so powerful, so energized, when we’d only just gotten here and they hadn’t had time to draw from our living energy. Here’s our answer.”
Zeek looked back and forth between them, confused. “I don’t get it. I mean, I understand what you’re saying, but what is this thing doing here in the first place?”
Dr. Lawson’s eyes narrowed, and her lips drew back from her teeth. “Patricia.”
Nigel had never seen Dr. Lawson so utterly furious. She ground her teeth, clenching her hands into fists, then gave the generator’s motor a vicious kick. The cord connecting it to the battery popped loose, and the monotonous hum fell silent.
“She always goes too far,” she said, eyes blazing. “This is it. I’m done with her shit.”
She marched toward the door and Nigel hurried to get out of her way. Oscar, always the peacemaker, trotted after her saying, “Maybe we should get Ms. Montague’s side of the story.”
“Oh, I know what her side is,” Dr. Lawson growled as she stormed toward the sitting room. “And I’m not letting her get anyone else killed.”
Then she was gone, everyone else chasing after her. Nigel followed, but as he reached the top of the stairs, his lungs protested the activity, forcing him to double over coughing.
Damn it. He’d felt worse and worse all day, and now his head swam and his vision spotted with the force of his coughs. Foul-tasting phlegm filled his mouth, and he was helpless to do anything but spit it out to the side.
It was time to admit defeat and ask Oscar to drive him to urgent care. With Dr. Lawson having it out with Ms. Montague, it seemed unlikely they’d be investigating any further anyway.
Why the hell had Ms. Montague done this without telling them? Had she just hoped for better results, or…?
Cotton wrapped around his thoughts, and he found himself breathing through his mouth, his nose too clogged to draw in air. The faint sounds of footsteps echoed up the stairway, followed by the sound of the asylum door opening.
He’d been left behind in the rush, with Oscar trying to keep the peace between the two old women, and everyone else hurrying after them.
He wanted to sit down, or maybe even lie down, but the decaying furniture might not even support his weight. Nothing to do but struggle down the stairs and out to the tents. Find Oscar.
Oscar would take care of him.
Still clutching Dr. Wilkes’s file in one hand, he descended the stairs, holding tight to the solid oak banister with the other. At least they’d only been on the second floor.
When he reached the first floor, the elevator doors stood wide open.
Nigel stared at it blearily. Something wasn’t right here. How had the elevator doors opened on their own? Had Ms. Montague ordered the elevator hooked up to a generator somewhere without telling them?
The air was ice cold against his feverish skin, and he had the feeling he wasn’t alone.
The front door still hung open, sunlight streaming inside. If he could just get to it, he’d be safe.
Behind him, the elevator groaned like a living thing. He stumbled away from it, concentrating on staying upright, on getting outside.
Just before he could reach it, the front door slammed shut, locking him inside.