Chapter 22
CHAPTER
TWENTY-TWO
Oscar sat in the command center, head in his hands. Outside, the sun was slipping below the horizon, bringing on full dark. Whatever protection the daylight had offered against the spirits of the asylum would be gone within the next five minutes.
Not that it had protected Nigel.
He didn’t know what to do. His boyfriend had seemingly disappeared into thin air, though he knew that couldn’t be the case. Could Nigel have found some door they’d overlooked, gotten trapped somewhere? But why would he have gone exploring on his own, especially when he knew they needed to stick together?
“This is my fault,” Dr. Lawson said. She stared at the monitors, which showed nothing but the silent corridors of the wards. “I let my anger distract me. I couldn’t wait to confront Patricia, so I didn’t stop to make sure everyone was accounted for.”
Oscar shook his head. “Don’t blame yourself.” The fault lay solely with him. He loved Nigel so much it hurt. It was his job to look out for his partner, to take care of him when he needed to. He was the one who had failed.
What if they couldn’t find Nigel? What if Oscar never saw him again?
What if he was dead?
Fear tightened his throat. If he lost Nigel, the way it sounded like Montague and Lawson had lost Robin…
Was Nigel hurt somewhere? Suffering? He wanted to run back into the asylum, take it apart stone by stone. But the place was too big, too sprawling.
Tina approached with a bowl of ramen. “You should eat.”
“I’m not hungry.” He stood up. “I need to go back in. Maybe the ghosts can tell me where he is. Ruby seems aware of what was going on in the building. She might know what happened.”
“Not by yourself,” Chris said firmly. They held their own bowl of ramen, slurping up the noodles quickly with a pair of chopsticks. “I’m going with you, armed with every salt canister we have.”
Adrienne ducked inside, followed by Zeek. “We’re going, too. We’ll search every inch of the building. And if we don’t find him in a couple of hours, I’m driving to where I can get a cell signal and calling the police for help.”
“What are the cops going to do?” Oscar asked bitterly. “Shoot the creeper? Tase Ruby?”
Zeek sat down by Oscar. “I know you’re worried,” he said. “We’re all doing our best, okay? Getting some calories in us, gearing up, everything to make our chances of finding Nigel better.”
A part of Oscar—the part that was angry with himself—wanted to lash out. But that would be pointless, so he said, “Thanks. I just…fuck.”
“We’ll get him back, Fox.” Dr. Lawson leaned over and touched the back of his hand. “One way or another.”
“Okay. Just…hurry it up.”
Zeek stood. “We’ll get our gear now. Everything in our car that might possibly help.”
“I’ll keep an eye on the cams,” Tina said, slipping into her chair. “Just in case he goes past one of them.”
That seemed wildly unlikely, but Oscar appreciated the effort. As she settled in, Tina pushed aside an age-spotted folder.
Right—his mamaw’s file. He’d left it on the table at some point.
Desperate for something to do, he picked it up. The first sheet was the diagnosis that had brought her here to begin with. Paranoid schizophrenia with aural and visual hallucinations, marked by violent outbursts.
None of that was true. She’d been like him, a medium. Her downfall had been an accidental possession, and in a just world she would have been released once the ghost lost its hold on her. But once a person was marked as crazy, it was almost impossible to be seen as sane.
He flipped through the fragile pages. Lists of treatments, various medications. A write-up for attacking a nurse, which had seen her moved to the fourth floor ward not long before her death.
At the very back, haphazardly stuffed into the file, was a small stack of drawings. No doubt she’d made them in the arts and crafts wing that Zeek and Adrienne had investigated.
Oscar took them out one at a time. They’d been done in crayon—the asylum probably didn’t allow patients to have anything as sharp as a pencil. Whatever else Barbara Fox had accomplished in life, she hadn’t been much of an artist. The human figures were awkward, the trees lollipops topped with green.
Most of the drawings showed the things she likely missed in here. A smiling family, labeled “Richard, me, and Scott.” Mountains in fall colors. A peaceful graveyard.
Near the bottom of the stack was a drawing that seemed set in the asylum, however. What looked like a woman in a nurse’s outfit was holding her hand out, as if warding off a mustachioed man in surgeon’s gown. All around him hung a black aura, colored in roughly by the crayon. The words “Let me help!!!” had been scrawled so forcefully beneath it looked as though the tip of the crayon had broken off at one point.
He stared at the drawing for a long moment, only looking up when Adrienne and Zeek returned.
“Okay, we’re as ready as we’re going to be,” Adrienne said.
“Yeah.” Oscar held out the paper. “About that. I think I found something.”
Nigel bolted up the center of the room.
A door flew open, and freezing air accompanied by fog poured out. Then another opened, and another, all of them banging wildly back and forth. He weaved to avoid them, and something that felt like fingers grabbed him by the hair, wrenching his head back.
He flung the salt over his shoulder blindly, and the grip of his hair vanished. A door ahead of him flew open, and the drawer slid out. A body lay on it, so rotted almost nothing was left but a pile of bones coated in decay. The skull turned on its side, jaw falling open, two faint lights shining from deep within the empty eye sockets.
Nigel yelled and dodged, catching his ribs on the edge of the steel drawer. More hands grabbed at him out of the thickening fog, the restless dead pleading with him to stay, to become one of them. Breath rattling in his throat, he scattered the last of the salt crystals clinging to his hand.
It was enough; he was free, the doors just ahead. They swung open when he hit them, and he stumbled to a halt, chest heaving as he fought to suck oxygen into his congested lungs.
His flashlight dimmed, then strengthened, then dimmed again. A footstep sounded in front of him, and he swung the light up.
A figure stood just at the edge of the beam, so solid for a moment he thought someone living had found him.
Dr. Wilkes smiled at him, revealing a mouth filled with rotting teeth. He dressed in an old-fashioned surgeon’s gown, its fabric stained with gore. His eyes burned red, and slick tendrils of rot spread out from them, streaking his face. The once-gray hair of his head was matted with pus.
“That’s quite a nasty cough you have,” he said, and lifted a bone saw crusted with old blood. “I’m afraid we’ll have to operate.”
“Look at this.” Oscar spread the drawing out on the table beside Tina’s workstation for all to see. “This was in my grandmother’s file. I assume she drew it—her initials are on the back.”
Adrienne leaned in, frowning. “Okay?”
“She was a medium. Like me.” He swallowed. “Look at the picture—there’s a nurse in an old-fashioned outfit, and it seems as she’s holding back a surgeon. We know Della Young tried to report Dr. Wilkes for unethical and ineffective operations on the patients. And we know both of them became ghosts.”
“And when we trapped her, all hell broke loose,” Chris finished for him.
Tina looked skeptical. “Don’t forget, she killed the investigator back in 2006.”
“Did she, though?” Oscar glanced from face to face. “She yelled at them to get out, and one of them tripped on the stairs. We’ve been assuming she pushed him, but maybe it really was an accident. She was trying to keep us from investigating, trying to get us to leave, just like she was trying to get them to leave. What if…what if she was trying to protect us?” He pointed to the words. “Look—Mamaw wrote ‘Let me help’ with three exclamation points. She was frustrated. Maybe she wanted to get rid of Wilkes once and for all, but Nurse Young wouldn’t let her get near him. Trying to protect a patient from him, mistakenly in this case.”
Dr. Lawson tapped one finger against her lips thoughtfully. “The surgeon—Dr. Wilkes—was the dangerous one in life. If he’s also the dangerous one in death…”
“Then we trapped the wrong ghost.” Zeek looked around for confirmation. “And without her to hold him back, everything’s gone sideways.”
Tina still seemed unsure. “It’s a theory, but if you let her go, you could end up with another dangerous ghost to deal with. Is it worth taking the chance?”
“It might be,” Ms. Montague said from the opening to the tent. “But that’s for you to decide.”
She looked frailer and more tired than Oscar had ever seen her before. Most of her weight seemed supported by her cane. Ethan stood a pace behind her, the Devil’s Toy Box in his hands.
“I’ve come to apologize,” Montague went on. “My conduct has been…less than ideal.”
Dr. Lawson snorted.
Montague sighed and said, “I’ve made mistakes. It pains me to admit it—I was raised to believe such admissions are a sign of weakness, and I fear I’ve clung to that idea far past the time it served me, if it ever did. Are you happy now, Ruthie?”
Lawson’s expression softened slightly. “‘Happy’ isn’t a term I’d use. But I accept your apology.”
“You know Nigel’s missing,” Oscar said. It wasn’t a question; with all her hidden cameras, Ms. Montague knew everything that happened in this tent.
“Yes. And your grandmother left behind a clue.” She gestured for Ethan to come forward with the box. “It sounds as though you’ll need this.”
Dr. Lawson might have forgiven her old…flame? partner?…but Oscar hadn’t. “Where is the basement entrance?” he demanded. “Nigel’s life might be at stake, so just tell us!”
Montague’s mouth pursed unhappily. “I truly don’t know, Mr. Fox. And now I have a question for you—do you think the ghost hunter who died here moved on?”
“I haven’t explored that part of the asylum yet, so I don’t know, and also what the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“We got something in a patient room near where he died,” Adrienne offered. “When we used the Dead Ringer. I have no idea if it was him we were in contact with, though. Why?”
“Simply because he might be inclined to help you, as fellow ghost hunters.” Montague turned to Ethan. “Can you retrieve the coat, please?”
Oscar rose to his feet. “We don’t have time for this.”
Montague didn’t shriek back, but she seemed to crumple. “Please. Allow me to help Doctor Taylor, if I can.” She glanced at Dr. Lawson. “Since, as we’ve discussed, this is my fault.”
Ethan returned in under a minute, carrying a neatly folded black hoodie in his hands. As he shook it out, Oscar saw parts of it were stiff from some old stain that didn’t show up against the black cloth.
“This belonged to the ghost hunter who died here,” Montague said. “Kyle McIntosh. His parents preserved all of his possessions, including this. When they died, the lot went to a cousin, who put it all in a storage unit.”
“Like your dad did with his parents’ stuff, Oscar,” Chris said. “I used to hate storage places, but now I’m starting to change my mind.”
Oscar stared at the old hoodie. The stains on it were almost certainly Kyle’s blood. “Why?” he asked Montague. “You didn’t even want to tell us about his death.”
“I’d intended to reveal it later.” The translucent skin of her hands tightened over her knuckles as she gripped her cane. “Assuming you were able to contact him in the first place. I imagined some artifact belonging to him might come in useful during a seance.” She paused, gathering her thoughts. “Of all the ghosts here—if he does still linger—he’s the one who’s most likely to understand what you’re trying to accomplish. He may have no knowledge beyond what he possessed in life, but if he does know where the original basement entrance is…”
Oscar sucked in a breath. “That’s a lot of assumptions and maybes, given Nigel’s life is on the line.”
Montague looked away. “I know. But it’s all I have to offer.”
Oscar stared at the bloodstained hoodie. Tina came up beside him and put a tentative hand on his arm.
“I know it isn’t much,” she said. “But what other choice do we have?”
Every second that slipped past was another second Nigel might be in danger. If this didn’t work, if they were wasting their time…
Then what? As Tina had said, what other options did they have?
“All right.” He took the hoodie from Ethan. “Let’s give it a try.”