Chapter 23
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
Oscar led the way back to the asylum. Lights from their headcams and flashlights cut through the night, revealing the tall grass and overgrown trees, their leaves shivering in a steady wind. The clockface in the tower above glowed a sickly green; one of the hands loosened and fell away even as they approached.
Their walkie-talkies crackled, and Tina’s voice sounded. “Something’s going on inside on the static cams. The paint is really falling off the walls all of a sudden, and some of the plaster is following it.”
“Is the whole place coming apart?” Adrienne wondered. She didn’t suggest they turn back.
Oscar took his walkie-talkie out of the holster and depressed the button. “Thanks for the heads-up, Tina. Keep an eye out for out us. Over.”
The front door stood open, even though Oscar was certain they’d closed it after giving up the search for Nigel earlier. Pouring as much energy into his wards as he could, he went up the steps and passed inside.
Most of the wallpaper had peeled away in diseased strips. Rot crawled along the exposed plaster and mushrooms sprouted between the floorboards. The air smelled like a sick room: pus and unwashed bodies, combined with a whiff of gangrene.
The splotch of mold on the wall had grown and filled in, forming the shape of a man. Dr. Wilkes, or one of his victims?
He came to a halt when their lights found the elevator. It stood open, as if beckoning them to enter.
“Um, wasn’t that closed before?” Zeek asked nervously.
“It was,” said Adrienne, “and no, we’re not getting on the damn thing so it can plummet into the basement with us.”
Nigel was in trouble. He needed Oscar to find him. It would be so much easier to get on the elevator than go on what might amount to nothing more than a wild-goose-chase after a dead ghost hunter.
But the sense of menace rolling out from the elevator set Oscar’s teeth on edge. One way or another, he felt certain it was a trap.
Even so, it was hard to turn away from it and take the stairs up to the third floor. The northern wing was a mirror image of the women’s wards, the long hall seeming to deteriorate before their eyes when they entered. Threads of mold crawled all over the walls and ceiling, and the doors hung half-off their hinges. The hardwood floor groaned under their feet, and Oscar had the horrible image of it giving way and plunging them all into the basement below.
Yellow paint flaked from the steel mesh protecting the nurse’s station at the end of the first ward, revealing great swathes of scabrous rust. The abandoned chair looked as though a body had rotted in it, the upholstery stained with brown fluids.
“The doctor’s influence is certainly pervasive,” Dr. Lawson remarked, which was an understatement if Oscar had ever heard one. He’d tried to convince her to stay behind with Montague, Ethan, and Tina, but she’d flatly refused to let them go after Nigel without her.
“I’m not losing a student, even a former one, on my watch,” she’d said. “Nor am I coming out of retirement to teach his classes, just because some long-dead man spirited him away.”
The second ward was decaying as rapidly as the first, and Oscar was relieved when they reached the solid concrete forming the third floor landing. Beneath the layer of grit, their flashlight beams revealed old stains on the floor, no doubt left over from poor Kyle’s tragic and painful death.
“What do we do?” Zeek asked.
He wished they’d thought to grab the thermal cam from the children’s ward. “We need to try and contact him. See if he can at least indicate the direction we need to go to reach the basement.”
“Oh!” Adrienne pulled off her backpack and began to rummage through it. “What about dowsing rods? We’ve used them at a couple of locations where we haven’t gotten anything else good for the camera.”
Dr. Lawson’s lips thinned. “Dowsing rods aren’t remotely reliable. The tiny tremors in the user’s hands are what causes them to move, not spirits.”
“Yeah, I know.” Adrienne stood up, a pair of L-shaped copper rods in her hand. “That’s why we only use them if we don’t get anything else—it gives us something for the camera. Then Zeek jumps around a lot and threatens to fight a ghost baby.” She held out the rods to Oscar. “But hopefully a medium in a location we know for damn sure is haunted will have better luck.”
Why not? It wasn’t as if he had any better suggestions. Oscar held one rod loosely in each hand, the long part of the L-shape pointed directly in front of him. He grounded, centered, and then said, “Spirit of Kyle McIntosh, I call upon you. If you’re here, can you give us a sign?”
Silence. Then, so faint the audio would never catch it, a sigh near Oscar’s ear.
He gave a tiny nod to indicate to the others that he’d felt something. “Thank you, Kyle. We’ve come here just as you did—to investigate the spirits haunting this building. I’m sorry you became one of them, and I promise I’ll do everything I can to set you free. But for right now, my partner is missing. We think he’s in the basement. If you know how to find the basement, can you give me a sign?”
The pause was so long, he didn’t think Kyle was going to answer. Then static shocked his palm, and he almost dropped the rods as they swung to point at the stairs going down.
“Thank you.” He started down the stairs, the rods seeming to hum with electricity against his skin. They continued to orient to paths down, which was to be expected since they were looking for a basement.
When he emerged back onto the first floor ward, the rods swung north.
“The arts and crafts wing is down there,” Adrienne said.
Following the rods, they walked to the security door at the end of the ward, which let them into a big room that mirrored the storage room on the southern wing. Old tables, stained with paint, had been pushed up against the walls, wooden chairs stacked haphazardly on top of them. Fungus sprouted from the spongy wood. The nurses had tacked some of the drawings to the walls in pride of place, but whatever they had originally depicted was obscured by mildew stains that seemed to form the image of screaming faces.
“Is it just me,” Chris asked, “or is it getting colder?”
Adrienne shivered. “Not just you.”
As Oscar walked further into the room, the rods swung west, pointing to the back wall. “Can you clear a path?” he asked, and Zeek, Chris, and Adrienne all rushed to shove the furniture out of the way.
The rods guided him to a spot in the center of the rear wall. The plaster was badly degraded, sloughing off in places like loose skin.
Frustration boiled in him—maybe Kyle didn’t really know? Or maybe it wasn’t even Kyle at all, just another spirit messing with them. “This is just a wall. Please, show me the door to the basement.”
A static shock delivered through the rods nearly made him drop them, but they continued to point steadily forward.
“Wait.” Zeek pointed. “Is that part of a door?”
Sure enough, his light had picked out what looked like a bit of a doorframe through one of the holes left by falling plaster.
Frustration vanished, replaced by hope. And gratitude. “Thank you, Kyle—we never would have found this without you.” Though he wanted nothing more than to start clawing at the plaster to get through to Nigel, he forced himself to continue. “Your work in this world is done, and peace awaits you beyond the veil. You’re free to go. And—thank you again.”
Even though he wasn’t trying to open a doorway to the other side, a flicker of silvery light played in his peripheral vision. For a moment, he glimpsed Kyle as he’d been in the picture, dressed all in black and with a smile on his face.
Then he was gone.
Oscar lowered the rods. “He passed over.”
“He was just waiting to help, in case some other team came to explore here,” Dr. Lawson said. “Or at least, he wasn’t here because the doctor had a grip on him.”
“Wow—what a good guy, to hang around like that, then.” Zeek shook his head, impressed. “I’ll pour one out for him once we get back to civilization.”
“I’ll join you.” Oscar passed the dowsing rods back to Adrienne. “For now, let’s get this wall down so we can go save Nigel.”
Instead of dry and powdery, the plaster on the wall was slick and wet under Oscar’s fingers. It came away in sheets, releasing the smell of rot as it did so.
Zeek grabbed a handful himself, grimacing. “Why is it wet? Ugh, don’t answer that.”
Between the two of them, they soon had the door uncovered. It was just another steel security door, no different from the ones that had led to the other staircases they’d used.
Oscar heaved the door open on groaning hinges, and a blast of icy air surged up to greet him, carrying with it the stink of gangrene. He took an instinctive step back, bile rising in his throat.
“Oh geez.” Zeek pressed his wrist against his mouth. “What the fuck?”
All of Oscar’s instincts screamed at him to turn away, flee back outside into the clean air. Away from whatever horrors waited below.
But Nigel might be down there. And Oscar was damned if he’d leave him behind.
He shone his flashlight down the stairs, but the beam seemed swallowed up by the blackness, as if the shadows were something physical rather than the absence of light. At least the steps were concrete, so he wouldn’t have to worry about them rotting out from under his feet.
“All right,” he said, turning back to face the others. “I’m going down there. It’s pretty obvious the situation isn’t good, so if anyone wants to leave?—”
Adrienne held up a hand to stop him. “Spare us the heroic speech about how you’ll understand if we turn tail, and are prepared to march down there alone. Just get a move on before the entire asylum falls down on our heads.”
“Agreed.” Dr. Lawson took a step forward, as if she’d push Oscar out of the way if he didn’t move fast enough. “You’ve been watching too many action films, Fox. Skip the speeches and shake a leg.”
The yellow paint had completely peeled away from the metal railings, leaving behind great scabs of rust that Oscar had no desire to touch. He led the way down cautiously, half-expecting something to jump out at each turn of the stairs.
Nothing did, though. At the bottom, the steel door stood wide. Its surface was badly dented, as though someone had bludgeoned it open at some point in the past. And beyond…
What the room had started life as, Oscar wasn’t sure. Fire had blackened the brick walls, and a thick layer of ash covered the floor. A metal bedframe and gurney stood scorched alongside melted medical equipment of some sort.
“This must have been the electroshock room,” he said. The ash stirred around his feet as he moved deeper into the space. “Where Nurse Young and Dr. Wilkes died.”
Dr. Lawson played her flashlight over the ruined equipment. “They just sealed the door away and left everything behind. Were they afraid of a scandal if more attention was paid to the doctor’s death?”
“Someone definitely wanted this forgotten.” Adrienne picked her way through tumbled, burned equipment toward the exit. “It makes me think Della Young did kill him. She’d tried to warn the board, and when they ignored her, she took matters into her own hands to save her patients from his ‘care.’ Either she got caught up in the flames accidentally, or she was willing to die with him.”
“If word got out, that would definitely draw unwanted attention,” Dr. Lawson agreed. “If a reporter got hold of the death records and realized the board had ignored malfeasance on the part of the superintendent they supported…I suppose we shouldn’t be surprised they just plastered over the evidence and pretended it wasn’t here.”
“Let’s just hope the door out isn’t also plastered over,” Adrienne said, and pushed on it.
It swung open with a scream of rusted hinges, revealing a long hallway with pipes running along the ceiling and walls.
“Steam tunnel.” Adrienne took a few steps into the corridor, shining her flashlight along the long-cold pipes. “No sign of Nigel yet.”
Oscar had been trying not to think about the fact the door they’d come through was still sealed up, which meant Nigel couldn’t have come down that way. The only other option was the elevator…which, to be fair, had somehow opened, even though it wasn’t connected to any electricity.
Surely Nigel wouldn’t have been so stupid as to voluntarily get on it. Had he been forced inside somehow?
Was he even down here?
If he wasn’t, he could be anywhere. Lost on the grounds outside, trapped inside some closet or hidden space they hadn’t been able to find. Nigel had mentioned the asylum once had its own coal mine. If he’d fallen through into an old shaft…
His increasingly panicked thoughts must have shown on his face, because Chris’s hand settled on his shoulder. “It’s okay,” they said with a squeeze. “We’ll get him back.”
One thing at a time. “Thanks,” Oscar said.
The long hall paralleled the ward above, first running straight, then in a short dogleg where the nurse’s station and door between wards would be. On the other side, the corridor widened, pipes continuing straight along one wall and the ceiling.
The enormous drums of industrial washing machines lined the back walls, the comparatively small hatches in the front reminiscent of submarines or iron lungs. Canvas laundry hampers hung in rotting tatters from their steel frames. As with the rest of the asylum, decay seemed to be unnaturally accelerating here, the stainless-steel tables meant for folding and sorting gone mottled with rust. The sour stink of mold poured out of the open washing machines, and greenish slime dripped down their sides.
Overhead, a number of metal chutes emptied into a central hopper. And hanging from the hopper was a long, ragged curtain.
It took Oscar a confused moment to realize the curtain consisted of human hair.