Chapter 24
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
“Shit!” he flinched back in shock, and the hair whisked upward, vanishing into the hopper. One of the chutes groaned, as if settling under a sudden weight.
“What?” Zeek exclaimed. Flashlights traced wild arcs as everyone searched for whatever had startled Oscar.
His heartbeat slowing, Oscar took a step closer to the hopper and chutes. “Ruby? Is that you?”
Knock, knock.
Thank god. It was good to see a friendly…not face. Head of hair, even if it belonged to a ghost. “Has anyone else come through here tonight? Anyone alive, I mean?”
Knock.
“Damn it,” Dr. Lawson muttered.
If Nigel hadn’t come this way, if they were down here for nothing…
Trying to ignore his rising panic, Oscar said, “Thank you, Ruby. You’ve been a great help.”
“What now?” Chris asked. “If Nigel isn’t down here, should we go back up?”
“No,” Dr. Lawson said firmly. “If he came or was brought down here using the elevator, he wouldn’t necessarily have entered this room. We need to keep looking.”
The next door opened into a huge room that mimicked the size of the administration floor above. Strangely, the door opposite stood open—and a low bank of fog was rolling in through it.
“That’s not right,” Chris said, shining their light on the fog.
“It certainly isn’t.” Oscar scanned the room with his own flashlight. Machinery dominated much of it: an enormous boiler, an industrial-sized hot water tank, control panels, and more. The more modern additions were jammed in wherever they would fit, and pipes crisscrossed the space above. Toward the back of the room, the elevator shaft came to rest beside what was no doubt the motor powering the lift.
“Um, guys?” Zeek said uneasily. “Wasn’t the elevator on the first floor earlier?”
Oscar’s skin felt as if a thousand ants crawled across it. Despite the cold motor that hadn’t turned in decades, the elevator car had somehow come to rest in the basement.
Doors open. Inviting them in.
Zeek took a few steps in its direction, the fog swirling around his feet now. Chris grabbed his arm. “Dude! Don’t go in the scary elevator.”
“I was just taking a closer look,” Zeek protested. Then his expression grew chagrined. “But you’re right, we should probably stay over here.”
“We don’t have a choice but to go farther in.” Dr. Lawson stepped past them, shining her flashlight between pieces of equipment, making the shadows jump. “There are too many hidey-holes in here—we have to make sure Taylor isn’t lying unconscious in one of them.”
She was right. Oscar could feel invisible eyes on them, the air tense as though holding its breath. And that fog…
“Keep your salt ready,” he warned. “And stay close together.”
They fanned out, shining the beams of their flashlights into every crevice they could find. Some shadows were too deep to pierce, and the thickening fog formed a haze across the floor that the light struggled to penetrate.
Chris peered into the open door of the old boiler. “Too bad Tina isn’t here—she’d love this,” they said.
A pair of arms shot out of the opening and grabbed their wrist.
Chris yelled and dropped their flashlight, which instantly went out. They managed to brace their feet against the outside of the boiler, even as whatever lurked within struggled to haul them in with it.
“Salt!” Oscar shouted, and ran toward them.
Hands formed out of the fog, latching onto Oscar’s feet and calves. He tripped forward, palms scraping the concrete beneath the fog. The salt canister went flying out of his hands, spilling a trail of crystals as it went.
The others were yelling as well, as spectral hands emerged from the fog to drag them down. Zeek managed to dump salt out onto the ones holding him, but as soon as he charged in Chris’s direction, more emerged to cling to his legs.
Oscar tried to focus his will. “Spirits! I?—”
The hands yanked him backward, dragging him with shocking speed across the rough and pitted floor. He managed to twist onto his side, backpack catching on the concrete and nearly yanked off over his head. The hands pulled him toward the open doors of the elevator, where dozens more groping arms emerged through the walls of the car.
“No!” he shouted—then he was inside. The hands clutched at him—pulling on his hair, wrapping around his waist, pinning him against the back of the elevator. One of them tried to remove his pack, but a strap was still hooked around his shoulder. For a moment, they were in a tug-of-war—then the backpack split open, spilling out extra batteries, the Faraday cloth…
And the Devil’s Toy Box.
Oscar managed to get a hold of the mirror box an instant before any of the flailing dead hands did. Holding it high over his head, he brought it down on the elevator floor.
The box shattered.
“Stop!”
Oscar didn’t hear the command so much as feel it reverberate throughout his entire body.
The hands released him, and even the fog coiled away. The chorus of shouts from the others fell silent as they too were released by the undead.
A thin mist rose from the broken pieces of the mirror box, coalescing into the semi-transparent shape he’d seen once before, on the fourth floor hallway the first night they came to the asylum. The shape that he’d seen in the staff photo, taken not that long before the fire that killed her.
Della Young glared down at him, her eyes mere pits in her face. She wore her nurse’s uniform as always, the cap and apron crisp and unstained. All the force of her regard—her anger—bore down on him.
“I’m sorry,” he said, and started to hold up his hand before he realized how useless the gesture was. “We thought you were trying to hurt us. You were trying to protect us, weren’t you?”
“Oscar?” Adrienne asked. “Can you see her?”
He nodded, not looking away from the nurse. In answer to his question, she nodded once, curtly.
“You’ve been guarding this place against Dr. Wilkes’s spirit ever since you died, haven’t you?” It was a dangerous question—he’d read that some spirits didn’t like being told they were dead, would react violently to the mere suggestion.
But she nodded again. “Yes.” He wasn’t sure her voice was audible to anyone but him. “Kept the patients away from here. Away from him.”
The heart of his power must be down here—which made sense if he’d done his cruel operations on this basement level. “And since the asylum closed, you’ve been trying to chase away anyone who came inside.”
Another nod.
This was why she’d tried to keep the other ghosts from talking to them, hoping they’d leave if they didn’t get answers. Why she’d done her best to terrify them.
And the investigators who had come here so many years ago. Kyle’s death really had been an accident.
“I’m sorry we misunderstood. We made a mistake…and as you can see, we could really use your help fixing it.”
She stared down at him with those empty sockets: cold, judging. Well, in her place, he’d be feeling pretty judgmental too: locked up by a bunch of fools who refused to run away from danger, then freed in order to help them clean up the mess they’d made.
“I want to help the spirits of this asylum cross over,” he said, hoping honesty was the best policy in this case. “They’ve been trapped here in their suffering for too long.”
Her voice was a rasp along his nerves. “They follow his commands, in hopes he will restore what he took from them. But it is a false promise, like all his lies.”
He half-dreaded to ask, but did anyway. “One of our friends is missing. Does…is he with the doctor?”
“Yes. ” She turned away and began to glide across the room, the fog rolling away from her like waves before the prow of a grand ship. “I am weak from my time in your trap. But I must stop Dr. Wilkes from operating.”
“O-Operating?” Oh god. Nigel.
Oscar scrambled to his feet, grabbed one of the salt canisters from his spilled backpack, and hurried after her. The others were getting to their feet, Chris leaning heavily against the cold boiler that had almost devoured them.
“What’s going on?” Zeek asked. “Is that the nurse? Is she going to help us?”
Nurse Young had reached the door and passed through its closed surface. “Yes,” he said. “And she said the doctor has Nigel, so come on!”
Nigel lay on his back on a hard, cold surface. The only light came from his flashlight, somewhere to his right, probably on the floor given the beam’s angle. It revealed a room that had once been painted pale green. Now the paint had cracked, edges curling up, like scabs ready to fall off. Mold climbed up from the floor, and the ceiling above was spotted like the coat of a diseased leopard. Directly overhead was an old-style surgical light, surrounded by reflectors that could be positioned to direct beams wherever needed.
His mind reeled, and his lungs felt filled with concrete. Each gasping breath brought in only a small amount of oxygen.
He was dying.
How had he gotten here? He’d encountered the ghost of Dr. Wilkes outside the morgue, and then…
He didn’t recall how he’d gotten into the basement, either. Maybe Dr. Wilkes had been able to possess him, though he’d always been taught only mediums could be possessed. Perhaps his mind had been clouded in some way, memories manipulated…
It didn’t matter. The only thing that mattered was the struggle to breathe. To hang on just a little bit longer.
The surgical light overhead flickered—and a sickly green luminescence that had nothing to do with electricity began to glow in its heart. A creak and the rustle of cloth came from one side, but Nigel was too weak to even turn his head.
He didn’t need to. Dr. Wilkes loomed over him, still dressed in the rancid surgical gown. Thick rubber gloves covered his hands, and he wore a surgical cap and cloth face mask. The mask was black over his mouth, as though his breath rotted it.
The strip of skin left uncovered between mask and cap crawled with disease: blackened veins, clusters of pustules, purple lesions. Yellow crusts surrounded bloodshot eyes, the pupils made ghostly from white growths on the cornea.
Nigel’s cry of horror turned into a fit of coughing. Dr. Wilkes leaned over him, as if drinking in his suffering. The ghost must be feeding off his pain and fear—but he was helpless to do anything about it.
“Don’t worry.” Dr. Wilkes’s voice sounded distant, as if he spoke from the bottom of a well. “I’ll fix you right up.”
He lifted a bone saw—the same one Nigel had touched the first day in the asylum. The day he’d started feeling bad, and blamed it all on allergies.
The doctor had been feeding off him the entire time.
“St-Stop,” Nigel tried to gasp out.
“I’m the doctor here. I know what’s good for you.” The diseased eyes scanned Nigel’s body. “You’re suffering from delusions, but I can help.” The bone saw waved over his torso, from pelvis to throat, then paused over his chest. “Let’s start with removing your lungs. That should put you right as rain.”