Chapter 25
Kendyll
(Present Day)
THE LITTLE GHOST GIRL STRUGGLED to flip the page of the picture book.
She must’ve run out of the energy to interact with the physical world like that, so with a small smile, I turned the page for her, which she and Catsper watched with wondrous undead eyes.
The two hunched over the story book while I resumed my reading of the last patient file I’d found.
In the week since I’d stumbled upon this little ghost girl in Mountview, I’d managed to get her slightly more comfortable with me.
When she saw me, she still hesitated, but when I’d wave with a smile or she’d see Catsper perched on my shoulder, she’d join me in whatever I was doing, whether it was taking photos, collecting papers to see if they contained any information about patients or the building, or just sitting on the rooftop for some fresh air.
She still hadn’t revealed her name. She hadn’t said anything, yet.
I wondered if she was mute in life and now silent in death, too.
While we hadn’t made much progress in communicating, we were still making baby steps in trust. She’d even brought another ghost out of hiding today, though he was skittish and unwilling to come too close to where we currently sat on the rug of the common room in the children’s ward.
The new ghost was a teen boy in a patient hospital gown, and he hovered against the wall of windows.
He constantly moved between standing and squatting with his arms wrapped tightly around his legs.
He couldn’t seem to decide on whether he wanted to brave coming closer or not.
So far, I’d gone through the random paper charts that had been left behind at the numerous nurses’ stations while Xander shadow-walked into the locked file room to sift through those charts.
I didn’t want to unlock the file room since so many personal stories and histories were inside.
Random trespassers loved breaking into abandoned “haunted” buildings, so I wanted to make sure those records would stay private if that happened.
If Bethelma chose to open that room once she took over, I couldn’t stop her, but I’d protect the patients that did and didn’t haunt these halls.
I finished reading through the chart in my lap and closed the folder before stretching out my tired muscles.
I sighed and pulled out my phone to check the time.
My stomach soured slightly as I ignored the clock and instead opened a still silent text thread.
Nothing from my brother, nor anything from me.
The no service bar flashed, but I tried dialing his number anyway.
The piercing beep of the busy signal made my eyes close and my head hang.
Would he ever forgive me? Would he finally pick up the phone when I got done with this job and out where my call would reach him?
I shook the melancholy feeling away by distracting myself with the mysteries here at Mountview.
I helped the little girl flip to the next page of her book again.
Catsper purred and rubbed his head against my hand as much as he could while it hovered there.
The new page depicted two fuzzy bears at a park, and one of them held the strings of numerous balloons.
The phantom girl immediately brightened upon seeing them, and she tapped the image excitedly.
“Do you like balloons?” I asked her.
She beamed up at me and nodded hard, which made glee fill me up like helium in one of those very colorful balloons. Her acknowledgement wasn’t words, but it was still communication. If I could keep figuring out her interests, maybe I could get her to open up to me.
She tapped happily at another image on the page. A bear was riding a scooter in that same park. She beamed at Catsper while pointing at the picture. I shared a confused look with my cat, not seeing the correlation.
“Do,” I started slowly, “you like scooters, too?”
She shook her head and simply pointed at Catsper with a happy smile. The cat stared at her finger with his one eye and meowed in response. What did a scooter have to do with my cat? A light bulb went off in my head.
“Are you saying Scooter is the name of a cat?” I asked.
She looked up at me and nodded hard with her toothy grin.
I mirrored her expression. “Was Scooter your cat?”
Again, she bobbed her head gleefully.
“So you had a pet cat named Scooter, huh? How sweet. Cats are the best, aren’t they?”
Cats—specifically ones named Scooter—and balloons. So far I knew she liked those two things. It wasn’t much, but it was a great sign that I’d managed to learn both things within a handful of minutes. Her story was still a huge question mark, but the revelations renewed my confidence.
“If only I had your chart,” I mused with pursed lips. “Maybe Xander found it.”
Or maybe it’s in the area I’ve been too scared to venture into.
I swallowed hard at the thought of going to the area I’d avoided, but I knew I had to.
As much as it unnerved me, I refused to let fear win.
Not again. Not like the last time I’d let it take over.
That was exactly what had cost me the relationship with my brother and my belief in the one I could’ve had with Xander.
I quickly shoved the memory of that day down and refocused on the two nameless ghosts in the room and their mysteries.
No names, no clues as to why they were patients here, no explanation for how they died so young, nothing.
Not only were their lives an unsolved puzzle, but so were their states here in the afterlife.
I couldn’t tell from their behavior if they realized they were dead or not.
In instances like this, I always aired on the side of caution and pretended as though they were alive so as not to trigger an outburst that led to them turning into a malicious spirit.
“It’s time for my doctor’s appointment,” I told the ghosts as I stood up. “We’ll play after I talk to the doctor, okay?”
“Doctor?” the teen boy in the corner suddenly shouted. His spectral form flickered as his eyes darted around wildly while he chewed on his fingers and began pacing. “Doctor? Doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor.” While mumbling the word over and over, he abruptly vanished.
I was still staring in shock at the spot he’d been in when a faint tug came on my shirt. I looked down at the little girl, who stared up at me with a worried frown, her little hand clutching my shirt. She gave a small shake of her head.
“Bad,” she whispered.
I couldn’t even leap with joy upon hearing her finally speak, because her terrified whisper had a chill rolling down my body.
“Bad?” I repeated. “The doctors?”
Her brow furrowed, and her grip on my shirt tightened as much as her phantom form allowed. “Bad.”
She disappeared the second the word left her lips, leaving Catsper and I alone in the children’s ward. He meowed in confusion while staring up at me with one eye, but I didn’t share in his bewilderment. I knew very well what type of people the doctors at Mountview were like.
“Come on, boy,” I told Catsper.
The ghost feline drifted through the air near my shoulder as though traversing invisible ground with his puffy paws.
We made our way downstairs, and when I rounded the corner to the doctor’s hall, my legs froze.
My heart raced from the sight of the door at the very end of the hall.
For me, the closed door was akin to what most felt when staring down a dark staircase with no end in sight, nor sign of what lurked at the end of the eerie abyss.
The bronze plaque on the door read Director Edwin Cartwright.
A thick sickening knot climbed my throat.
I breathed in through my nose for four seconds and held it for seven before exhaling for eight seconds.
It was one of the few helpful things I’d learned while at Mountview, and I repeated the breathing exercise until the nausea vanished.
My palms remained clammy, and an anxious tremble lingered.
The doctor’s offices and admin hallway were on the first floor, and the hallway was directly across from the public elevator.
Every ward had an attending physician’s office, but each doctor’s personal study resided in this hall.
I wasn’t sure how much useful information I’d glean from rummaging around in these rooms, but I hoped to find some files or creepy notes or something to begin piecing together a somewhat accurate story of what kind of patients the hospital catered to and what sort of ghosts might’ve lingered.
I started down the silent hall with Catsper by my side when a light tapping sounded from behind me.
I stopped in my tracks and looked over my shoulder, but the only thing behind me was the elevator.
The rusty tan-colored doors were closed, and the unlit floor numbers above it were dark.
While the building had power, the elevators had been shut off due to Bethelma not wanting to deal with the maintenance that came with them.
I strained my ears to catch the tapping again, unsure why the shut-off elevator would be making a sound. After a few seconds of silence, I shrugged it off and started to turn back around.
Tap, tap.
Frowning, I changed directions and slowly approached the elevator. “Hello? Is someone there?”
Normally, that was a stupid and overused line within bad horror movies, but in this case, I knew there very well could’ve been a ghost on the other side of those doors.
Maybe it was a nurse, a doctor, or a patient who didn’t realize they were dead and thought they were actually stuck in the elevator.
“Do you need help?” I called out upon reaching the doors.
Silence.
I held my glasses in place while closing one eye and putting the other up to the crack in the elevator doors, hoping there was enough of a gap for me to catch sight of whoever was on the other side, but it was pitch black.