by Karina Halle
I shook my head. “No. Sorry, I haven’t. Not since New Orleans.” It was a lie of course, but sometimes it wasn’t worth getting into my dreams, especially when I knew Rebecca couldn’t understand them the way I did. It was hard enough for me to figure out if my dreams were something to consider or not.
The image of the little girl and the bouncing ball flashed into my head. If I ever ended up meeting this Shawna I’d be a little bit closer to the truth.
She nodded and walked to the door of the café. “Well, shall we go in? We don’t have much time before we have to go back.”
We went in together with Dex putting his hand at the small of my back, a gesture I found so enticingly protective.
“Are you all right, kiddo?” he asked gruffly in my ear, his breath tickling the hairs on my neck.
“I’m okay now,” I told him. We found a booth at the back—it wasn’t hard since the diner wasn’t very busy—and the waitress came over with some menus. It wasn’t quite the same waitress as we had before—this one had severe bangs and a crooked smile—but Dex flirted with her just the same.
While we downed the tarlike coffee, we quickly went over the plans for the coming week. I wasn’t too keen on staying at the sanatorium for that long, but Rebecca shrewdly pointed out that we should take advantage of the free accommodations.
“Besides,” she said, sipping from her cup of green tea, “I don’t want us to pull the usual get in and get out.”
Dex snickered at that and I kicked him under the table.
She smiled mischievously at him. “That is what you call the Dex Foray Special, right?”
He gave her a stern look. “Hey now.”
“What’s the Dex Foray Special?” I asked, suddenly intrigued. Sometimes the two of them had these inside jokes that drove me nuts. I just hoped it wasn’t something that involved Jenn.
“Baby, you’ve already had the special,” he said with a wag of his brows. “And you liked it. Anyway, I agree with Rebecca, but only if it’s what everyone wants.”
“And by everyone you mean me,” I said, starting to feel the slightest bit annoyed. “Seriously, don’t treat me like my head might start spinning around at any moment. We’ll do what we have to do for the show.”
He opened his mouth but I cut him off with the raise of my hand. “It’s been almost six months since all that…shit happened. We’ve been taking it easy, and when things have gotten too scary or risky, we’ve gotten out. We’ll do the same here. There’s a difference between having our lives at risk and being scared. I know I’ll be scared every second we spend there this week, that’s just the way it is when you see fucking ghosts every day. But please don’t start treating me like I’m some special case. The three of us have been through a lot already—I don’t see how this is going to be any different.”
Yet the minute those words came out of my mouth, I knew it was a lie. Whether it was the warnings from my dreams, the look of utter fear in Brenna’s eyes, or the fact that Rebecca—our rock, our island—was being affected by the place, I didn’t know. But I knew we’d find out.
***
The plan for the next few days seemed simple enough at first. We would start filming tomorrow with the historian and take in an actual tour of the place from top to bottom. Then, depending on what we felt about each floor, or if there were any particular areas that stood out to us from the tour, we would start concentrating our efforts there. Rebecca wanted to make sure every corner of the place was covered, from the playground at the back of the building to the roof where Dex saw the paper planes come from, with the most haunted sections getting the most attention.
Once we got back to the near-empty school and put our meager groceries away, the plans changed. Like usual, it was all Dex’s doing.
While Davenport was bidding us farewell, she noted that Carl, the custodian, would be the last one in the building and locking up when he was done with his shift in a few hours. Rebecca, feeling her claustrophobia come back in full swing, was happy to know that the emergency doors at the ends of the first floor wings opened up from the inside.
“Remember, it can be very unsafe for you to investigate the upper floors without being supervised. I’ll have you know that I do have security cameras monitoring the first floor, turned on by motion detector,” Davenport said as she was ready to go out the main doors. She seemed to direct her eagle gaze at Dex, who didn’t squirm under her scrutiny. “Just keep that in mind. Of course, as long as you stick to your rooms, the break room, and the washrooms, that shouldn’t be a problem.” She finished that off by eyeing a place on the wall behind us.
We turned to see a tiny video camera mounted just above the grand staircase that led to the upper floors. Big brother was watching. We didn’t have to voice it to know that we weren’t expected to go anywhere else in the building except for the first floor.
And I didn’t have to look at Dex to know what he was thinking. I could just feel it. He was already plotting ways for us to get around that camera. As soon as we saw Davenport get in her Lexus and drive off into the darkening fog, he turned to us and said, “There’s more than one way upstairs.”
Then he grinned impishly, the dimples sticking out on his stubble-flecked cheeks, and turned to head back to the nurses’ quarters. I looked at Rebecca and sighed. She shrugged, apparently not expecting anything less.
“Okay, so what exactly is your plan?” Rebecca asked as we followed him into our new bedroom.
He sat on the edge of my bed, his weight nearly lifting the whole thing, and looked up at us, completely devious. He really was something else when he was in this mode. His attitude was infectious, even when it proved to harbor a terrible idea.
“The way I see it, Custodian Carl is probably here for another two hours tops. I say while he’s here we film a bit of the first floor. I mean, that motion sensor camera is going to be activated anyway. Then when he leaves, we hunker ourselves down in the break room where I’ll whip up my patented mac and cheese and hotdog special, we break out a few contraband beers, relax a little. Then, when it’s dark as sin and we’re sure Carl and anyone else are miles away from here, we pick up the cameras and go upstairs.”
“By this secret other way that you know about?” Rebecca repeated sardonically.
He stroked his chin. “Yep. The one elevator in this building doesn’t work anymore. I saw it just past the washrooms. It’s boarded up, the power probably cut a long time ago.”
I put my face in my hands. “Please don’t suggest we’re climbing up an elevator shaft, because I’m not doing it.”
“Relax, kiddo,” he said. “This ain’t Speed.” I watched him carefully to see if he was going to launch into another Keanu impression. He didn’t. “Anyway, that normally would be the only way upstairs. But I’ve done my research, just like Becs here has done, and I know there’s one more way. We may have to search for it, but it’s there.”
“Hold on,” I interrupted. “Before I find out what this way is, what do you propose we do? Go upstairs and film? Alone? The three of us? Sure, we won’t trip the camera and it’s not like Davenport explicitly said we weren’t allowed upstairs but…you know she’s eventually going to see the footage. She’ll know we went up on our own.”
“So?” Dex said, looking at me as if I was crazy. “By the time this episode airs, we’ll be back in Seattle and she’ll be stuck down here with her Sharpie eyebrows and her shitty haunted school. No harm, no foul.”
Mmmhmm. I hated burning bridges, but he did have a point. It’s not like we were trespassing since we’d already been invited to stay on the property. “So what’s the way?” I asked with trepidation.
Dex wiggled his lips back and forth and looked at Rebecca. She stared blankly back at him for a few beats until she groaned. “Oh dear, I think I know what bloody way you’re talking about.”
“Bloody is right,” he said. “Unless the bodies had been drained already.” He read my puzzled expression. “The body chute.”
&n
bsp; “The what?” I asked.
“Almost every sanatorium has a body chute. It was a way to get the bodies from the morgue or autopsy areas out of the building and into the hearses outside. Think about it…a hospital like this had at least five hundred deathly ill patients at a time. Thousands died, right here. How could you instill hope in people, the hope to survive, if you were wheeling out dead bodies in front of them on a daily basis?”
Shit. This was a lot bigger than I’d originally thought. Usually when we did a show, we went to where one or two people had died. Only in very few instances was it a group of people. I think the leper colony at D’Arcy Island was the largest amount, about thirty to fifty of them. But thousands of people—children—died here over the course of Sea Crest’s operation; right in the very building I was in. Thousands. This was so damn different from just one ghost. It was so different from just worrying about Elliot or Shawna or a few suicidal nurses. There would have been dead upon dead upon dead here.
“Perry?” Dex asked. “If you don’t want to come, you can stay behind.”
I nearly laughed. “Stay here? Alone in the room? And do what? Knit you guys some socks?”
“It might be less scary,” Rebecca offered. At that moment I kind of wanted to hit her. She was never scared, what the hell did she know about anything being less scary? She was barely even right. Yes, staying in the room seemed like a better idea than going up to the other floors, but being alone was being alone. I’d rather see horrendous gore with someone else by my side than hear the giggle of a child on my own.
“I’m good,” I said firmly. “So where do you think this body chute is?”
“I’d think there would have to be access on this floor considering all the nurses were staying down here. We just have to do our usual try every door and see which one is a winner.”
None of them are winners, I thought. “And this chute…”
“If I’m right,” Dex said, “it’s just a tunnel with a steep incline. Stairs on one side, a slab on the other where you can wheel the gurney.”
“You do realize I’d rather trip Davenport’s security camera and deal with the consequences tomorrow,” I said.
“And where is the fun in that?”
So we decided to go with Dex’s plan. While Carl—a quiet and small-eyed senior with the unruliest ear hair I’d ever seen—mopped the hall, we started filming the first floor. Rebecca operated the light while Dex filmed, and I tried to look both scared and pretty on film. Considering Carl was watching us at times, I’m not sure I succeeded at either.
Then when I ran out of interesting things to say and we’d filmed every single classroom, trying to find cold spots or weird sounds or unexplained breezes and coming up empty, we acted like we were done for the night and retreated to the lounge for Dex’s redneck special. Carl eventually got in his beater of a car and drove off into the night, leaving us feeling completely and utterly alone.
“So,” I said as I washed down a bite with a mouthful of warm beer. “It’s just the three of us.”
The isolation wrapped its cold arms around me. Outside, the fog was lifting but the sun had set and the sky was turning a purplish bruised color, darkening by the moment. Though the lights in the lounge and the outside hall were on, it still felt dark as hell. The only sound was from the hum of the fridge and from the clank of our forks against the plates. Everything else was quiet, deathly quiet. The kind of quiet that became a character of its own.
Rebecca gathered her frilled cardigan around her. “If I admit that the whole situation is a fair bit unnerving, will the two of you laugh at me?”
Dex took a swig of his beer before asking, “Do you want us to laugh at you? You know I’m always game.”
She glared at him. “Here I am, admitting that I’m borderline scared and you’re taking the piss.”
“Ignore him,” I told her. “I won’t laugh. This place is like its own entity. I swear if you listen hard enough, you can hear the walls breathing.”
“Perry,” she admonished, giving me a dirty look. “That was something I didn’t need to picture.”
It was true though. Even though the lounge was tastefully furnished, resembling a trendy waiting area for a downtown office more than a staff break room, there was something in the air that reminded you where you were: miles above sea level on the Oregon coast, locked in an old sanatorium where thousands of children died, spending the night and hoping to film at least one of the many ghosts who were rumored to live here. I was hit again with that overwhelming urge to flee. I guess that fight mechanism of mine petered out from time to time.
I glanced at Dex, who seemed to be acting normal, eyes dancing slightly in anticipation of the night. “How many beers did you bring, by the way, because I think I might need another,” I told him.
“I’ll have some tea,” Rebecca spoke up, pushing her plate toward us. “I can’t eat anymore.”
“Feeling sick again?” I asked her. I leaned in more to observe her face. Like earlier, she still looked more tired than normal, her skin taking on a lackluster bluish tone that looked vampiric against her dark hair and brows.
“Nothing tea won’t fix,” she said as she got up to put on a pot. Dex pulled another lager out of the fridge and handed it to me.
It wasn’t long though before he started cleaning up and suggesting we get ready. I know it was my job as host to look as attractive as possible, but when your face was filmed in grainy, green night vision and you were usually making the stupidest expressions, I’d learned it was kind of a lost cause. I brushed my hair back into a ponytail, added some powder to my nose and liner to my lids, but the jeans and Kyuss hoodie stayed and I was ready to go. Or at least ready as I’d ever be.
With Dex taking the small camcorder, Rebecca with the external light, and me with…well, me, we headed out the door and down the hallway. I was immediately creeped out. The hallway was completely dark down the wing where the classrooms were. Our wing was only lit by the occasional wall sconce, giving off a romantic but dim light. The whole place must have been on timers.
“Do you know if there’s power upstairs?” I asked as we slowly walked down the hall of the administrative wing, Dex and Rebecca peering at every door or wall paneling we came across.
“Probably not,” said Rebecca. She walked along the wall, her fingers trailing beneath intricate white molding. “There would be no point if no one ever used the space above. Which reminds me, we have no idea what the physical state of this supposed tunnel will be, let alone the floors above. What if some places are out of bounds for a reason?”
“Relax,” Dex said as he looked through the camera, aiming it around us. “We’re just going to the second floor for now. We’ll take a peek and if anything looks unsafe, we’ll turn around and head back.”
I licked my lips nervously. If we did have to turn back in a hurry, I knew I’d be sprinting down that main staircase, two steps at a time.
The thing about the building that made things extra eerie in the darkness was the way the floors were laid out. The main hall, where the nurses’ room was, the offices, the lounge, the showers, it was all one straight shot up and down. If you stood in the absolute middle of the building—where the staircase was—and looked down past Davenport’s office to the end, it looked like that was it, ending at a distant room. But the hall actually veered sharply to the left, so that if you were viewing the building from above, it would look like angular bat wings. We were almost where the hall turned down the wing when Dex let out a satisfied sigh.
“What?” asked Rebecca, shining the light where he was looking. There was the faint outline of a door in the wall in front of him, wider than normal, and though it had no handle or visible way of opening, it was obviously an entrance to somewhere.
Dex handed the camera back to me to film, and as I did so, he reached into the pockets of his cargo pants and pulled out a Swiss Army knife. I pretended I didn’t notice the way his large forearms and biceps were flexing as he stuck
one end of the knife into the door’s edge and tried to pry it open. After a few frustrated grunts and failed attempts as Rebecca and I watched helplessly, he found purchase and with extra leverage, the door began to part from the wall. It let out a low groan and we were all hit with a blast of stale, frigid air. It wrapped around me and chilled me to the very core.
“Oh, man,” I said, taking a step back but remembering to keep filming.
“What is it, Dex?” Rebecca whispered.
He took a small flashlight out of his other pocket and stuck it in his mouth as he pushed the wooden door open the rest of the way. He grabbed the edge of the wall and poked his head into the cold abyss. I could only see the light from his flashlight bobbing faintly against stark cement walls, and I had this fantastic urge to reach forward and pull him back, as if something was going to come out of the darkness and take him.
He pulled the flashlight out of his mouth and turned his head to look at us. “Looks like we found the body chute,” he said just as a loud smacking noise resonated from the tunnel, echoing loudly and making my heart thump.
He aimed the flashlight back inside in time to illuminate a lone bouncing ball roll past him and disappear into the rest of the darkness.
“Holy fucking fuck!” I screeched, my voice catching in my throat. “No. No! Bad!”
“Shit,” he swore, now frantically trying to light up the tunnel. ”Did you guys see that fucking thing? Holy shit!” He waved at Rebecca. “Quick, bring the fucking light here.”
Though my heart was in my mouth, I watched Rebecca as she stepped forward and handed him the light she was holding. In the dim glow of the hallway, she didn’t seem scared at all.
“You did see that, right?” I asked her, my eyes begging for sanity. “Please tell me that wasn’t just for me and Dex again.”
She gave me a half smile. “The ball again? Oh, I saw that. I just don’t believe we’re truly alone here after all. And I don’t mean in the supernatural way, either. Who knows who Davenport has upstairs, playing tricks on us?” My mouth dropped slightly at her resistance to believe. She nodded at the camera and continued, “By the way, I really hope you got all that.”