by Karina Halle
“What do you think about this floor so far?” Dex asked in his on-camera voice.
I stopped and looked around. So far I’d just walked straight down the hall, only briefly passing the light over the open rooms on either side. “It’s different. It feels…unreal, in a way. It’s very cold here. It could be because there is no power or heating above the first floor, but look.” I breathed out in front of the lens so you could see my breath rise in the air like a burnt-out cloud. “It’s probably fifty-five degrees outside at least. It’s May and we’re in Oregon. There’s no way it can naturally be this cold in here.”
“But supernaturally…” Dex noted. I almost smirked at that cheesy line but I just didn’t have it in me. I wanted to get to the end of the hallway, come back to the tunnel, and call it quits.
He lowered the camera slightly and gestured at one of the empty rooms. “These were the patients’ rooms. Maybe we can find something in there.”
I sighed, not really wanting to find anything, and headed to the closest room to me. The doorway was extra wide and from the rusted hinges, it looked like the door had been taken off long ago. The room itself was long, big enough to fit a bunch of beds, and the windows that lined the wall were either broken or missing entirely. Cobwebs swung lazily in the breeze, white wisps in my light.
There was a strange, almost foul smell in the air and a faint sound that I couldn’t quite place. Suddenly Dex jumped toward me and yelled, “Jesus!”
“What?” I cried out, automatically jumping too.
“Something touched my foot,” he said, taking the light from me. My heart was racing a mile a minute and I held on to his arm, my fingernails digging into his coat. He shined the light at the doorway behind us just in time to see a large rat scampering out of the room and out into the hall.
I exhaled noisily, feeling as if I’d almost had a heart attack. “This is ridiculous. I think we ought to head back.”
Dex frowned. “Rebecca hasn’t called yet. Come on, let’s just keep going until she does.”
“Are you going to scream like a girl every time you come across a rat?”
“You’re asking for a spanking, missy,” he warned, raising his palm as a threat. “And for your information, that rat came across me.”
We went back into the hallway and continued in the same way as we had before. My pulse still hadn’t slowed, and all I could think about was how cold and dark it was in this place where thousands of souls lost their lives. I think part of the reason—other than being scared out of my wits—that I wanted to pack it in was because I wanted to know more about the sanatorium, the way it was run, the people who were there. I wanted to know the history so I could give meaning to the things we were seeing. For all we knew, the second floor was a happy place and posed no harm to us.
Once we reached the end of the hall, we came to a washroom and then the rest of the wing as it veered off at an angle. Dex reached out for the washroom door, the faded symbol of a woman in a dress on it, but I quickly grabbed his arm and stopped him.
“Can we just leave it for now?” I asked, looking at him with pathetically sad eyes. “Good things never happen to me in bathrooms.”
“Not true,” he countered, though he took his hand back. “What about when I fucked you in that bar washroom a few months ago? From the way you came, you can’t possibly tell me that wasn’t a good time.”
I managed a smile, remembering. Jenn had been just outside the door too. “Okay, I’ll give you that. But still. No way am I going in there. I’m having enough trouble in the washrooms downstairs. I keep thinking I’ll see, like, someone standing on the other side of the door when I’m in the stall. Pippa did that to me once. Scared the hell out of me.”
He adjusted the camera in his hand and raised a brow. “When was this?”
“Oh, a long time ago. Back when we first met.”
“That wasn’t so long, you know.” From the way his voice dipped, I could tell that Uncle Al probably had talked to him about the same thing.
I swallowed thickly. “Feels like it’s been ages.”
“Yeah?” he asked. “Me too, baby. It feels like I’ve known you my whole life.”
He was looking at me with such intensity, the light reflecting off of his dark eyes in hard specks, that I started feeling strangely anxious. I rubbed my lips together and looked around us. “I guess when two people are constantly placed in situations like this, you go through a lot together.”
He took a step closer to me. Despite the chill, I could feel heat radiating off of him. “And we’ve been through a lot together. And I certainly don’t mind a future of this, as long as you’re at my side.”
Okay, he was getting oddly mushy considering our circumstances. It really wasn’t the place to start reflecting on our relationship. In our bed, in each other’s arms, yes. Standing in the freezing cold dark, trying to find ghosts…um, no.
Dex stared at me relentlessly until I was tempted to ask him if I had something on my face. Then he bent down to put the camera on the floor and straightened up, his hand going into his pocket.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, because now I had the impression that something was wrong. His forehead was creased with worry and he was biting his lip.
He closed his eyes and breathed in through his nose, his hand still in his pocket. “Nothing is wrong,” he whispered.
“Then why are you acting weird?”
He opened his eyes, looking at me in the softest way. “Perry,” he said gently.
My heart did a thumpa-thumpa and missed a beat.
“Yes?” I whispered back, his tone of voice contagious.
Just then I noticed the area behind him lighten up slightly, providing a faint outline of his silhouette. I looked around his body and let out a small gasp. At the very end of the hall, in the west wing, a single light had come on in one of the rooms.
A wave of nausea rolled through me. “Shit.”
Dex turned around to see then quickly scooped the camera back off the ground. With vague curiosity I noticed he hit record and started filming, which meant he’d turned off the camera just seconds earlier. He cleared his throat a few times and then said for the sake of the recording, “We were just standing here talking when that light down there suddenly came on. We don’t know what it is since we haven’t explored that end of the second floor. From here it appears that the light is coming from one of the rooms. The odd thing is, I’m pretty sure there is no electricity up here.”
“The other odd thing is that lights just don’t turn on by themselves,” I added. “Electricity or not.”
“Could be a motion detector,” he said. “Solar paneled.”
“Now you’re pushing it.”
“Well then, why don’t we go down there and see?”
“Because…a million reasons,” I said. My eyes were glued to the light, the way it splayed out from the room with a chilling white glow, illuminating the area around it and deepening the shadows. “Because I don’t want to know what turned it on.”
“I do,” he said, staring at it before looking back at me. “Come on. You’ll never sleep not knowing what it was.”
He was right about that, but I figured I wouldn’t sleep either way now. He walked a few steps then stopped to look at me expectantly. I knew if I told him I wasn’t ready or felt…at risk, we’d head right back downstairs. But the thing was, some sick part of me wanted to know what was down there. That sick side always popped up at the worst times.
But curiosity hadn’t killed me yet.
I adjusted the light and joined him. He shot me this wicked, adrenaline-fueled grin.
“Now, if you think I’m going first, you’re crazy,” I told him.
He grabbed my free hand and held it with a vice-like grip. We were going like this, as if we were carefree young lovers out for a midnight stroll.
We walked down the hall, my eyes trained on the light ahead. Each step we took, I felt my pulse racing faster, my heart beating louder. The
air grew colder, each inhale burning down into my lungs like I swallowed dry ice, until it felt like I couldn’t breathe at all. We didn’t even dare utter a word. The only sound other than the dull patter of our footsteps was the rustling of leaves blown in through open windows or the distant scurrying of a rat.
We crossed the center of the building, where we both looked over to the staircase that led to the first floor. I had to remind myself to breathe and then I almost had to laugh. It was funny how easy it was to just get to this floor via the grand staircase instead of the body chute. If we weren’t on a mission, I would have popped my head over the edge and called out to Rebecca.
And that’s when it happened.
We both looked back down the hallway, making our way to that eerie white light, when something moved in the shadows between us and the lit room.
It was a shadow.
At first.
Where the black inky space began to move, my eyes suddenly focused on a large, long-limbed creature, like a skinny human on all fours, crawling down the wall.
It paused—long enough for me to see an oblong head and stark white eyes, long enough for me to feel the life being sucked out of me—and quickly scampered across the hall, disappearing into another room.
The scream ripped out of my throat, leaving me raw. Dex cried out, “Holy fuck, did you see that, did you see that?”
And yes, I saw that, but oh god I wish I hadn’t.
Oh god, we had to get out of there.
But Dex wasn’t moving, stuck as if in mud, and he kept mumbling, “What the hell was that, what the hell was that?” He was losing his mind. My mind was already trucking it down the stairs; it was just waiting for me to catch up.
Whatever the hell that thing was, it crawled across the hall and was in some other room, waiting for us. And that’s when I knew it was the thing in the darkness, the thing I always felt watching me when I couldn’t see it.
The bad thing.
Brenna had some explaining to do.
With a blast, Dex’s phone went off with his X-Files theme song ringtone which sounded like death. I cried out, tears springing to my eyes from so much fear, my body assaulted by nerves that would not let me be. Dex quickly pulled out the phone and put it to his ear, his eyes still trained on the doorway where the bad thing disappeared.
“Rebecca,” Dex shouted into the phone, “you need to fucking come up here.” He paused. “Rebecca, are you okay?”
“She’s not there,” said a boy’s voice from behind us.
We whirled around, my hands shaking uncontrollably as I shined the light forward. There was nothing in front of us but the swirl of dust motes.
“It’s not her,” the young voice said again, even though we couldn’t see where it was coming from. “Don’t leave her alone.”
“E-Elliot?” I whispered, my voice breaking.
“We have to go,” Dex said. He pulled at my arm and I snapped to attention. We ran to the staircase and went racing down it, two steps at a time, not caring if we tripped the motion detector cameras or not when we reached the first floor.
I slid on the shiny marble floors, almost falling over, but Dex held me up, and we scampered down the hall, nearly colliding with Rebecca as she stepped out of the nurse’s office.
“I was just about to call you,” she said. She frowned at us, stepping closer. The lights on the first floor were working again, giving off a warm glow. “What’s wrong? What is it?”
Dex waved his phone at her. “You called. You were…I heard you crying.”
I shuddered. Crying?
She shook her head, her face paling. “No, my alarm went off just now. I hadn’t had the time to call you yet.”
“It doesn’t matter,” Dex said, even though I thought mystery phone calls from people who weren’t Rebecca did matter. He shot me an agitated glance. “We saw something up there.”
She pushed her hair back behind her ear. “What?”
“I don’t know. A light in one of the rooms went on.”
At that her eyes grew to be saucers. “What? Where? How?”
“I don’t know. It was down the other wing. We headed over there to check it out and then some black…form, like a black dog or something, it ran across the hall.”
I gave him an odd look. “Dog? It was definitely a person…or something like it.”
I didn’t want to say the bad thing; I didn’t want to acknowledge its name. “It crawled down the walls,” I added to quell his dubious expression.
He rubbed at his chin. “No, it went across from the room with the light to the room across the hall.” I stared at him and he shrugged uneasily. “What? That’s what I saw.”
“But you heard the voice, the little boy.”
“That I did, kiddo.”
“All right, hold on,” Rebecca said. “You said a light turned on upstairs and there might be a dog loose, and you heard the voice of a young boy but you didn’t see him.”
“More or less,” I conceded, even though it sounded a lot tamer than it was.
“Well, bloody hell,” she said, hugging herself. She looked down the hallway to the staircase. “I don’t exactly feel safe staying here if there’s someone else in the building with us.”
“Are you talking ghosts now or people?” I asked carefully.
“People,” she said loudly. “Ghosts don’t bother me but people do. How do we know there isn’t some homeless person, some vagrant, living in the building? They could have a dog. They could set up a nice little area for themselves upstairs and no one would know.”
“I know what I saw,” I said. “It wasn’t a dog.”
“But you don’t know for sure,” she said. “Your eyes play tricks on you, you know that. That’s why you and Dex didn’t see the same thing.”
“I also know ghosts play tricks on me too.”
Dex waved his camera in the air. “I have the footage, we can take a look and then figure out what to do. Either way, it’s eleven o’clock at night. If we wanted to, we could leave this place and go stay at the motel.”
“No, we can’t,” I reminded him. “We’re locked in here, remember? Carl has the keys, we don’t.”
“Baby, there are emergency exit doors on either end. We can leave. We’ll just probably get in major shit for it.”
“We’ll probably get in major shit already for tripping the motion detector,” I muttered. I pushed my fingers into my forehead and then looked at Rebecca. “Okay, boss. What do you suggest we do? I can tell you what I’m not doing and that’s going back upstairs. But I’m also not staying down here by myself. If you want to go explore with the camera and the light by yourself, you go right ahead.”
“Okay,” she said, holding out her hands. “Give those to me.”
I held the light to my chest and out of her reach. “Rebecca…I was kind of kidding.”
“Well, I’m not. You guys saw something. I want to see what I can find. They’ll already know tomorrow that we were upstairs so we should try and abuse it while we can. I want to go upstairs. Alone.”
I looked at Dex. “She’s crazy.” She was crazy.
“I know,” she said smartly, looking at both of us. “I really am not in the right frame of mind now, let alone lately, but dealing with this sounds preferable to thinking about other things, so if you two will please indulge me.” She made a grabby motion with her hands.
“It could be dangerous,” Dex said, though I could tell from his tone that he was relenting.
She pursed her lips. “Maybe I feel like living life on the wild side.” She snatched the camera out of his hands and then took the light from me. She fixed a few settings on the camera then nodded at us. “If I’m not back in thirty minutes…just wait longer.”
We watched as she walked off down the hall.
“I should really go after her,” Dex said, making a move to follow.
“Don’t you fucking dare, Dex,” I said as I grabbed the back of his coat. “Don’t you dare leave me here alon
e. You can’t do that to me.”
His expression softened as he saw how panicked I was. “I won’t. I’m sorry. I’m just worried about her.”
“Well, so am I!” I said. “We know what we saw. We’ll kind of.” The more I started thinking about it, maybe it had been a trick of my eyes. Maybe it really was a dog. Maybe there really was some squatter upstairs. Funny thing was, I hoped it wasn’t. When it came to Rebecca, ghosts were less of a threat.
“This has been one hell of a first night, hasn’t it,” I muttered.
“You can say that again.” He grabbed my arm. “No use waiting for her out here. Let’s get ready for bed and by the time we’re ready to fall asleep, she’ll be back.”
And if she isn’t? I thought. What then?
Even though sleep was almost unheard of, Dex and I did get into our pajamas and settled in for bed. He walked me over to the washroom where he stood guard as I did my business because I was too chicken shit to go alone. By the time we got back to the nurses’ quarters and settled into our beds—I decided to squeeze in with Dex on one bed that night—Rebecca returned.
Naturally she appeared in our doorway like a shadow figure, nearly prompting me to scream before I realized it was her.
Dex and I sat up, and I nearly fell off the bed in doing so.
“What happened?” he asked.
She sighed and came into the room, shutting the door behind her with a click. She plopped down on a wheelie chair across from us and put the camera and light on the counter. “Well, I didn’t see anything weird. Unusual, maybe. The light was on in the room when I went. It was a room with an old, moldy desk and a desk lamp. The lamp was on…no idea how, I guess they do have electricity up there after all. I didn’t see any signs of habitation though. Maybe that’s on the other floors, I don’t know. But there were no moving shadows or children’s voices.”