by Karina Halle
With that we left the room and walked down the hall back in the other direction. Toward the room with the light. My heart started racing as we neared it. I had to find a way to point it out.
Oldman showed us one of the rooms, saying, “As you can see, these rooms are smaller. They were private or semi-private, while the other rooms for the lower class were bigger, having sometimes twenty children squeezed into one room. The rich could afford privacy and space. Sometimes the kids were older, in their teens, and they were kept separately.”
While he spoke, I kept walking down the hall, trying to ignore the pounding in my chest as I neared the room. Once I saw a glimpse of the desk and the lamp, I stopped. I didn’t dare poke my head inside.
“Hey, why does this room have a desk and a lamp?” I announced, thinking I sounded totally fake. I kept the questioning look on my face as Oldman, Dex, and Rebecca came over. Oldman walked in the room which gave me the courage to do the same.
The lamp was turned off, the desk covered in a thick layer of dust. The window behind the desk was boarded shut for unknown reasons. There was a crooked picture on the wall, a painting of a girl that caught my eye.
“This would have been an office,” he said. “Perhaps one of the doctors who was stationed on this floor.” He went on to tell the history of some of the doctors who came to work at the hospital but I stopped listening. I was totally fixated on the painting.
It looked exactly like the girl I saw in my dreams. Brown hair, dark eyes, and a smile that seemed more wicked than joyful. Was this Shawna? I felt myself staring deeper and deeper at the painting until I heard the voice of a young girl whispering “Perry” in my ear.
I jumped and turned around. There was no little girl behind me. The three of them were ignoring me while Dex was trying to turn on the lamp.
“No electricity up here,” Oldman informed him just as the lamp’s switch went click and nothing came on. I looked at Rebecca as if to say I told you so but she just shrugged in return.
“Hey, what’s this painting about?” I asked, motioning to it. “Kind of weird that it’s just hanging here.”
“Perhaps it was a favorite patient or the daughter of one of the doctors,” Oldman said without much interest. “Shall we move on? If you folks are really interested in the horror stories of this place, this floor isn’t the one to give them to you.”
We all nodded and followed him out of the room, me being the last one out. As we went, I absently glanced into the room across the hall, the one that I’d seen the bad thing go into.
The little girl in the painting was standing in there, her pale hand holding onto a leash.
She smiled at me with cold black eyes and menacing teeth.
I screamed bloody murder and stumbled backward, trying to run away, just as the girl vanished before my eyes.
Dex was at my side in seconds, holding me at the waist, while the rest of them ran over.
“What happened?” Dex asked, brow furrowed with concern as he looked me over and then the empty room.
I shook my head, my mouth Sahara dry. “I…I just saw a girl. A little girl. Like the one in the picture. She was standing right here.” I looked over at Rebecca who was pursing her red lips. “I’m serious. I know what I saw.”
“I believe you,” Dex said. “Are you sure it was the one in the picture? The one right in there?”
“Yes!” I cried out, my chest feeling squeezed. “Yes. She looked the same. She smiled at me. She was holding onto a leash.”
“A leash?” Rebecca asked, her voice rising.
I nodded meekly. “Uh huh. But I couldn’t see around the corner to see what was at the end of it.” I looked at the historian. “Have you ever heard of people seeing a little girl before?”
“Yes,” he mused, sticking his hands in his pockets. “But she’s usually on the fourth floor, not this one. I didn’t know what she looked like either, but if she’s like the girl in the painting…perhaps I should take it to the museum and do some background work on it.”
“No offense,” Dex said, “but that picture is probably there for a reason. I don’t think removing it would be a very good idea. We have to live here for the next few days, if you catch my drift.”
He nodded. “I do. I guess it’s not really helping that I’m telling you these stories then.”
“Occupational hazard,” Dex said with a quick smile. “We’re all used to shitting our pants.”
“Lovely, Dex,” Rebecca said coolly. She slid her eyes over to me. “Are you okay to continue?”
I exhaled. “Yes. I’m fine. Obviously that just scared the shit out of me.”
“Hey, come here,” Dex murmured, pulling me into an embrace. “You stick by me, okay? I don’t want you seeing anything without me.”
I nodded and we started for the third floor, Rebecca throwing me looks of concern—or pity—as she and Oldman walked ahead. Gah. I’d like to see how she reacted if she saw a dead girl.
As we climbed up the staircase to the next floor, Dex whispered in my ear, “Do you think that girl was Shawna?”
I swallowed hard. “I think so,” I whispered back. “She’s at least the girl from my dreams.”
He paused on the step we were on and stared blankly at me. “What dream?”
I glanced up the staircase to Rebecca and Oldman who were almost at the third floor. “Oh, it’s nothing.”
“Perry,” he said sternly, his eyes turning dark. “You know it’s never nothing. What dream?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said, and then continued up the stairs after them. I really didn’t want to get into a conversation about my crazy dead grandmother in front of a stranger.
He let out an annoyed grunt before running up after me, loose coins and keys in his pockets jingling.
“So this is the third floor,” Oldman said, voice slow and measured. “This was where the dirty work happened.”
“Dirty work?” Rebecca repeated.
“This is where the morgue is. Where the operating rooms are. Some of the rooms were used as a barber and a dentist office for the staff. I’m sure you know by now that if you worked for the hospital, you weren’t allowed to go home until there was a cure. No one could risk infecting friends and family members in the town below. Everyone was truly isolated up here.”
We looked down the hallways. They looked the same as downstairs except there were fewer rooms and many had metal doors with the white paint peeling off. It was also a few degrees colder. I voiced that to Oldman.
“You’re correct about that,” he said. “But I’ve been here when it’s cold enough to see your breath, cold enough to freeze water. That’s something you can’t really explain.”
“So tell us something about this floor,” Dex prodded him. “What have you seen here? What have others seen here?”
“Do you want me to show you something?” he asked. “Follow me.”
We went down the hall to the left, pausing in front of a closed door. He put his hand on the knob. “This is the autopsy room. Or as some people have called it, the room of blood.”
He pushed the door open and it groaned on its hinges like a wounded animal. There was nothing but dust and darkness in front of us. He turned to Dex. “Do you have a light on that thing?”
Dex nodded seriously, flicking it on. Rebecca and I stood in the doorway while the men went into the room, Dex’s light illuminating the walls in a harsh glow. To my surprise, the room wasn’t empty, not by a long shot. Somehow this made things even more disturbing.
There were counters and a couple of sinks, closets, and large metal storage cabinets all along the walls that were decaying with splotches of rust. In the middle of the room were three tables, all spaced well apart and bolted to the floors. Large operating lights hung above them, looking like a doctor was about to switch them on at any moment. To the side of all of this was a giant compartment with six slots—the body cooler.
Every bone in my body felt frozen. There was no way I was going
in that room. I looked over at Rebecca, who was biting her lip and watching as Dex and Oldman walked over to the operating tables. I knew she felt the same, even if she didn’t say it.
“Shine the light here,” Oldman said, pointing to the middle table. “You see this ring around the edge? That acted like a moat to catch the blood. The doctors had little understanding of tuberculosis and how it was transmitted. They thought if they could study it, they could find a cure. Of course, as time went on, they did fewer autopsies. What was the point? You’ll notice the cooler there.” He waved at the metal block with its compartments. “Only six bodies could fit in there at one time. Because the disease was so highly infectious, the dead were moved out of here right away.”
“Down the body chute,” Dex said.
Oldman eyed him. “Yes. You’ve heard about that, no doubt. I believe the doorway to it is somewhere in this room, but I haven’t bothered to look. I don’t like to push my luck.”
“So this was called the blood room because of the way they bled the patients out?” Rebecca asked. She sounded slightly disgusted.
He shook his head. “Yes, and no. There were also a lot of surgeries done in here—experimental surgeries. One involved collapsing a lung to get the fluid out. That was the most common one, done to probably half the patients that came in here. Others involved removing ribs or muscles in their chests in order to expand the lungs. Sometimes they would insert balloons into their lungs and fill them with air.” He grimaced and looked at the walls, and I realized the rust might have been blood stains. “It got messy.”
“They actually did that to children?” Rebecca asked.
“Not all,” he said. “But some. They rarely survived the procedure. If they did, they were usually worse off, walking around like their chests had been scooped out.”
“Jesus,” Dex swore under his breath. “I just can’t imagine it.”
“The horrors of history,” Oldman said slowly. “And I’d love to say that a visit to this room was as bad as it got for a youngster. But with rumors of abuse and crumbling standards in Sea Crest, I hate to think of what could be worse.”
“Was there abuse?” I asked.
He cocked his head, considering his answer before saying, “My grandmother never reported anything like that. She was a good woman, saintly almost, who loved to help others in need. But they weren’t all like her. It was hard to be up here, isolated, in constant fear of death while constantly surrounded by it. The nurses had rules too. They couldn’t get emotional over patients, they had to act like everything was fine all the time. It was hard. Many nurses killed themselves. And some nurses, we’ll if you believe the rumors, some went crazy. Took it out on the children. But they are, of course, just rumors. None of this has ever been documented. I should know.”
My body felt like it was getting colder by the moment. This floor had fewer windows than the others, making it darker. If Dex thought we’d explore this floor in the night, he was absolutely out of his mind.
“We should get going,” Oldman said as he came toward us with Dex in tow. “I need to get back to the museum soon and we’ve one more floor to go.”
“But you haven’t told us what you’ve seen here,” Dex pointed out.
Oldman grunted and stopped in the middle of the hallway. “Personally, on this floor, it’s not what I’ve seen but more what I’ve heard. What I’ve felt. I’ve had the feeling that someone was behind me when there was no one there. I’ve heard screams coming from the blood room. I’ve heard wet coughing, like someone is coughing up blood, the sound of wheels going past, and footsteps. I’ve seen a doctor in a white coat standing in the corner of one of the rooms.” He shuddered at that thought. “And I hope I never see him again. Can we get going?”
I picked up on how noticeably agitated he was acting, which in turn made me feel queasy. If the historian wanted to get going, we were definitely going.
“What have others seen?”Dex asked as we climbed the stairs to the final floor.
Oldman gave him a grave look. “It depends who you ask and what their beliefs are.”
“Beliefs?” I repeated.
He nodded as we stopped on the landing. Below us was the darkness of the third floor, above us was the contrasting light of the fourth floor. And yet I felt the fourth floor held more secrets, more animosity than any of the others.
“People have reported seeing the same…creature…on the third and fourth floors.”
“Creature?” I felt icy trails going down my spine. I didn’t want to venture what the creature looked like.
“The fourth floor, as you’ll soon see, was used to house the patients who were close to death and the ones that had gone insane. There used to be a metal gate right here,” he pointed across the stairs, “that prevented them from escaping. As weak and skinny as they were, they were always a threat. Some people say that with all the bad energy, the lost souls, the mistreated patients, the experiments gone wrong, the mass grave—“
“Mass grave?” I interrupted.
He gave me a sympathetic look. “Many bodies were never claimed by their families. They feared the disease would get them, even in death. Superstitions, you know. The dead had to be put somewhere.”
This place couldn’t possibly get worse.
“So what was the creature?” Rebecca asked.
“Many that have seen it believe it’s a demon,” he said. “It looks like a human but isn’t. Crawls on the ceiling and walls.”
And it totally just got worse. That was what the bad thing was. A demon.
A motherfucking demon.
I started to think that maybe Pippa’s warning hadn’t been a figment of my imagination after all.
“Does it ever hurt anyone?” Dex asked in a low voice.
Oldman shook his head and stuck a toothpick between his teeth. “I honestly don’t know. I’ve never seen it. That doesn’t mean it’s not there but…as you can tell, this place will play tricks on you. There’s too much history, too many people who have passed through these walls. You never know what you’re going to get here. And I find that fascinating.” He looked up at the fourth floor. “On second thought, do you mind if we skip that floor? You’re welcome to take a quick look but that whole thing I said earlier about not pushing my luck…”
“No, that’s totally cool,” I said a little too gratefully.
“Do you mind if I just shoot a few seconds?” Of course Dex had to ask that.
Oldman shook his head and sauntered over to the window on the landing, hands behind his back. “Go ahead.”
Rebecca decided to go up with Dex while I stayed at the historian’s side as he looked out the window.
“You know,” I admitted, hoping that talking would calm my heart rate down, “before I knew about this place, I had no idea that sanatoriums existed.”
He smiled quietly. “That was the same back then. Despite these hospitals all over the country—despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people came to them to die—everyone liked to pretend that this didn’t exist. But it did. You can shuffle people away into isolated buildings and lock them up with false promises of a cure. But the patients, the ones that never saw their families again, they didn’t forget. It’s no wonder this place is haunted. All the ghosts here just want someone to talk to, someone to recognize that they exist, even when they don’t.”
“And the demon thing?” I said, my voice shaking slightly.
“Maybe some ghosts don’t want attention. Maybe they just want to inflict the pain and terror that they felt every day. Maybe some are too far gone in their hate and revenge that they cease to be ghosts and become something else.” He spoke quietly as he leaned in closer and speared me with a shrewd gaze. “Have you seen it?”
I felt like my throat was closing up. I nodded slowly.
He made an “ah” face, then said calmly, “You’ve got a nice energy about you. They like that.”
“Okay,” Dex said loudly as he jogged down the stairs with Rebecca at
his side. “There wasn’t too much to see up there. Looks pretty much the same as the second floor, although I think I located the door to the body chute.”
“Dangerous thing,” Oldman commented. “You know they found a runaway girl in there one year. She’d snuck in by the post office and then got stuck for a few days.”
“Post office?” I asked.
“There’s an abandoned one down the road. The body chute actually goes all the way in. It’s a real long walk in a very dark place.”
I shot Dex a look to warn him to not even think about it, but Oldman went on, “After that, they boarded it up around the post office so you couldn’t get in. Or out, I suppose.” He glanced at his watch.”Well, I’m afraid it’s time for me to go. I hope you’ve enjoyed your tour of the Sea Crest Sanatorium.”
We walked down the stairs, and with each landing we reached, my shoulders felt lighter and lighter. Once we got to the main floor, the first bell rang and teachers began scurrying about, and I started to feel like I was back in my own skin again.
“And I hope you be extra careful while you’re here,” Oldman said to me just before he walked off into the sunshine.
“What did he say?” Dex asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing I wasn’t already thinking.”
CHAPTER TEN
After we’d gone through the tour, the last thing I wanted to do was talk to Brenna about her experience with the bad thing. In fact, I was so close to suggesting we head out into Tillamook to get some food while we could, just to be in the sunshine and see the freedom of the waves, when Kelly came looking for us while we were sprawled in the teacher’s lounge.
“Hi there,” she said in her quiet voice, her hair gathered delicately around her face. “Brenna wanted to let you know that she had to go home sick and that she’ll take a rain check for tomorrow.”
“Oh no,” I said, straightening up in my chair. “Is she okay?”
She nodded. “I took a quick look at her. It’s probably food poisoning or a 24-hour bug. She’ll be fine.”
“What about her students?” Dex asked. “What do they do if she’s not there to teach? Is there a sub?”