by Krista Walsh
The evening grew darker and the road fell into shadow, with no glow from the street lamps to encroach on the fields. She parked the car behind a group of trees well away from the house and switched off her headlights. She hoped the police patrol wouldn’t extend this far, but even if it did, she couldn’t back down now.
She grabbed her black sweatshirt and pulled up the hood to pass through the shadows in obscurity.
As she approached, she was relieved to find that the police presence hadn’t spread far enough to encompass the backyard. Traces of their investigation remained in the tall grass, but the area had been abandoned for the more easily accessible front entrance.
The back of the house was more impressive if slightly less elegant than the front. Without the ornate doors and porch, an unbroken wall of dark windows stared out at her. Daphne rubbed her clammy palms against her pant legs and breathed through the racing of her heart.
Although the house appeared empty, she was willing to bet there were more than twenty-one ghosts inside. If the pattern had kept up since the hospital closed, there could be closer to hundreds. And she was about to walk into the middle of them and ask how they died.
There were so many ways this could go wrong.
Once she reached the back door, she paused and closed her eyes. She cocked her head, listening for any noises in the night. Voices carried from the front of the house, but the back was silent.
She ducked under the police tape and reached for the door latch. Expecting to find it locked, she was more than a little surprised when the handle turned smoothly and the door swung open without the slightest creak. In a house that was falling to pieces everywhere else, there was no way the hinges should have been in such good condition.
Someone had been working on the house.
She thought about Harold Cly, but doubted his maintenance would have focused on the hinges of a door that wasn’t used anymore.
With a cautious step into the back corridor, she eased the door closed and listened for any sound of movement. Hearing nothing but the building settling, she took a few more steps toward the back stairs. A hush of whispers drifted by, but unlike last time, they continued on their business and left her alone. She closed her eyes and stretched her mind to check for anyone else who might have chosen to spend their evening in the abandoned wards, but while she picked up three different energies at the front of the hospital, the interior felt empty.
Without her flashlight to guide her, she kept her steps slow and scraped her feet along the surface of the floor to avoid tripping over any uneven floorboards.
She crept up the stairs, one slow step at a time, then paused on the second floor to take another survey of her surroundings. The whispered voices grew louder the higher she went, but no matter how hard she tried to understand what they said, the words remained an incoherent babble, full of anguish and confusion.
Her skin crawled and goosebumps rose on her arms. She pulled her hoodie closer around her neck to ward off the faint draft as imprints of the nurses floated past her.
A car door slammed out front and headlights cut through the windows on the west side of the house. Daphne crossed the corridor into one of the empty rooms and peered down into the front yard in time to see a police cruiser backing out of the driveway. Only a single car remained, with two uniformed officers starting a patrol of the grounds. She dodged away from the window and leaned her head back against the wall with a deep exhale. She didn’t want to think about how Hunter would react if they caught her snooping around. She wanted to change his opinion of her, not cement it.
If you really want to change his opinion, maybe you should stop doing things that would piss him off instead of trying to hide it better.
She dismissed her inner words of wisdom and continued down the hallway.
The number of people going in and out of the rooms over the course of the day had disturbed decades’ worth of dust, and Daphne pressed her finger above her upper lip to prevent a sneeze. She stretched out her hands to gain control of the energies around her, then stirred up the air and shifted all the dirt out of her path. The spell was cast almost before she was aware of it, and she kicked herself for letting her instincts take over. But since the damage was already done — and not having the dust in her face was a great relief — she hung on to the magic, which hummed happily in her veins. The dust swirled in the faint light from outside, clouds of it catching the light in soft twinkles like a strange September blizzard.
The voices drew closer around her, drawn to the power. The harsh emotions of her unseen company eased, and she sensed their curiosity. A few of them drew close enough that their energy prickled her skin, but none of them were strong enough to break through.
Yet, she thought. She would help them come through, and hopefully they would have answers for her.
A click and sudden spark of light down the hallway made Daphne freeze. She pressed herself against the wall and strained her ears to pick up any other sounds. Again, she cast out her mind. Still only three people, but the third energy had changed. One of the cops had left, and this one had replaced it. But no one else had entered or left the building, which meant this energy had been here the entire time, and she’d missed it somehow.
The waves were faint, as though whoever hid in the shadows was hardly there at all, more in the afterworld than this one.
She dropped the magic keeping the dust out of her way and reached deeper, grabbing the water from the walls. She had no time to craft a blade as she’d done the night before, but the water would hopefully distract any attacker long enough for her to come up with something better once she gauged the threat. The glistening droplets melded together into a ball and hovered over her palm, ready to fly.
After the previous night’s work, her magic flowed more smoothly and easily, and she forced herself to cradle it gently and not draw too much. She wanted to help these spirits, but not at the cost of her own relapse.
Edging step by step toward the light, she found that it came from the room directly beneath where she’d found the body. The soft light flickered in the darkness, causing shadows to dance on the floor and on the opposite corridor wall. She inhaled slowly and paused outside the door.
When the light went out, the darkness became filled with the thick aroma of cigarette smoke. She held her breath and clung to her magic, bracing herself to step into the room.
The being within didn’t give her the opportunity.
With a hiss, it jumped out in front of her, and in the glow of the streetlight, Daphne saw the face of death.
6
Daphne launched the water ball at the shadow, and it jumped back as the ball splattered in its face.
“Shit! What the hell!” it said, and in the curses, Daphne didn’t hear the voice of any skeletal apparition but that of a young man, fully alive and very annoyed.
His energy had been so faint she’d almost missed it, yet when she cast her own energy against it now, it pushed back with the force of a human being. Something external had caused it to weaken, and by looking at him, she guessed that something to be hunger.
She raised her hands defensively and stepped back. The young man shifted on his feet, and the movement brought his face into the light long enough to reveal the heated glare he cast in her direction. He grabbed the hem of his shirt and used it to wipe the water from his face, revealing a hollow stomach and clearly defined ribs.
“That how you go after people? Throwing water in their faces?” he demanded.
“What about you?” she retorted. “You think jumping out of the shadows and hissing is the best way to let someone know you’re around?”
“No one’s supposed to know I’m around. That’s the whole goddamn point of being in the shadows.”
Daphne had to give him points for logic, but docked him more for poor judgment. “This place is crawling with cops and you thought playing bogeyman would scare them away? How did you get in here, anyway?”
She glanced over her should
er to see if their raised voices had attracted the notice of anyone outside, but the hospital remained silent except for the whispering souls. The whispers hadn’t faded, but sounded as though the sources had stepped away from her, slinking back into the shadows to watch her even as they continued to demand her attention.
“Could ask you the same,” the young man said.
Daphne crossed her arms and took the time to form a clearer opinion of him, keeping her magic hovering below the surface of her skin in case she needed it quickly.
On closer inspection, she couldn’t blame herself for seeing a skeleton at first glance. Under his closely shaved hair, his face was thin, his high cheekbones protruding at harsh angles. He stood around five foot ten, and yet Daphne felt like she might snap him in two if she breathed too hard in his direction. He wore a baggy, long-sleeved T-shirt and loose jeans. As they stood watching each other, he never stopped moving — shifting his weight from one leg to the other and rolling a soggy cigarette between lean fingers, as though he didn’t know what to do with his hands — yet his gaze remained steady and clear on hers.
For all the toughness of his appearance, Daphne felt pity rather than fear. He looked to be around seventeen. Likely one of the abandoned youth the city of New Haven didn’t like to admit it had.
“What’s your name?” she asked.
“What does it matter?” he countered. He flicked the end of his doused cigarette, his brow knitted.
“I’m not a cop,” she said, in the hopes of getting him to stand down long enough for her to pry some answers out of him.
“Didn’t think you were. No cop would go around splashing water on people they saw as a threat. Chances are I’d be dead instead of soaked through.”
He tugged at the collar of his shirt and grimaced at the way the material clung to his skin. Daphne felt guilty for making him more uncomfortable than he already was. She wished she could draw the water out of the cloth without his noticing.
“My name is Daphne,” she said, deciding to go first. “Daphne Heartstone. I’m a crime journalist for the Chronicle.”
She handed him a card and he glanced at it, running his thumb over the embossed lettering.
“Reporter? Makes sense. Explains why you’re sneaking around in the dark, anyway.”
He left it at that and continued to stare at her until she said, “So? Who are you?”
He raised his left shoulder in a slow shrug. “Emmett.”
Another stretch of silence. Clearly she wasn’t getting a last name.
“Do you come to the hospital often, Emmett?”
This question earned her a smile, and he flashed a top row of teeth that looked in far better shape than she would have expected. “You use that pickup line on everyone?”
Daphne blinked, her thoughts stumbling, and then she rolled her eyes. “You’re hardly my type, let alone my age group. I prefer my men legal. Are you going to answer me or not? You do know this is the scene of a murder, right?”
The change that came over Emmett at her words made Daphne regret her sarcasm. His shoulders slumped and he sagged against the wall.
“I know,” he said, and the emptiness of his tone matched the death-like appearance she’d first seen on his face.
A small voice in the back of Daphne’s mind wanted to warn him against touching the structure of the hospital, not trusting what might lurk behind the rotting plaster. But the way he wavered on his feet shifted her priorities. Keeping her movements slow, Daphne closed the distance between them and joined him against the wall. She forced her thoughts away from the mold and the rats creeping unseen among the beams.
“Did you know the young man who died?”
“Yeah,” he said.
“I’m sorry. Did you two come here together often?”
The hospital offered privacy and a lot of dark corners — the perfect place for kids to get into mischief. The thought occurred to her that Emmett and the dead man might have been the ones shining lights in the windows the previous night.
He could be the murderer.
But nothing in the kid’s energy gave off the pungent tang of cruelty. If the police found him here, they might have other ideas, but as far as she could tell, he was innocent of the crime.
“Not like that,” he jumped to say. “Jack and me just liked using this place sometimes.”
She looked around the dank and empty ward.
Jack. Somehow knowing the poor kid’s name made finding his body that much harder. With a name, he stood as a real person in her mind, instead of something out of a nightmare.
She shoved the thought away and asked, “Why here of all places?”
Emmett shrugged. “Rent’s good. Keeps the rain off our heads, and these rich streets aren’t popular spots for most of us, so no one else really comes here.”
The conversation faded into silence, and they both stared into the darkness. A draft cut through the window behind Daphne’s right shoulder, and she shivered, hearing moans on the wind of those who had died in these rooms.
Taking a chance, she asked, “I don’t suppose you’ve ever heard anything…strange when you stayed here?”
Emmett laughed, and the sound came out unforced and full of warmth. He struck her as someone who saw the funny in the serious, the one who always made jokes when everyone else was in tears. In spite of their awkward and off-putting introduction, Daphne found herself liking the kid.
“You mean the ghost stories?” he asked. “Sure, I’ve heard the odd bump in the night, but this is an old place. Bound to be all kinds of things breaking down around us.”
“I don’t suppose you’d mind showing me where you heard them?”
He tilted his head to stare at her, assessing her with the same depth and curiosity with which she’d evaluated him. After a moment, he shrugged. “Why not? Not like I have anything better to do tonight.”
He pushed off from the wall, and she trailed after him as they went down the hallway toward the stairs.
“I don’t usually hear anything on this floor,” he said. “Sometimes I’ll hear the wind and it sounds like voices. Maybe that’s what it is, if the stories are true. But that’s why I prefer to sleep on the main floor. It’s the quietest.”
Daphne was hardly surprised when he led her up the stairs to the third floor. The same place where Jack died — another connection between his death and the ghosts. The energy in the air on the old TB ward was even stronger than it had been the night before. The ghosts apparently weren’t happy with the police barging in on their space.
Or is there more to it than that? Is it because the police are here but not hearing them? Not helping them?
She wished Emmett wasn’t there so she could stick with her plan of speaking with them, but her questions would have to wait.
“It never used to be so bad,” he went on, keeping his voice low so his deep rumble wouldn’t bounce off the walls. “I’ve been coming here for a few years now, and it used to be all I’d see was a shadow out of the corner of my eye or a door closing once in a while. Now, sometimes, it sounds like a bunch of people running down the halls shouting or screaming for help. Nothing there when I check, of course.”
“A little more than bumps in the night, then.” She kept her tone carefully neutral.
Emmett glanced at her. “I don’t believe it when I hear them — I definitely don’t expect you to believe me.”
Daphne remembered the doctors running across the ground floor, the heavy beds being rushed to surgery.
“When did you first notice the change?”
Emmett ran his fingers over the wall, jumping the space of the first open doorway. “The first time I heard them was two years ago. Not really there — like whispers, you know? But it’s been getting worse. Then two months ago, probably, it happened every night I was here. Tonight doesn’t seem as bad.”
Daphne frowned. “Did you do anything different here that might have caused the change? Gone into a new room? Found something?”
&n
bsp; He eyed her sidelong. “You sure you’re a journalist? You’re talking about all this like you do believe me. You a ghost hunter or something?”
She flashed him a smile. “Hardly. I go where the story is, and readers love a good supernatural slant to their mysteries.”
Not that she had any intention of mentioning more than a few passing hints in her article. Her readers would be disappointed if she left out the eerie factor, but no one needed to know the truth of what lingered in this old hospital. The spirits would never get any rest if people actually believed Peony House was haunted.
“Well, I didn’t change anything. We stuck to the lobby. Nice open space.” Emmett drew to a halt halfway down the hallway and spread his arms wide to take in the emptiness. “The worst comes from up here. This is where I hear the screaming. Like someone’s being torn to pieces.”
The question drifted through Daphne’s mind about whether the trouble lay on the TB ward specifically, or if this was just where the ghosts chose to hide.
The whispers rose around her again, and Daphne’s magic flared out of instinct. She clamped it down and hugged it to her. The pressure of holding on to it built up inside her head until her temples throbbed, but she felt safer having her power close than pushing it down. Her hand trembled as she brushed her hair out of her face.
The voices died out, leaving the hallway in silence.
Emmett didn’t seem to hear them, but he rubbed his arms as though to warm them against a sudden chill.
“You weren’t here last night?” Daphne asked, then kicked herself for the bluntness of the question when Emmett’s gaze narrowed with distrust.
“I didn’t —”
“I know you didn’t,” she cut in. “Believe me, I know. But if you were here, you might have seen something.”