Quarter to Midnight: Fifteen Horror Short Stories

by Darcy Coates

  The air was too damp; moisture had gotten into the towels and rotted them during the five years the Sub Basement had been unoccupied. I grimaced and turned to the taps. I chose the sink with the least discolouration and turned the tap on. Grinding and shuddering rose from under the tiles at my feet, and I jumped back. The whole room sounded alive at that moment, filled with echoes of noise as long-unused pipes were forced to carry water.

  Dark-red liquid spat out of the tap, splashing over the edge of the sink as it burst out of its pipes.

  “It’s just rust,” I told myself, trying to slow my heart rate. “Nothing to be frightened of.”

  The red water flowed for nearly a minute before it became clear. I waited until there was no trace of discolouration then dunked my slime-coated hand under the flow. The water must have been near freezing; my skin smarted wherever it touched, and I pulled my hand away as soon as it was clean.

  I glanced into the mirror and jolted back. One of the stall doors stood wide open. I could have sworn they were all closed when I’d come into the bathroom, but it stood ajar, exposing a broken toilet inside.

  The pipes below me increased their noise to a scream, and the water flowing from the tap reduced to a trickle then began to spew something thick and inky black into the sink.

  I turned off the tap, but the liquid kept coming. It poured out in globs that contained something strangely brittle, like decayed plant matter, and painted the sink black. An oily, metallic smell rose from it, making me gag, and stuck in my nose even when I held my breath.

  The gunk was too thick to drain quickly. The sink filled and began to overflow, and I stepped back to avoid the splatter. The pipes below my feet wailed and screeched, then abruptly, they fell silent. The thick black flow reduced to a drip.

  I glanced around the room.

  All four stall doors were open.

  I grabbed my light and left the room–not quite running, but not loitering, either.

  Once I’d put a dozen paces between myself and the bathroom, I stopped and rubbed at my eyes with my spare hand. It was shaking.

  Finish the job quickly. Ignore any distractions. Ten more minutes, and you’ll be out of here.

  I found the misfiled folder and put it on the stack by the door. I examined the list and found that I’d finished with the most recent section. The next batch of files would be in the tall wooden shelves.

  My task became more difficult then. The boxes had been filed alphabetically, but the shelves only collected the first letters together, forcing me to flip through whole bundles to find the correct name. Frustration built in my stomach. I had fourteen names left–there was no way I would finish quickly.

  The Sub Basement was freezing. My breath clouded in front of my face as I muttered names to myself. Occasionally, I thought I heard words being muttered back at me from across the room, but whenever I stopped to listen, it fell silent.

  Jenna had said she’d heard people talking to her. The voices sounded like old men, and when she’d gone searching for the source, she’d found letters scratched into one of the walls. Other employees said they’d looked for the scratchings but hadn’t been able to find them.

  The stack of files by the door grew slowly. By the time I’d found the second-to-last name, I must have been in the Sub Basement for nearly an hour.

  I was breathing hard from the repetitive crouching and stretching and shivering from the cold–but I only had one name left: PERRICK, Clarissa.

  She was in a category of her own–the 60s to 70s decade. Why she would want her records more than forty years after she’d done business with us was beyond me.

  I paced up and down the shelves as I looked for her section, but the records seemed to go back only as far as 1970. Did Andrew make a mistake on the decade beside her name?

  Then I found the door hidden at the back of the room. It was tall and metal, with a push lever on the front, just like at the entrance to the Sub Basement. A faded plaque at the top read Archives 1960-1970.

  “Hell,” I whispered.

  I dropped the four files onto the stack I’d collected at the entrance to the Sub Basement. I was tempted to return to the office without the last folder and claim I couldn’t find it, but I knew management would be ruthless. Clarissa Perrick wanted her records, so she was going to get her records one way or another. They would either send me back down or send someone in my place–and that was a fast way to become unpopular in the office.

  I returned to the door, rubbed my hands across my face, then pressed down on the lever. The door ground open, its hinges wailing, and brilliantly cold air blew through the gap.

  I held the torch in front of myself as I crept through the doorway. My ears suddenly filled with the clang of my shoes on metal as the concrete flooring ended. Beyond the door was a staircase – not one of the solid, enclosed concrete ones, but a rusted metal fixture that had been screwed onto the wall. I pointed my torch over the railing, but the light wasn’t strong enough to bring the floor below into relief. All I could make out were some shelves and what looked like a lounge area.

  “Damnit,” I whispered. “A basement below the Sub Basement.” No one from the office had said anything about another level.

  I moved with intense caution, brushing one hand against the wall to my left and swinging the torch across the steps in front of my feet. Ten steps down, the railing to my right disappeared. Where it ended was bent, as though someone had torn off a section. I moved closer to the wall.

  Another five steps and I nearly slipped. The metal slats had been dry up to that point, but some type of slime, unnervingly similar to what had dripped onto the back of my neck, coated the rest. I slowed down even more, placing each foot with painstaking care. A little farther on, the slime developed on the wall. It felt strangely warm under my fingers, and I recoiled in disgust. I became aware of the stench of organic decay. The farther down the stairs I went, the stronger it became until it felt like as if it were coating my tongue.

  I reached the concrete floor and stopped to catch my breath. My fingers were shaking as I loosened my tie to allow for easier breathing. The room wasn’t as large as the floor above had been, but it was deep. I angled my light up the stairs and could barely make out the top. I turned slowly, bringing shapes into focus with the narrow beam of my torch, and gazed into the room with sick fascination.

  Shelves, much like in the room above, stood in two straight rows through the centre of the room. Two of the closer ones had fallen over like dominoes, the first propped up by a lounge. Folders and pieces of paper had fallen out of it and were scattered across the floor.

  I turned my flashlight over the mess. Many of the files had rotted in the dampness, but the ones towards the top were still mostly intact. Typewritten titles such as “Case 2461” and “Case 9330” were displayed on the front. I nudged one of the folders open with my shoe and instantly recoiled.

  Inside was a black-and-white photograph of a disfigured man. He was missing both eyes, and where his nose should have been was a black hole. An open mouth showed badly deformed teeth. To either side of him, two doctors—passive, expressionless, and dressed in white lab coats—held the man still with a hand on each of his arms.

  I shuddered as I turned away.

  To the left of the shelves were lounges. I skipped my light over them in morbid fascination. They were badly decayed, sagging and rotting–probably the cause of the stench.

  Several had large stains on them. The discolouration was spread across the backrest and concentrated on the cushions below, almost as if…

  No, I told myself. No, not as if people had been left to rot in the seats. That’s a dangerous way to be thinking. Find the folder and get out.

  I moved between the shelves, looking for the familiar customer folder markings, but they were all numbers. “Case 0058”, “Case 4902”. No names.

  “Damn it, where are you, Clarissa?”

  I panned my torch across the walls, looking for any bookcases or filing cabine
ts I might have missed. Paintings had been glued to the wall opposite me, creating a haphazard patchwork of colour. They depicted strange faces and distorted shapes.

  I was close to giving up when my light passed over a door at the back of the room. Bronze signs were posted above it.

  Respite Rooms

  Pharmacy

  Conditioning Rooms

  Brightwater Accountants–Archive

  I chewed on the inside of my cheek. I’d thought the whole building belonged to Brightwater. Maybe another business worked in the basement levels at one time.

  Perhaps the company’s owner, Paul Brightwater, had rented the basement when he started his business then bought the entire building later on. That would explain why the file for Clarissa Perrick, one of Brightwater’s first customers, was squirreled away in the nightmarish sub-sub-basement.

  I glanced back at the numbered files and the rotting lounges then pushed through the metal door. A long corridor with multiple doors stretched in front of me. I moved carefully, swinging my light to check the plaques above each side-shoot. The doors were old, many of the hinges were rusted, and the glass panes set in the front were blurry from accumulated dust and grease.

  I peered through the window of the first door I passed, labelled Respite Rooms. Beyond it was another long hallway with many doors of its own. Medical trays were left abandoned along the walls. The window was too blurry to offer a clear view, but I thought I glimpsed movement near the back of the hallway. I paused, holding my torch still, but I couldn’t see anything else.

  My curiosity wasn’t strong enough to make me linger, so I quickened my pace as I passed the other passageways. Brightwater Accountants was the last door to the left. I paused in the entryway and moved my torch over the room. It was a small office with a bare, defunct bulb hanging from the ceiling and age stains across the walls. A cheap desk sat to one side with two broken chairs opposite it. Behind the desk was a filing cabinet, which I hurried to and opened eagerly.

  “Come on, Clarissa Perrick, where are you?” I muttered to myself. I checked under P and felt sick when I found only four files there, none of them belonging to Clarissa.

  I’d come too far to turn back empty-handed. I checked under C, in case she had accidentally been filed under her first name. When I didn’t find her there, I began to rifle through the other folders, desperate and frustrated.

  She wasn’t there. I slammed the drawer closed in a fit of anger, and froze as the slamming noise echoed back at me from the hallway. I moved to the office door and shone my light down the length of the hallway. It was empty, but the door at the end was closed.

  My breath whistled as I let it out through clenched teeth and began jogging for the door. To hell with Brightwater and their missing files. They’ll have to do without.

  I pushed the door’s handle to open it. It stuck in place. I pushed harder, then pulled, jiggled the handle, and pressed my entire weight on it.

  It didn’t budge. I’d been locked in.

  My flashlight beam jittered over the walls as I turned and looked down the hallway. Had the door locked itself, like they did in some hospitals? Was there a button to open it again?

  No, no button. I found only stained concrete walls, stained concrete floor, and blank metal doors with fogged glass.

  I knelt beside the door and tried to slow my breathing while I thought. They’ll come looking for me if I’m down here for too long. Just like they’d searched for Joan…

  I cringed and pressed my sweating palms against my eyelids. I would never forget the moment they brought Joan out of the Sub Basement. Nearly everyone from my floor had stayed late as we waited for news. We’d congregated outside the lifts, talking in hushed voices as police and emergency workers swarmed through the building.

  The lights above the only elevator that went to the Sub Basement lit up. We pushed forward, eager to see Joan, ask her what had gone wrong, and possibly hear a new tale of the macabre firsthand. But the elevator doors opened, and all that came out were four rescue workers and a sheet-covered body on a gurney.

  She’d had heart problems, I reminded myself. You’re young and fit, and they’ll find you.

  Eventually.

  I stood up. There was another option. Health and Safety codes meant that every building above a certain size had to have two exits for each floor. There was another way out.

  I started down the hallway. The room at the end, Brightwater’s office, was a dead end. So was the pharmacy, which was missing its door. I glanced inside but didn’t linger—every drawer and cupboard was open and empty.

  The door to the conditioning rooms was locked. That left the respite rooms.

  The handle creaked when I pressed on it, but it opened, granting me access to the long hallway of abandoned medical carts and closed doors.

  I shone my light at the first door to my left. Through the blurred glass, I was able to make out a metal examination table. Leather straps were draped over its dulled surface, and the concrete floor was stained.

  The following four doors all led to bedrooms. They had identical accommodations: plain, rusted metal bedframes held mattresses in varying stages of decay. A chair and a bedpan sat neatly against the walls. A single hand-painted sheet of paper hung above each of the beds–two had nature scenes, one was abstract splotches of colour, and one depicted a face with no eyes.

  The hallway turned a corner. As I walked, I became aware of a noise behind me. It sounded almost like shuffling, stuttering steps on the concrete floor. I froze. As though it were a switch being turned, the noise stopped.

  An echo? I held my breath and scuffed my shoe across the ground. It made a dull thumping noise. No echo.

  I started walking again. The noise was gone, but a horrible feeling of dread had taken its place. I walked faster and faster, and the flashlight’s beam jittered erratically in front of me as I broke into a sprint. I didn’t bother stopping to look into the rooms I passed—I just wanted to get out of there.

  I rounded another corner, and the hallway ended in a double door, just like the entryway to the Sub Basement. Sweat trickled down the back of my neck even as the icy air coaxed plumes of condensation out of my breath. I was shivering almost too severely to keep the light steady as I pressed my face against the cold metal door and peered through the glass window.

  It was too blurred for me to see anything. I flexed my shoulders, took a deep breath, and pushed the handle down. The door opened, and I could have laughed from relief. A landing stretched for a few feet ahead of me. Beyond that, stairs led upwards.

  Then I raised my torch and saw the rubble.

  There had been a cave-in, probably a long time ago, from how settled it looked. Slabs of concrete, natural rock, bricks, and dirt mingled in a pile partway up the stairs, effectively blocking the exit.

  I ran my hand over my mouth. I might still be able to dig my way through. If the rubble isn’t too deep, I could shift enough to get past it, get back to the Sub Basement, take the lift up to the twenty-second floor, and hand in my resignation, just like all of the other souls who quit after doing a Basement Run.

  The entire area was smothered in thick dust. I shrugged out of my jacket and tried to find somewhere clean to hang it. Eventually, I slung it over a metal support that stuck out from the broken wall.

  I began climbing the rubble, moving slowly and testing each foothold to make sure it was solid. I hadn’t gone more than a few steps when I noticed something strange—other footprints marred the dust. They were fainter than mine and belonged to smaller shoes. Someone had been there before me.

  I crouched down to get a closer look at the print. I guessed it belonged to a woman’s shoe, and, although it had left a clear imprint in the half-inch-thick layer of grime, fresh sheets of dust softened its appearance. It was old.

  Maybe the owner of this print been faced by the same obstacle as myself, but gotten through? I followed the tracks up the collapsed stairwell, turning my light backwards and forwards over the de
bris to follow the progress of the scuffed footprints and occasional smudge from where a hand had been used.

  Near the top of the pile, the tracks stopped. I looked for a gap in the debris and held up my hand to feel for a breeze, but the way was clearly blocked. I sat down on a slab of concrete and evaluated my situation.

  To my right, a strange shape leaned against the wall. I jerked backwards in shock and turned my torch towards it.

  Coiled up in the corner, leaning against the wall and holding a folder tightly to its chest, was a human body. At first, I thought it was a skeleton, but it still had skin, dried and stretched tight across the bones after months of exposure to the icy air. Its eye sockets were empty, and its mouth was open, exposing a shrivelled tongue and discoloured teeth. Dirty blonde hair lay in limp coils on its shoulders. I looked more closely at its clothes, and a horrible sick feeling surged through me as I recognised our office uniform.

  The clue to the body’s identity was the shoes: leather, with red buckles. Only one person in the office had worn shoes like that.

  Joan.

  I thought I was going to be sick. I ran my hands over my face as I tried to slow my racing heart. This thing crouched in the corner can’t be Joan. We all saw her carried out of the lift.

  That wasn’t true, though. We’d seen something carried out on a stretcher, but the cloth had never been lifted. She’d had a closed-coffin funeral, too.

  I wiped my hands across my eyes, smudging away tears and leaving dust in its place. If Joan came this far before giving up…

  Her bony hands were clamped over a plain manila folder. I had a terrible premonition of what it would contain, and I leaned forward just far enough to reach it. Without disturbing Joan’s body, I pulled the folder’s corner back to expose the name inside:

  PERRICK, Clarissa

  I slumped back, resting against the concrete block, a bitter taste permeating my mouth. Cold dust billowed around me, prickling at my skin and irritating my eyes. I let out my breath in a long heave, watching it make the dust swirl.