The Dark Corners Box Set

by Robert Scott-Norton

  “Why do you think that was an Adherent? We haven’t even confirmed that the grave belonged to Adam.”

  Seth held the note out. “Do you want to read it again? Signed by A.”

  “A for Adherents? A little simplistic don’t you think?”

  “Or for Adam.”

  “I’m really not sure.”

  “I don’t need you to be sure. I need to know why a cult might steal a painting and then a body. Olivia said that Adam was obsessed with prolonging his life. That’s what he intended to do at Ravenmeols, take over a body. He’d done it once before with Graeme Lowman, the doctor at Ravenmeols. He may have done it before that.”

  “It’s not very plausible though.”

  “Tell that to Johnny Oswald.”

  Malc fell silent. “It’s late. Perhaps we should go to bed and talk about this in the morning.”

  An idea was forming in Seth’s mind. If it was true it would explain a lot. “The Book of the Fourth was used during the ritual at Ravenmeols. The ritual was focused on bringing back Adherents from the Almost Realm and guiding them into new host bodies. But if the bodies were capable of fighting back, perhaps that was something Adam wanted to avoid. What if Adam had planned for something more permanent? A plan that relied on other Adherents to comply and act accordingly. What if Adam wants to be fully reincarnated, back into his own original body?”

  Malc’s brow furrowed. Seth recognised the look as one of intense worry. Seth wanted to shake his friend out of it.

  “You’re crazy. No one can do that. No one comes back from the dead.”

  “As a man of the cloth, don’t you hear the irony in your words?”

  “You’re exhausted. I’m knackered and I’ve got a million things to do tomorrow. Let’s pick this up in the morning.”

  Seth had no interest in leaving things till the morning.

  Malc had insisted Seth stay at the vicarage. It made no sense travelling back to Lamont’s house at this time of the morning. Seth didn’t argue, but he had no intention of sleeping. The coffee and the excitement of the last twenty-four hours were keeping him awake, making sleep an impossibility.

  He waited a full hour and a half after hearing Malc’s bedroom door close before he snuck out of the vicarage and drove to Ravenmeols Hospital. His watch made it a little before 3:00am.

  It was impossible to not think of the book.

  The truth was that he didn’t know for sure whether the book had been destroyed. Perhaps it had only been damaged, and yet a damaged book might still be valuable. Adam might have been unhinged, but he'd been proved right about many things. Whatever rituals the book contained, it had served Adam well enough to continue possessing bodies and opening doorways to the Almost Realm.

  Seth had never had success in contacting his sister. He’d had hundreds of visions, communicated with hundreds of dead people on behalf of other people, but he’d never been able to communicate with his own sister. Until his conversation with Olivia Gwinn he’d never had an answer but there was something she’d said that sparked a terrible idea in his mind.

  What if Kelly is trapped in the Almost Realm? Trapped where he couldn’t communicate with her. She’d been able to open a doorway for him and had saved him, but what if that was the limit of what she could do? What if that had been a cry for help?

  He couldn’t ignore the possibility. Nor, the possibility that the Book of the Fourth had the answers on how to free someone from the Almost Realm. There had been a book used in the Adherent’s ritual at Ravenmeols. Seth had tipped the altar during their escape; he’d seen the book fall into the fire.

  But… what if the book had survived?

  There was a chance.

  There was also a chance that the Adherents were watching him. The Vigilance Society had admitted they were and were keeping tabs on Adam’s house. It would be naive to believe that the Adherents themselves weren’t doing the same.

  Ravenmeols Hospital was waiting for him. The ever-stoic sentinel on top of the hill. Even on the approach, the smell of smoke seemed to seep inside the car and catch the back of his throat. Nonsense. The smoke was long gone. The building had survived. He had survived. He wondered whether that made their fates linked.

  He left the car at the side of the building, away from the main entrance and any chance of being spotted from the road. There was no sign of any security. Taking a thin pencil torch from his glove box, he left the car and walked to the front entrance. The acrid taste of the fire was still there. Flashes of memory assaulted him. Falling and screaming. Goosebumps broke out on his arms and he spun around, positive there was someone right behind him. There was no one of course, just his overactive imagination keeping him on edge. Was the Vigilance Society out there now, watching?

  “You might as well show yourself,” he shouted into the night with more confidence than he felt. “I’d sooner not go in there on my own.”

  If Olivia had sent someone to follow him from the vicarage, they were keeping quiet. Probably told not to engage with the madman. He smirked. If anyone was observing him now, they would be thinking he was mad. Why else would he come back to the place of his nightmares?

  The front entrance defeated him with large chains and heavy padlocks. Stepping back, he looked up at the full height of the building and the boarded-up windows staring down at him. In fact, the windows were only boarded up on the lower level and some on the first floor. If there was a way up to the first floor, he thought it might be possible to find a way in there. Cautiously, he worked his way around the building.

  A board was loose on a ground-floor window on the east side of the building. The wind was knocking it gently against the stonework. The board had been roughly pulled aside from the frame and was hanging from the top fastenings, meaning that all Seth had to do was lift it up and away from the opening whilst he ducked inside. Taking a deep breath, Seth did exactly that, and with his head on the other side of the board, could shine his torch into the building and take a good look around. During the ghost hunt, they’d not explored every room in the place but judging from its position, it must have led off from the main downstairs corridor. He scrambled in and landed clumsily inside.

  Immediately everything felt different. A sense of foreboding threatened to smother him. How had the smell of the fire made its way down here? He shone the torch around but this room appeared untouched by fire. A laundry basket and wheeled cage left by the opposite wall alongside a row of exposed plumbing connection points suggested he’d made it into the laundry section. Cupboards, their doors open, were still fixed to the walls. Above him, the ceiling tiles were half missing, exposing the innards of the hospital ventilation system and power lines. Chunks of insulation were dropping and littered the floor. It was like the beast had been slain and gutted by an even stronger creature.

  There were only two doors in this room and neither of them looked suspicious. Seth made a note of them and proceeded through the open one on his left. A smell of urine hit his nostrils as he stepped out onto the main corridor and he considered the prospect of others making use of the building as a shelter. Perhaps that was why the board was loose by the window.

  Feeling the distinct possibility of not being alone, he pulled his jacket closer and began paying attention to any loose debris or furniture on the floor, anything he could gather and use as a makeshift weapon should he need to defend himself.

  He passed several more rooms on the ground floor and soon found himself back in the main entrance foyer where he spotted some belongings from the ghost-hunting party. One of Russell’s crates was against the floor with the useless EM reading machines they'd been encouraged to use to detect anything paranormal. No one who’d been in the ghost party needed an EM reader anymore. They’d witnessed the destructive force of the paranormal first hand.

  There were six doors in the entrance foyer. There had been six the first time he’d been here. So far, so good. Nothing had changed. He cast his beam back along the corridor he’d come along, checking for
any sign of anyone moving up the way he’d come but the place was devoid of life. That sense of someone close by had increased.

  The sanctum was at the top of the building, reached through one of the treatment rooms. Seth pointed his torch light up the main stairwell where the beam caught the wire mesh that had been installed around the interior of the stairwell to stop jumpers. Taking a deep breath, Seth proceeded up the staircase. He quickly reached the first floor and ignored the signs indicating the recreation room, heading onto the second floor. Dust rose with his footsteps and mixed with the smell of smoke from the fire, stuck to the back of his throat and began to cloy his nostrils.

  As his feet touched the top step, and he found himself on the second floor, he paused. This was the fabled correction floor, the part of the building that contained the therapy suites and the punishment rooms. On his left, the corridor branched off towards the punishment attic space. Before the building was a hospital, it had been an orphanage and dozens of children would have been punished in that attic for sins as heinous as catching measles. That was also the most dangerous part of the hospital. Roy had successfully opened over a dozen doorways to the Almost Realm and—

  Seth closed his eyes for a moment and put his hands on the bannister. No, he wouldn’t be trapped in those memories. If he allowed that fear to consume him, he would be useless and then Adam would win. He needed to keep his wits about him, to live in the moment and trust that he could handle this.

  The fire had done plenty of damage up here. Wood looked black and half-destroyed. The floor was sodden with the water used to fight the flames. It was a minor miracle that the hospital was still standing, but then Seth had a feeling the hospital hadn’t wanted to go down, and it had struggled for its survival along with the fireman.

  Seth headed west, following signs to the therapy suites, counting doors and noting any that stood out. The doors to the Almost Realm did all they could to blend in with their surroundings. A perception filter that could keep them disguised for days, weeks or even years, allowing free passage from the Almost Realm to the here and now. The only way to actively fight the perception filter was to keep count and remember. That was a trick he’d learnt years ago. It had kept him alive.

  The musty smells grew thicker along the therapy corridor. Framed pictures still hung on some wall fixings, simple paintings of flowers and sunny fields. All, he presumed, intending to make this part of the hospital feel less like a hospital. But it failed. There was no way you could disguise what you were walking through. And yes, they’d replaced the lino with a carpet, but that was now threadbare and the source material for the rodents’ nests who’d now run the underbelly of the hospital.

  This area more than any other reminded Seth of a building with an identity crisis. It didn’t know what it was, nor what it should be. It chilled Seth to the core as he imagined the poor souls who’d been trapped in this institution, with psychos like Adam imprinting his ideas on them.

  He found himself at the end of the corridor, standing in front of a bare wall, his nose almost touching the mildewed plaster.

  What?

  He’d blinked and had been thinking about the previous occupants and then.

  Time had shifted. Or his perception had been manipulated.

  He spun around, and the passage stretched out behind him into the impossible distance, a hundred metres, a thousand. The doors repeating themselves, the paintings on the wall a streaking blur of desaturated colours, and he saw the patients themselves. Lone transparent creatures ambling along the passageway. Some were still, and those were the more unsettling. They were resting against the walls, staring as he had found himself. Young and old, male and female. They were there.

  And Seth turned again and discovered the wall he’d been standing against had gone, and he was facing the same corridor from the opposite angle. And in the distance a figure he recognised. It was a man in a battered green parka holding a pencil thin torch. It was Seth.

  He could feel it, creeping inside his head, twisting his perception. The same trick as the doors used to hide themselves was at work on his senses, probing away at his resolve, trying to push onto him the delusion that he knew at his core to be false.

  Seth didn’t understand what was happening to him. His instinct was to turn and run back the way he’d come but as he moved his body around, the walls spun with him leaving him staring into an endless smear of corridors all with his image waiting for him at the end.

  Where the hell was Charlie when he needed him?

  He sat down slowly on the floor and folded his legs underneath him, ignoring the musty odour emanating from the carpet, and then Seth shut his eyes and tried to imagine a single candle burning in the darkness.

  Only, in the darkness of his closed mind, it wasn’t a candle he could picture, but a single wooden door, the door he’d seen that first time in his bedroom.

  His eyes snapped open, and he found himself once again at the end of the corridor, sitting cross-legged, the wall inches away from his face.

  He scrambled to his feet and saw that everything was as it had been when he’d first entered this section of the hospital. Whatever perception tricks it had wanted to throw at him, had been put aside for now and it left him with the sinking realisation that he had possibly made an incredibly stupid mistake in coming here on his own. He took out his phone but saw the familiar no signal message at the top of the screen. The proximity to the doors was to blame, it always interfered with electronics and phone signals were the most susceptible of all.

  A deep breath and Seth got to his feet and headed back the way he’d come, checking out the labels on the doors as he passed. And then he found it—treatment room 3. A neat metal badge was still attached to the door. A sliding indicator to show whether the room was being used or not, and Seth gingerly reached out a finger to touch the label.

  The door opened, seemingly of its own accord. Moonlight came through the narrow windows towards the top of the room and caught the strange apparatus. A chair of sorts, like a dentist’s, only this seemed more primal somehow, more improvised than anything he’d seen in a dental surgery. His torch light flickered as he waved it over the thing, a deep feeling of repulsiveness grew in him as he tried not to imagine what Adam would have been doing to his patients in that chair all those years ago. What had he done to Roy and the others to make them so convinced that they should follow him to the destruction of all that they knew and loved?

  Beside the chair, were several more pieces of equipment. Box-shaped and fixed to casters, there was a mass of cables coming from the backs of each of them and they all fed into each other in some chain of equipment that also had a ramshackle feel to it.

  It was hard to imagine that treatment could have been on Adam’s mind. Stepping into the room, Seth felt like he was taking a step down into some other place, a disconnected reality from the corridor outside.

  “I knew it was you.” The voice came from the shadows that shouldn’t have been there. Seth flashed his torch in that direction but the light beam failed to penetrate the darkness.

  “Adam,” Seth replied. “Couldn’t resist revisiting your old stomping ground.”

  “You took a risk coming here. I’m not sure it was the smartest move you’ll ever make, but perhaps it will be the last.”

  The door slammed closed behind him, and a figure stepped out from the dark at the far edge of the room. Adam looked every bit as murderous as he had when he’d last seen him on the top of the building, but the body he’d stolen was not looking good. Besides the missing eye, the fires had taken their toll on his body and he looked like he should drop at any moment. The skin looked crisp and blackened and there was a smell coming from his body that made Seth want to wash his nostrils out and never smell again. A smell like all the world’s refrigerators had gone broken and their doors were all suddenly opened.

  Seth charged at the monster. They both thundered backwards and Adam crashed into the wall. But before Seth could do anything more to
take advantage of the situation, a fist struck hard in his abdomen and Seth flew backwards across the room. The wall struck the back of his head and Seth could feel the approaching bliss of unconsciousness.

  23

  A building site was in full swing in the centre of Seth’s head. Seth tried to open his eyes but all he could manage was the briefest squint before the pain forced them shut again and he fell back into a fitful black void.

  The blackness would save him. The blackness was a blanket that would protect him from the monster in the haunted hospital.

  His eyes snapped open again.

  The monster.

  The hospital.

  It all came rushing back like an adrenaline fuelled recap of a favourite TV show. It was only when he tried to raise his hand to pull himself upright that he realised he was restrained.

  A light appeared above his head and he blinked. Fingers touched his skin and the smell of rancid meat struck his nostrils and he knew whom those fingers belonged to. He forced his eyes open again but the torch light struck his retinas and pain hit him. No hurry, he thought. Get him talking. Gather your wits.

  “How long have I been out?”

  “A few hours.” Adam’s voice was close, behind him. “I was worried you might not wake up at all.” His chuckle made the skin on Seth’s arms ripple with gooseflesh and instinctively he tried to pull his arms up but the restraints prevented that.

  Seth sighed and looked around. The pain in his head was subsiding just enough to allow him to think.

  “It was you I sensed earlier. How long have you been following me?”

  “If you will break into a man’s home, you’ve got to expect some repercussions. You have the other lot monitoring you as well. You’re a popular man.”