The Wrong Goodbye

by Chris F. Holm

  I craned around in my seat to face him, and in so doing, knocked a spool of microfilm onto the floor, where it dutifully unraveled. I'm pretty sure I heard the old lady making bake-sale flyers at the photocopier snicker. "I swear, Gio, if you're calling me over there to watch another video of a monkey dancing, I'm going to be pissed."

  "No monkey this time, honest. Stop fucking with that thing and come over here, would you?"

  Turns out, Gio had found something: a series of hits about an old hospital nestled in a narrow box canyon a few miles outside of town. Abandoned since the Fifties, its sandstone façade was crumbling and decrepit, and it had been all but reclaimed by the desert that surrounded it. He had enough windows open to make my head hurt – I think people born into the digital age must be wired differently to process so much shit at once – but most of the hits were pretty useless: a piece from the local historical society, too dry to bother reading; a couple hikers' websites, chock full of photographs of the hospital and the surrounding desert; a video piece from the local NBC affiliate on the perils of teen drinking that highlighted a story of a kid who, several years back, fell to his death from a window of the abandoned structure while he and a bunch of his friends were out partying in the desert. I began to wonder what the hell Gio dragged me over here for.

  But as I read, there were others that were more illuminating. The minutes from a city council meeting in which the purchase of the old hospital was discussed. The results of a formal land survey – complete with map – submitted to the city by the developer, who declared his intent to build a resort upon the land in question, to take advantage of the natural sulfur springs that bubbled up from beneath the canyon floor. And the subsequent announcement on the city's website that all construction of the resort had ceased due to lack of funds.

  For each of them, the developer was listed as Walter Dumas.

  I clapped Gio on his borrowed shoulder, and fought the urge to do a little end-zone dance. His meaty face broke into a grin. "Nice work, Gio – this is perfect."

  "So what now?"

  "Print it. Print it all."

  It was dusk when we arrived back at the squat, and the house was submerged in shadow, the nearest working lights over two blocks away. The second we pulled into the driveway, I heard Roscoe screaming "HELP!" over and over again, to no one. He must've been carrying on like this a while; his voice was hoarse, and his calls sounded more rote than plaintive, as though his heart wasn't really in it anymore. He picked up a bit when he heard us coming in, but when he spotted me through the open bathroom door, he slumped against his restraints, and his shouting ceased. Seeing him there, glaring at me in petulant defeat from atop the unplumbed toilet, he looked for all the world like a child sentenced to a time-out.

  "Oh," he said. "It's you."

  "You been shouting like that the whole time?"

  "No," he said, too quickly.

  "I'll take that as a yes. Don't worry – it doesn't bother me any. It's just there's no one around to hear – you really could've saved your breath."

  "You two are gonna kill me, aren't you?"

  I laughed. "Roscoe, if we were going to kill you, you'd be dead by now – if only to save ourselves the trouble of carrying your ass around. Look, I know this sucks, OK? But tonight, I've got some business to attend to, and once that's done, me and Gio will be on our way. So just sit tight a while, and everything's gonna be just fine."

  "Fine. Right. Says the guy who thinks he's a Grim Reaper."

  "Roscoe, look at me. Whatever it is I think I am, I'm telling you, it ain't your time to die. Now, maybe I'm nuts, or maybe Gio was just fucking with you, but either way, I promise you you'll be just fine, OK?"

  He locked eyes with me a moment, and then he nodded. "Shit," he said, though it sounded more like SHEE-it. "I guess I believe you. And it ain't like I got nothing better to do, I suppose. But do an old man a favor, would you?"

  I smiled. Roscoe had no way of knowing it, but I had a few decades on him easy. "Name it," I said.

  "Whatever damn-fool thing you're fixin' to do tonight, you be sure to get it done and come back in one piece. Last thing I need is to die strapped to a toilet 'fore my divorce is even finalized – then that thieving devil-woman would wind up with everything insteada just half."

  I smiled. "It's a deal."

  "Oh, and one more thing – if it ain't too much trouble, that is."

  "Yeah?"

  "I could sure as hell use another beer."

  "So what's the plan?" Gio asked, once I got Roscoe settled down.

  Gio and I were in the midst of a convenience store feast, polishing off the last of the junk food we'd picked up that morning and washing it down with lukewarm beer. Truth be told, it was making me kind of queasy – or maybe that was the thought of what I was about to do.

  "The plan?"

  "Yeah – like, are we goin' in guns blazin', or what?"

  "Last I checked, Gio, we didn't actually have any guns."

  "You know what I mean. Whaddya use to take down a demon, anyway? You stake 'em or some shit? Hit 'em with holy water? There some kinda prayer you gotta say?"

  I shook my head. "None of that stuff works."

  "Then what does?"

  "Aside of a mystical object designed specifically to kill a demon? Pretty much nothing."

  A pause. "You got one of those?"

  "Nope."

  "Know where we can find one?"

  "Nope."

  "So what the hell're we gonna do then?"

  "We're not going to do anything. You're going to stay here and babysit Roscoe, while I go out there and see what I can find out."

  "So lemme get this straight: I'm supposed to sit here on my hands while you go pokin' around a demon crack-house fulla scary monsters that want you dead with no strategy, no backup, and no weapons of any kind?"

  "Yup."

  "Actually, you know what? My end of this plan don't sound half bad."

  "You sure?" I asked. "Because it's not too late to trade."

  Gio laughed. I took a pull of beer, and wished that it were something stronger.

  "Listen," I said, "there's a damn good chance I won't come back from this–"

  "Aw, come on, man, don't talk like that."

  "– and if I don't, you let him go and then you run, you hear me?"

  But Gio shook his head. "No need, man. You'll come back. And Sam?"

  "Yeah?"

  "Make sure you come back."

  21.

  Plumes of red-brown dust billowed outward from beneath the Caddy's wheels as it barreled through the hilly landscape north of town. I hadn't seen a paved road in over twenty minutes, and the steering wheel struggled against my grasp like a living thing. Storm clouds gathered over the mountains to the east, blotting out the rising moon, and the breeze was thick with the heady scent of creosote resin – a sure sign of coming rain. As darkness descended over the desert, my world shrank to whatever was illuminated by the jitter of my headlights as I jounced along the uneven dirt drive.

  Even with my map, I damn near missed the entrance to the box canyon. A stand of cottonwoods obscured its entrance, their thick foliage creating the illusion of a solid mass of rock when really it was cleaved in two. But something in the way the breeze disturbed the leaves gave me pause. A rock shelf should have sheltered them, but instead, they whipped about as though they were in a wind tunnel – which, upon closer inspection, they were.

  I ditched the car behind a thicket of tamarisk and plunged into the canyon. Lightning flickered in the distance, providing snapshots of the world around me. The entrance to the canyon was maybe twenty yards across. The canyon floor sloped downward, dense with scrub brush and mesquite, and strewn about with massive hunks of rock. A narrow ribbon of dirt, more trail than road, wound through it all, and disappeared into the nothingness beyond. And, without so much as a flashlight to guide my way, so did I.

  Mindful of the fact that the darkness that enveloped me would provide me little in the way
of camouflage to the keen eyes of any watching demons, I clung to the edge of the trail, taking shelter among the underbrush. It was slow going, and I stumbled more than once, tearing the knee of my suit pants and scraping the hell out of my palms. An hour in, the rain began, plastering my hair to my scalp and my clothes to my weary, borrowed frame, but I pressed onward, grateful that the noise of it would serve to mask my stumbling gait.

  Eventually, the ground began to rise, and above, the pitch-black shadows of the canyon walls gave way to the softer purple-black of storm clouds. A smell like rotten eggs hung in the air, mingling with the scent of desert rain. My pulse quickened, and I scanned the darkness for any sign of sentries or booby traps or the like, but as far as I could tell, there weren't any. Doubt crept in, and I wondered if I'd been wrong in coming here – if I was wasting my time chasing down a flimsy, dead-end lead as all the while the clock ticked down to Nothing.

  No. Dumas was here.

  He had to be.

  It was the graveyard I discovered first: several dozen simple wooden crosses encircled by a low iron fence, and jutting at odd angles from the uneven canyon floor. They'd once been painted white, it seemed, but a good long while out in the desert sun had seen to that; now they looked as gray and dead as the bones they served to mark.

  Beyond the graveyard sat a smattering of squat, stone ruins, built upon a series of rock terraces carved into the crook of the canyon, and linked by a winding set of stone steps. The smaller outbuildings scattered at the bottom of the incline were reduced to just a couple crumbling walls, but the large main building that presided over them was largely intact – and its windows flickered with candlelight.

  Looked like this was the place, after all. I wished like hell I had some kind of weapon; all of the sudden, this plan of mine didn't seem like the best idea.

  I scaled the steps, noting as I did the iron bars that still graced the framed-out, glassless window holes of the ruins that I passed. The bars seemed somewhat out of place on the windows of a hospital – not to mention, this campus was way too small to have required such a large cemetery on its grounds.

  That's when it clicked for me. What I was looking at. The town historians could call this place a hospital all they wanted – but this far out of town, with bars on every window and a goodly cache of bodies in the ground?

  This place was no hospital.

  This place was a sanitarium.

  Isolated. Reinforced. Impossible to escape. A prison in which to stash the terminally contagious, so that the healthy people of Las Cruces could go about their days unburdened by any worry about suffering and death. Once upon a time, I sold my soul to Walter Dumas to keep my Elizabeth from winding up someplace just like this. It's only fitting that I'd find him here tonight.

  As I approached the base of the main building, I abandoned the easy going of the stairway in favor of the rocky slope beside it. I skirted the building at a crawl, freezing every time I slipped and sent a cascade of pebbles pattering to the canyon floor, listening for any evidence I'd been spotted.

  But that sign never came. My approach, it seemed, was undetected. And as I circled the building, a hand against the coarse stone wall to guide my way, I discovered something. Or, rather, I discovered nothing – a patch of even deeper black within the darkness that enveloped me, a void where a wall was supposed to be.

  I felt around. It was a hole in the foundation, big enough to accommodate a man. Provided, of course, that the man in question didn't mind sucking in his gut and squirming under a clutch of wobbly rocks held in place by the barest hint of crumbling mortar, and each large enough to squeeze the breath from his lungs should they dare to fall.

  Lucky for me, I was just such a man.

  I tried feet-first, but no dice – the hole was maybe three feet off the ground, and once I stuck my legs inside, I couldn't reach anything to push off of to propel myself inside.

  Shit. Looked like I was going to have to go in head-first.

  The wall was damn near two feet thick. Chunks of masonry clawed at my clothes and skin as I scrabbled through the hole, leaving behind the subtle illumination of the canyon and plunging into darkness so complete I couldn't see my hands in front of my face. Stone shards sharp as glass bit into my palms. Phantom colors danced before my eyes, blotches of blue and red and yellow-green. I clenched shut my lids, but the blotches remained. My meat-suit's brain trying to make something out of nothing, I suppose. Not so different from how I'd be spending my eternity, if I didn't track down Varela's soul in time.

  The wall ended. I spilled forward. A good ten feet of empty space, and then I slammed into the packeddirt floor. For a moment, I just lay there, struggling to reclaim the breath that had been knocked from my lungs. Then I pushed myself up off the floor and took stock of where I was.

  There really wasn't anything to see. I mean there really wasn't anything to see. The room I was in was windowless, and as dark as the hole through which I'd entered – I couldn't tell if it was ten feet across, or a hundred. Somewhere in the darkness, water dripped, and the air was cool and damp, raising goosebumps on my exposed skin.

  My hands splayed out before me like a blind man's, I staggered forward, disoriented by the utter lack of light to guide my way. The ground was uneven, and scattered with detritus – the brittle crunch of paper, the ankle-rolling clink of glass vial against glass vial. Occasionally, my way was barred – the cold iron of an ancient boiler, which reeked like blood and rust; the dry creak of old bed-frames, their springs whining in protest as I shouldered a stack of them and nearly sent them crashing to the ground – and I was forced to feel my way around. The going was slow and laborious, and despite the cold, an acrid sweat sprung up across my face and neck – sweat borne of concentration, and of mounting fear.

  As I plunged deeper into the dank basement of the sanitarium, I noticed something: a strange, thick, scratching noise like sandpaper against wet wood. I stopped and listened. The sound was rhythmic and oddly repellent, and for the life of me, I couldn't tell where it was coming from. Suddenly, though, I knew exactly what it was – my every muscle tensing as realization dawned.

  It was breathing.

  Breathing, but not human.

  OK, I thought, no big. You're just blind and defenseless in a creepy, creepy basement with what is almost certainly a big, scary demon. So what say we see about leaving said basement before big, scary demon decides to earn that big and scary.

  I forced myself to take one step, and then another. It wasn't easy. My meat-suit's every instinct was leaning more toward curling up into a ball and crying. Of course, this meat-suit's former occupant asphyxiated in his own home when all he had to do was crack a window, so as far as I was concerned, its instincts didn't count for much.

  I inched across the room, hoping to spy something that would signal a way out. My progress was so halting, and the room so very dark, that at times I felt as if I was walking in place. And all the while, the sickening sound of the demon's breathing enveloped me, reverberating off the distant walls until it seemed to come from everywhere, and from nowhere at all.

  My foot came down on something soft and slick and alive – arm or leg or fucking tentacle for all I knew – and it recoiled beneath me. I pitched forward, falling to the floor. My heart banged out a drum roll in my chest as a massive, unseen hulk shifted noisily beside me in the darkness. But then it settled down again into what I assumed was a skiminduced slumber, the awful meter of its breathing like the devil's own metronome. And once I managed to stop trembling, I picked myself up off the floor and continued on.

  At the far end of the basement was a staircase. Well, half of one, at least. The bottom five steps had rotted out, and the sixth, which spanned the space between the two supports at chest height, appeared to be on its way – it was spongy and smelled sickly sweet like fallen leaves after a rain. But at the head of the stairs was an open doorway, through which spilled the faintest hint of candlelight, so one way or another, I was getting up there.
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br />   I placed my palms atop the sixth step and pressed, testing to see if it would hold my weight. It sagged and crumbled like wet paper. I wrapped my fingers around the edge of the one above it and pulled until my toes lifted off the ground, and the wood began to crack. Not great, but good enough. The only problem was, I had no leverage – I'd left my sling back at the squat, but thanks to my tangle with the bug-monster, my right arm wasn't of much use. And there was no way I was going to be able to hoist myself up there on the strength of my left arm alone.

  After a moment's consideration – and another few moments of trying to talk myself out of it – I decided I had no choice but to go back and retrieve a bedframe from the pile.

  Back through the stifling darkness.

  Back past that unseen thing.

  With a steeling breath, I retreated from the faint illumination of the doorway above, plunging once more into the absolute black of the basement. The creature in the darkness shifted, and its breathing hitched and skipped – its sleep turning fitful perhaps as the skim left its system?