Glancing over my shoulder, I stopped. “Hold on, where's Elizabeth?”
Terrence and Jake both halted.
“I thought she was behind you,” said Jake, his voice casting a hint of blame.
“I thought she was behind me, too,” I replied. I took a few steps back, wondering if she hadn't slipped into one of the rooms we'd passed, but I neither saw nor heard any trace of her.
Terrence shuffled past me, making a beeline for the stairs we'd just come from. “She kept going,” he muttered.
“Kept going where?” asked Jake.
“Downstairs.” He pointed at the floor. “She went down to the basement without us. Must've pulled a fast one while we had our backs turned.”
26
At kicking open the door to the basement, we were struck by the smell of moisture. From some nearby pipe or sewer grate there came a steady dripping, which became all the more pronounced as we stood and listened for Elizabeth.
She'd been quick on her feet and was no longer in sight. With their flashlights, the other two took turns searching their respective sides of the hall, bringing to light our damp, cluttered surroundings. The air here tasted foul, like a rainy autumn day gone bad, and an awful chill haunted the subterranean passage which caused the sour air to cloud very slightly with every breath. A stack of cardboard boxes stood before me, slumping against the wall in a single warped mass. The things had been worn down into pulp by the dampness and had fused into one gelatinous, brown whole. A succession of old hospital beds, their components badly rusted, stretched on to the left, while the scene to the right showcased a gurney whose once-white padding had gone black with mold.
“Where the hell could she have gone?” I asked. “She couldn't have made it too far.” I tried calling out her name, shouting through the passage, but the way my voice came back and hit my ears didn't sit well. The acoustics of the space made for a harsh, unsettling echo.
Terrence kept listening, taking a few exploratory steps to the right where he shoved away the mold-ridden gurney. “There's a lot of ground to cover,” he said. “If she ain't careful, she's gonna end up lost. Or worse...”
“What is she even doing down here?” asked Jake. “We told her not to! Why the hell doesn't she listen?”
“We're going to split up,” I announced, giving his shoulder a firm shake. “And when we find her,” I continued, “we're getting the fuck out of here. I agreed to come take a tour of this place, but I won't stay here and let her put herself—or any of us—at risk of injury. This has gone too far. If we split, is there any way for us to stay in touch? Do cellphones work down here?”
Terrence shook his head. “No, not down here. You'd have to go outside of the building to place a call.” He began down the hall, leaving the two of us behind. Before he did so, he shared with us one bit of advice. “Remember where this stairwell is at. The basement ain't like the other floors. It's got lots of passages—some of them long and winding. If you can't get back to a stairwell you could end up stuck down here. It's a maze; you could wander for a good hour without seeing the same spot twice. If you find her, meet me back here, at the stairs. Or you can meet me back in the parking lot. The back entrance door is still unlocked.”
My sense of direction, especially in the damp and the dark, was nothing to write home about. Nevertheless, I took this kernel of advice to heart and led Jake in the opposite direction. Pulling my cellphone out of my pocket, I turned on the flashlight app and doubled the available light.
Though, if we're being honest, navigating the basement in the dark might have been wiser. The moisture-swollen refuse that crowded in from both sides cast strange shadows as our lights washed over it. Just ahead sat a toppled wheelchair, beneath which there stared the blank, malformed face of a CPR mannequin, mouth slightly ajar. From a box which teemed with yellowed hospital gowns came a sudden burst of rustling and the emergence of a long, fuzzy tail.
We quickened our step.
“This was her plan all along, wasn't it?” I griped. “She wanted to come here and go off on her own from the very beginning. What did she think she was going to find in this basement?”
Jake shook his head. “I dunno, man. I dunno. Like I told you, she's always been big into this ghost shit. But she's never... she's never done anything this reckless before.”
I looked over my shoulder and found that Terrence was now completely out of view. I couldn't even see his light breaking the darkness. Pausing, I placed a finger to my lips and listened for a few moments, hoping to pick up the sound of her footsteps.
Except for a nearby dripping, there was silence.
The silence down here, like the pervasive cold, felt profoundly unnatural to me. All of the junk that had been abandoned down here to grow heavy with moisture had a way of smothering noise. The sodden boxes and discarded furniture were a kind of soundproofing that stifled even the sounds of our own footsteps.
I cast my light about the walls, zeroing in on a sweaty wall of stone. Water from some upstairs source trickled very neatly into a circular puddle below. I spied a door not a few steps beyond the puddle, its seams blocked in peeling red tape and a sign fastened to it that read CUSTODIAN. I nodded to the door, studying the tape. “Doesn't look like she went in there. If she went this way, then she went further ahead.”
Jake ambled ahead, finding himself standing at a junction where the passage branched off into two new segments. “Shit,” he uttered, “which way do we go?”
I stepped into each of the new hallways, looking for signs of recent passage. There were some fallen boxes and misplaced bits of furniture, but nothing that gave a clear clue as to her route. I looked elsewhere for clues, scanning the walls and ceiling. Skittering across the wall at meeting the light, a brown spider hid behind a waist-high pile of old wooden chairs. Upon the ceiling hung a sign from a pair of rusty chains, which put a name to the different passages we had to choose from. Going to the left would apparently take us in the direction of WASTE RESOURCES/HYDROPTHERAPIES. To continue straight ahead would lead us to a section marked SURGICAL/THERAPY. The path to the right led to a single destination, if the sign was to be believed. MORGUE.
“OK, let's think. Get in Elizabeth's head. She came down here on her own, looking for God knows what. Which way would she go if she saw this sign? What option would she pick?” I asked, fearing that I already knew the answer. With a sigh, I gave the right-hand passage a cursory glance, finding it clearer of clutter than the rest. “I'll bet she went to the goddamn morgue, didn't she?”
Jake's throat quivered and he paced around in a circle. “W-We're not gonna split up, are we? We're gonna stick together, right?”
I rolled my eyes. “What's this? Getting clingy with me, are you? You like me all of a sudden?” Sighing, I held the light over my head and looked again into the passage which would lead us to the morgue. “No, of course not. We need to stick together. Terrence knows where he's going, which is why he can go off on his own. The two of us don't have that benefit, though.”
With evident relief, Jake tucked one of his hands into his hoodie pocket and shot me a frail smile. “Listen, professor, I'm sorry I gave you so much shit before. I didn't mean it, I was just—”
I threw up a hand. “Save it, kid. You know what I'm sorry about? That I ever said yes to this nightmare of a trip. But when we've found your girlfriend we're going to get the hell out of here and call it quits. If she still wants to continue her club we'll do something different—walk around a graveyard or something. No more of this asylum shit.”
He nodded. “Sounds good to me.”
We took turns shouting her name, the choked echoes hanging in the air. There was no reply.
And then, on the floor, my light fell upon something that caught my eye.
It was a footprint, wet and well-formed. More than that, it was fresh. I pointed to it, kneeling. “What's this?”
Jake studied the mark with a furrowed brow and then found what appeared to be a second one just a short d
istance away.
And a third.
We'd picked up on Elizabeth's tracks, it seemed. They led in the direction of the morgue. Still, this find left me with some questions. “Why the hell is she barefoot?” I asked. “If she steps on something in here without her shoes on she could end up in the hospital.”
Jake followed the trail of prints a short distance, licking his lips nervously. “A-Are you sure they're hers?” he asked, a slight tremor in his voice.
“Who else's?” I snapped. Spying the fright in his eyes, I found even myself reconsidering the prints, however. There was a remote chance, I had to admit, that these prints weren't hers, and that there was someone else wandering the basement with us, other than Terrance. The thought of some barefoot wanderer walking through these pitch dark halls sent a surge of dread through me, but I tried not to think about that possibility. “No, they have to be hers. This place is kept under lock and key. There aren't any squatters... we'd have seen or heard them by now.” I cleared my throat and began following the trail. “They're very fresh. She can't have gone far. We probably just missed her.”
We started for the morgue, plunged into a contemplative silence as we scanned the passage for any signs of Elizabeth. It occurred to me that she'd been wearing her strawberry-scented body spray that night, though as we walked, I could detect no trace of it in the air. Only the scents of moisture and dust reached my nostrils. If these really were Elizabeth's footprints, made only minutes ago, then I should have been able to smell at least a whiff of the stuff. I told myself that the prevailing stench of the cellar was simply too overpowering and kept walking.
There were light fixtures in the ceiling, mostly long things with broken fluorescent bulbs in them. They looked like they hadn't worked in ages and swayed gently on their brittle chains as we passed. The prints on the floor had not faded; in fact, the longer we walked, the more wet and defined they seemed to become. Perhaps Elizabeth had fallen, gotten soaked in one of the puddles that seemed to accumulate in every corner of this damp basement, and was now trying to find her way back upstairs?
Some twenty feet from the enormous metal doors blocking the way to the morgue, I thought I felt someone watching me. Jake seemed to feel it too because, rubbing at the back of his neck and turning, he brought his light around and cut through the darkness to our backs. There was nothing, of course, but the grotesque shadow cast by a mesh bag full of crumpled linens.
I motioned to the doors. Made of polished steel, with square, frosted windows set in them, they looked about the cleanest things in the entire asylum and reflected our lights back at us like a mirror. “Looks like we made it,” I muttered. Though no bodies had been stored there for many years, the idea of barging into a morgue tied my guts into knots. I recalled the kid who'd died in my arms on Main street and pictured him waiting for me inside, laying out on a cold slab. Banishing the thought, I set off for the doors. “She's probably in there. Let's go.”
The footprints continued right up to the outside of the door, and it was there, when I was about to reach for the handle, that I noticed a dense, black shadow in the square window. I startled, my breath caught in my throat. “Elizabeth?” I managed to ask without choking.
The shadow darted from view, the thing that cast it disappearing into the morgue.
“She's inside,” I replied. “I saw her.”
Jake held his flashlight in both hands like a lightsaber, standing behind me. He, too, had seen the shadow, but didn't seem altogether convinced it'd been his girlfriend. Looking down at the prints on the floor, he asked, “A-Are you sure it was her?”
Suddenly, I wasn't so sure anymore.
But I reached out and shoved open the creaky door to the morgue anyhow.
27
The inside of the room—smaller than I'd imagined—was a blur of stainless steel. Steel doors lined the walls, behind which were probably steel shelves sturdy enough to support the weight of human bodies. Steel sinks, two in total, sat equidistantly to the right and left of a long, steel table that had probably been used at one time to examine the dead.
Elizabeth's absence did not go unnoticed, however.
Not only could I find no sign of her from where I stood, but the trail of wet footprints had suddenly and inexplicably ceased just outside the door. The floors of the morgue were dusty white tile, and across them, despite a long search, I couldn't find any foot-shaped breaks in the dust that covered them.
Jake wasn't interested in looking around and waited back near the door, squeezing the life out of his flashlight. “I-I thought you said she was in here,” he said, knees buckling. “Where is she, then? We followed the footprints...”
I walked a complete circuit around the room, my heart working its way up into my throat. I was getting a bad feeling about all of this. I'd been carrying dread around with me since the moment we'd walked into the building, but what accosted me now was more intense, more arresting. Call it a sixth sense, if you want, but I had a terrible feeling we were about to walk straight into a trap. We needed only to trip the right wire, and wouldn't know we'd done it until it was too late.
I felt strongly that there was something in the room with us, but it wasn't something I could see with my eyes. If it did show itself to me, then it was going to do it on its own time. I paused before the mortuary coolers and reached out for the handle. “Don't go to pieces,” I said, every bit as much for my benefit as for Jake's. “Maybe... maybe she's hiding in one of these coolers,” I suggested.
“You're not seriously going to open those things, are you?” His face was bone white, and in the light he held so close I could see his eyes trembling in their sockets. Gone was his usual facade of toughness. I was standing in the room with a scared little boy.
The door disengaged with a click. I held my breath and took a step back, letting it fall open, and then raised my light to have a look.
It was empty.
There were shelves, thick things like baking sheets, but nothing was stored upon them except for what looked like toolboxes filled with metal instruments.
“Nothing,” I said, shutting it and turning to the next. There were three such doors in total, and before I could psych myself out, I yanked open the second.
It may have only been a shadow cast by a trunk of surgical implements, but I thought I sensed movement within the second cooler. I braced myself, loosed a small gasp, and held out the light with a quiver.
But there was nothing.
Wiping at my light-starved eyes with the back of my hand, I shook my head and slammed the door shut, turning to the last in the stretch. “She's not in here. It seems... it seems we were mistaken.” It was a tough pill to swallow, considering the fact that we'd followed a trail of prints down the hall to this very spot. If those hadn't been Elizabeth's, then whose were they? And where was the maker of those prints now?
I tried not to think about it, wrapping my hand around the stocky metal handle of cooler number three. Just when I was moving to open it, I heard something, a voice from close-by, and I suddenly let go of the handle as though it'd burned me.
“Can you hear them?” asked the voice.
“What did you say?” I asked, turning to Jake, who remained cowering near the entrance.
He stared back at me blankly, shrugging. “I didn't say anything.” When I refused to let him off the hook and had fixed him in a stern gaze, he continued. “Really! It wasn't me, man. What'd you hear?”
I raked a hand through my hair, sucking in a deep breath. Returning to the cooler, I began to open it, only to pause half-way. From the seam of the door leaked a low whisper that sent my heart hammering in my chest.
“Can you hear them?” asked the voice on the other side of the door.
It was coming from inside the cooler.
As furious as I was frightened, I grit my teeth and threw open the door, the hinges giving a loud crack as I did so. My light flashed across the polished steel interior and came back at me, hurting my eyes.
; What I saw within sent me reeling back towards the slab, where I dropped my phone and sent Jake into hysterics.
“Shit! What is it, man?” He clawed at the door to his back, preparing to flee the morgue and leave me to my own devices.
I clawed my phone up off of the floor and held it close, slumping onto my ass and looking up into the interior of the third cooler with a mist of cold sweat forming upon my brow. The thick metal shelves cast queer shadows throughout the inside of the thing, all three of them empty. But that hadn't been the case only moments ago. Where now, upon gaining my feet, I found only an empty cooler, I had seen something upon first opening it that had hit me like a kick to the gut.
There'd been a reflection of something within that cooler. It'd been a face staring back at me from the polished metal—a white, misshapen face with enormous black eyes. I considered for just an instant that it'd been a perversion of my own reflection, but somehow that explanation didn't stick. The dimensions had been different, and the face had been too close, too detailed.
Wheeling around, I scanned the entirety of the morgue with my light, wondering if I wouldn't find the grinning specter standing behind me. I only found Jake, his hands clumsily negotiating the handle of the main door and his wet eyes wide with terror.
“What's in there?” he demanded, making himself very small as he pressed against the wall.
Shaking, I slammed the cooler door shut and leaned against the slab. I shook my head, tried to reply, “Nothing”, but my voice was gone. My mouth was parched. My tongue felt like it might split in two. I knew that I must be losing it, that the darkness and stress of this visit were wreaking havoc on my mind and making me see things that weren't really there.
I blamed my frail nerves because considering the alternative was too terrible.
Even so, the feeling of being watched, of being accompanied in this room by some other presence, did not abate.
Asylum: The Afterlife investigations #1 Page 16