Movement.
The chamber, it seemed, wasn't quite so empty after all.
30
I froze, but only because I didn't know where to run. Without a light in my hand I felt adrift in the blackness. The concept of direction lost all meaning to me.
“Elizabeth?” cried Jake. He tugged at my sleeve, every bit as much to steady himself as to drag me closer. “It's her,” he insisted. “It's Elizabeth. She's in here somewhere.”
The scream—tortured and shrill—cut through the air again, though I admit I heard nothing of Elizabeth in it. “If you say so,” I replied, my eyes scanning the darkness. Somewhere nearby was another presence. It watched us from the shadows, I felt sure. Around some unseen corner, biding its time just beyond the flashlight's reach... “I think there's someone in here with us,” I blurted. “I saw someone move before I dropped my light.”
“Was it Elizabeth?”
I shook my head gravely. That burst of silent motion in the darkness may have been a lot of things, but I felt reasonably sure it hadn't been Elizabeth.
Jake led the way, stalking deeper into the room and calling out to his girlfriend. “Babe? It's me! Where are you? We're coming.”
The screaming went on, grew sharper. We struck out in a different direction, the source of the cries seeming to grow at once closer and yet more distant. The floor all looked the same, and with no features in our surroundings to lock in on visually, the feeling that we were drifting aimlessly through some void persisted. I felt dizzy, my stomach sloshing, and prayed that Jake's light might reveal something in the inkiness. I wasn't sure where my phone had landed, and just then I didn't care whether I ever saw it again.
The flashlight illuminated a sharp, metallic edge.
Then, drawing nearer, the outline of a writhing leg.
The foot was bare, sticking out from the edge of a crisp, white hospital gown.
“Elizabeth!” Jake ran towards her, knocking the wind out of himself as he struck the side panel of a boxy leather procedure chair. It was a shabby thing, with deep grooves along the armrests where wrists had been bound by thick steel manacles and fingernails had carved into the material in anguish. Elizabeth's wrists had been locked into the things, and as I got closer I noticed she wore a leather strap around her neck, intended to keep her head against the headrest. Her orange hair whipped this way and that as she struggled to free herself.
Jake and I both worked at the restraints, tugging at them impotently in the darkness. They'd been secured tightly, and it took a great deal of force to loosen the clamps that held them. When we'd made some progress on that front, Elizabeth wasted no time in wrenching her wrists free, breaking the skin in the process. Tearing the strap from her throat, she fell sideways out of the chair and collapsed in a blubbering heap.
“B-Babe, what are you doing here?” asked Jake. He held her, tried to comfort her, but for a time it was like she didn't even know he was there. Whimpering and tugging at her hair, she seemed frightened out of her mind. When she did open her eyes, glancing up at Jake and I in the sparse light, she had the look of a wild animal.
“Let's go,” I said, surveying the darkness once more. “I don't think we're alone here.”
Elizabeth calmed in her whimpering just long enough to see me proven correct.
A light slapping, as of bare feet striking the stone floors, resounded.
The three of us—Elizabeth included—froze. Clutching Jake's arms, she shook and said, “There's someone in this room.”
I nodded. “Who is it? Can you tell us who it is?”
“It can see us,” she uttered, one shaky hand placed over her mouth. “It can see us better this way, in the dark.” She bit her lip, the skin looking like it might snap between her teeth. “If you sit long enough, you can hear it.” Elizabeth looked to me in particular, asking, “Can you hear them?”
“What?” I asked. “Can I hear what?”
From across the room there came a small burst of whitish light. My cellphone's flashlight came back on suddenly, and in its glow I glimpsed a hazy, human silhouette. Pale, with lanky limbs, it stood a mere foot from where my phone sat, its head low. A mane of tangled black hair shielded all other characteristics from view, save one.
The figure held something in its hand that looked an awful lot like a meat cleaver.
Jake and I took Elizabeth's arms and hauled her to her feet. Then, all but dragging her, we dove into the darkened chamber in search of the door. In our mad flight we didn't dare to turn around and look at the figure. We could feel it following us. It was a very familiar sensation by now; all throughout our tour of the asylum we'd felt these eyes upon us, had felt this presence lingering.
We struck a solid wall and immediately began running our hands against it. No door to be found.
Edging to the right, keeping a firm hold on Elizabeth, who was sobbing and staring back at the figure, we searched everywhere for the huge metal door we'd come in through. Finally, after what seemed like an eternity of frightened groping, I felt the cold steel of the handle. “Here it is!” I shouted. With both hands, I pulled on the handle and heard a loud, metallic click. Then, with the power of a blue chip tackle, I struck the door and felt it fall open.
Nearly dropping the flashlight, Jake dragged Elizabeth out into the stairwell and then joined me in slamming the door shut. The red tape clung to our hands as we pulled away and began hiking out of the sub-cellar. All the while, Elizabeth wept, her gaze fixed over her shoulder.
I didn't slow down until we'd made it back into the basement. Resting with my back to the wooden door, I palmed the cold sweat from my eyes and tried to still the racing of my heart. “Have you seen Terrence?” I asked Elizabeth when she'd regained a bit of composure.
Cradling herself, she shook her head.
“What were you doing down there?” asked Jake. “Why'd you go off on your own?”
She dried her eyes and tugged on the edges of her gown. It was the only thing she wore; where her bag and clothing had gone was a mystery. “I heard... I heard a voice,” she explained. When we were in the stairwell, I heard a voice. It seemed to be coming from down in the basement, and so I went down there just to take a peek. I had planned to meet back up with you, but when I got down here I just felt so strange. And I kept hearing the voice. It kept speaking to me—I don't remember what it said—and I followed it. That's how I ended up down there.” She paused, gritting her teeth. “But it brought me down there and put me in that chair. It said that if I just stayed still, in the darkness, I'd be able to see it.”
Ordinarily I'd have called bullshit on this entire story, but after everything Jake and I had encountered in the past hour I didn't have much trouble believing that she'd been led astray by some presence. “And? Did you see who it was?” I asked. “Was it Enid?”
Elizabeth shook her head slowly. “I saw it,” she admitted with a shudder that rocked her entire frame. “It wasn't a person at all. But... But it was inside of Enid, once.”
Gripped by an icy terror, I looked to Jake. “Come on, let's move. We need to get out of here. Let's try and find the stairs.”
31
Our wandering through the basement began anew. We took turns shouting for the groundskeeper, but eons passed without our hearing his step. We had only the one flashlight between the three of us and wanted desperately to make it to one of the upper floors, where at least some of the lights still worked. Meandering down the hall as quickly as we could get the shaken Elizabeth to go, we kept our eyes peeled for a stairwell or some other feature that might lead us out of the basement level.
As before however, the passage we found ourselves in seemed to stretch on forever. We put what seemed like miles of blackness behind us, groped about moisture-slick walls and stepped over heaps of mold-ridden garbage without making visible progress. Trying to fight back both the despair and sheer terror that threatened to break me, I summoned up what little reason I still had left and attempted an explanation for this madde
ning trip through the cellar.
“The air down here,” I said, slowing down very slightly, “is probably full of mold spores. When you consider everything that's been happening tonight, there's a good chance that we've all breathed in something that's making us hallucinate.” I wished for a drink of water; all of this hiking throughout the complex had left me thirsty as hell. Unable to scratch that fundamental itch, I did the next best thing and lit up another Viceroy. The orange glow of a lit cigarette was a small comfort.
“Mold is one thing,” challenged Jake, “but there's something happening in this building that we can't explain. No mold I've ever seen can make you see things like this. Terrence would have warned us about it. And anyway, Elizabeth was led away from us by something.” He shook his head, guiding Elizabeth by the wrist. “Something is after us. It wants to separate us, to prey on us.”
“Looks that way,” I conceded. “Would be nice if all of us were just tripping on exotic mold, though.” I looked to Elizabeth. “So, what happened to all of your stuff?”
She shrugged. “I don't know... I don't remember any of that. I just remember going into that room. And then... I was in that chair. I can still remember its voice,” she said, wiping at her ears as though she might rid herself of the memory.
“What was it?” I asked. “A ghost?”
She shrugged again, the shoulder of her gown drooping to bare the ivory flesh beneath. “It didn't give a name. I don't think it was a ghost, though. It wasn't anything like a person. It was... it was an imitation of a person.”
An imitation of a person? What the hell is that supposed to mean? I took a pensive drag. “What did it want?”
“It wanted me to listen to it. And then... it wanted me to see it. I think it wanted to wear me,” she said, nesting close to Jake. “Like it wore Enid.”
“It wore Enid? Is that why she went off the rails?” Elizabeth didn't answer, likely because she wasn't sure. I pressed on. “That thing we saw back there looked kind of like Enid to me.” I recalled the figure we'd left behind in the sub-cellar chamber, standing aglow in the light of my phone. At least, I hoped that we'd left it behind. A thing like that, I reckoned, wouldn't be held back by a mere door, no matter its thickness. I had a nervous look around the passage, half-expecting to see the specter standing close-by. “Is that what lured you down there? That figure?”
She nodded. “But it's not Enid,” she was quick to explain. “It's an imposter. It remembers what she was like. It remembers how she moved, how she looked and acted. But it's not Enid. Enid's moved on. She moved on a long time ago. This other thing has been waiting for years. Gaining strength.”
Jake was losing his cool. “Can we talk about this later? Please, let's just focus on getting upstairs.” He adjusted the collar of his hoodie, looking past a gurney stacked with steel basins. “Hey, what is that?” He singled something out ahead, circling what appeared to be a small placard with the flashlight's beam.
STAIRS
A few feet away, hitherto buried in darkness, was a wooden door. Hurriedly putting out my cigarette, I rushed forward and gave the knob a turn. “I'll be damned. Stairs! Where have they been all my life?” The three of us crowded in the doorway and had a glance at the stairwell that opened up before us.
This one, thank goodness, seemed to lead back upstairs.
“All right!” said Jake, some of the old energy coming back to his voice. “This is the way out we've been looking for. Let's go back to the ground floor. We can find our way to one of the entrances easy once we've got some lights to work with.”
Elizabeth, though, wasn't feeling it. She stiffened, teary eyes darting about the hall. “Can you hear them?” she asked. “Can you hear them?”
I shook my head and gave her a light push into the stairwell. “Gonna be honest, I'm getting real tired of people asking me that question. What is it you hear?” I looked back into the hall before the stairwell door fell shut, and spied nothing there except for the yawning darkness.
“The dead,” she replied, her voice a breathy whisper. “If you sit and listen sometimes, you can hear the voices of the dead. They rise up from all around us, from cracks in the earth. That's how the dead tell you their secrets.”
I wasn't sure what to make of that cryptic talk and tried to shrug it off. Elizabeth had been through a lot and was allowed to ramble senselessly. But the more I thought about it, the more I wondered if that hadn't been what the dead kid on Main had meant when he'd asked me, with his final breath, “Can you hear them?” Maybe he'd heard the dead calling out to him in those final moments, had heard the sounds of the next life. Corvine had asked that same question over the phone. Perhaps his experiments in sensory deprivation had been intended to make contact with something. Maybe he'd wanted to listen to these “voices of the dead”. That a respected physician would dabble in such things would have seemed far-fetched if not for the cavernous isolation chamber we'd just seen. As things stood, I figured my guess was in the right ballpark.
We made our way up the flight of stairs quickly, and when we came upon the door to the first level, we wasted no time in bursting through it. We found ourselves at the center of some long, unlit corridor. It was dark, though at the far end of the hall I could make out the flickering of those sparse, unreliable bulbs I'd seen during our earlier wanderings. The sight of them made my heart soar. “All right!” I led the other two down the dark hall, towards the light. “Let's see where we're at.”
The rooms we were passing—spartan rooms often lacking in toilets and sinks—looked familiar to me, though something about them set me ill at ease. The doors to most sat open, giving us a look into their shadowed depths, but I couldn't for the life of me get over the sensation that, from a great and many of these rooms, something was looking back at us as we went by. Jake kept the light focused straight ahead, carving a path through the night-tinged hall, and only lowered it as we neared the flickering chandelier I'd pointed out.
That was when the last piece fell into place. I stopped abruptly at the bend, looking down the next stretch of hall and no longer much comforted by the chandelier overhead. “How... How did we...”
The other two seemed to share my dismay. They stared at the door before us, marked with a roman numeral III and a fair bit of red tape, in silence, though their terrified eyes said much.
“How did we end up here?” I managed to croak.
“We went up one flight of stairs, from the basement. But this... this is the third ward. That's supposed to be on the second floor, r-right?” whispered Jake. “Did we... did we go up two flights?” He looked to Elizabeth, but she was still staring at the door, chest heaving and eyes glazed over in fright.
From the other side of that door came a most unexpected sound.
The ringing of a telephone.
I tensed at the noise, taking a few steps towards the door and listening more closely. From somewhere just inside the ward, a phone was ringing off the hook. “Do you hear that?” I asked.
They nodded, sticking close behind me. “Where is it coming from?” squeaked Elizabeth.
“In here, just beyond the door.” I placed a hand against the cold metal of the door and left it there till I'd gathered the nerve to tear away the tape and push it open. The hinges groaned and the lights to our back flickered as I stepped into the third ward.
Except for one light, which brightened and dimmed, brightened and dimmed some distance down the hall, the ward we'd entered was completely dark. I waited for Elizabeth and Jake to come through the doorway and then trained my ears on the ringing. It was clearer now, closer, and upon borrowing Jake's flashlight it took me only a moment to discover the source. In a walled-off alcove that must have once served as a nurse's station, I discovered a countertop whereupon sat an old rotary phone. It rattled against the counter with each ring, a frayed cord jutting out of its back end like a rat's tail.
Stepping into the alcove, I looked back to my companions and motioned to the phone. It seemed poised to r
ing endlessly until someone answered it, and having tired of its shrill noise I picked up the receiver.
The ringing stopped. It was some time before I could muster up the nerve to bring the phone to my ear.
“H-Hello,” I said quietly, gripping the dusty receiver and waiting with bated breath for a reply.
What came in answer to my voice was not a single reply, but many. A mass of whispering voices rose up out of the silence in a harsh mass.
The voices were frail, but taken all at once they swelled into something like white noise. Try as I might I couldn't make sense of what I was hearing, and I moved to set the receiver down, only to drop it onto the counter. With a jerk I backed away and struck the wall with my back, nearly toppling Jake who stood close-by.
“What's wrong?” asked Elizabeth, stepping back into the hall. “Who was it?”
I couldn't answer her. Instead I dragged them from the nurse's station and tried not to hyperventilate. The phone I'd picked up, as it turned out, hadn't been connected to anything. I'd glimpsed the end of its cord, which had been rolled into a neat loop, hanging from the edge of the counter. And at the same time, I'd seen something else. Something—or, more accurately, many things—moving just beyond the edge of the alcove. “There's something in there,” I managed.
The whispers I'd heard hadn't been coming from the phone at all, but from the other side of that counter, where several pale figures could be seen to crouch in the shadow. They'd covered their faces with their bluish hands, one and all, and swayed back and forth against each other. I'd brought them to light for only an instant before my nerve had gone, but that had been enough. They were cadaverous things, with long, yellow nails much overgrown, and none among them wore a scrap of clothing. They looked like they belonged back in the morgue, like they were waiting to be autopsied.
Asylum: The Afterlife investigations #1 Page 18