by H. P. Bayne
His instincts told him Gerhardt was in this up to his eyeballs.
“Why don’t you tell us your version of what happened?” Dez said.
“My version? You mean the truth? I was at work and my wife stayed home with David. I received a frantic call from her that afternoon, telling me the police were there and that someone had taken David. The police investigated the matter thoroughly as far as Eloise and I went. We were questioned as suspects and nothing came of it, for one simple reason: We had nothing to do with it. Some lunatic sat there, outside our yard, and waited for the opportune moment. When Eloise went to answer the phone, the man took my son.”
That story matched what Gerhardt had told the police at the time, and the one that had become the version of events that had gone out to the media. That told Dez the police, at least, had believed it.
“What happened between you and Eloise afterward?” Mara asked.
“What happens to many couples who lose a child. We fell apart. We blamed each other, we blamed ourselves. We grew distant and barely spoke. She didn’t tell me of her plans to leave, simply left a note stating she couldn’t bear to live in that house anymore, couldn’t bear life without David in it. I found the note when I arrived back from work one day, and I called the police. I thought perhaps she’d gone off to kill herself. When she didn’t return, I became convinced of it. It never occurred to me she’d been murdered. This psychic of yours, how reliable is he?”
“Reliable,” Dez said.
“Who is he?”
“I’m not at liberty to share that info. What I can tell you is that I’m willing to help you find the answers you’ve been looking for.”
Gerhardt sat back and crossed his arms. “And what makes you think I want your help? You’ve questioned me, my methods, my very character. I’ve ordered you to stay away from Lockwood, and yet here you are. You’ve made it very clear you blame me for Sullivan. Why should I trust you with this investigation?”
“Because you have no choice,” Dez said. “You’ve spent years torturing psychics for answers you couldn’t find any other way. We’re giving you an opportunity here, a chance to finally lay this to rest.”
“And you’ll do this for me out of the goodness of your heart, will you?”
Dez was about to reply, but Mara beat him to it. “Not after what you put Sully through. We have a favour to call in, and we’ll expect some quid pro quo before we turn over any significant information.”
Gerhardt’s smile reminded Dez of a snake. “Ah, so now we come to the crux of the matter. What is it you’re looking for, precisely?”
This was the part Dez hadn’t been sure about. How much could they comfortably share with Gerhardt before they put themselves and their loved ones into a lethal spot?
Mara provided another answer, one that made Dez even more grateful for her presence here.
“You carry a lot of secrets, Doctor, many your job requires you to keep. We’d never dream of asking you to breach the confidence of other families. What we want—what we will demand—are the secrets you carry about our family. We’ll help you solve your family’s mysteries if you help us solve ours.”
Mara stood, ending the conversation without awaiting an answer, forcing Dez to do the same.
“We’ll be in touch,” she said, offering Gerhardt a cool smile.
Then she left the office, leaving Dez to trail behind her. He glanced back as he passed into the hall, too curious about Gerhardt’s response to play this as cool as Mara had. Gerhardt wasn’t looking at him, eyes fixed upon the surface of his desk. Whether the man suspected what Mara had been hinting at was unknown, but it was clear he was deep in thought about something.
Gerhardt looked up just before Dez could turn to follow Mara.
“Be careful, Mr. Braddock,” he said. “You have no idea how far I’m willing to go to find the answers I need.”
Dez’s lips formed a humourless grin. “Finally, something you and I have in common.”
21
Caraganas had grown over portions of this part of Lockwood, obscuring windows and concealing sections of wall that had been allowed to crack with time and weathering.
At Lockwood’s inception, this stone construct was the entirety of the institution, with the main building erected nearer the turn of the century. Lockwood had taken advantage of its new space, launching itself into a new era of mental health treatment. It became not so much an asylum as a place of treatment, and it quickly filled its rooms. The old institution, the home of so much trauma—the site of everything from electroshock to lobotomies—was eventually closed down. Sully had heard blame placed on the presence of asbestos in its walls and ceilings, but he suspected the full answer went beyond the structural. This building held secrets, dark ones the modern-day board members would as soon be kept buried deep within the past.
Talk of demolition had begun, but it had yet to happen. Sully suspected Gerhardt, and possibly even Lowell, had something to do with it. Destruction of the old wing would mean the loss of their experimental space. Connected as it was to a collection of human lab rats—the kind who would talk without being believed—there could be no better location in all of Kimotan Rapids.
Sully followed closely behind Emily as she emerged from the shadow of the woods encircling the hospital grounds. Lachlan remained a fixture at the woman’s side while Forbes, who’d caught up partway through their trek, kept as far from the private investigator as he could. An obvious friction existed between the two men, Lachlan possessing the kind of investigative brilliance and acquired respect every working cop aspired to. Forbes’s own gifts as a cop ran more to dogged determination, the kind of persistence needed to see plodding investigations through to an end. While equally necessary, stubbornness just didn’t come with the same star quality as Lachlan’s brand of near-psychic skill in gauging the truth behind a case.
The two men seemed to have agreed to put their mutual dislike aside, though, cooperation and silence required as the unlikely group made its way toward the old wing.
Emily led them to the farthest end of the building. From here, Sully could just make out a portion of the grounds toward the front of the main institution, and several groups of people were visible as they talked. The tinkle of laughter was a distant sound, far enough Sully knew he and his companions could speak without fear of being overheard. Still they kept any thoughts they carried to themselves, following wordlessly as Emily led them from the shelter of the woods and into the few yards of open space separating trees from the building’s edge.
In her gloved hands, Emily held the set of keys Sully had pilfered from the Gerhardt house as she pressed between a pair of caragana bushes. It sounded like she said something to Lachlan, and he responded by pushing away some branches, enough to allow Emily to move forward more easily.
It was also enough to reveal a doorway lying at the base of a short set of steps, one the bushes rendered invisible to all but the most knowing eyes.
Sully, with Forbes at his left flank, pushed forward, branches poking at his clothes as he listened to Emily’s progress. The jangle of keys suggested she was looking for the right one, and it took a full minute before another sound reached his ears: that of a rusty lock being turned.
The door was unlocked, but entry, it turned out, wouldn’t be quite so easy. Lachlan slipped on a set of gloves and took Emily’s place, and thudding sounds reached Sully’s ears even as Emily stepped up to him.
“Something’s holding the door shut,” she told Sully. “If my guess is correct, I’d say Dr. Gerhardt had the entrances sealed off from the inside after Nate and I helped you and your mother escape back then.”
“Probably boarded up,” Forbes said. “It’ll need a more forceful touch than Lachlan will manage.”
Sully wasn’t convinced. Lachlan had reached retirement age, but he was far from weak. Even so, Sully joined Forbes in ducking past the caraganas to reach the door. Lachlan was putting his shoulder unsuccessfully to it, and he turned na
rrowed eyes on Forbes as the younger man tapped him on the upper back.
“What?”
“Let me have a go at it,” Forbes said. “Some things need a younger man’s touch.”
Lachlan’s face cracked into a derisive smirk. “Then you should step aside and let Sullivan at it.”
Forbes’s snort was more that of an angry bull than an amused recipient of a joke. Luckily, he possessed other bovine qualities that might come in handy: Forbes wasn’t tall, but he was solidly built, a short wall of bulky muscle.
Lachlan returned to the other side of the caraganas, and Sully stepped back as much as he could to allow Forbes the room to move. The cop gave the door two precursory shoulders that did little before deciding a kick might be the better option. Forbes jammed his hands into a pair of leather gloves, then gripped the doorframe and lifted a foot. One kick—a solid one by any measure—resulted in nothing but a pained grunt. A second one, though it came with a slight sound of splintering, ended in a loudly muttered curse.
“Maybe we can go through a window,” Lachlan suggested to Emily from the other side of the bush.
“It won’t work,” she replied. “The windows are barred.”
Forbes glanced back at Sully, his expression a combination of annoyance and his usual brand of stubborn determination. “This bitch isn’t budging. How about I shoulder while you kick? Aim for the spot just above the knob. That seems to be where the block is most solid.”
Sully took up Forbes’s position, slipping into his own set of gloves as the cop contorted his body to deliver a shoulder blow while avoiding any impact from Sully’s boot. Then the two of them went at the door together.
Whatever barricade had been constructed on the door’s inner side was a solid one, enough to rattle Sully’s teeth as his first kick connected. Yet he felt a little give, enough that Forbes turned hopeful eyes on him.
“One more,” the cop said. “Count of three.” Forbes counted down without an acknowledging reply, and Sully gave another hard boot to the door as Forbes finished the count.
A loud splintering noise sounded, and it took a final good kick from Sully to send the door crashing inward, a large piece of two-by-four clattering to the floor.
“Quiet,” Lachlan scolded as he brushed between Sully and Forbes, flashlight in hand and clicked on.
“There wasn’t exactly a quiet option,” Sully said.
Forbes settled on a more direct response before following Lachlan. “Asshole.”
Sully held the bush back to allow Emily to pass more easily beneath its branches. Her fingers found Sully’s forearm and squeezed gently.
“Are you ready for this?” she asked.
He nodded, the expression an unspoken lie. He wanted to be anywhere else right now. Until this moment, he’d had little recollection of how he’d been brought down to the Blue Room, but Lachlan’s flashlight bobbing against dusty tiled walls had jarred something loose inside his brain. He saw the tile in his mind, softly illuminated within dim lighting as he bumped along a cracked floor in a wheelchair, brain barely aware, body unresponsive beneath the weight of drugs.
Another gentle squeeze at his arm drew him out of the hazy past, and he looked down to find Emily’s bespectacled eyes gazing up at him. “Sullivan?”
“I’m okay,” he said. “Just remembering something.”
“Try not to,” she said, then took his hand as she led him gently into the basement hall.
Sully paused to close the door, sealing them in darkness. He located the flashlight feature on his phone, his flash cutting only a little into the press of shadows as he guided Emily inside. A short distance ahead, Lachlan’s flashlight had stopped, its beam fixed on the ground at Sully and Emily’s feet as he waited for them.
“Where to?” Lachlan’s voice was a muted echo on tile, one Emily responded to by moving quickly into the beam, drawing Sully along behind her. She took the light from Lachlan in her free hand, casting it down the hall and on various doors.
“The old treatment room is this way,” she said.
The old treatment room. Sully didn’t need to ask to know it was the place Harry had called the Blue Room, its sky-blue walls a deceptively soothing colour likely intended to calm unwilling patients for old-school, torturous procedures.
During his own experience at Lockwood, Sully had been heavily drugged, enough that he’d seen or felt none of the ghosts he might have expected to otherwise see in a place so full of trauma. He was no longer similarly limited.
Dimly lit forms emerged from the shadows around him. A woman, bald and drooling, in a wheelchair. A man, body rocking as he sat curled on the floor, pulling hard at shaggy hair. Most unnervingly, a wild-eyed woman, face partially concealed beneath a tangle of matted hair, moving along at his left shoulder, so close he would have, in life, felt her breath on his neck.
He did his best to ignore the ghosts, but the challenge wouldn’t be an easy one, even with his hood acting as partial barrier. These were, after all, only the ones he could see, each apparently the victim of an unlawful death. But there were others, many others, ones who had died whether by illness or their own hand. He couldn’t see them, but there was no ignoring the weight of them in this place, the creeping sensation of dread and desperation they emitted as he moved around them and through them.
Emily had yet to release his hand, and he tried to derive what comfort he could from the touch as he forced himself onward.
Emily paused briefly partway down the hall. Her lips parted in the castoff glow of the flashlight, a signifier of yet-unspoken words. He waited, wondering what she was deciding to say.
Finally, she made up her mind, shining her light on a partially opened door. “That’s the room where you were born,” she said.
Shadow lay beyond the door, the promise of further darkness beyond.
“You were born here?” Forbes asked. “Jesus.”
“Do you want to go in?” she asked.
Sully shook his head before she’d even finished the question. No, he didn’t want to go in. He wanted to get the hell away from this room as fast as was humanly possible.
Emily must have read the need in his eyes because she immediately turned and kept going, distancing them from the room and the terrible secrets it held. Lucky Dule had been kept against her will there, had been subjected to God knows what while carrying the unborn baby of the man who’d put her there. This place, all of it, was the stuff of nightmares, and Sully wanted nothing more than to burn all of it to the ground.
He hadn’t said it out loud, but with Emily, he didn’t need to.
“We’ll find justice for her, Sullivan,” she said. “I won’t rest until we do.”
“Thank you,” was all he could think of to say. The expression of his gratitude was nowhere near enough, not for this little eighty-something-year-old lady who had nearly sacrificed her own life to ensure Sully had a chance at one.
They continued on, putting a few more doors between themselves and the room. Here, they were closer to the old elevator and the stairs that would lead them to the current institution. Somewhere near here, he knew—somewhere near enough to set his skin crawling—was the Blue Room.
Lachlan found it first. Light burst from the room as a switch inside was flicked, revealing electricity had not been cut off to the old wing despite its supposed disuse.
“I’ve got a treatment room here,” he said, head popping out from the doorway to announce the find. Forbes, too, disappeared inside, leaving just Sully and Emily in the hallway.
“You don’t have to go in,” she said. “We can wait right here.”
It was a good thought. As much as Sully hated the darkened hallway and its ghosts, he liked far less the idea of entering that space ahead, the light bright enough inside to reveal in detail the room that held so much trauma for him.
Yet, deep inside himself, he knew he had to face this. It would be easier with Dez, their mom or Eva at his side, but Emily was fine replacement, one he knew he could t
rust to watch out for him.
“It’s okay,” he said. “I need to do this.”
She gave his hand a squeeze but didn’t make a move toward the room, letting him take it at his own pace. Unfortunately, there wasn’t a pace in existence that would make this any easier.
Sully stepped forward, closing the distance, keeping his eyes on the dusty floor as he moved. In the light, he could see the trail there, a worn path through the dust made by feet and wheels coming and going from the old elevator. He waited until the moment he’d crossed fully into the Blue Room, when the darker tile of the hallway turned to dusty, clinical white. Only then did he look up.
His eyes bypassed Lachlan and Forbes, went immediately to the bed. He knew he was still standing here, at the entrance to the room, but his mind took him elsewhere. He was no longer on his feet, but restrained on the gurney, Gerhardt coming at him with a syringe while Hackman stood over him with a smirk. He was feeling the prick of the needle in his arm, the sensation of the chemical as it flowed into his vein. He was sinking, further and further, fog separating him from the here and now as the drug took him under. Then, with the press of an object into his hand, a memory not his own exploded in his consciousness until, inevitably, he experienced a ghost’s horrific, terrifying death.
Panic seized him, robbing him of breath. He heard a voice, then two, tugging on his consciousness, the way he would hear Dez or their mom or Eva or Ara as they sat with him in Lockwood’s visiting area.
A woman’s voice—Emily’s—reached him first, but it was a deeper, firmer one that broke fully through the haze.
“Sullivan, breathe. Come on. You’re okay. Look at me. Hey! Look at me!”
He felt a firm grip on his chin and his head being tweaked to the side. A series of none-too-gentle slaps to his cheek. Then, at least, the fog parted, revealing not Emily or Lachlan in front of him, but Forbes.
Sully blinked once, twice, forcing the remains of the flashback from his brain. Somehow, he’d ended up on the floor, seated and curled against the wall. Forbes was kneeling in front of him, Emily standing just to the side. Lachlan stood back near the bed, but headed for the door and left the room the moment it was clear Sully was okay. He had a set of keys in his hand—Gerhardt’s keys—and Sully guessed Dez’s boss must have grabbed them while Sully was trapped in the flashback.