She opened the door and nearly screamed when she saw the bodies strewn about. What was worse, she recognized the sight. She’d seen it already on a poster in the hallway. The limbs, the blood, there had to be over half a dozen people here, boys and girls, adults and kids. She leaned over and vomited on the floor, chunks of half-digested pot roast and vegetables pooling around her feet. Her stomach burned and her eyes watered.
She broke out in a cold sweat and her arms and legs threatened to give out. She shook and started crying. The smell in there was thick with rot.
“What did I do?” she whined through her tears. “God, just tell me what I did and I’m sorry, just get me out of here, please.”
Her mind played a trick and for a second she saw the bodies twitch, saw the severed pieces knit themselves together and rise off the floor and start shambling after her.
She closed her eyes and the vision was gone, but when she opened them, the bodies weren’t. She stepped into the gym, easing the door closed behind her. A slamming door would bring trouble. She looked around the cavernous room, hoping for that red glow of an exit sign and so relieved when she saw it, she wanted to cry again.
She couldn’t see through the gloom enough to tell if it was chained or not, but it was a door, and that was hope enough for the moment.
She couldn’t bring herself to cross the sea of severed limbs, so she pressed herself against the wall and skirted the outer rim of the gymnasium, keeping her eyes on the pieces even though she hated every second of it and wasn’t entirely sure she wouldn’t puke again.
Her heart raced and she felt her whole body covered in sweat. Her hands were slick against the wall. Her eyes darted about the room and a voice at the back of her mind said one of them was playing possum. She scanned the body parts again, looking for that one corpse that might be just a little too complete, the one that could potentially rise up and come after her, but from what she could see in the dim emergency lights, there were nothing but parts. The heads were the worst. Some of them looked like they’d died in pain. Some still had their eyes open. Some seemed to be watching her.
This is what Hell is like, she thought. This was the worst thing that had ever happened to her, even worse than Sam walking out, worse than coming home after spending the night at Katie’s to find he’d been there and she had missed him. It couldn’t get any worse.
The floor looked as if buckets of blood and gore had just been dumped out. She couldn’t even count the limbs to try to determine how many bodies there were. She didn’t want to know, anyway.
The door was twenty feet away. Looking out across the sea of corpses, she wasn’t sure she could take the disappointment if the door did turn out to be chained. She wasn’t sure she could cross the room again. She sure as hell didn’t think she could make herself go back toward those classrooms. What if the people--the creatures?--in them weren’t in them anymore? If she ran into them in the hall . . . Or whoever had done this? Or worse? God knew what else was roaming the halls. This was Angel Hill. At least, she thought it was; but she’d also been in the Mertland Childrens' Home and now she wasn’t, so whatever nightmare this was she was living, she realized, she might not even be in Angel Hill anymore.
She just wanted to go home.
She stopped short of the door, but wouldn’t look, not yet. She had to tell herself it might be locked. She had to make herself realize this might not be the way out, and if it wasn’t, she was going to have to figure out something else, because the alternative was to sit on the floor and cry her eyes out until the sound brought someone who might not be interested in helping her. So just know that, she thought, this might not work. But it’s a school, obviously this isn’t the only door in or out of the building, there are other doors.
She looked to the side, found the handle and felt everything inside her burst: it was unlocked.
She pushed the iron bar and the door opened a crack, letting in the cool night air, turning the sweat on her arm to ice. Mandy burst outside, taking in a huge lungful of air and feeling the night on her face.
She closed the door behind her then turned around to see where she was. She hadn’t recognized the layout inside so this wasn’t William Cooper where Mandy had gone to school. She didn’t recognize the outside of the building, nor could she see anything of the neighborhood to help her figure out where she was.
A Spring breeze blew, carrying the scent of open air, green grass and freedom.
The ground wasn’t concrete like she’d expected, but manicured grass with bushes along the wall. She looked into the dark and saw a basketball court forty feet away, with a small play area across from that. Further on, she saw trees. This wasn’t a school playground.
“Where am I?” she asked. She turned to look at the building again. It was brick on the outside, several stories high. Looking to the left and right, it was a wide building. She backed away to try to take in the entire building, looking up and up until it seemed the structure was all there was in the world, as high and as wide as she could see.
She saw the door she’d come out of and thought it looked strange somehow. She couldn’t place what it was about it at first, then she saw it. There was a small rectangular window above the handle. It hadn’t been there when she came out.
She went to the window and cupped her hands around her eyes trying to see inside. All she made out was a double set of stairs, one going up two or three steps to a hallway she couldn’t make out, and another going down, to where she couldn’t tell.
This wasn’t the way she’d come out, but it was the only door she saw.
She pulled the handle but it was locked.
She looked around again, trying to see into the darkness, sure there was someone out there watching her. She felt the eyes on her like fingers walking up and down her ribs. Phantom hands grabbed her shoulders and pulled her into the nothingness, swallowing her up with a futile scream escaping her lips.
Suddenly every creak was a footstep, every breeze a breath in her ear. Every shadow was a figure coming out of the dark. Mandy ran along the building, heading for the corner, just trying to get away from those woods. If this was a school, there was a street, and on a street were houses. No schools she’d ever heard of were built in the middle of nowhere; they built schools in neighborhoods. So she ran, searching for whatever salvation the world was willing to offer.
“I’ll figure out where I am,” she mumbled. “Then call Katie to come pick me up.”
She’d spend the night at Katie’s again and go back to the Home in the light of day to get her car. And her purse, which she realized she’d left sitting on the bench inside the front door.
But she had her phone this time.
She pulled it from her pocket. No missed calls or texts from Sam. Thanks for nothing, she thought. I see how much I really mean.
She dialed Katie’s number while she walked around the building. This time the phone rang and she felt a wave of relief wash over her. Katie would answer and even if someone or something appeared out of the dark now, she’d have the comfort of her best friend’s voice in her ear to help her out.
But all she got was Katie’s voicemail and she wondered where the hell she was that she couldn’t answer a call from Mandy. Doesn’t matter, she told herself as the voicemail greeting played. The call went through, that’s a lot better than before.
“Hey,” she said, “it’s me. Um, I’m not sure where I am, but I’m not at the Home. My car is, though. It’s a really long story and I’ll tell you later, but right now I need a ride, so call me back as soon as you get this.”
She hung up, then sent a text repeating her message.
The building was huge, whatever it was, but eventually she rounded a corner and saw the front of the building. Confusion sank in even deeper then because she was standing in front of the Mertland Home.
“Jesus. This isn’t right.”
She looked around. It was dark and the moon was small and dim in the sky. She tried to find the parking lot, b
ut couldn’t see anything in the dark. She walked away from the building to get some perspective, then turned and looked back again to take in the whole thing, but even at this distance she couldn’t see it all.
It was big. It wasn’t that big before, she thought, but looking at the building, it didn’t look like there was any more to it, it was just bigger. The sight wore at her mind, like watching a magician perform an illusion she knew the secret to, but the hands were so deft, she missed the trick anyway.
The Mertland Childrens' Home loomed above her, imposing and menacing in brick and glass. She knew the building was only three stories, but now it stood above her high enough to house twice that, and it stretched so far on either side she’d lost sight of the corners. As she stared at it, she got a sense of the building pulsing, like a slow heartbeat, or a breath, some sentient movement in the structure.
She found herself unable to look away, as if the sight of the place had hypnotized her. Her vision tunneled out ahead of her, focusing on the windows and bricks, every ounce of will inside Mandy expelled on a sigh when it seemed the place grew even larger only for her to realize she was walking toward it.
Stop, she tried to tell herself. Don’t go back inside, not in the dark. Get Katie here, come back tomorrow, in the daylight.
But did she really think something like a little sunshine would make this place any less malevolent? What was inside it was inside it all the time. If it had locked her inside once, it could do it again, and the time of day or night had no bearing on that whatsoever.
She felt herself being pulled toward the front steps. She had the feeling this time the door would open, because it wanted her inside. But she couldn’t make her feet stop moving, even though with every step her heartbeat pounded harder and harder inside her chest.
Please, she begged, please don’t make me, please let me stay outside, please, just please.
Something caught her attention in her peripheral vision and her eyes darted to the side to see the little boy whom she’d seen reading, but he wasn’t at his table anymore. He stood at one of the front windows, watching her.
The distance was too far to make out his expression, but she could tell it was the same boy. She hoped the plea was clear on her face but she didn’t know if he could do anything about it even if he did understand.
The battle inside her was fierce, struggling to make her legs stop moving while her body carried on like a machine, strong and determined.
She focused on the boy and tried to make herself walk toward him instead. She didn’t try to stop her legs, just redirect them. She thought maybe if she could get close enough, if she could make him see the panic on her face, maybe the ghosts were more aware than Mr. Winters, that mysterious non-entity himself, had understood.
Maybe if the boy saw the fear on her, he would intervene like Denise had done, in whatever fashion he could. She had only wanted to help the kids here, he would have to see that, he would have to do something, if he could.
She watched him and tried to use the vision like a guidepost, trying to convince her body that was the direction to go. Focus on the boy like a magnet.
She did feel something when her feet bumped each other on her next step, like the right had been trying to step in front of the left, it was just this momentary weakness in the motor that was driving her on, but she seized it in a blink and, on reflex, took off running away from the building, toward where the parking lot was. Her keys were in her purse, but she could get into the car and sit there and wait until this feeling passed, whatever it was that was trying to get her inside.
The keys wouldn’t matter now, because Mandy almost never locked her Jeep; there was nothing in it to steal and no one in their right minds would take her car. She always said if someone needed a car so bad they had to take hers, she’d consider it an act of charity.
But the parking lot wasn’t there. She’d parked in front of the building, maybe a hundred feet away but the parking lot wasn’t here now, there was only damp grass no matter how far she ran.
It was dark, though, and she thought maybe she was just off course. She didn’t want to turn back and find the building. She was still afraid it would try to draw her back in again, but it was so dark out here. She pulled the phone from her pocket and found her flashlight app, flipped it on, but the darkness practically swallowed the beam. She could make out a little bit, but there was no parking lot anywhere in sight.
Mandy said, “Fuck this,” and took off running.
She was headed for the street. It wasn’t like the Home was in the middle of nowhere; there were houses a block away. She just had to get off the property and she’d feel safer. Because it wasn’t just the building. If whatever was in there could affect her while she was outside, then its reach had to cover the grounds too. She ran for the street, knowing once she crossed that boundary and was safely in the street, she’d feel a weight fall off her.
Where the hell was her car, though? Where were the other cars? Lynn’s, Jane’s, Bea’s?
Mandy had seen her share of unexplained things in Angel Hill--who hadn’t--but none of them had filled her with this dread she felt now. None of them made her afraid for her life.
There was a night in high school soon after Katie got her license. They had borrowed Katie’s dad’s car, a red Volkswagen convertible, and they’d been driving around the outer streets of town, skirting Angel Hill where it was the quietest, and they’d looked up and marveled at how dark it was, how black the sky looked. They didn’t see any stars, no moon, the only light came from their headlights, and they pulled over to the side of the road to take a better look because they’d never seen the sky look so much like a blanket of nothing.
Katie turned off the engine and the girls leaned back against the seats, raised their faces to the sky and watched, and that’s when they heard the noise. The flapping, the screeching, that high-pitched whine of thousands of bats flying by overhead.
It wasn’t the sky; the blanket had been thousands of bats, and when they realized what it was, they both screamed and Katie started the car and took off, but the bats were still above them. They couldn’t tell how close, whether they were high above or just skimming the area directly over them, and it didn’t matter because with no top on the car, those things could dive at any moment and if that happened, Mandy knew, Katie would react, jerk the wheel, and probably send them flying off the road, into a ditch or a field where they’d be thrown from the car, and there they’d be, broken bodies exposed under that sea of bats, and even that hadn’t been as terrifying as what was happening to her at this moment, trying to get away from the Mertland Childrens' Home, just trying to get outside and onto the street where, if the town wanted to give her bats again, Mandy would cover her head with her arms and run like hell, but at least she’d be out of here.
She looked down and realized she was running in grass. Of course, with the parking lot gone, so is the driveway. And looking up, she didn’t see the street anywhere.
She ran on, anyway. She ran until the fire in her chest began to lick up into her throat and her arms felt so weak she thought they might fall off at the elbows.
She didn’t want to stop, though. If she stopped, it would feel like giving up. But how much longer could she run?
Not long, she thought. But it was getting her nowhere. She thought about walking and walking and when she turned around, the stairs were still right behind her. She was afraid if she turned around, she’d find the building was still there, twenty feet away, that all this work was for nothing. She didn’t think her mind could handle something like that, so it was best to convince herself to keep running, to tell herself that it would get her somewhere, eventually. It had to.
She stumbled and almost fell, but was able to grab hold of a tree directly in front of her, snagging one of the low branches so she didn’t wind up face first in the dirt.
She steadied herself, then looked up, ready to keep running, but the sight before her looked different than it had a secon
d ago. She’d grabbed a tree branch, but where had the tree come from?
She looked to the left, then the right, her head heavy and her breath coming in and out of her throat like razors, and she saw trees on both sides. She didn’t look back, though. Because now she knew for sure what she would see. Whether ten feet or twenty feet, even if it gave her a hundred feet, it wouldn’t matter. However far she was from it, it wasn’t the front of the building she’d see, but the back. Somehow she was in the woods behind the building. How many acres were back here? And what was on the other side?
She tried to picture the neighborhood and what would be at the opposite end of the Mertland Childrens’ Home back yard, wherever that may end. She couldn’t picture the area well enough.
“I’d never get there anyway,” she said. “You’re not going to let me go, are you?”
She saw herself going back to the front and sitting on the steps to wait for either Katie to come get her or for third shift to show up, because it couldn’t hide the parking lot if there were cars trying to pull into it, could it?
But she carried that vision a little further and knew that if she went to the front of the building and sat on the steps, it wouldn’t be long before something inside made her turn and look, and if she did that, it would have her again. It would take over her legs and bring her back inside, like it almost had only a few minutes earlier.
What was the alternative? Stay right here in the woods with her back to the thing she was trying to escape?
There were zombies in these woods. There were werewolves. There were nameless monsters she couldn’t even think of. They’d come out of the dark, silently, unexpectedly, and she wouldn’t see them until they were right in front of her, their mouths open and teeth ready and nothing would stop them.
Or it could be rats. Or raccoons. Or bats again. Angel Hill was a devious bitch, like an abusive lover who only beats you for your own good, insisting all the while that it hurts them more than it hurts you, and asking why do you make me do this to you.
The Ghosts of Mertland (An Angel Hill novel) Page 11