“Don't be fooled by her pretty face, my dear boy. She attacked two of our guards last night.”
Frederick gulped. He ran a hand through his wild, red hair and double-checked the leather restraints. “It's okay,” he said, attempting to calm her. “The gag will prevent too much water from entering your lungs. You'll be fine... good as new when this is over.” His words had no effect on her rattled nerves. She continued to shiver, weeping with her eyelids shut against the horror.
His gaze lingered one last time on her plump lips and rosy cheeks, her long eyelashes slick with tears. Then he stood, shook off the effects of her beauty, and closed the lid of the coffin-like box. He flipped two copper latches, one at each side of the box, locking the lid into place. A myriad of holes had been drilled through the planks. He detected a flurry of movement from inside as she gyrated against the straps, to no avail.
Candlelight reflected on the glistening surface of the water as Frederick turned his attention to the pool. It was more of a tank, really, dug into the ground level of the asylum at Dr. Walter's request. The water must be so cold. I am cold just standing here above the ground.
He shook the thought from his head. Never mind such trivial things as the temperature of the water, the girl's fear. This would be over soon, and she would thank them. She'd be fixed.
Dr. Walter's methods had been successful in the past: bringing a patient to the brink of death and then reviving them before they passed away. This process, though frightening for the persons involved, provided a brand new start for the mentally ill. It was akin to wiping their slate clean, giving a second chance at life. As if the water itself washed their insanity away.
“We must lower it.” The doctor's booming voice echoed through the room. The girl in the box screamed a guttural protest from deep within her chest, the sound muffled as it tried to leave her lips.
Thick ropes attached to the sides of the box began to tighten as a device overhead slowly moved. Nothing more than a heavy pole affixed to a Y-shaped base, the device resembled a well-sweep, the kind used for raising and lowering buckets of water from a well, only it was much larger, stronger, and capable of dragging a human trapped inside a coffin-like tomb.
The box plummeted into the tank with a resounding splash. Frederick cringed as water poured through the holes, filling the wooden box, sinking it.
“Don't look so glum, my faithful assistant. We need only stop her heart for a minute. Then we will bring her back.” He watched air bubbles rising to the surface of the water, waiting for the young girl to drown. “Her mind will be reborn. Fresh and new. She'll feel better than ever. You will see.”
........Several decades later...........
The atmosphere inside the old asylum on Harper Hill could only be described with adjectives best suited for Poe: ghastly and somber, beguiling Mark into walking its decrepit halls and exploring its long-abandoned rooms. Sam didn't share Mark's enthusiasm. He'd been jumpy since they arrived, looking over his shoulder, arguing with Mark as they ventured further into the belly of Harper Hospital. He didn't like this. Any of it. As film projects go, he was certain they could have selected a topic of equal mystery and intrigue, and fewer—
Ghosts.
There. Sam finally admitted it to himself. He was terrified of encountering a ghost in these morbid rooms. Full of bad memories and the heartache of a thousand abused patients, this place permeated an aura of sadness. The air was thick with it, pressing in on him, making it hard to breathe. Or maybe that was his fear.
None of it seemed to faze Mark. He strolled through the asylum in a state of awe, giddy at times because he knew this film was going to earn him some respect. He hadn't stopped moving since the moment they arrived. He would gesture for Sam to “come here” or “look at this”, all the while narrating for the camera. This was his final year of college, and it was time to make things happen. Time to shit or get off the pot, as his father used to say. For years, Mark had dreamed of landing a position in the world of TV broadcasting. All he needed was for others to take notice. So many graduates let their dreams fall by the wayside, their majors all but useless in the real world. But Mark was going to make something of himself. With his best friend at his side, he couldn't fail.
Sam paused to catch his breath as they rounded a corner. The two-hundred-thousand square foot grounds of Harper Hospital was starting to take its toll on his body. A dull ache burned its way up his calf muscles. Reluctantly, he leaned against the moldy cement wall for support, resting as Mark poked his head into the nearest room.
Sam felt as if he had walked the college campus three times. This place was huge, and he was out of shape. His weight gain hadn't stopped at The Freshman Fifteen. Its successors, The Sophomore Twenty and the Junior Twenty-five had followed in its wake, leaving behind extra baggage. A steady diet of junk food and energy drinks was to blame. Parking his ass in a chair several hours a day didn't help. But he had to study. He was determined to graduate with honors.
“Right here,” Mark said. “This is where we'll shoot the highlight piece.”
Mark's eyes were alight with a new-found energy. He smiled, and Sam didn't like the look of that grin. It was too wide, too full of mischief. He said, “Come on, buddy. You've got to see this! Oh man, there is some creepy shit in here!”
As invitations go, this was a pretty lousy one. It didn't make Sam want to enter the room. This was their last project together at Griffin Film University, and it meant a lot to both of them. Sooner or later he would have to humor his friend, explore the “creepy shit” and capture it on film. But first he was resting his legs.
“Yeah, yeah, I'll be there in a minute.” He waved a hand in the air to dismiss Mark, who shrugged and disappeared into the shadows of the room.
Sam fiddled with the hand-held camcorder. He was worried about the darkness of the old hospital building. Barred windows, set high into the walls, were the only source of light. He wished he had a better camera, but this one was lightweight and easy to tote around. He sighed and shrugged to himself, still resting against the wall. With enough editing, he would make the footage work.
Something stirred at the end of the hall. Sam looked up. A portion of the hallway was illuminated by sunlight that filtered in through the bars of a narrow window. Everything else was cloaked in darkness. It was hard to make out anything in those shadows, especially from where he stood halfway down the long hall. He focused. His vision was drawn to the darkest patch of shadows, where the hallway turned down an adjacent corridor.
His heart froze. There in the inky blackness glowed a thin, pale face. A rush of both terror and sadness washed over him as he gazed upon her face, full of melancholy, framed by a mess of unruly blonde hair that looked as if it hadn't seen a brush in many years. She was half-hidden by the wall. One gleaming, silver-blue eye peered at him from where she stood at the bend in the hallway. He ran his eyes down the length of her body, noticing the rags she wore that resembled a tattered burlap sack. He gasped. She wasn't touching the floor, but hovering there in the darkness.
She floated sideways from her hiding place, coming into full view. Every hair on his body stood erect. “Mark!” he screamed.
Mark's reply from the other room seemed to come from miles away. “What?”
“Mark! Come here! Quick!”
The girl drifted toward him in a fluid motion, her feet still inches from the ground. Her skin was an eerie shade of pale blue, glowing faintly in the dimness of the hall. Her face was young and slender, and even though he was afraid, he recognized a natural beauty there. Yet the sickly blue color of her down-turned lips caused him to step backwards, away from the ghastly sight as it approached.
She was only a few yards away as she reached out to him. “He's here,” she whispered in his mind. She didn't speak the words aloud. Her lifeless blue lips never moved. Sam heard her voice like a gust of wind through his skull, a sense of urgency in the words. He shivered. The girl's unwelcome entry into his thoughts frightened him mor
e than anything else.
“Who's here?” he stammered. The girl's foggy, white eyes flicked to the doorway.
Mark appeared in the opening, eyeing Sam with confusion. “What did you say?”
Sam gulped, eyes wide. “The girl,” he said, pointing. But she was gone. Whipping around to check the other direction, he nearly lost his balance.
“Dude, what's wrong? You look like you saw a—” Mark paused. A shit-eating grin spread over his face. “Don't tell me you saw a ghost...” He teased his friend with a slight shake of his head, chuckling softy.
“I'm out of here,” was Sam's only reply. He turned and headed in the direction from which they'd come.
“But you can't! We're not done!”
“Oh, I'm done!” Sam was fuming. He stormed down the corridor, camera in hand, determined to wait in the car. Yes, he would wait there until Mark agreed to call it quits. Why? Because there was no reasoning with Mark. Sam knew him well enough to know that if he explained what had happened, if he described what he saw, mockery and skepticism would be Mark's only reaction. He didn't have time for that. He trusted his own sanity; he knew what he'd seen was real, and he wasn't stupid enough to hang around a haunted asylum for the sake of a college film project.
“Sam! Sam, wait!” Mark's hand was on his shoulder. He eased around to block his path. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean to piss you off. You saw something?”
“Not just something. I saw a fucking dead girl, and she talked to me.” There was silence then, tension so thick you could taste it in the air. Or maybe that was the dust and mold spores.
“Look, I'm not saying you didn't see something. This place is crawling with bad vibes. We'll get out of here, bro... No problem.” Mark rubbed his chin as Sam waited for the catch. “But we're so close. The film is nearly done. I just need you to shoot one more clip. Then we'll leave... Together. We need to stick together.”
Mark waited as Sam mulled this over. He sighed, gesturing to Mark with the camcorder in his hand. “One clip. No retakes. And you better talk fast. Because what I saw...” He trembled. “I'm not crazy. You know this.”
“I do.” Mark smiled, patting his friend on the back. “A few more minutes and we're out of here, I promise.”
“We are now in the heart of Harper Mental Hospital. This place grows darker the further in you go, but its history is the darkest part of all. In this room on the second floor, I've discovered what I believe to be an electric shock treatment table. The electroconvulsive therapy, or ECT machines are no longer here, but these restraints,” he pulled on one of the leather straps, displaying it for the camera, “these were used to hold the patient down at several parts of the body: head, wrists, arms, torso, and ankles.”
“Imagine being strapped to this table, forced to endure more than a hundred volts of electricity pumped straight into the brain. Under the care of the callous Dr. Walters, this was a harsh reality for many patients here.”
Sam followed Mark with the camera, holding his hand as steady as possible despite his heightening anxiety. He couldn't wait to be finished. He felt more like an idiot with every passing second. Why hadn't he stood his ground and insisted that they leave?
Mark strolled away from the wooden table with the leather restraints, making his way to a straight jacket he'd found hanging on the wall. Thick cobwebs covered its surface, the fabric yellow with age. “When Harper Mental Hospital closed its doors in 1942, stories began to surface. Personal accounts of extreme cruelty within these walls. A few reports claim that patients disappeared, that they checked in but never checked out. None of these claims are supported by any solid evidence, and yet, standing here in this torture chamber, it's not so hard to believe.” He paused to throw the camera his very best dramatic look. “Some patients were left in straitjackets for days on end, unable to perform even the most basic human functions.”
As Mark delved into his narrative on the history of straitjackets, Sam noticed a cold breeze touch the back of his neck. Goosebumps formed there, causing the hair to stand on end. He rubbed his free hand over the chilled skin, warming it. Another draft whistled past his ear, cooling the side of his face. He clenched his jaw to keep from fidgeting and tried to hold the camera steady as an inexplicable breeze swirled around him.
An icy hand touched his forearm, and he jumped to the side, jerking the camcorder. It ruined the shot, and Mark stopped talking mid-sentence to furrow his brow. “What now?”
“Something touched me.”
Mark spread his arms wide in front of him, gesturing around the room. “There's no one here but us, bro.”
Sam breathed deeply, trying to calm his nerves, but the icy touch returned. Frigid fingers closed around his hand that gripped the camera. Sam looked down and realized Mark was partially right: There was nothing there. Nothing visible anyway. But he felt it, the cold grip of death. There was something foul in the sensation, an unnerving feeling that shocked Sam into a motionless stupor.
He looked at his hand, frozen in terror, unsure of how to react. One of the camera's buttons pressed down on its own. The footage began to rewind. Squiggly lines filled the viewfinder as the documentary rolled by in reverse.
“Okay, you're obviously spooked by this place. Let's shoot the straitjacket bit again, then we can call it a day.”
“Mark...”
“Yeah?”
“Shut up.”
The camera stopped rewinding in the middle of the footage. The rewind button was released with a soft clicking noise. The play button was pressed. Sam watched the video come to life, not knowing what else he could do.
In the viewfinder of the camcorder, Mark was walking the halls, narrating bits and pieces of information about the hospital's history. The footage had been taken only thirty minutes ago, but Sam's mind was so weary from his encounter with the ghost, it felt like much, much longer. Mark prattled on, practically walking backwards so that his face was the center of attention at all times.
Mark took a break, resting to catch his breath and wet his tongue as Sam poked the camera into random rooms, allowing a glimpse inside. He liked the way the dust motes swirled in the strips of light coming through each tiny window, the corners of each room lost in shadows.
Sam continued to watch as the view panned across one of the many rooms he'd filmed in that moment. The footage paused. “He's here,” her voice whispered in his mind.
Sam gasped, nearly dropping the camera when he realized where the film had stopped. On the paused screen of a camera operated by unseen hands, a man's face leered at him. A broad chin and bright, squinted eyes, pale against the blackness of the shadows that hid him.
“We've got to go... now.”
“What? No. We need to finish this shot.”
Sam flipped the camera around so that Mark could see the picture. “No, we don't. We've got company. And here's proof.”
Sam put the camcorder inside the case he carried over his shoulder. A furtive glance through the door assured the hallway was clear. Their footsteps echoed through the corridor, hearts thudding in their ears as they quickened their pace with each stride. The overcast sky beyond the bars of the narrow, high-set windows cast eerie shadows on the mildewed walls. Sam felt as if those shadows were reaching for him, the memory of the cold hand still fresh in his mind.
Rounding a corner, Sam and Mark reached the stairwell and stopped. The girl was there. She waited for them at the foot of the stairs, an ethereal beauty marred by death and decay. Her knee-length dress resembled something a peasant would wear: torn and filthy, thick, stiff fabric that didn't flatter her curvy figure. But no attire could flatter her now. She was ghastly. Her skin glowed morbidly in the dim stairwell— pale blue, as if every particle of oxygen had been squeezed from her body. Purple splotches riddled the flesh around her lips, which were cracked, swollen, and perpetually sad. A mane of wild blonde hair flipped and curled at impossible angles, floating about her face. Her eyes were covered in a thick, white film, reminding Sam of a cadaver beginn
ing to rot. The slightest hint of silver-blue shined in those eyes as she hovered there, gazing up at them.
The Tooth Collector (and Other Tales of Terror) Page 9