“Amy had a nightmare,” I say. “And I’m going for a run.”
She nods groggily, and I can tell my words haven’t quite penetrated yet, but they will soon enough. I leave her and am out in the crisp morning air before either she or Amy have left their beds.
I’m on my second lap around the hospital, letting the one-two of my shoes on the pavement stomp out the echoes of Amy’s screams, when something pulls me out of my head and back into reality. A sound. A car. A car, but not any car, Keith’s car. I would know its specific rumble and rattle anywhere.
I cannot deal with him. Not right now. As his Trans Am turns the corner in front of me, I see I’m at the gap in the chain-link fence around the hospital. The sun is coming up behind me so there’s no way Keith can see who I am. Not for sure. Not yet.
I’ve never been brave enough to ignore the NO TRESPASSING signs before, but now I don’t hesitate. I duck through the hole in the fence and run around the corner of the hospital.
As Keith’s car drives right by without even slowing, a little thrill goes through me, shifting all my misery off to the side a bit, and it has nothing at all to do with him. It’s only a few steps through a fence but it feels good to be doing something forbidden. I don’t linger on that thought because at first being with Keith had felt good for the same reason and then suddenly it had felt very, very bad.
This is different, I tell myself.
There is no one here except me and the pigeons. So many pigeons. I often photograph them. Some people call them flying rats, but I think they are beautiful. They whirl in and out of the empty windows of the hospital, dancing in the air in giant flocks before suddenly veering off in a random direction. One day, what must have been hundreds of pigeons, crows, and magpies, had been roosting up on the top of the hospital. I don’t know what startled them, but suddenly they’d all taken flight at the very same moment, rising up into the sky as one massive flapping, squawking cloud that whirled and twirled before shattering into individual birds which then swooped and dove and vanished into different windows, nooks, and crannies.
I approach the nearest outbuilding. It’s built of grey stone that looks like someone had made the frame and then poured concrete over the whole exterior. Giant cracks spiderweb all the sides, and the single window has long since been shattered and its glass scattered. Now grass clumps poke through the hard-packed gravel all around it, and when I peek inside, I see nature has reclaimed the interior as well. The floor had once been concrete but now cracks split it into sections and dandelions and weeds peek up from between them. It’s small, a single room. Rather boring.
Leaving it, I peer up at the hospital. I grew up beside it, have seen it every day, but it looks completely different from this close.
Standing in its shadow and looking up at its cold, grey walls, I feel a shiver go down my spine, a shiver that can’t be completely explained away by the cool autumn morning. Given my current mood, however, that chill is more of an incentive to keep going than a deterrent to it.
Though I’ve never been on the grounds before, I know, as well as anyone in the neighbourhood, how to get into the hospital. There’s one window in the South East corner of the main building that provides the easiest access. It’s boarded over, the same as every other one in the building, but not securely. Once it had been screwed in on all four corners but now only one screw remains so the board pivots on it. It looks closed but if you push on it, it swivels up and out of the way so you can climb in.
Dirty glass litters the ground, and I’m careful about where I place my feet on my way to the building’s corpse and the loose board that will let me into it. Nothing stands out about the board, there is no X on it to mark the spot, and it’s as filthy and tagged with graffiti as all the others on the bottom floor, but every kid knows about it. It’s how the junior high kids get in to cause mischief and the high school kids to party and make out. The only people who don’t know about it, it seems, are the adults.
Suddenly I’m not sure entering the haunted hospital is a good idea. I don’t believe in ghosts. Not anymore. Not really. But I do believe in rusty nails, crumbling supports, and unpredictable vagrants. I look over my shoulder, at the neighbourhood I grew up in. I can’t see my house from here, it’s on the other side of the building, but all the streets around here are as familiar to me as my own. All safe. All boring.
Maybe what I need to deal with Keith and all the other troubles in my life, is to learn to be braver. Maybe that’s what this trip will teach me. Maybe. I look back toward the hospital.
“Twenty seconds,” I tell the boarded-up window. “I’ll give you twenty seconds to start.” If I’m too frightened after twenty seconds I’ll leave, but not before. You can do anything for twenty seconds.
“One one-thousand . . .”
I push the board out of the way and peer down into the darkness of the hospital.
“Two one-thousand,” I whisper. I can see a table pushed against the wall beneath the window. It’s filthy from the passage of countless feet but very welcome as it saves me from a substantial jump down into the hospital’s basement.
“Three one-thousand,” I say, putting my left foot down carefully, testing the table before putting all my weight on it. It looks sturdy but there’s no telling how long it’s been there or how many hundreds of kids and vagrants have tromped across it. Better safe than sorry, as Mom likes to say. The table wobbles a little beneath my weight, but it seems stable enough. “Four one-thousand.”
I pull my other leg through the window, followed by the rest of me. The plywood over the window swings shut behind me, taking the light with it. Suddenly it’s dark. A new flutter of fear flits in my belly, and my voice shakes a little when I whisper, “Five one-thousand.”
My mouth is dry and the familiar taste of fear fills it, tangy and bitter. I strain my ears against the darkness, slowing my breathing to minimize its interference and searching for any sound. Any proof I’m not alone.
I wait, my back pressed against the cool concrete wall, for my eyes to adjust to the difference in light. Nebulous blobs of colour float across my field of view and I imagine a dozen sets of eyes on me. Eyes belonging to rats and spiders and other creatures unhampered by the darkness.
“Six one-thousand,” I say as the darkness bleeds away into a grey half-light and shapes begin to become visible. A filing cabinet leans in one corner; three of its drawers are missing completely and the remaining two stick out at drunken angles. Obviously this had been some sort of office. Nothing to be afraid of.
I sit on the table, dangling my feet over the edge before making the tiny hop to the floor. “Seven one-thousand.”
I scour the ground with my gaze as well as I can in the dim light, making sure there are no hazards waiting to trip me and make me break a leg. Or worse. All I see are water stains and tracked-in dirt.
“Eight one-thousand,” I say after much more than a second has passed with only the sound of my heartbeat heavy in my ears.
“Nine one-thousand,” I say, though the more time I spend in the shell of a hospital the more comfortable I become in it. Besides, despite my count I’ve already been here substantially longer than nine seconds. “Right,” I say, and look around the room once more before taking the first step to follow the tracks of hundreds of other adventure-seekers deeper into the old hospital.
Chapter Nine
“HELLO?” I CALL into the long hallway before me, pausing to listen for a response, but all I hear is the sound of my own voice chasing itself down the endless corridors. Of course, I think, if there is a vagrant or someone in here who means me ill, they’d hardly be likely to answer back, would they? Still, the thought lacks any real feeling of threat. I feel oddly comfortable in the half-lit basement.
I haven’t forgotten the story of Dr. Woods, though. The thing about that story? It always ended with Dr. Woods’ ghost haunting the grounds of the hospital, roaming through the hallway in search of those upon whom he could reap his revenge. It s
aid, if you’re in the hospital and you hear the sound of shoes squeaking against the linoleum floors, you’d better get out fast because if you are still there when the sound stops it means Dr. Woods has chosen you as his next victim.
As weirdly comfortable as I might feel right now, if I hear anything that sounded even remotely like squeaky shoes I am going to get the hell out of here.
I wander through the hallways, aimlessly in and out of rooms and up and down staircases. With my fear gone, I become determined to explore as much of the building as possible. To make up for all the times I could have come here but hadn’t.
The first few rooms are empty of everything but footprints. There are holes in the walls and ceilings where people have stripped out pipes and wiring to sell as salvage but there’s nothing left behind of any interest to me. A thick layer of dust covers one empty room, and I squat down to write my name in the layer on the floor before moving on.
As I go deeper into the bowels of the building, the landscape changes. There are still gaping wounds in the walls and ceilings but the rooms aren’t empty. One section of what must have been the administrative area is filled with what looks like old offices. In one I find desks stacked three high, the legs on the top layer pointing straight up and nearly stabbing the ceiling. They look like dead bugs, curled up on their backs, legs pointed skyward.
Several rooms contain the remains of campfires and bundles of blankets and other detritus. I don’t go into those ones, but hurry onward, happy their occupants aren’t in.
Eventually, after what seems like a remarkably long time, I find a staircase leading upward. The smell of smoke and char permeates the air, so I know, finally, I’ve discovered the way to the psychiatric ward. Only last year there had been a fire inside that part of the hospital. The thick concrete walls had contained it for the most part, and from the outside you couldn’t even tell it had happened. Inside, however, where the air is still and protected from exposure, the smell is nearly as powerful as it must have been a year before.
I climb the stairs slowly. I hadn’t realised up until this point that I’d been looking for this part of the hospital, and I’m still not even sure why. Morbid fascination, perhaps?
The smell of smoke and charcoal is heavy in my nostrils, the metal handrail rusted and rough beneath my hand. This, I think as I reach the top and look around, is definitely the psychiatric ward.
Smoke stains coat most every surface, lighter near the stairs where I’m standing and becoming heavier and more concentrated as they retreat down the hall. It’s more like a giant room than a traditional hallway. The outside walls are very tall, like the ones in the school’s gym, but the concrete cells that must once have been the patients’ rooms are short and squat. The windows are all small, smaller than in other parts of the hospital, and boarded up so only the faintest trickles of light manage to penetrate the gloom. Rather than being spooky, it’s all rather depressing.
Still, the thick shadows and overwhelming stench of smoke make me feel cold and small. I wrap my arms around myself, rubbing the goosebumps from my upper arms.
The walls of the room are all made of cinderblocks, so though the smoke has left its mark there isn’t nearly as much ash on the floor as I’d expected from the smell and the stories. Still, I’m careful not to rub up against anything—I don’t want to go to school looking like the abominable coal monster.
In one of the rooms, a burned-up jumble of interconnected springs that used to be a mattress is pushed into the corner, and broken glass in every colour of the rainbow litters the floor around it. I snap a quick picture with my phone. I’ll up the saturation and contrast and title it something about beauty in unlikely places.
“Must have had some wild parties in here,” I say, shifting the broken neck of a beer bottle around with my foot. Of course, I hadn’t been invited to any of them. I’m not cool enough for that.
I hear someone call my name. Or, I think I do. The sound doesn’t come from anywhere I can pinpoint, but rather from all around me. I stop, halfway in and halfway out of one of the rooms, frozen like a rabbit in headlights. The sound, real or imagined, has the same effect as a bucket of ice water on a sleepwalker. Suddenly, I’m hyper aware, freezing cold, and want to be anywhere but where I am.
The light is almost gone. Outside, the sun must have ducked behind a cloud because the beams that had tickled their way around the boards on the windows and highlighted dancing motes when I’d first arrived are gone. Now, only a weak outline shines around their perimeters. Grey half-light without the strength to push inside.
In my eyes, every corner is filled with shadows and each room houses nameless horrors that are waiting for me to stray too close so they can grab me.
When I was much younger and I had to pee after a bad dream, I would leap from bed, landing as far from any hands that might reach out from beneath it as I could. Then, when it was time to return, I would take a running start and leap from maximum distance onto the safety of my bed once more. The way my heart is hammering right now is exactly the way it used to then.
My fingernails are leaving half-moon shaped dents in the palms of my hands, but I see something. It is in what must have once been a nurse’s station. It’s centred at the far end of the hallway, looking straight down the rows of rooms. The bottom half of its walls are the same as the back and side walls of the hospital rooms, made of cinder blocks and concrete, but the top is missing. Perhaps, I think, harkening back to the “bin” flicks I’d watched with Sevren, it had once been glass or Plexiglas. Nurses locked in there for their own safety, warily watching over their charges. It wasn’t a nurse that I’d seen though, not even the ghost of one. What I’d spotted out of the corner of my eye is a camera. It is blue and bulky and sitting on a shelf at the back of the room like it has every right in the world to be there. Except it hadn’t been there a moment ago, I am almost certain of it. The blue colour of its shell is bright against the monotone background of this place. If it has been there this whole time, I couldn’t have missed it. Yet there it is, so apparently I had?
I step into the darkened room, startling a handful of pigeons I hadn’t noticed until too late. The swoofing sound of their wings through the air makes my breath catch in my throat. The creepiest part is how I hear my name again amidst their fluttering. “Okay, Imagination,” I whisper. “That’s about enough of that.”
I step into the cramped room and feel desiccated bird shit crunch beneath my shoes as I study the camera closer.
It is old. From the ’80s at least. I recognise it from books and television as the kind of camera that spits out a picture right away, without having to wait for the film to be developed. The question is, what is it doing here?
From the hallway, the blue of its shell had seemed bright and new, but now that I’m up close I can see that is not the case. It seems bright in contrast to everything else in this place, but in reality it, too, is old and dirty. How long has it been here? What pictures might it have taken over the years?
I reach for it, and a grey shape comes hurtling down from the ceiling toward me. I scream and jump back toward the doorway, heart stumbling to keep up to my fright, fingers shaking and belly trembling. Several long seconds later I’m able to resolve what the shape is—a bird. Specifically, the bird from the other day. The magpie.
Before I’d only had the briefest glimpse of it, enough to see it was a magpie and that something was wrong with its colour. Today I can see it perfectly clearly.
The bird lands on the shelf right beside the camera. It tilts its head to look at me and then stands and struts in front of the camera and then back the other way. Like a sentry on guard. And while it is very much a magpie, where its feathers ought to have been black they are grey instead. A soft grey, like a pigeon. It isn’t albino, I don’t think, because its eyes are as black and unfathomable as any other magpie’s I’ve ever seen.
“Oh, hi there,” I say, my voice still shaky from the fright the disappearing sun and the bird’s sud
den appearance had given me. “Aren’t you a pretty boy?”
The magpie stops directly in front of the camera and regards me silently. I remember something Dad once said about magpies: he said there were two different kinds of them. The ones that never speak and the ones that never shut up. This one seems to be of the former variety, and I’m beginning to find its silence unnerving.
“So, here’s the thing. I want that camera and since you can’t use it—no, you can’t,” I say, filling in the bird’s half of the conversation in my head. “You don’t even have thumbs. Also, it’s got to be as heavy as you—okay, okay, heavier than you. There’s no way you can carry it.”
I step toward the bird, slowly. Though it’s much smaller than I am, its big, black beak could take out my eyeball in half a second if it got close enough—it hadn’t been that long ago that Sevren and I had watched The Birds. “So, I’m going to take that—”
I reach for the camera. The magpie doesn’t move until my fingers nearly brush the soft-looking feathers of its breast, then it hops up on top of the camera, stares at me, and cries its kek-kek-kek call. I stop and tilt my head at the magpie, a mockery of the way it’s holding its head and regarding me with its doll-like eyes. The machine gun staccato of its cry hadn’t felt menacing. More like a warning than a threat. Still, I don’t particularly want to have my hand pecked either. I just want to get the camera and get out of here.
“I’m not sure what that means,” I say, feeling remarkably calm given that I’m talking to a ghost-grey magpie in the middle of a haunted hospital. “But you really can’t use the camera.”
The magpie kek-kek-keks again, rubs its beak on one side of the camera, then the other, looks at me, and kek-keks a third time.
“Oh, enough of this.” I wave my hand in front of the magpie, trying to shoo him away, but he remains unstirred. “Just. Get. Off. The. Camera.”
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