CHAPTER NINE
It’s funny how different things can feel by the light of day, let alone look. Our alarm clock was Davenport rattling the door and trying to get in. I actually fell out of bed and onto the floor, trying to get up in a panic, my body confused from lack of sleep and the terror fresh in my mind.
Yet the moment I opened the door to sunlight streaming in through the halls and Davenport’s disapproving face, I felt like whatever we dealt with last night was nothing compared to this woman’s wrath.
“Pardon my intrusion,” she said, disdainfully eying my clingy t-shirt that my breasts were high beaming through. “But I need a word with the three of you. Since you’re staying on my property, I take it you won’t mind.”
She pushed past me and walked over to the beds where a shirtless Dex was sitting up, his crazy bed hair pointing every which way, and Rebecca pulling her covers up to her collarbone.
“I don’t want to say this more than once, but it’s too late for that,” she said.
“And good morning to you too,” Dex said with a groan. “Are you sure we can’t have coffee before the lecture?”
She put her hands together. I noted she was wearing another brown suit that made her look like a giant Hershey’s Kiss. “So then you know what I’m about to talk to you about. This morning as I was getting ready for work, I got an alert to my email saying that the motion detector on the camera had been tripped. Imagine my surprise when I saw footage of the two of you,” she looked from Dex to me as I rubbed my bruised tailbone, “careening down the staircase like you were on fire.”
I gulped. “We’re sorry, we—“ Rebecca started.
She raised her nose in the air and went on as if Rebecca hadn’t said anything. “I don’t even know how you two managed to get up there without tripping the recording the first time. I never got an email about that.” I shot Dex a look to keep quiet. We didn’t want to tell her we’d been in the body chute. “What on earth were you guys doing up there without my permission?”
“We are so sorry,” I said, coming forward with my arms across my chest. “We were only on the second floor, We just thought we heard something, like someone was here. We just wanted to look around.”
She cocked her ugly eyebrow. “And? Did you find anything?”
“Sorta,” I said, though now I could see Dex was giving me a look to keep my mouth shut. I guess he didn’t want us sharing our footage with her just yet. “We thought we saw a dog.”
“A dog?” she repeated. She seemed to mull that over. “I don’t know anything about any dogs. But this building does house raccoons on occasion. I’m sorry if it gave you a fright.”
That was no damn raccoon, I thought, trying to convey my thoughts to Dex. We knew raccoons.
“Still,” she said, clearing all the sympathy out of her throat, “you know I don’t want anyone up there without a staff member present. This could be a large liability for us. Do I make myself clear? Those floors are off limits unless I give you permission otherwise.”
Dex raised his hand straight up into the air like an eager school kid.
She narrowed her eyes. “What is it?”
“Can we have permission?”
She sighed like her patience was near depletion. “You have your tour with the historian in two hours. I suggest you film what you can. If you want to do more after that, then we’ll talk.” She marched across the room toward the door then looked over her shoulder at us. “Coffee is in the teacher’s lounge.”
She left the room just as I remembered something. “Dex,” I hissed. “Did you remember to get all the beers out of the staff fridge?”
“F*ck!” he exclaimed and popped out of bed. He ran out the door and down the hall in just his boxer briefs. His hard, beautiful body got a cry of surprise and look of admiration from an early-bird teacher who had just walked in the main doors. I could only hope he wasn’t sporting his usual morning wood, though I’m sure our encounter with Davenport had officially frozen his balls.
I looked over at Rebecca. “How did you sleep?”
“Why, do I look tired?” she asked almost defensively.
“No,” I said, coming around to sit on the edge of her bed. She did have dark circles under eyes and this sense of weariness to her, but I was no better off. “I just barely slept at all. Doesn’t help that these beds aren’t made for two.” I observed her, pondering over her words from last night, that she wasn’t in her right frame of mind. It had been at least two months since she and her ex-girlfriend broke up and I wondered if she was still deeply affected by it.
Before I had a chance to ask her though, a breathless Dex appeared in the doorway, a six-pack of beer cradled in his arms like he’d just stolen the holy grail, and quickly shut the door. “That was close,” he said, opening the cupboards under the nurse’s sink and sliding it in there. “Let’s hope Kelly doesn’t like beer.”
“Did anyone see you?” I asked.
He grinned. “With the beer, no. In my underwear? Let’s just say I gave a few teachers something to dream about tonight.”
I snorted while Rebecca’s eyes sought the ceiling.
With the school slowly coming alive, it became easier to go about the morning without that ever-present cloud of dread hanging over me, enough that I was able to use the showers by myself and not freak out that someone was going to trap me in the stall or pull a Psycho. The events of last night seemed far away, and even though I was a bit nervous about the tour, I was excited to hear some of the truths about the place from a trusted source and not “Dikipedia.”
Just before nine o’clock, as bleary-eyed students were shuffling into their classrooms and occasionally looking at our motley crew with curiosity, the three of us waited outside Davenport’s office for Brenna and the guide.
“Hey guys,” Brenna said, waving at us as she came down the hall. She looked bright-eyed and bushy-tailed and I had no idea how she was able to work at this place day in and day out without going absolutely crazy, especially given the things she had seen.
Dex smiled, adjusting the camera in his hand. “Does your boyfriend ever sing ‘Hot for Teacher’?” He glanced at me. “Man, if you were a teacher, I’d be singing that to you every night. Maybe pull your hair back into a bun, put on some sex kitten glasses, and carry a large ruler…”
“Dex!” I admonished him, jerking my head at Brenna.
She only laughed. “It’s no bother. And yes, he sings ‘Hot for Teacher’ all the time. Makes a nice change from Raffi.”
Rebecca leaned in closer to her and lowered her voice. “So what can you tell us about the man who will be giving us the tour?”
“Patrick?” she asked. “He’s legit. Lived in Gary his whole life. His mother or grandmother used to work here.”
“But does he know about what you’ve seen?” I asked. “Will he think we’re nuts if we start talking about what we saw last night?”
Her attention sharpened. “What did you see last night?”
Dex patted the camera. “We have footage. We haven’t looked at it yet, but I think it picked up most of the anomalies. When do you have a break today?”
“Just at lunch,” she said. “Noon.”
“We’ll come by your room then, if that’s okay,” I said. “I personally have a few questions for you myself.”
She nodded with trepidation. “Okay.”
The doors to the school opened and in walked a man in his mid-forties with thick brown hair and glasses. He was hunched over a bit from bad posture and wearing a khaki jacket that looked too warm for the sunny day we were having.
“That’s Patrick,” she said, gesturing to him. “I’ll see you at noon.”
While she walked off, Rebecca managed to catch Patrick’s eye.
“You’re Mr. Rothburn?” she asked.
He gave her a shy smile and walked over to us. “I am, but please call me Patrick. Are you…?” He had quite the low, raspy voice.
We all introduced ourselves, which went well until Dex added “Ghost hunters” to the end of his introduction.
Patrick brought a toothpick out of his front pocket and stuck it in his mouth. “Oh, I don’t care much for ghost hunters.” He eyed Dex’s camera warily.
“Weren’t you told why we’re here?” Rebecca asked.
He nodded slightly. “I was. But I thought you were from a paranormal society, not for an actual show.”
“We don’t have to film you,” Dex told him. “And if we accidently do, we can blur you out.”
“I’d like that,” he said appreciatively. His eyes softened beneath his glasses. ”Sorry, I work at the museum and don’t want to be associated with any sort of show or entertainment. I’ll gladly show you around though. It’s much better this way than it has been in the past.”
“What happened then?”Dex asked.
“Ghost hunters or paranormal researchers have broken in on their own, trying to film. So, I guess we can all appreciate you taking the official route and respecting the history.”
I exchanged a loaded glance with Dex. It was probably a good idea if we left last night’s rule-breaking shenanigans out of it.
“No problem,” Rebecca filled in quickly. “Shall we get started? Do you want a spot of tea or coffee from the break room?”
He raised his palm. “No. Thank you though.”
“Are you still offering, Rebecca?” Dex asked. “Because you know I’d love one.” He batted his eyes at her.
“Get stuffed,” she told him. She and Patrick turned and headed for the stairs.
Dex looked so stunned at her comment, as if he was genuinely let down, that I had to kiss him on the cheek. “Nice try,” I teased.
“The nerve,” he said. “She does it for this Gary Oldman impersonator but not for good ol’ Dex.”
I put my arm around his waist, loving the feel of his abs beneath his thin t-shirt. “Tell you what, I’m not going to get you a coffee either but when we get back to Seattle, you can put on Van Halen and I’ll dress up like the bad, bad teacher that I am.”
“F*cking hell,” he groaned, turning so his body was pressed up against mine, his eyes becoming seductive. “Don’t tease me because I’ll seriously pull you into Davenport’s office right now and bend you over her desk.”
I grinned, sticking the tip of my tongue out through my teeth. “I told you, I’m not having sex in this place even if—“
“I had two dicks,” he supplied. “Yeah, so you say.”
“Ahem,” Rebecca said, clearing her throat. We looked over to see her and Patrick (who did look freakishly like Gary Oldman) standing at the middle of the staircase and waiting for us.
“Sorry,” I apologized. I looked back at Dex, covering him from their unamused eyes while he adjusted the erection in his jeans.
We caught up to them just as the morning bell rung and I nearly flew out of my skin in surprise.
“Got the creeps already?” Rebecca asked.
“I guess in some way I know what things might lie ahead,” I said carefully.
“Actually,” Gary Oldman said as we climbed the stairs, “Sea Crest was a hopeful place. My grandmother was a nurse here, just at the end of the administration when the cure for TB had been found, and she said that most of the children were happy. Sick, yes, but not all of them died. Many of them went home, and until then, they had their friends here to play with. Have you seen the playground out back?”
We stopped on the landing and he nodded out the large bay window that faced the back of the property as he fished another toothpick out of his pocket and placed it in his mouth. I had no idea where the other toothpick went.
Outside there was a large play area—a small grassy field lined with flower beds, a baseball diamond, a woodchip flecked jungle gym complete with swings and slides. Everything looked brand new, if not unremarkable.
“That’s where the playground used to be back when Sea Crest was operating,” he said. “See that grassy area there just before the trees? The students often go there to paint nature scenes. The forest, the flowers, the clouds. In the old days, that grass stretched along the length of the building. The nurses would wheel the patients out there for fresh air and leave them there for hours. If they were well enough, they’d play on the old swing set which is where the new swing set is located now.” He let out a sad sigh. ”Being outside was important for these kids—they believed fresh salty air was the cure. On the fourth floor, where they had the deathly ill, they had the windows open all the time, even in the dead of winter. Sometimes the nurses would come in the morning and find them dead of hypothermia.”
“My god,” I said, putting my hand to my mouth. “That’s horrible. You said this was a happy place.”
He gave me a wry look. “Happier than you’d think, yes. But like any hospital back in the day, there were horror stories. It didn’t mean it was the norm for these kids, though.”
We started back up the stairs to the second floor. Dex was already filming. “And these horror stories would be…” He trailed off.
“You want to hear some of them?” Oldman asked.
“A floor by floor rundown would be great,” Dex said. He looked over the camera to see Oldman wincing, toothpick in mouth. “Don’t worry, I’m not filming you, just past you.” >
He nodded and stopped in the middle of the hall, the same place where Dex and I had been when we saw the thing. “The second floor,” he announced without flourish. “This floor housed the majority of the children. To our right here, down this wing, they kept the lower-class children. Over to our left is where they housed the upper class.”
“And the difference?” Dex asked.
“Minimal differences now,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Let me show you.”
He took us down to where we were last night, near the room where Dex saw the rat. We poked our heads into one of the rooms. In the daylight it was still creepy, but a little more morose; the walls were a stark grey, the floor hard and austere. Dead leaves and yellowing newspaper littered the ground, along with rat droppings. You could see the broken glass of the windows, jagged edges glinting against the sun. I walked across the room and peered out. From this floor you could just see over the tops of the trees, the Pacific Ocean glinting on the horizon.
“They had a nice view,” I said.
“They did when it was sunny, like today,” he said. “But most of the time, the fog rolls in and gets stuck here on these hills. When they first built the hospital back in 1912, they were having good luck with the summer. This spot never saw a lick of fog. Then, a year after it was built, the fog rolled in around Gary and never left. The patients were caught in the clouds.” I turned around to see him addressing Dex, who was filming me. “That’s something to note for your show. On the fourth floor people report seeing fog in the hallways, no matter what time of day or what the weather is like outside. Sometimes the fog gets so thick you can’t see your hand in front of your face.”
“What have you experienced?” Rebecca asked. “If you don’t mind me asking.”
He stuck another toothpick in his mouth. Dex nodded at it. “Can I have one? I used to chomp on these f*ckers myself.”
Oldman raised an eyebrow but took a container of them out of his pocket and offered one to Dex, who confidently popped it in his mouth. He shot me a cheeky look. “Just like old times, kiddo.”
Oldman waited patiently for Dex’s attention to return to him. Once he did, he continued. “My experiences have been all over the map. If you believe in ghosts, they would frighten the hair off your chest. If you don’t…I’m sure you’ll find some way to explain it scientifically.”
“And do you believe in ghosts?” I asked.
He smiled quietly, eyes glinting beneath those glasses. “All historians believe in ghosts.” His toothpick bobbed from his lips. “Let’s see. On this floor I’ve seen the little boy. Many people have seen him, including previous ghost hunters.”
“Elliot,” I said.
“Is that his name?” he asked curiously. “Suits him. I often see Elliot when I’m here, day or night. He’s usually going after a rubber ball. I’ve seen ghost hunters place toys around on this floor, trucks and the like, and I’ve seen them move as if he is playing with them.”
“Anything else?” Dex asked.
Oldman eyed Dex in surprise. “That isn’t enough? No, I suppose it isn’t really. But the boy is a kind soul, never playing tricks or doing anything malicious.”
“Do you know if he plays the xylophone?”
His lips crooked upwards. “Ah, you’ve heard the music. I have never seen evidence of him playing any instrument, but you must understand there were so many children here over the years, so much energy in one place. No one knows where the music comes from, but we at least know it comes from this floor. You can sometimes hear children giggling and laughing too, or the sound of footsteps and children running past, though you can’t see them. I’ve experienced all of that on this floor.”
With that we left the room and walked down the hall back in the other direction. Toward the room with the light. My heart started racing as we neared it. I had to find a way to point it out.
Oldman showed us one of the rooms, saying, “As you can see, these rooms are smaller. They were private or semi-private, while the other rooms for the lower class were bigger, having sometimes twenty children squeezed into one room. The rich could afford privacy and space. Sometimes the kids were older, in their teens, and they were kept separately.”
While he spoke, I kept walking down the hall, trying to ignore the pounding in my chest as I neared the room. Once I saw a glimpse of the desk and the lamp, I stopped. I didn’t dare poke my head inside.
“Hey, why does this room have a desk and a lamp?” I announced, thinking I sounded totally fake. I kept the questioning look on my face as Oldman, Dex, and Rebecca came over. Oldman walked in the room which gave me the courage to do the same.
The lamp was turned off, the desk covered in a thick layer of dust. The window behind the desk was boarded shut for unknown reasons. There was a crooked picture on the wall, a painting of a girl that caught my eye.
“This would have been an office,” he said. “Perhaps one of the doctors who was stationed on this floor.” He went on to tell the history of some of the doctors who came to work at the hospital but I stopped listening. I was totally fixated on the painting.
It looked exactly like the girl I saw in my dreams. Brown hair, dark eyes, and a smile that seemed more wicked than joyful. Was this Shawna? I felt myself staring deeper and deeper at the painting until I heard the voice of a young girl whispering “Perry” in my ear.
I jumped and turned around. There was no little girl behind me. The three of them were ignoring me while Dex was trying to turn on the lamp.
“No electricity up here,” Oldman informed him just as the lamp’s switch went click and nothing came on. I looked at Rebecca as if to say I told you so but she just shrugged in return.
“Hey, what’s this painting about?” I asked, motioning to it. “Kind of weird that it’s just hanging here.”
“Perhaps it was a favorite patient or the daughter of one of the doctors,” Oldman said without much interest. “Shall we move on? If you folks are really interested in the horror stories of this place, this floor isn’t the one to give them to you.”
We all nodded and followed him out of the room, me being the last one out. As we went, I absently glanced into the room across the hall, the one that I’d seen the bad thing go into.
The little girl in the painting was standing in there, her pale hand holding onto a leash.
She smiled at me with cold black eyes and menacing teeth.
I screamed bloody murder and stumbled backward, trying to run away, just as the girl vanished before my eyes.
Dex was at my side in seconds, holding me at the waist, while the rest of them ran over.
“What happened?” Dex asked, brow furrowed with concern as he looked me over and then the empty room.
I shook my head, my mouth Sahara dry. “I…I just saw a girl. A little girl. Like the one in the picture. She was standing right here.” I looked over at Rebecca who was pursing her red lips. “I’m serious. I know what I saw.”
“I believe you,” Dex said. “Are you sure it was the one in the picture? The one right in there?”
“Yes!” I cried out, my chest feeling squeezed. “Yes. She looked the same. She smiled at me. She was holding onto a leash.”
“A leash?” Rebecca asked, her voice rising.
I nodded meekly. “Uh huh. But I couldn’t see around the corner to see what was at the end of it.” I looked at the historian. “Have you ever heard of people seeing a little girl before?”
“Yes,” he mused, sticking his hands in his pockets. “But she’s usually on the fourth floor, not this one. I didn’t know what she looked like either, but if she’s like the girl in the painting…perhaps I should take it to the museum and do some background work on it.”
“No offense,” Dex said, “but that picture is probably there for a reason. I don’t think removing it would be a very good idea. We have to live here for the next few days, if you catch my drift.”
He nodded. “I do. I guess it’s not really helping that I’m telling you these stories then.”
“Occupational hazard,” Dex said with a quick smile. “We’re all used to shitting our pants.”
“Lovely, Dex,” Rebecca said coolly. She slid her eyes over to me. “Are you okay to continue?”
I exhaled. “Yes. I’m fine. Obviously that just scared the shit out of me.”
“Hey, come here,” Dex murmured, pulling me into an embrace. “You stick by me, okay? I don’t want you seeing anything without me.”
I nodded and we started for the third floor, Rebecca throwing me looks of concern—or pity—as she and Oldman walked ahead. Gah. I’d like to see how she reacted if she saw a dead girl.
As we climbed up the staircase to the next floor, Dex whispered in my ear, “Do you think that girl was Shawna?”
I swallowed hard. “I think so,” I whispered back. “She’s at least the girl from my dreams.”
He paused on the step we were on and stared blankly at me. “What dream?”
I glanced up the staircase to Rebecca and Oldman who were almost at the third floor. “Oh, it’s nothing.”
“Perry,” he said sternly, his eyes turning dark. “You know it’s never nothing. What dream?”
“I’ll tell you later,” I said, and then continued up the stairs after them. I really didn’t want to get into a conversation about my crazy dead grandmother in front of a stranger.
He let out an annoyed grunt before running up after me, loose coins and keys in his pockets jingling.
“So this is the third floor,” Oldman said, voice slow and measured. “This was where the dirty work happened.”
“Dirty work?” Rebecca repeated.
“This is where the morgue is. Where the operating rooms are. Some of the rooms were used as a barber and a dentist office for the staff. I’m sure you know by now that if you worked for the hospital, you weren’t allowed to go home until there was a cure. No one could risk infecting friends and family members in the town below. Everyone was truly isolated up here.”
We looked down the hallways. They looked the same as downstairs except there were fewer rooms and many had metal doors with the white paint peeling off. It was also a few degrees colder. I voiced that to Oldman.
“You’re correct about that,” he said. “But I’ve been here when it’s cold enough to see your breath, cold enough to freeze water. That’s something you can’t really explain.”
“So tell us something about this floor,” Dex prodded him. “What have you seen here? What have others seen here?”
“Do you want me to show you something?” he asked. “Follow me.”
We went down the hall to the left, pausing in front of a closed door. He put his hand on the knob. “This is the autopsy room. Or as some people have called it, the room of blood.”
He pushed the door open and it groaned on its hinges like a wounded animal. There was nothing but dust and darkness in front of us. He turned to Dex. “Do you have a light on that thing?”
Dex nodded seriously, flicking it on. Rebecca and I stood in the doorway while the men went into the room, Dex’s light illuminating the walls in a harsh glow. To my surprise, the room wasn’t empty, not by a long shot. Somehow this made things even more disturbing.
There were counters and a couple of sinks, closets, and large metal storage cabinets all along the walls that were decaying with splotches of rust. In the middle of the room were three tables, all spaced well apart and bolted to the floors. Large operating lights hung above them, looking like a doctor was about to switch them on at any moment. To the side of all of this was a giant compartment with six slots—the body cooler.
Every bone in my body felt frozen. There was no way I was going in that room. I looked over at Rebecca, who was biting her lip and watching as Dex and Oldman walked over to the operating tables. I knew she felt the same, even if she didn’t say it.
“Shine the light here,” Oldman said, pointing to the middle table. “You see this ring around the edge? That acted like a moat to catch the blood. The doctors had little understanding of tuberculosis and how it was transmitted. They thought if they could study it, they could find a cure. Of course, as time went on, they did fewer autopsies. What was the point? You’ll notice the cooler there.” He waved at the metal block with its compartments. “Only six bodies could fit in there at one time. Because the disease was so highly infectious, the dead were moved out of here right away.”
“Down the body chute,” Dex said.
Oldman eyed him. “Yes. You’ve heard about that, no doubt. I believe the doorway to it is somewhere in this room, but I haven’t bothered to look. I don’t like to push my luck.”
“So this was called the blood room because of the way they bled the patients out?” Rebecca asked. She sounded slightly disgusted.
He shook his head. “Yes, and no. There were also a lot of surgeries done in here—experimental surgeries. One involved collapsing a lung to get the fluid out. That was the most common one, done to probably half the patients that came in here. Others involved removing ribs or muscles in their chests in order to expand the lungs. Sometimes they would insert balloons into their lungs and fill them with air.” He grimaced and looked at the walls, and I realized the rust might have been blood stains. “It got messy.”
“They actually did that to children?” Rebecca asked.
“Not all,” he said. “But some. They rarely survived the procedure. If they did, they were usually worse off, walking around like their chests had been scooped out.” >
“Jesus,” Dex swore under his breath. “I just can’t imagine it.”
“The horrors of history,” Oldman said slowly. “And I’d love to say that a visit to this room was as bad as it got for a youngster. But with rumors of abuse and crumbling standards in Sea Crest, I hate to think of what could be worse.”
“Was there abuse?” I asked.
He cocked his head, considering his answer before saying, “My grandmother never reported anything like that. She was a good woman, saintly almost, who loved to help others in need. But they weren’t all like her. It was hard to be up here, isolated, in constant fear of death while constantly surrounded by it. The nurses had rules too. They couldn’t get emotional over patients, they had to act like everything was fine all the time. It was hard. Many nurses killed themselves. And some nurses, we’ll if you believe the rumors, some went crazy. Took it out on the children. But they are, of course, just rumors. None of this has ever been documented. I should know.”
My body felt like it was getting colder by the moment. This floor had fewer windows than the others, making it darker. If Dex thought we’d explore this floor in the night, he was absolutely out of his mind.
“We should get going,” Oldman said as he came toward us with Dex in tow. “I need to get back to the museum soon and we’ve one more floor to go.”
“But you haven’t told us what you’ve seen here,” Dex pointed out.
Oldman grunted and stopped in the middle of the hallway. “Personally, on this floor, it’s not what I’ve seen but more what I’ve heard. What I’ve felt. I’ve had the feeling that someone was behind me when there was no one there. I’ve heard screams coming from the blood room. I’ve heard wet coughing, like someone is coughing up blood, the sound of wheels going past, and footsteps. I’ve seen a doctor in a white coat standing in the corner of one of the rooms.” He shuddered at that thought. “And I hope I never see him again. Can we get going?”
I picked up on how noticeably agitated he was acting, which in turn made me feel queasy. If the historian wanted to get going, we were definitely going.
“What have others seen?”Dex asked as we climbed the stairs to the final floor.
Oldman gave him a grave look. “It depends who you ask and what their beliefs are.”
“Beliefs?” I repeated.
He nodded as we stopped on the landing. Below us was the darkness of the third floor, above us was the contrasting light of the fourth floor. And yet I felt the fourth floor held more secrets, more animosity than any of the others.
“People have reported seeing the same…creature…on the third and fourth floors.”
“Creature?” I felt icy trails going down my spine. I didn’t want to venture what the creature looked like.
“The fourth floor, as you’ll soon see, was used to house the patients who were close to death and the ones that had gone insane. There used to be a metal gate right here,” he pointed across the stairs, “that prevented them from escaping. As weak and skinny as they were, they were always a threat. Some people say that with all the bad energy, the lost souls, the mistreated patients, the experiments gone wrong, the mass grave—“
“Mass grave?” I interrupted.
He gave me a sympathetic look. “Many bodies were never claimed by their families. They feared the disease would get them, even in death. Superstitions, you know. The dead had to be put somewhere.”
This place couldn’t possibly get worse.
“So what was the creature?” Rebecca asked.
“Many that have seen it believe it’s a demon,” he said. “It looks like a human but isn’t. Crawls on the ceiling and walls.”
And it totally just got worse. That was what the bad thing was. A demon.
A motherf*cking demon.
I started to think that maybe Pippa’s warning hadn’t been a figment of my imagination after all.
“Does it ever hurt anyone?” Dex asked in a low voice.
Oldman shook his head and stuck a toothpick between his teeth. “I honestly don’t know. I’ve never seen it. That doesn’t mean it’s not there but…as you can tell, this place will play tricks on you. There’s too much history, too many people who have passed through these walls. You never know what you’re going to get here. And I find that fascinating.” He looked up at the fourth floor. “On second thought, do you mind if we skip that floor? You’re welcome to take a quick look but that whole thing I said earlier about not pushing my luck…”
“No, that’s totally cool,” I said a little too gratefully.
“Do you mind if I just shoot a few seconds?” Of course Dex had to ask that.
Oldman shook his head and sauntered over to the window on the landing, hands behind his back. “Go ahead.”
Rebecca decided to go up with Dex while I stayed at the historian’s side as he looked out the window.
“You know,” I admitted, hoping that talking would calm my heart rate down, “before I knew about this place, I had no idea that sanatoriums existed.”
He smiled quietly. “That was the same back then. Despite these hospitals all over the country—despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of people came to them to die—everyone liked to pretend that this didn’t exist. But it did. You can shuffle people away into isolated buildings and lock them up with false promises of a cure. But the patients, the ones that never saw their families again, they didn’t forget. It’s no wonder this place is haunted. All the ghosts here just want someone to talk to, someone to recognize that they exist, even when they don’t.”
“And the demon thing?” I said, my voice shaking slightly.
“Maybe some ghosts don’t want attention. Maybe they just want to inflict the pain and terror that they felt every day. Maybe some are too far gone in their hate and revenge that they cease to be ghosts and become something else.” He spoke quietly as he leaned in closer and speared me with a shrewd gaze. “Have you seen it?”
I felt like my throat was closing up. I nodded slowly.
He made an “ah” face, then said calmly, “You’ve got a nice energy about you. They like that.”
“Okay,” Dex said loudly as he jogged down the stairs with Rebecca at his side. “There wasn’t too much to see up there. Looks pretty much the same as the second floor, although I think I located the door to the body chute.”
“Dangerous thing,” Oldman commented. “You know they found a runaway girl in there one year. She’d snuck in by the post office and then got stuck for a few days.”
“Post office?” I asked.
“There’s an abandoned one down the road. The body chute actually goes all the way in. It’s a real long walk in a very dark place.”
I shot Dex a look to warn him to not even think about it, but Oldman went on, “After that, they boarded it up around the post office so you couldn’t get in. Or out, I suppose.” He glanced at his watch.”Well, I’m afraid it’s time for me to go. I hope you’ve enjoyed your tour of the Sea Crest Sanatorium.”
We walked down the stairs, and with each landing we reached, my shoulders felt lighter and lighter. Once we got to the main floor, the first bell rang and teachers began scurrying about, and I started to feel like I was back in my own skin again.
“And I hope you be extra careful while you’re here,” Oldman said to me just before he walked off into the sunshine.
“What did he say?” Dex asked.
I shook my head. “Nothing I wasn’t already thinking.”