CHAPTER TEN
“Seriously kiddo, are you OK?” Dex reached for me from the driver’s seat and placed the back of his hand against my forehead. His hand felt nice and hot. So I quickly opened the door and stepped into the cool night and faced the mission ahead of us.
“Right as rain,” I said, smiling as the fat, icy drops fell on to my raised cheeks. I drew my coat in close around me as Dex got out on his side and brought out only a wireless mic and a small camera. We’d go back to get the EVPs, infrared and the rest of our ghost-busting goodies if we needed them but we didn’t want to seem too pushy in front of Dr. Hasselback.
We walked together against the rain and wind to the heavy and strangely ornate doors at the front of the old building. Dex tried to open the beasts but after a few attempts, he discovered that it wasn’t that they were too heavy but that they were locked.
He glanced at his phone. “Huh. It’s only five.”
I craned my neck up to get a better look at the windows above but only got rain in my eyes. I wiped them and then tried the door as well. It was locked.
“I told you,” Dex said.
“Maybe they all like to go to bed early here,” I offered. “Didn’t you have a bedtime at your institute? Visiting hours? Curfew?”
I knew by the time I got to “visiting hours” I had gone too far, so I stepped away from the door and looked around again, avoiding Dex’s eyes.
“It’s early,” he said after a minute. He leaned forward and peered through the doors. There was a half-lit desk inside the lobby area with a placard that could have said “Administration” but I wasn’t sure. All I was sure of was that for five in the evening, the hospital looked dead empty. The short clip of a hallway that we could see was devoid of movement, except for those flickering lights, and all the doors were closed. I started to imagine all the horrors behind those plain doors, the psychotic blank faces and lost lives, but I stopped myself. I did not need to develop a fear of hospitals. I was sure that would come later.
I eyed the side of the entrance but there wasn’t even a buzzer or intercom to let people in. I tapped Dex on the shoulder. He looked at me, perplexed.
“You do have this doctor’s number right?” I asked. “Just phone him and be like, dude, what the f*ck, we-”
The front doors suddenly rattled back and forth with deafening noise. I grabbed Dex’s arm in fright as my heart jumped around inside my chest. Were the doors moving by themselves or…
A small figure appeared in front of us, on the other side of the doors, as if she rose up from beneath the linoleum floor.
I screamed but reined it in quickly as I got a better look at the woman. At first I thought she was Mary, the ghost we encountered on D’Arcy Island. She was the same height, freakishly short, and had the same stupid glasses and mousy face. But this woman also had a pinched nose, a mass of wrinkles that only comes from being a cold-hearted spinster. Plus she was wearing a white nurse uniform and seemed to be from this century, albeit barely. She glared at us from the other side, turning her small weird head back and forth as if she were a horse that couldn’t look at you head on.
Satisfied, she unlocked the front door and casually pushed it open with all her might. Which was apparently a lot for this tiny, nasty-faced imp. Dex caught the door with his arm and I could tell he was straining to keep it open with the same amount of ease.
“You Mr. Foray and Miss Palomino?” she asked in a voice that had as much reverb as Katherine Hepburn. Her eyes were quick and spastic as they flew between our faces.
“That’s us,” Dex said. He smiled broadly, hoping to charm her, but I could tell from the tightness of his cheekbones that he was nervous and uncomfortable. Maybe he was reminded of Mary too.
She looked him up and down – finding his moody good looks ineffective – before saying, “You’re late!”
Then she turned on her white heel and strode down the hall. We were quickly ushered in through the giant doors and they sealed us in with a jarring slam.
We hurried after her, our shoes squeaking down the hall. She could move fast, whoever the hell she was.
“Sorry, we thought we had enough time to get here,” I called after her, watching her white form wiggle jerkily back and forth with each quick stride. “What’s your name, by the way?”
She raised her hand in the air as if to tell me to shut up.
“I’m Mrs. Roundtree,” she said without looking behind her.
Dex gave me a look that said, “Mrs? Someone’s married to her?” but thankfully he didn’t open his big mouth. We just kept squeaking and skidding after her until we were midway through the long half-lit, half-dark hallway. She had come to an abrupt stop and pointed at a plain door that read ‘Dr. Lewis Hasselback, Head Administrator.’
“He’s waiting for you,” she said. She had a funny way of keeping her lips as glued to her teeth as she talked.
And then she was gone, jerking down the hallway until her white uniform was just a blob against the shadowy corridor.
I took in a deep breath and raised my brows at Dex.
“Can’t charm them all,” he said with a disappointed downturn of his lips and raised his hand to knock on the door. Before he brought it down, it was flung open. A short, balding man with beady eyes and thick frames was looking up at us with an anxious look on his face. I thought that being face to face with a psychologist/psychiatrist/whatever would have brought back some unpleasant memories for both me and Dex. But Dr. Hasselback was so nervy and twitchy that he put me at ease for some reason. None of that calm, condescending demeanor that Dr. Freedman had back when I was a teenager. And judging from Dex’s nonplussed expression, he seemed to feel the same.
“Come in, come in,” the doctor said, opening the door wide and quickly gesturing with his arm while he poked his tiny, tanned head out into the hall and looked up and down it.
I walked close beside Dex and entered the room, a large office that was more messy than orderly. Two hard-backed chairs faced the big oak table, which was strewn with overflowing file folders and piled comically high with a stack of books that seemed to reach halfway to the ceiling. It was like he was playing Jenga with textbooks.
In the far corner of the room were a couch, an armchair and the weird, Disneyland-like set design of a shrink’s office, plus a few storage locker cabinets, which I knew housed some pills, and a sink.
As Dex and I were taking in the scene, the doctor shut the door gently and then scampered over to the desk and took a seat in his rolling chair. He barely looked at us and pointed at the chairs in a rough, careless manner. “Please sit down.”
The chair was hard and uncomfortable, a big change from his cushy leather one. But even though that was the case, Dr. Hasselback looked like he couldn’t be comfortable anywhere. He was already squirming, as if he couldn’t get into an acceptable position.
“Sorry if we’re intruding, doctor,” Dex said, leaning forward in his seat with his diplomat’s face on. “I had mistakenly thought we were on for five.”
The doctor let out a nervous giggle, steepled his hands together and leaned back in the chair with a creak. “Oh, no, you were right on time. It was my fault. I hadn’t told Mrs. Roundtree that you were dropping by. I’m afraid we close the hospital to visitors at 4:30 p.m. I should have mentioned that, too.”
“That’s kinda early for a mental hospital, right?” I said.
His eyes turned unkindly for second. At least I thought they did. It was hard to tell when they were so small and weasely and he was wearing such thick glasses. But he smiled, perfect orthodontics from childhood. “It is early. But it is the winter and we go by the light here. It’s just easier. And our patients don’t get many visitors these days anyway. We don’t have many patients in general.”
“How many are here?” Dex asked.
“Thirty-three,” the doctor said. “And the numbers diminish each year. Technically, we shouldn’t even have three over thirty, but families get desperate and I have a soft heart.”
I wasn’t sure about that.
“Do you mind if we start setting up for the interview?” Dex asked, bring around the camera and placing it on the desk. With his other hand he produced a few waivers out of his camera bag and placed those along with it.
The doctor eyed them suspiciously before picking the papers up and giving them a very thorough read.
“I hope you two realize why I am letting you do this.”
Dex and I looked at each other.
Dr. Hasselback continued, eyes on the paper, “It’s risky for me to open my doors to a film crew. Too much publicity, the wrong publicity, and I would humiliate myself and my patients.”
“I can assure you that won’t happen,” Dex said.
The doctor looked up at him. “Can you? I hope so. The reason I said OK to this little venture is because you aren’t the sensational type. You’re honest, I believe. I hope, anyway. Sometimes I can’t really believe what it is that you’re writing, but I’ve noticed that even if you are making up every episode, you’re doing it for the right reasons.”
“Which are?” I asked.
He looked surprised and then looked back down at the papers again. “You’re obviously seeing things that aren’t there. Things you want to see. But you’re not making it up for the wrong reasons. For fame. And money.”
I opened my mouth to say something in our defense, but Dex laid his hand on my knee and shot me a subtle, warning look.
“And therefore, I don’t mind if you film here. Because I know from personal experience that you aren’t going to find anything. And I know you won’t embellish on something that isn’t there. However, I’m also agreeing to an interview and this is the most important part. Because an interview, right now, would help shine a little bit of light on this dark corner of the world. The country has forgotten we exist. And I can bring that light back, with you both.”
So the doctor wanted to use us as much as we wanted to use him. I suppose that was perfectly fair. And we were all being honest about it, a major plus.
“That sounds like a great plan, Dr. Hasselback,” Dex said, smiling but uneasily eyeing the papers he had yet to sign. He picked up on that and eventually signed it with a runny pen.
He handed them back to Dex and said, “Shall we begin then? I’m afraid I don’t have all night. You two are free to film in this building for tonight. The third floor. It’s totally empty. I’ll see tomorrow about Thursday and access to Block C.”
I presumed that it was all up to him whether we were going to film Thursday or not, but I let him have his power trip instead of questioning him. I knew how much of an accomplishment this was for Dex to get us any access at all. I especially saw it in the face of Annie Potterson when she realized we had access to a mysterious institute. They knew all right.
Dex lifted the camera up to eye level and aimed it at him. I wondered if I should say something or introduce it but Dex had already hit record. I guess we would edit my part in later. Fine with me. My hair was wet and grody and I probably matched it.
Dex did most of the talking. He seemed to know a lot more about the institute than I had garnered from my brief internet session. That didn’t surprise me at all. The upper hand changed over, at least in this regard.
Dr. Hasselback was just as jittery on camera as he was off camera, but he was forthcoming and passionate about the questions. He gave a thorough history of the place and the challenges of getting funding for America’s struggling mental health victims, before Dex touched on the whole haunted aspect.
“When was the first time you heard Riverside was haunted?” Dex asked. >
The doctor laughed, naturally for once, and leaned back in his seat. “I have no idea. Probably the first day for me. I only came on board after medical school. Brought on by my father, who, as I just mentioned, took over the institute after the war. But you must understand, every hospital, every institute…or any place with history, is haunted in some way or another. Every place has stories and a place like this, festered with people who have stories of their own…it’s inevitable.”
“So you don’t believe in ghosts?”
“Heavens, no.”
“Then how do you account for what has happened here?”
Hasselback clasped his hands into a steeple again, and for the first time tonight, looked calm. He lowered his brow and looked at Dex head on. “You tell me, Mr. Dex Foray, what you think has happened here. What you’ve heard.”
Dex pursed his lips for a split second before shrugging. The camera moved a bit. “Just what has been reported around the world. That patients have seen apparitions in their rooms. That visitors have been locked in with their relatives when they try to leave. That nurses hear whispers and footsteps when no one is around. That Block C is occasionally riddled with random, decaying body parts.”
I shivered at that last sentence. I hadn’t read that part. I looked to the doctor for his opinion. His fingers were pressed harder together but his expression hadn’t changed.
“That’s all?” he asked mildly.
“I’m sure it’s not all,” Dex answered. “But it’s enough for us.”
“Well it’s not enough for me. All of that can be explained with two simple words: Mental Hospital. Anything a patient sees can’t be taken seriously.”
“And their families? And your paid staff?”
He managed a quick smile and eased himself out of his chair. He walked over to the window and peered out at the black rain-spattered night. Dex followed him with the camera lens.
“I think it’s contagious, you know,” Hasselback said. “The nurses, the night staff, the old security guards we used to have. These are people who had no connection to the patients at all. But these…diseases. These plays of the mind. They are contagious. And they catch. If this happens to people of rational thought, what happens to family members, when they see their loved ones strapped down to a chair, muttering nonsense about things that aren’t there?”
I wasn’t watching the doctor anymore, I was watching Dex. The camera had faltered down just a little bit and his eyes looked glazed and fearful at the same time. Like he was remembering something. I wanted to reach out for him and bring him back in but the doctor beat me to it.
Hasselback turned around from the window and looked squarely at Dex. “Wouldn’t you say that apparitions are nothing more than a virus? Spread between two people with nothing more than a sneeze. Or a suggestion?”
“Perhaps,” Dex said slowly. We both knew what he was saying. We had thought it before. But we also knew it wasn’t true.
“So you see, then. The way the mind works. No, this hospital or any of its buildings aren’t haunted.”
“Because you personally don’t believe in ghosts,” I pointed out.
“Not in the way that you believe in them. But there are ghosts, oh yes, there are ghosts and they all live here. Because people with mental illness are haunted by ghosts every day. But these are ghosts inside their heads. Ghosts created by chemical imbalances and strengthened through memory. Everyone has ghosts that follow them throughout their lives. Ghosts of the past they wish they’d left behind, ghosts of love they once turned down, ghosts of regret and ghosts of loss. Ghosts of guilt. We all have them. I do. Roundtree does. You both do. And if you don’t deal with your demons, they will haunt you for the rest of your life.”
Dex and I both fell silent, stiffened and awkward. Hasselback’s words hit me hard and I knew they hit Dex hard too. It all made sense. Our personal demons, the ghosts of our past, the things we hid in the closet or under the rug, or inside a hollowed-out book, would eventually find us. Maybe they’d find us in ways that only our mind could imagine and interpret as something supernatural.
But at the same time…that was impossible. Not because it couldn’t happen, but that it wasn’t the case with us. Not with Dex and me. Certainly not me. I wasn’t seeing a dead girl in his living room because I had a hard time letting go of my love for him. I didn’t see Mary because I felt unappreciated by my parents. And I didn’t see Ol’ Roddy because kids teased me when I was young. I saw those things because they were people once and they were haunted by their own pasts and just wanted someone to finally notice. I don’t know why they chose me, but to pretend they were a figment of my imagination was wrong. Evil or not, they were people and deserved at least a bit of recognition, even if they couldn’t have my compassion.
I looked over at Dex. He still had the camera rolling on the doctor during this long pause but his mind was elsewhere. I reached into my purse again and grasped my iPhone in my hand. I gave it a squeeze and let go. I would need it tonight, I knew this much.
“Did that answer your question, Mr. Foray?”
Dex slowly nodded and looked down at the camera. “I think we’ve got enough here.” His voice was lower than usual and as thick as soup.
Hasselback nodded then peered with his rodent eyes at Dex’s arm. He was just in a plain black tee shirt, his jacket on the back of the chair. It was a trifle warm in the room.
“What’s your tattoo of?” Hasselback asked.
Dex looked up at him, brows raised. “On my arm?”
“Yes,” he said patiently and walked over to him to get a better look.
Dex rolled up his sleeve to show him the black, simple-looking fleur-de-lis on his bicep. His bicep instinctively flexed and looked very nice indeed.
The doctor nodded and stood up straight. “The mark of a criminal.”
Dex didn’t move. I flinched.
“What?” I asked, leaning closer to Dex’s arm. Mark of a criminal?
“I assume Dex knows this. That’s why he chose it. The fleur-de-lis is the mark of French nobility, and also the mark of a criminal. They were branded with it, usually on the shoulder or on the back. It showed that they were owned by the monarchy. Are you French, Dex?”
“Yes,” he said, sounding plain. He rolled down his sleeve. The movement was very robotic. I watched them both carefully, not wanting to interrupt.
“There you go. Not that that was hard to deduce. I can see it in your coloring. Dark eyes. Dark hair. Olive skin. You have all the French in you. But not all. You’re a half-breed.”
Dex gave the doctor an annoyed scowl. But the doctor continued, “Sorry. No disrespect. People’s ethnicities say a lot more about them than the people themselves. It’s part of the past and the past is what molds us.”
“We really don’t have time for amateur psychology, doctor,” Dex sneered. I imagined his sneer was as polite as I’ve ever heard it.
“I’m hardly amateur. And I apologize for being curious. I can tell this is all news to her and she wants to know more.”
He pointed his steepled fingers at me. Dex didn’t meet my eyes but kept his focused on the doctor.
“Half French…half Scottish?” he asked.
I expected Dex not to say anything. But he eventually said “Irish” out of curiosity to see where the doctor was going with all this. It was like going to a palm reader. I was more than glad that the attention wasn’t on me but I kind of wanted to know if he could guess my background.
“Ah. Irish and French. How perfect that is.”
“Oh yeah? How so?”
“You look it. And I bet your mother was the French one, am I right?”
Dex didn’t say anything.
I spoke up, “Is this all relevant?”
I knew Dex didn’t like to speak about either of his parents. I didn’t know anything about his mom except for the fact that she was dead, and his father ran out on him when he was a young boy, forcing him and his family into poverty. Dex had a hard enough time telling me all of that – though it was really nothing in the grand scheme of things – and I knew he wasn’t about to do it with some random doctor. Besides, Dex had enough damn doctors already.
“No, not really,” the doctor said. “I think we are done here. You may go.”
Gee thanks. I got out of my chair and grabbed onto Dex’s arm, pulling him up. He followed in a weird sort of daze, his eyes still avoiding mine, looking utterly lost.
We headed toward the door but the doctor called after us, “Sorry for being intrusive. This sort of thing still fascinates me. And it’s a nice change to be able to discuss it with people who still have level heads on their shoulders.”
Level-headed. That was a new one. I smiled, short and tense, at the doctor and waved, opening the door for us with my other hand.
He waved at us and went back to his Jenga pile of books, calling out, “Don’t forget, third floor only and you have one hour. One hour and that’s it.”