CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“Perry,” he murmured, his voice coming out low, rough and vibrant in the echoes of the dark stairwell. It was delicious and dark, burrowing pleasantly in my ear, making me shiver again. I couldn’t quite tell where his face was but I knew it was somewhere close. Very close. Like if I leaned in one inch more, my lips would meet his lips. That kind of close.
It was unbearable.
The thumb on my cheekbone slowed down in its gentle caress. The tension between us began to spark and stiffen, like whatever was keeping us apart was going to finally bring us together.
“Perry,” he said again, slowly, smoothly. He was so close. One inch. Just one inch. “I don’t think you have any idea about the way I-”
SLAM!
A door below us slammed shut, causing a billow of cold air to come rising up in between the stairs. We both jumped and pulled back.
Great f*cking timing!
Dex kept his arm around me and his warm hand at my face but turned his head and yelled, “Hello? Doctor Hasselback?”
We listened hard but couldn’t hear anything. I could hear my heart whooshing loudly though. More from the way it had seemed like Dex was about to kiss me than from whoever just came into or left the stairwell. The way you what, Dex!?
The moment was gone, though. Dex let go of me completely and then shone the flashlight down the middle of the stairwell.
“See anything?” I asked, my voiced coming out all squeaky like a pubescent boy.
“No,” he said, drawing the word out. “But I think we should still check it out.”
I let out the air I had been holding inside me for the last few minutes. It floated away in the frigid air.
He turned around and placed one hand on my shoulder and said, “I’m serious about taking you out of here.”
I put my hand on top of his hand and gave it a squeeze. So we were just going to forget about what just almost happened. What else was new? Back to the damn ghosts.
“I know. I’m staying. Staying until we both go.”
He didn’t say anything for a few beats and began to move toward me again. My heart held still.
But then he hesitated, took my hand into his and led me to the stairs. He gave me the flashlight and told me to light our way.
We both made our way down carefully until we were at the second level. The door here was shut like it was before.
“Time to try floor number two. Same deal. OK, kiddo?”
I let out a small sound that sounded like a “yes” and we stepped into the next hallway.
This hallway was exactly like the one above. The same locked rooms. The same dust in the air. At least now I didn’t have to be a host in any way. Dex filmed with one arm, while he kept his other arm around me, holding me snuggly into his side the whole time. I was grateful for his protectiveness even though every other second I was worried some creature was going to touch me from behind.
Everything went more or less smoothly (considering the circumstances) until he stopped in front of one of the doors to a patient’s room. It was hard to tell from the light my flashlight was splashing on it, but it looked to be a different color from the other doors. A green instead of a white. The bolts also looked shiny and new. And the little slot window that you slid across? Well, that was open half an inch. You couldn’t see anything but…
“What do you think?” he asked me. He wanted to know if we should open the slot.
“I don’t think so,” I said softly, my voice barely registering.
“You don’t have to open it. I will. Just film me.” He took his arm off me and placed the camera in my free hand. I took it clumsily and tried to aim it in his direction. It was hard. I was shaking so much from the fear. I knew he was going to do this no matter what I said.
He stepped up to the door and first tried the deadbolt. It was locked from the inside like the others. Strange, when you thought about it, but I was relieved we wouldn’t have to be exploring a padded cell in the dark.
I kept the camera on his face, on close-up, as he looked at the slot inquisitively. Even through the grainy green light of night vision, he looked great on camera, better than I did. I wanted to think about that instead of what he was about to do.
“Give me the flashlight,” he said, with his hand extended. I placed it in it.
He raised it up to the slot, put his fingers on the small knob and slowly slid the window across.
I waited with bated breath for something to come jumping out, like a hand or something, but nothing happened.
We waited a few moments. Dex eyed the camera and gave it a little wink. Then he leaned in closer to the slot and aimed the flashlight in there to get a better look inside.
I kept the camera on him, the focus coming in and out, trying to catch him, but took my eyes away from it and watched in real life. I leaned forward for a better view. Part of me wanted to see what was inside, no matter how scared I was.
We both huddled around the slot as Dex illuminated a dark corner of the room.
We couldn’t see too much, but what we could see was in fact a padded cell. The walls looked like a fresh, clean mattress under the concentrated light. It faded and fuzzed out into a heavy mask of blackness on the sides where the light wouldn’t reach.
We exchanged a look and I leaned in even closer. This was as creepy as anything. A pristine-looking padded cell. He nodded, understanding what I was thinking. Then he shone the light over to the other corner of the room.
A small, bald man was standing there. Still as death. His back to us. Staring at the wall.
I felt an immense flow of evil seep out of the window and take hold of my body in a paralyzing grip. I couldn’t look away. Couldn’t look at Dex or check if I was aiming the camera correctly. I was stuck, my eyes locked onto this man in the straightjacket in the murky depths of the locked padded cell.
The man turned, slowly, to look at us. His face was one of the most disturbing things I have ever seen. It burned itself in my memory. He had only a wide, black mouth filled with bloody, wet teeth. No eyes and no nose. Essentially…no face.
Then the spell was over.
The man moved so fast toward us that he almost disappeared, until his gleaming, gaping mouth appeared at the slot, snapping and yelping horribly in our faces.
Dex and I both screamed in unison and turned to run for our f*cking lives. Dex held me up as I almost went down; I dropped the flashlight but couldn’t care. We booked it down the hallway, moving as fast as humanly possible, our screams still emanating from our lungs, following us as we went.
We piled into the stairwell and ran down the steps two at a time, running and jumping until the stairs stopped and we slammed into a door.
Dex quickly flung it open and we burst inside a large, dark space, both collapsing onto a concrete floor. It scraped up my knees but I didn’t care. I rolled onto my back, whimpering, unable to think, to breathe, to talk. The terror was taking hold of me and bringing tears to my eyes. I kept seeing the faceless face of the man in the cell, those bloodied, slightly pointed teeth. The smoothness where the eyes and nose should have been.
“Perry?” I heard Dex spit out. I opened my eyes and looked up at the ceiling. It was dim in here, wherever we were, but my eyes were quickly adjusting to some type of light. Natural light.
Dex laid his hand on my stomach causing me to jump.
“Sorry,” he said between gasps. “I didn’t know where you were.”
I grabbed hold of his hand and held it. Held it so tight that it must have hurt him, at least a little bit.
He grunted and I felt him adjust himself beside me.
“Can you sit up?” he asked.
I did so, feeling lightheaded from the lack of oxygen. I looked around me, slowly and carefully. We were thankfully not in a padded cell but what looked to be the basement. We had overshot the whole first floor entirely and ran all the way to the very bottom.
I turned my head and looked at the source of the light. The basement was huge, taking up almost the entire square footage of the building. There was a line of four rectangular windows placed very high up against the ceiling. They looked out onto the parking lot and the light that was being filtered in was coming from the lampposts outside the building. A twinge of comfort came from the fact that we could see the Highlander parked just a few feet away. Our way out of here.
I sat up straighter and moved myself backward toward Dex. He was sitting beside me, knees up, breathing heavily and staring at the ground. When he noticed my eyes on him, he looked up. I was happy I could read his face. I wasn’t happy to see he looked just as terrified as I must have.
“What…” I said slowly. But it’s all I could say.
“The…f*ck? I thought we were going to die,” he admitted, his voice quiet and slightly amazed. “I thought…that was it.”
“Who was that…what was that?”
“I don’t think we want to know.”
I shivered. I thought about that man/teeth thing opening the door and chasing us down into the basement. He would just need to open the door and we would most likely be trapped in here.
“Did you get it on the camera?” he asked, looking over at it beside me.
“Honestly, Dex, if you think I’m going to turn it on and look over the footage right now, you’ve got another thing coming.”
He smiled quickly and eased himself to his feet. He stretched up and looked around him. “Well ain’t this nice. Creepiest basement ever.”
I got up beside him and took a proper scan of the place. It was creepy. Not as creepy as what was upstairs but it was in the running. Boilers here and there, pipes, weird shapes and shadows, the occasional chains hanging from the ceiling (nice added touch) plus a lot of other weird crap and storage boxes.
“How about we take a quick look around here and call it a night?”
I turned to look at him and raised my brow. Was he serious? After everything that just happened?
He shrugged and held his hand out for the camera. Of course he was serious.
I sighed and placed the camera in his hands. He took the EVP out of his pocket and gave it to me. “I guess you dropped the flashlight.”
“Do you want me to go upstairs and get it?” I asked angrily.
He stepped toward me and said, “Perry, you are not going anywhere. We are filming this. Two minutes. And then we are gone. Into that car.” He pointed out the window to the Highlander.
“What happens after two minutes?”
“In two minutes my heart rate will have slowed enough that I’ll be able to think clearly. And I do not want to be here when my brain starts going over exactly what we saw upstairs. I couldn’t handle it. Not here. Not now.”
I agreed with him. The image of the man, the fright it gave us, the unknown of where he could be, what he was…it all kept trying to enter my mind every other second and I was so far doing an adequate job of keeping it all at bay. If Dex was going to lose it in two minutes, I was probably close as well.
“OK then,” I said and together we walked, carefully and side by side, down the length of the basement. It was cold but not as cold as the stairwell. And aside from a dripping noise that I could have sworn was blood dripping off of Abby (it was a leaky pipe), there was nothing too ghoulish or terrifying. Not that there needed to be. We were both so on the edge that we were literally attached at the hip and jumping at every little creak that the building made.
We got to the very end of the floor area and poked our heads around a slight corner. Through the night vision on the camera we saw a bunch of boxes that were filled with straightjackets. How lovely.
“Want to try one on?” Dex joked, picking one out of the box and holding it like it was poisoned. I pinched his side hard, hard enough that he dropped it onto the box with a thump.
“That’s not funny,” I hissed. “Don’t touch anything.”
It boggled my mind how he was able to still make jokes after what happened upstairs and the whole history of him being in a mental institute. But I guess a lot of him was always a defense mechanism. He was tricking himself into thinking none of this was a big deal.
A strange scratching noise from the side of the boxes brought me out of my thoughts. Once again I wanted to run but Dex just moved the camera over and searched for the cause of the noise.
In the corner, between a box and the moldy, concrete wall there was a frenzied movement on the ground. It was a bunch of bugs, spiders or ants or I don’t know what, and they were scurrying angrily over a small mound of something. Something dead.
“Oh God,” I said, putting my hand to my mouth, feeling sick at the sight and terrified of the feeding insects. >
Dex leaned down closer, trying to get a better look.
“It must be a dead rat or something,” he said, adjusting the camera settings. “These things are going f*cking-”
It jumped. The mound of writhing, consuming bugs suddenly flinched, moving closer to us. We both let out a small shriek and jumped backward. It stopped moving, but the fact that it moved to begin with was enough.
“OK, Dex, that’s the sign we get the f*ck out of here. Before the zombie rats come after us with bugs on their backs.”
He nodded quickly, his eyes wide and round, freaked again.
We stepped away from the “dead” rat and walked back around the corner.
At that moment the entire basement was alight with an artificial, cutting glow that came searing through the small basement windows. Headlights were pulling into the driveway outside. A sedan parked a few spots down from the Highlander, closer to the main door.
“What the hell?” I said out loud, but Dex was already running toward the window, trying to see out. It was too tall for him, even after a few leaps, so he waved me over.
“Come on, quickly,” he whispered urgently.
I went to his side as fast as I could, only bumping into one pipe on the way. Once I was underneath the windows he put his hands around my waist. They felt so firm around me.
“I’m going to lift you up, tell me what you see.”
I wanted to protest at this arrangement since I was not exactly a lightweight but I knew he wouldn’t have any of it and I also knew he was freakishly strong for his size.
I relaxed and he propped me up. He swayed slightly and grunted at the effort while moving one hand down to get better leverage on my ass but managed to keep me upright. I grabbed the edge of the window to keep some of the load off of him and peered through it.
I couldn’t believe what I was seeing.
“It’s Spook Factory,” I cried out as I watched the unmistakable form of Annie and G.J. disappear into our building, while the rest of the crew exited the car and followed them, extravagant gear in hand. A faint sound of doors closing reached down into our murky basement.
“Are you shitting me!?” Dex exclaimed.
“No, they went inside. Put me down.”
He lowered me awkwardly and we looked at each other, unsure of what to do.
“Really?” he asked again. I nodded vigorously and held up my finger to shush him. We listened. The front doors from above us made another sound, probably Little Joe and Waldo coming inside after them.
“Those f*ckers!” Dex growled, and he took off toward the basement door like a shot.
“Dex!” I yelled and scampered after him, nearly clothes lining myself on more wayward plumbing. If he got his hands on them, he was going to rip them to shreds. And though I was sure Dex could hold his own, G.J. did give up a career in Mixed Martial Arts, after all.
But Dex was stopped at the basement door. It wouldn’t open no matter how many times he yanked and twisted the handle. We were locked in. I suddenly wished I had brought my bobby pin and tweezers like I did the other day.
We started pounding on the door and yelling for help, hoping they would hear us. At this point we didn’t have a choice.
After a few minutes, we saw a light appear in the stairwell outside the door window, and G.J.’s stupid smug face appeared on the other side. It was too bad the glass was seven layers thick and layered with wire, otherwise I was pretty sure Dex would have punched right through it and grabbed the douchebag’s face. He looked angry enough to do it.
“Hey!” Dex yelled, pounding on the window. “The door’s locked. Let us out!”
G.J. laughed, the sound dim through the door. Then he shook his head. “This is just perfect. Why would I let you out?”
“G.J?” Annie’s muffled but still annoying voice came from the top of the stairs, and she joined him at the door window, peering at us through the glass.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“We’re locked in here and your f*ckfaced partner won’t let us out,” I said, hoping that Annie was the reasonable one.
Annie and G.J. exchanged a look and smiled at each other. Annie fixed her attention back on me and crossed her arms.
“You know, it’s not very nice to have a monopoly on everything ghostly in Seattle.”
“What?” Dex sneered. “We don’t have a monopoly. This is the first f*cking thing we’ve shot in this city.”
“Yeah, it’s not very nice. All bragging about this institute the other day,” G.J. said. “You shouldn’t have said anything at all but you couldn’t help it.”
“And now we’ve got your scoop,” she added.
“Did you follow us here?” I asked incredulously.
She shrugged in such a casual way that I was afraid I was going to try blasting a hole through the window.
“We might have. Doesn’t matter though. We would have shared this place with you but since you’re being difficult and you seem to be stuck, well, perhaps not.”
“The doctor, Doctor Hasselback, he’ll find out,” Dex said through gritted teeth.
“Oh, of course he will. He’ll see it when it airs tomorrow. Yeah, tomorrow. We work fast. But he doesn’t know us and if anyone is going to get in deep shit, it’s you. For telling other shows where you are filming. Maybe even inviting us? How else would you explain all the footage we are going to get, uninterrupted.”
“You bitch,” I scowled.
“Whatever. This is the big leagues now,” she said, and turned around, heading back up the stairs.
I pounded on the window again and yelled, “You can’t leave us in here! We are seriously locked in! This is…this is…”
“Unfair?” G.J. filled in. “Maybe for you. Not for us. All is fair in television. Oh wait, I forgot you two are on the internet. Good luck with that.”
And then he turned and headed up the stairs as well, taking the light with him.
Dex and I took to bellowing and hitting the door again to no avail. The last thing we heard before the f*ckface disappeared into the darkness was, “Keep on screaming. It’ll add to the atmosphere.”
I pounded even harder, flinging my fists hard into the glass like a kid throwing a cartoon tantrum on the ground. My wrists were growing numb, the fleshy side of my fists felt bruised but I couldn’t stop. It was all the fear, all the adrenaline coming out, and the door was taking the brunt of it.
Finally Dex stopped pounding himself and he grabbed both my arms, holding me still. “Come on, stop that.”
“Dex,” I said breathlessly. “We’re locked in here. They’re going to steal our show…they…”
“I know,” he said gruffly. “But they aren’t letting us out. I should have known we weren’t done with them.”
He exhaled long and hard and walked over to the middle of the room where the most light from the windows was. He eyed a clear spot on the ground and sat down with a groan, leaning against the wall. He patted the ground next to him.
My shoulders slumped. I felt so defeated. From everything we had just gone through, nearly being scared to death, finding untold horrors upstairs, and now we were just giving up while some other team was going to get all the credit for it.
“Sit,” he said, more sternly this time.
I did so, sitting beside him, shoulder to shoulder and leaned back against the cold wall, which luckily wasn’t as gross as it was near the boxes and the zombie rat.
I looked up at the windows to the outside. So close but so far. “What if we try to break out through there.” I pointed at them. “I might be able to squeeze through, if my boobs let me.”
“It’s not so much your boobs but your ass that won’t let you.”
I shot him a terrible glare. “Thanks, a*shole.”
He rolled his eyes. “I’m not saying that’s a bad thing. That’s a small window. I don’t even think your head could fit through it and besides, that glass is unbreakable.”
“Are you sure?”
“Do you want to waste your time trying to hurtle things through it?”
“Kind of. Do you have a better idea?”
He didn’t answer me but he brought out his phone. I frowned at it, his brows almost touching. “Oh, of f*cking course. That’s just great.”
I peered over at it. “No service?”
He shook his head. “What about you?”
I pulled my phone out. There was half a bar, which was something, but the batteries were almost dead. I hadn’t charged it in a couple of days. Aside from texting my family, there was no real need to use it.
I gave it to him and he dialed on the keypad.
“Phoning Jenn?” I asked, trying not to sound funny about it. She was our lifeline now, like it or lump it.
He nodded, holding the phone to his ear. “She should be at home.”
Or she might be humping Bradley, I thought viciously.
“Won’t she be mad about having to come all the way out here to rescue us?”
“Oh yes,” he said with a fake smile. “There will be hell to pay later. But I’ll pay it.”
He let it ring a few times and then left a voicemail telling her to call us back and that it was an emergency.
He gave me back my phone. We both leaned against the wall again and sighed in unison.
“Well, this really sucks,” I said, trying to make some sort of small talk so I didn’t have to really think about the situation we were in. “At least we’ve got some footage.”
He reached into his pocket and stuck some gum in his mouth. He chewed it a few times, the smacking noise reverberating in the room.
“What good is the footage,” he said, “if they are running their episode tomorrow?”
“Well…”
He leaned his head back against the wall with a thump that made me wince. In the dimness I could make out the waves of frustration and anger swarming his eyes and brow.
“I should have worked more on the stuff we had. I should have…uploaded the EVP, at least listened to it. I should have done the score, I should edited what we had, I should have at least uploaded the interview with the doctor and-”
“Dex,” I interrupted him, laying my hand on his knee. “It’s been a distracting week. You didn’t have time to do any of that. It’s my fault. I’m the one in your office, messing up your routine.”
He rolled his head to the side to look at me. “I invited you.”
“Not really. Jenn invited me,” I pointed out. “You were smart. You wanted me to stay in the hotel.”
He stopped chewing for a few moments, keeping his eyes on me. From the angle, I couldn’t see them properly. They looked like mysterious, fathomless holes, which wasn’t much different from how they looked half the time anyway.
“I’m glad you’re with me. Messing up my routine,” he admitted. “I don’t know what I’d do without you.”
The way he said it, the gentle sincerity in the words, tickled little pleasure spots inside my skull but I couldn’t let myself dwell on it.
“You probably wouldn’t have to contend with your ex-girlfriend haunting your place.” I gave his knee a little rub.
He moved his head over, his attention now on my hand.
I should probably stop rubbing him like this, I thought. But I didn’t listen.
“What are we going to do if this is the end of us?” he asked in a small, tired voice, watching my hand curiously.
I stopped massaging him. “What do you mean?”
“If people like those f*cks are going to beat us at our own game. What chance do we have?”
“That is not a very Dex-like thing to say,” I muttered, feeling strangely upset at his admission.
“I know. But I’m serious.”
I sighed and took my hand back, crossing my arms. I didn’t want to think about life without Dex, without the series. It meant so much more to me than I’d even admit to myself. “I don’t know. I guess I’d have to get a proper job.”
“You wouldn’t want to do anything with me?” he asked, sounding surprised.
“What? Of course I would. But what?”
“We could have our own music show,” he mused. “Act really pretentious and talk about bands that nobody likes.”
I smiled at that. “Yes, we certainly could. Though we wouldn’t have to act pretentious…just be ourselves.”
“Or,” he said with a higher tone of voice, “we could form a band!”
This time my smile broke wide open. “You want to start a band?”
He looked at me. It was hard to tell if he was joking. His features were stern but his eyes twinkled like shiny coffee beans. “Only if you’ll be in the band with me.”
“My guitar skills are pretty sucky,” I confessed.
“I know. You’d be the singer.”
“Me?” I exclaimed. Dex was the one with the voice. “I can’t sing.”
“I bet you can.”
“Well I guess I can do a wicked Chris Cornell impression,” I conceded.
“Oh really? Let’s hear it.”
I shook my head. “Maybe one day, if you’re lucky.”
“Tease,” he said.
I ignored that. “So if I’m the singer, what are you?”
“Drummer.”
“Let me guess…you can play the drums too.”
“I can play everything, kiddo,” he stated. Somehow it didn’t come across as boasting when it came out of his mouth. It was just fact and I believed it. “Actually, I always wanted to be a drummer. Played in high school. I mean, I tried to. A friend of mine had a set so I learned on that. Of course we had no money after my dad left, so having my own set was out of the question. But yeah, that was my goal. It just never worked out that way. Even when I joined Sing Sin I tried it out but…something about my rhythm being off. This was before mathcore got huge, mind you.” >
“I don’t see mathcore drumming and a lounge act band really melding together.”
“See, that’s where people go wrong with their thinking. If there are things you don’t think will mesh, you should at least try to see if they do. You might end up with something…life-altering.”
“Or something you regret,” I said, thinking of Jenn.
“True,” he said with a sigh. I guess he knew what I was hinting at because he motioned for my phone again. I handed it to him and he dialed her number. Once again, it rang and rang and went straight to voicemail. He left another message, this one more demanding and explained our situation in full.
It was strange that she wasn’t picking up, but I didn’t know her habits and didn’t want to say anything about them.
“Looks like we’re just going to have to wait this one out,” he said, putting the phone down between his legs.
“You could try calling Dean…or 911?”
“I’d rather keep the attention as minimal as possible,” he said.
Hmmpf. He and his stupid pride again. He looked at me and raised his arm hopefully. “Want to try to sleep?”
“Here? Now?” I asked. Like hell I’d fall asleep with ghosts, goblins and G.J. flouncing around upstairs.
He shrugged and his arm started to lower. But I couldn’t pass that up. I moved in as close as I could and placed his arm around my shoulder and snuggled in close. I breathed in the faint smell of cigarettes, minty gum and aftershave, a combination that was all Dex and as equally alluring. I placed my hand on his chest, feeling his heart beat beneath his jacket. The rhythm soothed me and despite the odds, I quickly fell asleep.