The plan for the next few days seemed simple enough at first. We would start filming tomorrow with the historian and take in an actual tour of the place from top to bottom. Then, depending on what we felt about each floor, or if there were any particular areas that stood out to us from the tour, we would start concentrating our efforts there. Rebecca wanted to make sure every corner of the place was covered, from the playground at the back of the building to the roof where Dex saw the paper planes come from, with the most haunted sections getting the most attention.
Once we got back to the near-empty school and put our meager groceries away, the plans changed. Like usual, it was all Dex’s doing.
While Davenport was bidding us farewell, she noted that Carl, the custodian, would be the last one in the building and locking up when he was done with his shift in a few hours. Rebecca, feeling her claustrophobia come back in full swing, was happy to know that the emergency doors at the ends of the first floor wings opened up from the inside.
“Remember, it can be very unsafe for you to investigate the upper floors without being supervised. I’ll have you know that I do have security cameras monitoring the first floor, turned on by motion detector,” Davenport said as she was ready to go out the main doors. She seemed to direct her eagle gaze at Dex, who didn’t squirm under her scrutiny. “Just keep that in mind. Of course, as long as you stick to your rooms, the break room, and the washrooms, that shouldn’t be a problem.” She finished that off by eyeing a place on the wall behind us.
We turned to see a tiny video camera mounted just above the grand staircase that led to the upper floors. Big brother was watching. We didn’t have to voice it to know that we weren’t expected to go anywhere else in the building except for the first floor.
And I didn’t have to look at Dex to know what he was thinking. I could just feel it. He was already plotting ways for us to get around that camera. As soon as we saw Davenport get in her Lexus and drive off into the darkening fog, he turned to us and said, “There’s more than one way upstairs.”
Then he grinned impishly, the dimples sticking out on his stubble-flecked cheeks, and turned to head back to the nurses’ quarters. I looked at Rebecca and sighed. She shrugged, apparently not expecting anything less.
“Okay, so what exactly is your plan?” Rebecca asked as we followed him into our new bedroom.
He sat on the edge of my bed, his weight nearly lifting the whole thing, and looked up at us, completely devious. He really was something else when he was in this mode. His attitude was infectious, even when it proved to harbor a terrible idea.
“The way I see it, Custodian Carl is probably here for another two hours tops. I say while he’s here we film a bit of the first floor. I mean, that motion sensor camera is going to be activated anyway. Then when he leaves, we hunker ourselves down in the break room where I’ll whip up my patented mac and cheese and hotdog special, we break out a few contraband beers, relax a little. Then, when it’s dark as sin and we’re sure Carl and anyone else are miles away from here, we pick up the cameras and go upstairs.”
“By this secret other way that you know about?” Rebecca repeated sardonically.
He stroked his chin. “Yep. The one elevator in this building doesn’t work anymore. I saw it just past the washrooms. It’s boarded up, the power probably cut a long time ago.”
I put my face in my hands. “Please don’t suggest we’re climbing up an elevator shaft, because I’m not doing it.”
“Relax, kiddo,” he said. “This ain’t Speed.” I watched him carefully to see if he was going to launch into another Keanu impression. He didn’t. “Anyway, that normally would be the only way upstairs. But I’ve done my research, just like Becs here has done, and I know there’s one more way. We may have to search for it, but it’s there.”
“Hold on,” I interrupted. “Before I find out what this way is, what do you propose we do? Go upstairs and film? Alone? The three of us? Sure, we won’t trip the camera and it’s not like Davenport explicitly said we weren’t allowed upstairs but…you know she’s eventually going to see the footage. She’ll know we went up on our own.”
“So?” Dex said, looking at me as if I was crazy. “By the time this episode airs, we’ll be back in Seattle and she’ll be stuck down here with her Sharpie eyebrows and her shitty haunted school. No harm, no foul.”
Mmmhmm. I hated burning bridges, but he did have a point. It’s not like we were trespassing since we’d already been invited to stay on the property. “So what’s the way?” I asked with trepidation.
Dex wiggled his lips back and forth and looked at Rebecca. She stared blankly back at him for a few beats until she groaned. “Oh dear, I think I know what bloody way you’re talking about.”
“Bloody is right,” he said. “Unless the bodies had been drained already.” He read my puzzled expression. “The body chute.”
“The what?” I asked.
“Almost every sanatorium has a body chute. It was a way to get the bodies from the morgue or autopsy areas out of the building and into the hearses outside. Think about it…a hospital like this had at least five hundred deathly ill patients at a time. Thousands died, right here. How could you instill hope in people, the hope to survive, if you were wheeling out dead bodies in front of them on a daily basis?”
Shit. This was a lot bigger than I’d originally thought. Usually when we did a show, we went to where one or two people had died. Only in very few instances was it a group of people. I think the leper colony at D’Arcy Island was the largest amount, about thirty to fifty of them. But thousands of people—children—died here over the course of Sea Crest’s operation; right in the very building I was in. Thousands. This was so damn different from just one ghost. It was so different from just worrying about Elliot or Shawna or a few suicidal nurses. There would have been dead upon dead upon dead here.
“Perry?” Dex asked. “If you don’t want to come, you can stay behind.”
I nearly laughed. “Stay here? Alone in the room? And do what? Knit you guys some socks?”
“It might be less scary,” Rebecca offered. At that moment I kind of wanted to hit her. She was never scared, what the hell did she know about anything being less scary? She was barely even right. Yes, staying in the room seemed like a better idea than going up to the other floors, but being alone was being alone. I’d rather see horrendous gore with someone else by my side than hear the giggle of a child on my own.
“I’m good,” I said firmly. “So where do you think this body chute is?”
“I’d think there would have to be access on this floor considering all the nurses were staying down here. We just have to do our usual try every door and see which one is a winner.”
None of them are winners, I thought. “And this chute…”
“If I’m right,” Dex said, “it’s just a tunnel with a steep incline. Stairs on one side, a slab on the other where you can wheel the gurney.”
“You do realize I’d rather trip Davenport’s security camera and deal with the consequences tomorrow,” I said.
“And where is the fun in that?”
So we decided to go with Dex’s plan. While Carl—a quiet and small-eyed senior with the unruliest ear hair I’d ever seen—mopped the hall, we started filming the first floor. Rebecca operated the light while Dex filmed, and I tried to look both scared and pretty on film. Considering Carl was watching us at times, I’m not sure I succeeded at either.
Then when I ran out of interesting things to say and we’d filmed every single classroom, trying to find cold spots or weird sounds or unexplained breezes and coming up empty, we acted like we were done for the night and retreated to the lounge for Dex’s redneck special. Carl eventually got in his beater of a car and drove off into the night, leaving us feeling completely and utterly alone.
“So,” I said as I washed down a bite with a mouthful of warm beer. “It’s just the three of us.”
The isolation wrapped its cold arms around me. Outside, the fog was lifting but the sun had set and the sky was turning a purplish bruised color, darkening by the moment. Though the lights in the lounge and the outside hall were on, it still felt dark as hell. The only sound was from the hum of the fridge and from the clank of our forks against the plates. Everything else was quiet, deathly quiet. The kind of quiet that became a character of its own.
Rebecca gathered her frilled cardigan around her. “If I admit that the whole situation is a fair bit unnerving, will the two of you laugh at me?”
Dex took a swig of his beer before asking, “Do you want us to laugh at you? You know I’m always game.”
She glared at him. “Here I am, admitting that I’m borderline scared and you’re taking the piss.”
“Ignore him,” I told her. “I won’t laugh. This place is like its own entity. I swear if you listen hard enough, you can hear the walls breathing.”
“Perry,” she admonished, giving me a dirty look. “That was something I didn’t need to picture.”