Once I was standing in the hallway of the second floor, I realized how right he was. Though we could only see a few feet in front of us from the light, that few feet was enough. In fact, it wasn’t what we saw that made a difference.
It was just a hallway, fairly clean though covered with a layer of grit and dust. Beyond the glow, you could see rooms stretching out on either side, some doors still intact, others gone. Patients’ rooms, empty skeletons in the darkness.
But aside from that, it was the feeling that got you. It held your chest, like a cold dark hand reaching in. While the whole building had given me the creeps so far, this was the part that told you that you were no longer safe. You were no longer at home.
“This ain’t Kansas anymore,” I murmured out loud, my breath visibly rising up into the air. It was cold, much colder than the tunnel.
Dex turned to look down at me and handed me back the light before putting his hand at my waist. “It’s something, right?” he asked. “Even if I brought Rebecca up here, she’d have to say that things weren’t right. The alignment is off. I wouldn’t be surprised if the toilets ran backward.” He looked away, surveying down the darkened hall as far as the eye could see. “It’s just all wrong.”
I could only nod. There was no other way to describe it.
We stood there for a long moment, perhaps thinking about the next steps. I know I was thinking about the blackness around me. I was thinking about the tunnel, about everything in there. I was thinking about what lay around us, the unknown. Sometimes I wished we didn’t have to put ourselves through so much inner turmoil to just get a show.
“Perry,” Dex said, looking at me over his shoulder with a furrowed brow. “Are you with me?”
“I’m here,” I said. I lifted the light so it was illuminating everything in front of us in a ten-foot radius. “Let’s see what we can do.”
He nodded, and after I shined the light down the hall both ways, he decided to head toward the east wing, toward the section that would be right above the administration offices. I supposed it was easier to stick with what we knew, and knowing Rebecca was directly below us would give us some comfort.
I walked to the side of Dex and just ahead enough to be captured on camera, taking in careful, frozen breaths. I spoke in a voice just above a whisper, enunciating properly so it would be picked up by the mic. It was my on-camera voice.
“We’re now on the second floor of the Sea Crest Sanatorium,” I said, “after coming up the so-called ‘Death Chute’ where they used to take the deceased.” I paused, knowing Dex would cut in with shots of the tunnel. “While we didn’t see any ghosts, we observed a bouncing ball, thrown down the passageway by an unknown entity. We also heard music that sounded like Ring around the Rosy.”
“What do you think about this floor so far?” Dex asked in his on-camera voice.
I stopped and looked around. So far I’d just walked straight down the hall, only briefly passing the light over the open rooms on either side. “It’s different. It feels…unreal, in a way. It’s very cold here. It could be because there is no power or heating above the first floor, but look.” I breathed out in front of the lens so you could see my breath rise in the air like a burnt-out cloud. “It’s probably fifty-five degrees outside at least. It’s May and we’re in Oregon. There’s no way it can naturally be this cold in here.”
“But supernaturally…” Dex noted. I almost smirked at that cheesy line but I just didn’t have it in me. I wanted to get to the end of the hallway, come back to the tunnel, and call it quits.
He lowered the camera slightly and gestured at one of the empty rooms. “These were the patients’ rooms. Maybe we can find something in there.”
I sighed, not really wanting to find anything, and headed to the closest room to me. The doorway was extra wide and from the rusted hinges, it looked like the door had been taken off long ago. The room itself was long, big enough to fit a bunch of beds, and the windows that lined the wall were either broken or missing entirely. Cobwebs swung lazily in the breeze, white wisps in my light.
There was a strange, almost foul smell in the air and a faint sound that I couldn’t quite place. Suddenly Dex jumped toward me and yelled, “Jesus!”
“What?” I cried out, automatically jumping too.
“Something touched my foot,” he said, taking the light from me. My heart was racing a mile a minute and I held on to his arm, my fingernails digging into his coat. He shined the light at the doorway behind us just in time to see a large rat scampering out of the room and out into the hall.
I exhaled noisily, feeling as if I’d almost had a heart attack. “This is ridiculous. I think we ought to head back.”
Dex frowned. “Rebecca hasn’t called yet. Come on, let’s just keep going until she does.”
“Are you going to scream like a girl every time you come across a rat?”
“You’re asking for a spanking, missy,” he warned, raising his palm as a threat. “And for your information, that rat came across me.”
We went back into the hallway and continued in the same way as we had before. My pulse still hadn’t slowed, and all I could think about was how cold and dark it was in this place where thousands of souls lost their lives. I think part of the reason—other than being scared out of my wits—that I wanted to pack it in was because I wanted to know more about the sanatorium, the way it was run, the people who were there. I wanted to know the history so I could give meaning to the things we were seeing. For all we knew, the second floor was a happy place and posed no harm to us.
Once we reached the end of the hall, we came to a washroom and then the rest of the wing as it veered off at an angle. Dex reached out for the washroom door, the faded symbol of a woman in a dress on it, but I quickly grabbed his arm and stopped him.
“Can we just leave it for now?” I asked, looking at him with pathetically sad eyes. “Good things never happen to me in bathrooms.”
“Not true,” he countered, though he took his hand back. “What about when I fucked you in that bar washroom a few months ago? From the way you came, you can’t possibly tell me that wasn’t a good time.”
I managed a smile, remembering. Jenn had been just outside the door too. “Okay, I’ll give you that. But still. No way am I going in there. I’m having enough trouble in the washrooms downstairs. I keep thinking I’ll see, like, someone standing on the other side of the door when I’m in the stall. Pippa did that to me once. Scared the hell out of me.”
He adjusted the camera in his hand and raised a brow. “When was this?”
“Oh, a long time ago. Back when we first met.”
“That wasn’t so long, you know.” From the way his voice dipped, I could tell that Uncle Al probably had talked to him about the same thing.
I swallowed thickly. “Feels like it’s been ages.”
“Yeah?” he asked. “Me too, baby. It feels like I’ve known you my whole life.”
He was looking at me with such intensity, the light reflecting off of his dark eyes in hard specks, that I started feeling strangely anxious. I rubbed my lips together and looked around us. “I guess when two people are constantly placed in situations like this, you go through a lot together.”
He took a step closer to me. Despite the chill, I could feel heat radiating off of him. “And we’ve been through a lot together. And I certainly don’t mind a future of this, as long as you’re at my side.”
Okay, he was getting oddly mushy considering our circumstances. It really wasn’t the place to start reflecting on our relationship. In our bed, in each other’s arms, yes. Standing in the freezing cold dark, trying to find ghosts…um, no.
Dex stared at me relentlessly until I was tempted to ask him if I had something on my face. Then he bent down to put the camera on the floor and straightened up, his hand going into his pocket.
“What’s wrong?” I asked, because now I had the impression that something was wrong. His forehead was creased with worry and he was biting his lip.
He closed his eyes and breathed in through his nose, his hand still in his pocket. “Nothing is wrong,” he whispered.
“Then why are you acting weird?”
He opened his eyes, looking at me in the softest way. “Perry,” he said gently.
My heart did a thumpa-thumpa and missed a beat.
“Yes?” I whispered back, his tone of voice contagious.
Just then I noticed the area behind him lighten up slightly, providing a faint outline of his silhouette. I looked around his body and let out a small gasp. At the very end of the hall, in the west wing, a single light had come on in one of the rooms.
A wave of nausea rolled through me. “Shit.”