He picked the lantern off the ground and gave it to me. “You won’t. There’s nothing here.”
I took it from him and looked behind me at the darkness. The faded light of the stairwell at the other end looked so far away.
“So I walk to the end, you follow me. That’s it?”
“No. We’ll go to the end, then come back up the hallway and I want you to try every door. Even if it’s locked. You do know how to pick locks, right?”
Actually I did. I did very well. I had great practice on my parents’ liquor cabinet growing up, practice I had hoped would come in handy tonight, hence why I had a pair of bobby pins, a credit card and tweezers in my right pants pocket.
“I can try,” I said, trying to sound surprised. “You want me to try every room here?” Will we have enough time?”
He shrugged and the recording light of the camera went up and down. He was already filming. That figured.
“Hopefully we’ll come across something interesting. If we don’t, we don’t. Fuck if we overstay our welcome, though you know the gold is in Block C anyway.”
We got started. I held the wind-up lantern in one hand, vaguely reminded of our first episode on the Oregon Coast, and gave a short spiel about the institute and what we were doing there. No point in getting into the details when Dr. Hasselback covered that thoroughly and far better than I ever could.
I walked down the hallway when I was done, taking small steps and shining the lantern on the walls. It was creepy in the dark but there was nothing fantastically off-putting about the third floor. It looked old and empty but it wasn’t decaying or anything. There weren’t even any cobwebs or dust bunnies about, which gave the impression that a cleaning crew still cleaned it every night. That put me more at ease.
We reached the end of the hallway without incident. Dex would pause every so often and hold the EVP thing still so it could pick up on something, but we wouldn’t know whether it did or not until later. We certainly didn’t hear anything except our own breathing and footsteps.
At the end of the hall, where the weak light from the other stairwell shone in, Dex discovered a blip with the camera.
“Can you fix it?” I asked, standing on my toes and trying to get a better look at the screen. It was black, even though the light said it was on and recording.
He shook his head. “I don’t know. It could be the battery, I had a feeling I should have charged it before we left. I’ll just switch it with the other camera. Won’t make much of a difference.”
He put the big camera down and started to pull the smaller, handheld one out of his pack.
It was time.
“I’m just going to go find the washroom,” I said, starting toward the door.
“Now?”
“Better now than never. I really have to pee. I’ll be right back.”
“OK. But if you’re not back in five minutes, I am coming down to get you.”
“Awww, you’re worried about me?” I asked sweetly.
“No, I’m worried about me! You think I want to be up here alone?”
I rolled my eyes. “I’ll be right back.”
I patted him on the arm and then opened the stairwell door with a heavy, echoing creak. I scampered down the stairs and paused at the second floor, waiting until I heard the door shut from above. Then I looked into the hallway of the second floor. It was lit but empty. So strange to know people were in their rooms, hiding, at 5:30 p.m. It didn’t make any sense to me but I wasn’t about to think about it too much either. I had a devious job to do and this floor was probably where I had the best chance of doing it.
I cautiously opened the door and stepped onto the hallway. I closed it behind me with as much care as I could muster, not wanting to alert anyone. I was glad for my Chucks on my feet. Though they squeaked when wet, they were dry now and if I walked extra slowly, like, ‘we’re hunting wabbits’ kind of slow; I would be as silent as air.
I wasn’t really sure what I was looking for. All the doors looked the same; they just had different numbers on them. I needed something that stood out and looked like it belonged to the staff.
A wild laugh broke out from one of the rooms and I froze in my tracks. The room was in front of me and to the right. The laugh continued, sounding more manic, then sad. And then the sobbing started.
“Please let me die,” the voice said. “Please let me die.”
My eyes widened. My heart froze. The voice, sounding clear yet still muffled, continued, repeating the phrase. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. It was unearthly. Inhuman. Haunting.
And then it broke out into laughter again. I gathered up enough breath from the fright to keep going, cautiously passing the door, which simply read “13.”
Then silence. Like it never happened. I held my fingers to my throat, trying to steady the madness of my pulse and kept my eyes focused on what I had come here to do. I kept walking.
I was near the other end of the hall when I saw what I was looking for. A door that said, “Staff Only.”
I looked around me before I quietly laid my hand on the knob and turned it. Of course it was locked. It wouldn’t budge either way. There could even be nurses on the other side. Just because the hospital was closed, surely that didn’t mean the staff was sent home. These patients needed care around the clock. Didn’t they?
I laid my head against the door and listened. After a few seconds, I still couldn’t hear anything and I got my credit card out of my pants pocket. I would try that first.
I slipped it between the door and the lock but after a few attempts, I decided that was not the way to go. It was an old lock but it wasn’t succumbing.
I brought out the bobby pin next and bent it straight. I hunched down, peered at the entrance of the keyhole and stuck the pin in, feeling for the catch inside. I looked around again as I continued to fiddle, expecting Roundtree, Dex or a mental patient to come running toward me at any moment.
But they didn’t. And the pin pushed against something light and a giant click told me to turn the knob. The door opened and thankfully it was silent on its hinges.
I looked around me once more for reassurance and then stepped inside. I didn’t want to hit the lights in case someone outside, like a security guard, was watching, so I brought out my iPhone and aimed the useless flashlight app around the room. There was enough light from the streetlights outside the window that I wasn’t going to trip over anything.
It was an empty office with just a desk and chair. There were a few picture frames on the table of a woman, perhaps Roundtree, and children. I didn’t have time to explore. In the corner was a tall industrial chest. That was the thing I was looking for.
I opened it. It creaked. Loudly. I froze and hung onto my breath, poised and ready to run out of the room if I heard anyone coming. But after a few seconds, everything else stayed silent.
I aimed the iPhone into the cabinet and shone it over the various shelves inside. There were pill bottles on every shelf, but whether they contained what I was looking for was another story.
The first shelf had some innocent looking white pills that matched the ones that Dex had, but when I got a better look at the name, it seemed too dangerous and risky to take. I had to stick with what I knew. What I wanted were placebos.
I went to the next shelf. Here I found tiny yellow pills. I picked up the bottle and looked at it closely. It said diazepam on the label. I knew this wasn’t the best thing to be taking, but at least I knew what it was. I had spent half of my life on Valium. Plus they looked exactly like the pills that Dex had been taking for his hallucinations or whatever apparently ailed him.
I quickly opened the pill bottle and poured half of the contents into my hand and shoved it into my pocket. Then I continued searching. I didn’t find the placebos until the very end, but at least they matched Dex’s pills with their round, Aspirin-like body and there were a lot of them. I took a generous helping of those out of the bottle and shoved them in my other pocket.
I didn’t want to waste any more time. Two different pills were enough for my experiment to go through. I closed the cabinet door, slowly this time, and crept over to the door. I poked my head out into the hallway and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw it was still empty. I was shaking all over. My body, and my subconscious.
I closed the door behind me with nothing more than a gentle click and started walking down the hall back the way I came.
A loud POP came from behind me while the hall in front of me became a smidge darker. The loud and unexpected noise caught my breath and made me jump mid-stride. I stopped and stood still.
Another quick POP followed by another level of dimness. I turned around expecting to see someone but what I saw was the overhead lights at the very end slowly going off.
Pop. Pop. Pop. They were fizzling out and leaving the once-bright hallway in darkness, as if some invisible being was going along and removing the bulbs. I knew enough that the scenario wasn’t all that crazy.
The dark was catching up with me. I turned and started to run as quietly as possible, chalking it all up to faulty wiring on a stormy night. But as I neared the stairwell at the end, the stairwell lights went off and so did every other light in the hallway.
The darkness engulfed me. I paused, disoriented and scared out of my wits.
Thump, thump, thump.
The sound of footsteps raced toward me from the far end of the hallway. They didn’t sound quick but they were coming.
For me.
I ran blindly for the door and felt around for it until my hands connected with the handle. I yanked it. It wouldn’t open. The door had locked behind me. There was blackness outside and in. I whirled around, hearing the footsteps still coming, this strange, slow and sloppy run.
They stopped somewhere in front of me, maybe a few inches away. I held my breath. All I could feel was that terrifying notion that something was standing in the dark and watching me. Wanting me.