The Dark Corners Box Set

by Robert Scott-Norton

  But, before he could do that, the fingers from the other side reached through the gap and touched his skin.

  Seth screamed.

  12

  Judy recoiled from the slap Seth had just landed on her and for an instant she was ready to strike back. She wasn’t about to let another man hit her. Then she knew why he’d done it and she stood, fixed in a moment of pure terror. She was short of breath like she’d been running and she closed her eyes for a second, focused on her breathing, tried to shut out the cries from the rest of the room asking if she was all right.

  She wasn’t all right. Coming to the hospital had been an awful mistake. What the hell had she been thinking? Was the money that had been promised her really going to make that much difference in her life? In Jemma’s? If she knew then what she knew now, would she have accepted the deal to spend the night in the hospital with a bunch of strangers?

  No.

  But Roy Oswald had been persuasive and held plenty of charm. He reminded her of Phil before he’d turned ugly. Her dead husband had been all charm too when they’d first started dating. They’d met on the same teacher training course and he’d made several ham-fisted efforts at chatting her up before she caved in and let him take her out for a drink after lectures. He’d smoked back then, a habit that would ultimately prove fatal, and when he’d had a glass of whiskey in his hand, a cigarette in the other, and told his obscene jokes, she realised she would fall in love with him. He was her almost-fatal habit.

  For a time, they’d fooled around, Judy conscious that she needed to do well in her studies to secure a good placement. Everything was comfortable for Phil, though. He sailed through his coursework and his lecture groups, and there was always a small cluster of friends hovering around. It was like being back in high school with the cool kid. The fact that Judy struggled where Phil found things easy didn’t cause any friction. He’d offer to help, or wait for her in the library to finish up, and he’d never push her to meet for a drink when there was a coursework deadline.

  Phil was the best thing that had ever happened to her.

  The first time he’d struck her was the scariest moment in her life. No, that’s not strictly true. The first time he’d hit her, she’d been startled, yes, but it happened so quickly and the apology came so swiftly and with such intensity that she thought she’d imagined the whole thing. The fear of that moment came later on when she woke in the night, her cheek still burning from the slap, and she cried herself back to sleep, deadening the noise in her pillow so her housemates wouldn’t hear. A dread that she wasn’t in control of her own destiny any more. She should have left him then and if she had, perhaps she’d have had a good life.

  Ouch. That hurt. No. She had had a good life. Her marriage to Phil had given her Jemma and there wasn’t anything she’d do to ever change that.

  Judy rubbed her cheek, aware that she’d stopped screaming and upon opening her eyes again, she discovered that nothing had changed. Seth, enigmatic, but full of danger, was in front of her bearing a newly lit candle. The others were behind him, a sea of worried panicked faces.

  “Focus on me,” he said. “Ignore the rest.”

  Easy for him to say. This medium was a little too full of himself and seemed to know too much about what was going on here. If this was all a big set up, he was the one pulling the strings. The tension was strained between him and Johnny, but she supposed that too could be part of the act. She’d heard about these living performance pieces of theatre and an idle thought occurred to her that maybe that’s what this whole night was—a practice run at a performance theatre piece. That would explain many things. The obsession over half-formed doors, the trick with the wheelchair upstairs, the thumping from outside in the corridor.

  The shadow creatures standing against the walls.

  No. They weren’t performers. They didn’t move like people. They moved like living shadows. Echoes of people.

  “What are they?” she asked Seth.

  “They’re drawn to us. To the ritual.” He looked as scared as she did. His cold eyes were worried, darting around the edges of the room, tracking the half-formed creatures that circled them. Seth reached out and tapped her shoulder. “We need to get out of here.”

  “They’re everywhere. All around us.”

  The rest of the group were hanging on her words.

  “What do you see?” Johnny asked insistently.

  Why couldn’t anyone else see what they’d brought here? She kept her eyes away from the candle flame, letting them adjust to the gloom. Her heart was thumping, and she felt every rapid beat against her chest. The creatures were taller than a man, seven or eight foot, their heads practically scraped the ceiling. And when they moved, it was as if they were travelling through a deep fog that carried them, blurring their contours, making them half-formed.

  “We’ve brought things here. Seth was right. This was a mistake.”

  “What things?” Glenda said in a high-pitched voice. She glanced restlessly around, keeping tight to her husband.

  The others took her lead. Arjun was the only one brave enough to take a step away from the group and move further into the darkness.

  “Stop,” Judy said. “Don’t move.”

  Arjun stopped. “Why?”

  “One of them is moving towards you.”

  “What should I do?”

  “Get back here,” Alisha said.

  “We need to get out of here,” Seth said.

  “But they’re all around us,” Judy replied.

  “I don’t see anything,” Michael said, but he didn’t seem as sure of himself as he had initially.

  “I’m not making this up,” Judy said, not caring what Michael thought of her. It was taking all her willpower to not just run from the morgue and abandon the others.

  “What are they doing?” Johnny again.

  “They’re all moving now.” But their movements didn’t make them any easier to track. The wavering lights from the candles were making it impossible to keep count of the visitors. She guessed there was anywhere between eight and twelve of them. It didn’t help that they all looked the same. Black shadows, fuzzy and indistinct. They moved in front of each other, sometimes through each other. She had a grim thought they were being herded.

  “We’re leaving,” Seth said. “We all go together. Everyone ready?”

  “Seth, they’re everywhere. We can’t leave.”

  Michael moved for the door. Judy resisted the urge to cry out a warning as he stepped through one of the shadow people. The black shape drifted aside. Michael held the door open, encouraging the others to make a move. The group did as he asked. “We’ll go back to the main entrance,” he told Seth and hurried after the others.

  Judy lingered, grabbed Seth’s arm and urged him towards the exit. “What are they?”

  “They’re the things that come through the doors.”

  And then she saw the doors all around the morgue walls. Every flat surface that could accommodate a door, had one. Different shapes and styles, but all old and battered. Tiny splinters of light edged all of them. The more that Judy looked at them, the more they seemed to shift around and jostle for position.

  “This is what you can see?” she said to Seth as he pulled her to the exit.

  “Sometimes, but never as many as this, never as many all in one place. Usually, just one at a time, and that’s bad enough.”

  “What do we do?”

  “We follow the others and regroup in the main entrance. Come on,” he urged, pushing Judy out into the corridor.

  13

  The group seemed drained. They’d regrouped in the main entrance hall and stayed well within the lighted areas, huddling close. Judy and Seth were the last to rejoin the party and a wave of relief washed over the others.

  “What happened in there?” Arjun asked. He looked so much younger now that the brash confidence had flown. Alisha kept a tight grip of her friend’s sleeve.

  “You got what you wanted, Johnny,�
� Seth said. “You got your reaction. Was that good enough?”

  Johnny, to give him credit, was looking decidedly flat, perhaps with the realisation that his excitement had been misplaced. Seth had tried to warn him against the Ouija board and he’d been right to. But the man back in the vigil wasn’t the same man standing in front of them now. The disappointment of what had transgressed mixed with the sudden rush of adrenaline as they’d raced from the shadows had left him looking deflated.

  “I’d say it was worth doing,” he said softly.

  “Worth doing? We almost didn’t get out of there,” Seth said, decisively.

  “What do you mean?” Peter chimed in. “We didn’t see anything. What are you talking about?”

  Judy had seen the doors, and she’d seen the creatures that had walked amongst them in the morgue, but she realised now that the rest of them hadn’t. Filtering, she tried to imagine what they had actually experienced but concluded it would be simpler to just ask. “What did you see back there?” she asked Peter, but her eyes darted flicked over the others, inviting any of them to answer.

  “After the candles got knocked over, it was impossible to see anything much. There was a lot of confusion, and I guess some of you were getting a little too carried away with it.” Peter glanced at Alisha and Arjun at this. They weren’t so scared that they didn’t notice.

  “Hey, wait a minute. None of that in there was us.”

  “I never said it had anything to do with you.”

  “You implied it. Listen, we had nothing to do with that.”

  Judy defused the quarrel before it got silly. She returned her attention to Alisha. “What did you see?”

  “It’s like he said,” she nodded at Peter. “After the candles went out, I couldn’t see a thing.”

  “And when we got some light back?”

  She shrugged. “Nothing. I was too bothered about getting out of there. Why, what did you see?”

  Judy saw that Seth was studying her now. It was a curious group of people. If she admitted what she saw, was it so outlandish that they’d consider her a crank? All eyes were on her now, and she didn’t know what to say to make their gaze go away.

  “I suppose we all got a little spooked.”

  Seth was smirking. He put his hand to his face to hide it before drifting off into the breakout room. Damn him. What was she meant to say? It was late, and she was exhausted and in a place as evocative as this building, her brain would play all sorts of tricks on her. Seth was full of himself, she concluded, and perhaps he was manipulating her in ways she didn’t understand. It was like hypnosis, she realised. They’d come here expecting to encounter the paranormal so when their brains were robbed of a stimulus, like, for instance, when the candles were knocked over, it was only natural for the brain to fill in the blanks and make them see what they demanded.

  But Seth had seen the same as she had, hadn’t he? Maybe this was her brain joining the dots in ways they weren't meant to be joined. Seth could be influencing them all, in cahoots with Johnny to ensure they gave a good recommendation on the website.

  Michael hadn't said a word but looked restless. She sidled up to him.

  “You OK?” she asked.

  “This isn't going how I expected.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  A hint of a smile. “Why were you lying just then? You saw more than you admitted to.”

  Taken aback, Judy frowned. “What did you see?”

  Michael straightened and sighed. “The shadows were moving.”

  “That was the candlelight.”

  “They were moving even when there was no light. I heard them. I think there are more of them. I don’t think they want us to leave.”

  Michael was just reiterating what the Ouija board had spelt out, and she was convinced that Johnny had been the driving force behind that message.

  Children of the Adherents.

  What the hell was that even meant to mean? Who were the Adherents?

  Seth returned from the breakout room. He had a curious expression on his face, serious and troubled—it aged him. “Are we ready for our next vigil?”

  The conversation, such as it was, dried up around them and all eyes were back to Seth.

  “You're joking,” Alisha said.

  “You came here to experience the paranormal, didn't you? Why would you want to give up after an incident like that?”

  Johnny was the only one in the group who cheered up at Seth’s suggestion. “You’ve got to realise that none of this can possibly hurt you. We’ve tapped into some of the energy left in this building, but that's all it is, energy.”

  The wheelchair had moved on its own in the rec room. Alisha had been disturbed by something behind her in the morgue. It certainly seemed that whatever they were experiencing had the power to physically interact with them. But Johnny’s enthusiasm had a positive effect on the group. They were attentive and even Glenda and Peter were once again on their feet, waiting for direction. No one mentioned leaving.

  “I want to try something on the Correction Floor,” Seth announced.

  Johnny lifted his head. “We’re not allowed on the top floor.”

  “But I'm sensing a lot of energy from high in the building,” Seth said, glancing up.

  Judy had come across the term Correction Floor when she'd looked into the history of the building and could understand why Seth might want to lead a vigil up there. Whereas the morgue was a clear remnant of the building’s life as a hospital, the Correction Floor was a powerful vestige of the building’s life as an orphanage and also where the unconventional treatments to the mental patients were administered. If there was a dark heart to this building that was where you’d find it.

  “What's wrong with the Correction Floor? Why aren't we allowed up there?” Arjun asked.

  “It's an old building,” Johnny said, “and it’s suffered from a lack of maintenance. The top floor has some rain damage. The insurers are worried about anyone going up there.”

  Glenda exchanged an uneasy look with her husband. “Perhaps we should leave it then. We can always hold another vigil somewhere else.”

  Seth shook his head. “It's getting late. We don't have time to keep switching location. It can take a while for the energies to become aligned and for me to tune into them.”

  Johnny’s demeanour shifted subtly. Perhaps the others hadn’t noticed but Judy had. Despite saying that he wanted no one to go up there, his body language was all wrong, no longer tense and defensive but relaxed. “Come on,” Johnny cajoled, “it will be entirely safe. The insurers are just being unduly cautious. We've plenty of strong torches. Just don't stand under anything that looks like it might drop on your head.”

  His tone lightened the mood and suddenly it seemed like everyone was up for a visit to the top floor. Now that it was decided, the group took a few minutes to nip to the toilets and grab a quick snack from the breakout room. Judy took the chance to corner Seth.

  “What's going on?” she said. “Why the sudden u-turn?”

  “I don't know what you mean.”

  “You were all for us leaving after what took place in the morgue, and then five minutes later, you want us to stick around and try again.”

  He signalled that she follow him and together they wandered away from the entrance hall back towards the exit to the car park. Seth had his torch lit and held it ahead of him. It barely stayed still as he panned it around the dark spaces.

  “You're worried,” Judy said.

  “No I'm not.”

  “You want to leave as much as the rest of us.”

  “Do you want to leave?”

  She faltered. From that first look at the shadowmen in the morgue she’d wanted to leave this building and put some distance between her and this new world of scary. But did she feel like that now? Seeing the doors made her uneasy, but it was also thrilling.

  “Do you get scared, by all this I mean?” she asked.

  “I'm more scared of the dark than I am
of those things in the morgue.”

  “Strange career choice for someone scared of the dark.” She smiled.

  “I never chose to be able to see the doors. Just like you didn't choose. We can and that’s our gift or curse or whatever you want to believe.”

  “What are they? What’s on the other side of them?”

  “The Almost Realm,” he breathed.

  “You're making this up.”

  “You don't have to believe anything I say, but, no, I'm not making this up. The doorways lead to another place. For centuries investigators have chronicled them. Some have even been unfortunate to step inside one and return.”

  “What happened to them?”

  “The handful that crossed the threshold and returned went insane.”

  Judy shifted and glanced behind her at the entrance hall where the rest of the group looked like they were getting ready to go. A torch shone at them and temporarily blinded Judy who put her hand up to shield against the light.

  “We'll be two minutes,” she called out. The torch moved off them. She focused again on Seth. “What is this place? This Almost Realm?”

  “It's like nothing any mortal should get to experience. A limbo dimension where the dead pass on their way to the end of their journey—wherever that journey may take them.”

  “You're saying it's hell?”

  “Think of it more like a waiting room, where spirits wait their turn.” He shone his torch behind him, into the dark corridor leading to the east wing and unexplored territory. “You hear that?”

  Judy tried to zone out on all superfluous sensation, but beyond the faint chatter of the ghost party in the entrance hall, and light rain against the windows, she failed to hear what had disturbed Seth.

  “What did you hear?” she asked.