by Jade McCahon
“That’s…” I realized I completely agreed with those words. It was entirely true.
The ground was littered with moldering linens, soiled garments, bunched into corners where they’d been kicked out of the way. In front of us were painted double entrance doors, their frosted glass yellowed with age, a tiny triangle missing out of one side. A crinkled paper sign was taped to the wall next to the doors. “Keep the Morgue Clean” it screamed out in bubbled ink. And directly beyond those doors were the cement stairs that led up to the first floor. I took a deep breath, shoving them open. “Come on,” I said to Raymond. “Let’s get this over with.”
The stairs were passable, though they were piled with debris. I hung on to the chipping bannister to ensure I could maneuver my way up them, Raymond holding the flashlight beside me. He flicked it off. There was enough light pouring through a cracked window to see pretty well here now. Behind the blurry glass I caught a stretch of sky. It was turning a gradual but particular color of blue. The storm was almost here.
“I gotta say, you’re taking this a lot better than I thought,” Raymond remarked as we walked.
I shrugged. “Now that I know you didn’t cheat on me with that…bitch…that’s all that matters.”
“So you’re not upset that I’m attracted to other people…as long as it isn’t another girl?”
“Specifically Bonita. But…basically yes.”
“Are girls really that territorial?”
“Yep.”
“You know…she’s not really a bitch.”
“Don’t even try to defend her to me. And did you know she has a kid?”
For a moment Raymond didn’t answer. “You know…maybe you should just call her back.”
“What?”
There was a clamor on the floor above us, just beyond the double doors, and we forgot our conversation and scrambled ahead. There was no way to hurry to where we needed to go. With the papers, pieces of the walls, the chunks of wood and wrecked furniture strewn about, we had to tread carefully. It took some concerted effort to get up the staircase, but another set of double doors at the top opened up to the first floor. I hadn’t been here in years, and the state of it had worsened considerably. I heard myself gasp.
The crescent-shaped nurses’ station desk was corroded, paint blackened like burned skin. The ceiling was a holey mess. The spray-painted Swan Song Angel was half-eaten by mold and newer graffiti. Was nothing sacred to drunks and teenagers? A light fixture had let loose, hanging by wires halfway to the floor. I stepped gingerly away from it.
There were papers scattered across the semi-circle desk, water-damaged and patterned with muddy footprints. Behind the desk I heard giggling. A group of teenagers were huddled in the dirt, smoking a joint. Apparently they had knocked over a huge metal shelf previously rotting in a corner, causing the commotion we’d heard. I scowled at them. “Jamie and Cole are supposedly in the Men’s Ward,” Raymond told me as he led me by my arm past the desk. “That was the last update anyway.” He pulled out his phone, looked at it, and shoved it back into his pocket with a sigh. “Of course, I can’t get a signal in this hellhole, so I’m not sure.”
“Here on the first floor?” I asked him. There were technically four wards for the men, one on each level, including the basement. The basement is where they kept people who weren’t white or rich, until that horror became illegal. Something told me the underground wards were only a shade better back then than they were today.
We went through another set of double doors and a long corridor with rooms on each side stretched out before us. Plaster sloughed off the ceiling and a stack of rebar had toppled near an ancient bedframe that jutted out from a doorway. Some sort of sinister-looking tubing snaked out of another. This hallway was one arm of another L-shaped corridor further down; the wings were staggered in the typical Kirkbride tradition as part of a belief that it was healthier for the patients to have a clear view of the sun and the outside. It also kept the more violent patients in the furthest wings, isolated from the others. I remembered all these strange facts from that report I’d done in seventh grade, the one I’d submitted the pictures with. Maybe someday I’d pick up a camera again, and try to make something out of myself.
Raymond’s phone made a noise and he pulled it out of his pocket, stopping in the middle of the hallway. “It’s Cole,” he announced. “My signal must be going in and out. Great.” He read the message aloud. “Can’t find Sara. Jamie is asking for her.” He looked up at me and shrugged, reading his return message while he quickly punched it in. “Where are you? Sara is with me.”
His words made me feel stronger. I was not alone. We had to keep going. Here where the hallway was a bit less strewn with debris, we were able to break into a sort of half-jog. The sense of urgency was bearing down progressively harder on us. There were stragglers here and there, and even a couple that looked like Jamie and Cole from the back, shock on their faces when we whirled them around and zapped them with the flashlight. Frustrated, we continued on.
Another set of double doors opened into the farthest wing of the first floor Men’s Ward. Things were bad here again, dirty. Graffiti (not even particularly imaginable) blanketed the walls. Some of the doors had been torn from their hinges. This was not evidence of the medically macabre; this was proof of the chronically undereducated. The light would have been good here except for the arrival of the storm. Everything was washed in blue-gray.
The crashing of the thunder reminded me of the beginning of this whole fiasco – the nightmare about Tommy. Emmett was dying in the car. Jamie needed me. I was one lost marble away from a complete meltdown. I could feel it coming on. I pulled out my cell phone but there was still no signal. Raymond checked his. Nothing. “This isn’t working,” I muttered, breaking away from Raymond. I tore back around the corner past the empty rooms, back through the double doors that led us toward the nurses’ station.
Without restraint I began to run. “Jamie!” I screamed. “Cole!” Raymond was trying to catch up to me, begging me to stop. But I couldn’t. Lightning was flashing in the windows, thunder rolling all around us. I was going to lose every shred of sanity I had left if I didn’t find them. I stumbled upon the bathrooms, the rectangular tubs and vacant shower stalls filthy with scattered remnants of insulation and chunks of broken tiles. As I flew around the corner and tried to slide to a stop, I twisted my ankle on a pile of trash and caught myself on the edge of one of the tubs, my face inches from making intimate contact. I’m going to throw up, I thought suddenly, as I pulled myself into a sitting position, perching on the side of the tub with my head between my knees. My ankle throbbed with pain and the floor tilted below me dizzily. The panic rose in my throat, and I gulped air to snuff it out. Please, Tommy, I spoke desperately inside my own head. My anxiety renewed my desperation that he hear me if he was out there. It was strange to have unquestioningly, finally acquiesced to raw hope. Please, just show me how to get to Jamie. Please just show me where to go.
My breathing was returning to normal, and the nausea was finally subsiding. I picked my head up, staring out of the shower room into the hall. Raymond came bailing around the corner. “Sara, are you okay? Don’t run off like that! It’s dangerous in here! I almost broke my neck on that—” He cut off, mid-sentence, following my gaze out of the room. “What are you looking at?”
I stood, not as shaky as I expected to be, and crept toward the shower room door. I took six steps, my eyes locked on a playing card that rested, face up, in the middle of the dirty floor. Even though it was surrounded by filth, it was perfect, clean and gleaming white. It was the ace of spades.
My sneakers crunched over broken glass as I kneeled to pick it up. I turned it over. It was a red-backed Bicycle card.
I looked at Raymond. “We need to go this way,” I said.
His eyes held questions, but he kept quiet. We walked through the bathroom and back out to the double doors that led to the outermost ward, moving in a straight line. We crossed the
ward in a few minutes, noticing that most of the rooms were empty of furniture. At the very back of the wing was another set of steps, adjoining a kind of cloak room which had a set of toppled lockers barricading the doorway. I started up the steps, uncertain whether I was headed the right way. That’s when I found another card, the ace of diamonds. Again, it was on the floor in perfect condition, as if it had just been placed there.
“Come on, we have to hurry,” I called down to Raymond, who was maneuvering past a rubber fire hose to catch up. He took the steps two at a time. “Show off,” I grumbled as we reached the top together.
It was dark now, a full-blown storm swirling outside. I wondered about the crowds – the protesters, the cops, the demolition crew. Were they still out there?
A calm had come over me, negating my panic from earlier, giving me the strength to go on. We shoved through the double doors that would take us to the second floor Men’s Ward.
In spite of my serenity, this hallway was the creepiest thing I’d seen since the morgue. There was grime two inches thick on the walls, and the floor tiles had been plucked out of their places like randomly extracted teeth. I took a deep breath and tried to fill the eerie silence with inane conversation. “So…is it my fault?” I asked Raymond as we took in the leaking ceiling, dirty floors, crackled paint.
He clicked the flashlight on. “Is what your fault?” he replied, his eyes warily following the yellow sphere of light.
“You know…”
He looked at me. “Really?” he replied.
“You know I had to ask.”
“Well, you are pretty gross,” he answered. He grinned widely, nudging me with his shoulder, but kept his eyes on the hallway. It was like a zombie apocalypse had taken this place down, and any second some gory-faced monster was going to come stumbling sloppily toward us. “Do I really have a small penis?” he asked, only a trace of uncertainty on his handsome face.
I laughed. I had never seen Raymond self-conscious about anything. “Sorry about that. Of course not. But…you might want to get a guy’s opinion…you know…to be fair.” I nudged him back.
He laughed, rolling his eyes. Me and him, we were gonna be alright. “Let’s go.”
At the end of the hall, at the entrance to the next, was another playing card. This time it was the ace of clubs. I thought we might be going toward the nurses’ station, but I found another card just outside the entrance to the tiny open dining hall. It was the ace of hearts.
Rummy.
And there was my best friend, Jamie, her back to me as she sat at the last dining table left standing in the room. She was immersed in shadows and I could vaguely make out Cole’s outline beside her, huddled in another chair. Raymond shined the light on him. His eyes were raw, disbelieving. He motioned us over.
“So, what’s going on?” Raymond asked. I pulled a chair over from a pile in the corner, and it squeaked loudly under my weight.
“I have been waiting for you, Sara,” said a male voice, from out of the dark. I looked around, bewildered. I almost asked who it was until I realized where it was coming from.
The voice was coming from Jamie’s mouth.
“See what I mean?” Cole whimpered.
“What the hell,” breathed Raymond.
Raymond pointed the flashlight at Jamie, and her face changed as she turned her head toward me. I’d never seen anything quite like this before; it was immensely disturbing. It was almost her, only slightly off. As if someone else were using her facial expressions. “Jamie?” I asked. “Is that you?” It was a useless question.
“I am not Jamie, and no harm will come to this body. It has hosted me before. I am Jamie’s guide here as well,” said the male voice, low and deep, ancient…terrifying. “I am a guide to those who have crossed the line between your world and mine. You know me, Sara.” There was a low growl in its tone. “You know my name.” Jamie’s moist eyes, flat and emotionless, locked on mine.
“Who?” I asked. “Who are you?”
“I am Joey,” the voice said.
****
Nine O’Clock
I jumped back so abruptly that I knocked over my chair. “What’s going on?!” I demanded. I was asking no one in particular.
“There is no reason to be afraid,” the male voice coming out of Jamie rasped. “I am not here to hurt you. I am here to impart truth.”
“What is she talking about?” Raymond asked me, his eyes wide. He leaned down to look her in the face.
“Don’t touch her,” Cole warned. Just as the words left his lips Jamie emitted a low, threatening, inhuman growl. Raymond stepped back. “I already tried that,” Cole said. He held his wrist under the flashlight, showing us three long, jagged scratch marks.
“She did that to you?” I gasped.
“It did that to me, yes,” Cole answered.
“Don’t tell me you’re buying into this,” Raymond mumbled, but he looked totally convinced. He was scared. And that made me scared. “Jamie.” Raymond leaned down to look at her again, but kept his distance this time. She turned her head ever so slightly to look at him. Her eyes glowed strangely in the dark. “Hey, girl,” he said in a gentle whisper. “Are you ready to get out of here?”
Again, the low rumbling growl answered, like a cat gone mad.
“What should we do?” Raymond asked Cole.
“I don’t know. If we try to pick her up…”
“She needs a doctor…something isn’t right here…”
“You think? She tried to tear my arm off and that voice coming out of her…”
As the guys argued about how to get Jamie out of the building without having their faces ripped off, I paced back and forth. Neither one of them knew what I knew. I was a bundle of nerves, a mass of conflicting emotions. Part of me wanted to know why The Thing was here. Part of me wanted to strangle Jamie just to shut it up. Instead I started talking to it. Raymond and Cole both went silent and stared at me. “What do you want, Joey?” I demanded.
“I am here to remind you of the information you have about Thomas and Jenevieve,” Joey answered immediately with Jamie’s lips. It was so strange; her mouth barely moved, but each word was fully articulated, clear and deliberate. “And I am here to remind you that there are items in your world which have significance to the two I speak of now who have crossed over into the fluid world.”
I folded my arms over my chest. If there was any inkling this was a joke, I would beat the crap out of her, and she knew it. She had, after all, fooled the mayor’s wife with one of her goofy voices. I paced again.
I knew it couldn’t be a joke.
“Who’s Jenevieve?” Raymond asked, frowning.
“That’s my sister,” Cole breathed, his eyes round as saucers.
Jamie couldn’t have known that, could she? Even Raymond and I hadn’t known that. “What items?” I demanded, answering because I didn’t know what else to do.
“Sara, what is she talking about?” Cole was frantic.
“I don’t know!” I screamed, my hands flying out helplessly. Then I remembered the necklace in my pocket. “Are you talking about this?” I pulled it out, holding it up in front of Jamie, the gold glinting in the light of the flashlight.
“Where did you get that?” Cole gasped.
“Is this what you’re talking about?” I shouted again, ignoring him. “Joey”…or whatever it was, wasn’t answering. The son of a bitch had no people skills. Instead, it uttered an eerie chuckle, the same one I’d heard on the phone when Cole had called me earlier. Furious, I took my messenger bag off my shoulders and emptied its contents on the table; the spirit board, the recorder, and the notebook tumbled messily into a pile. “Which one? Goddamn you, answer me!”
“Sara! Where did you get that necklace?!” Cole shouted.
At the same time, Raymond was trying to convince us both to calm down. “Tell us what’s going on, Sara,” he said gently. “Please.”
Lightning flashed, and the rumble of thunder followed.
> The low, infuriating chuckle continued to come out of Jamie. I marched back and forth some more, pondering. Could I tell Raymond and Cole what I knew? Would they think I was insane? On the bright side, it was unlikely I would sound any crazier than Joey. I could no longer handle all of this alone. And who better to tell? I could trust them, but not only that, they deserved to know. After all, they had loved Jenny too. They had both suffered along with me. We were all in this together.
I could have started out with logic, but it was all going to sound nuts anyway. So I decided blurting would be the most effective means of communication. “I think Ead killed Jenny.” I grimaced as Cole’s face crumpled. I hated to hurt him like this, but it had to be told. “And this necklace is the proof. Tommy found it in Ead’s car.”
I expected gasps of surprise, shouts of outrage, or at least a swear or two of disbelief. Instead the boys looked at each other. “Can I see it?” Cole asked of the jewelry, and I handed it over, exhaling loudly when his nod confirmed the reality. “It has her initials engraved on the back here. See?” He held his flashlight up so Raymond and I could get a look. “She got it for her birthday.”
I already knew that. I had seen it myself.
“Sara…why didn’t you take this to the cops or at least my parents?”
“I just found it last night in Tommy’s things. I didn’t know about it before. He didn’t tell anyone about it before he died.”
Cole frowned.
We both stared at Raymond, who had started fidgeting guiltily next to us. “Jon thinks the same thing,” he spoke finally, shaking his head. “I never told anyone because…because it seemed…too far-fetched. He had no proof. Not a single thing. He was just going off of some things he says Tommy told him about Jenny. About…making contact…with her…oh, Jesus, this is just nuts.” He rubbed the back of his neck with one of his large palms, clearly uncomfortable with what he was saying. “I’m sorry I didn’t mention it. I just…you know, he went a little weird after Jenny disappeared.” He shrugged. “He eventually stopped talking about it, so I just thought…”
