Soiled bandages and dirty syringes lay scattered around my feet. The half-melted head of a plastic doll stared up at me from within a nest of surgical gauze. I swung back my leg and booted the thing as far along the corridor as I could. I’ve found you can never be too careful when it comes to creepy-looking dolls.
Hungry, hungry, hungry! the voices behind the barricade screamed. Hungry, hungry, hungry!
That was it. I’d seen and heard enough. I had missed some of what Joseph had told me, but I remembered him saying I wouldn’t be able to get back. It was time to put that to the test.
I’d become pretty good at flitting between the Darkest Corners and the real world. It didn’t take much effort now. I used to have to really concentrate, but now I could make the jump just by thinking about it for a few seconds.
Still, I was taking no chances this time. I shut my eyes, tried to block out the crashing and howling from the entrance, and focused like I’d never focused before.
It happened in a heartbeat. The decaying walls around me appeared to heal, as the real world rushed in to replace the festering wound that was the Darkest Corners.
The sunlight that came streaming in through the windows burned away the stuttering shadows. I looked around. The barricade was gone. The filth and the rot were gone.
But Ameena was there. Ameena and Joseph. Her face crinkled into a grin when I appeared beside them. Joseph’s expression barely changed – just a raising of his eyebrows in the middle, and a slight widening of his eyes. It wasn’t a look that suggested he was pleased to see me.
From that look alone, I should have realised something wasn’t right, but I didn’t. I smiled cockily back at them, telling myself that Joseph was just unhappy at having been proved wrong—
A bomb went off behind my eyes and I saw blood splatter on the floor at my feet. The pain crippled me, making my body go limp. I dropped to my hands and knees, my muscles spasming, rivers of red flowing from each nostril and down over my mouth and chin.
I tried to scream, but the blood was flowing down my throat. I coughed, spluttered, hacked – choking on the stuff, drowning in it.
The second jolt of pain was worse than the first. It hit me like a hammer-blow to the side of the head. The force of it took my arms and legs out from under me.
I landed, face down, in a grimy puddle.
Hungry, hungry, hungry. Hungry, hungry, hungry!
The pain eased off and the blood stopped flowing. I coughed up a wad of dark red and left it floating in the water. I didn’t move for over a minute, just knelt there, staring at my bloodied reflection flickering off and on in the puddle. There one second, gone the next.
I didn’t have to look to know the barricade was there. There had been no flashing sparks, no sensation of movement – nothing to signal I was flitting between worlds. But I was. I had. I was back in the Darkest Corners. And it looked like I was stuck there.
At long last, I stood up. I looked at the spot where Ameena had been standing. Where she was still standing, a whole world away. She’d be shouting at Joseph now, demanding to know what had just happened. The thought of it almost made me smile. Almost.
The corridor went dark. For a few seconds I could see nothing. The crashing of metal and the screeching of the creatures outside sounded louder and closer in the sudden darkness, but I didn’t dare run. With no light to see by, I could bump into anything, and I didn’t imagine there was anything good to bump into in here.
Then, as I’d begun to wonder if the lights would ever come back on, they did. All four of them resumed their random blinking and flashing, offering me at least a partial view of the corridor.
I kept my back to the barricaded door. Going that way was out of the question. The only route open to me, it seemed, was down the corridor, further into the hospital.
I peered along it, at the filth and the rot and the dark pools of shadow. More than anything I did not want to go that way. More than anything, I knew I had to.
Ameena and Joseph had mentioned a cure – a cure that could only be found in the Darkest Corners. Was that why Joseph had brought me here? Was the cure here in the hospital? It made sense, but that was what worried me. Nothing about the Darkest Corners normally made sense.
But still, if there was a cure, then I would find it. What other choice did I have? Being stuck here – being trapped for ever in the Darkest Corners – was unthinkable.
I took a few big, bold steps along the corridor, then stopped. What was I doing? Joseph had also said there was somebody in the hospital. Somebody worse than anyone I’d crossed paths with before.
I thought of Mr Mumbles, Caddie and the Crowmaster. I couldn’t believe there could be anyone worse than those three. But what if Joseph was right? If there was something even half as bad as any of the monsters I’d faced so far, I was in real trouble. Back there, back in the real world, I could do things. I could stop them. Here, I was just a kid. Here, I was powerless.
Here, I was as good as dead.
Ameena would know what to do. She’d come up with a plan and find a way to make it work. But Ameena wasn’t coming. No one was coming. I was trapped in a big scary hospital in a big scary world, and I was on my own.
Squeak.
Squeak.
Squeak.
The sudden sound made me jump, and I gave a little yelp that only reminded me how scared I was. The squeaking had come from... where? Somewhere along the corridor, I thought, but it had an echoey quality, suggesting it might have come from further away.
I stood still, listening, not daring to make a move. Even the things outside had fallen silent, and were no longer battering against the barrier. The sound didn’t take long to come again – a high-pitched squeak-squeak-squeak like some sort of machine badly in need of oiling. There was another sound too, behind the first one. It took me a moment, but I soon identified it. Footsteps, slow and steady, clack, clack, clack.
Joseph was right. I was wrong. I may have been trapped in a big scary hospital in a big scary world, but now I knew, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that I was definitely not on my own.
Chapter Four
FINDING THE WAY
Ilistened again for the squeaking and the footsteps, but heard them only once. They were further away this time, somewhere deeper within the hospital, and I decided it was finally safe to... to...
To do what? I was at a loss. From what I’d seen of it from the outside, the hospital was enormous. Finding a cure – if there even was one – would be virtually impossible. Would it be a pill? A drink? An injection? Some kind of machine? How could I look for it when I didn’t even know what it was, let alone where it was?
Why hadn’t Joseph given me more to go on? Why hadn’t he told me anything useful? Time had been running out, but that hadn’t stopped him before. On Christmas Day, when I’d been running from Mr Mumbles, Joseph had somehow slipped a note inside a Christmas cracker and left it for me to find. Why couldn’t he have done something similar this time? Why had he left me to...?
My gaze fell to the leather wallet on the floor. He had wedged it into my mouth to stop me biting my tongue, but was that his only reason?
My pulse quickened, but I didn’t dare move. If I moved – if I grabbed the wallet and looked inside – I might be disappointed. Better to leave it there, to not look, and hold on to the hope for a little longer.
But hope wasn’t going to cure me. And hope wasn’t going to get me home. If there was something in the wallet that could help me, I had to get it. If there wasn’t, I had to deal with that and figure things out on my own. Either way, I had to know.
I stooped and picked up the wallet. It felt light and flimsy in my hands. I did nothing but hold it for a long time, unable to bring myself to look inside. Overhead, the closest light flickered – on, off, on, off – buzzing angrily, like a trapped insect.
The barricade was still silent, but I could hear other noises out there, off in the distance. Roaring. Screaming. Howling. I turned my back on the world o
utside, trying not to listen. My hands shook as I unclipped the stud fastener on the wallet, and carefully looked inside.
There was no money, that was the first thing I noticed. No notes, no coins, nothing.
In the bit at the back, where the notes should go, there were four photographs of different sizes. The pictures were in colour, but scuffed and scratched. One of them was scorched down the right-hand side, half of the image completely obscured by a mess of black and brown.
I flicked through the first three pictures. A waterfall. A sunset. A mountain – Fuji, I reckoned, in Japan. All nice, scenic images. All completely useless to me.
Then I came to the fourth photograph, and suddenly nothing in the world made any sense.
This one looked even older than the other three. Fold marks and scratches criss-crossed it like a road map. It was a different shape to the others too – square, with a white border that was yellowing round the edges. It looked like the ones Mum used to take with Nan’s old Polaroid camera.
I didn’t notice these details until later. Right then, all I could see was the image printed on the paper.
There were three figures in the picture, huddled round one side of a circular table in what looked to be a run-down old pub or restaurant. I recognised two of the people; the other I had no idea about.
The one I didn’t know was a boy of around four or five years old. He was on the right-hand side of the picture, kneeling on a chair and laughing so hard a little bubble of snot was popping out from one of his nostrils. His eyes were closed and his mouth was open in a wide, gap-toothed smile. A wispy white cloud in front of his mouth suggested the room – wherever it was – was icy cold.
Next to him, in the middle of the picture, was a much more familiar figure. He was leaning back in his chair, his arms folded across his broad chest. He was scowling at the camera – scowling at me – and I felt the hairs on the back of my neck bristle as I stared back into his dark, soulless eyes.
The collar of his overcoat was up round his ears, and the wide brim of his hat curved downwards, almost to meet it. Mr Mumbles looked just like he had when he’d come after me, but for two details.
His lips were unstitched, that was the first thing. My eyes had instinctively gone there, checking for the dirty lengths of thread that had kept his mouth sewn shut for most of our encounter. The scars were there – two rows of dark dots above and below his lips – but the stitching itself was gone.
The second unusual thing about Mr Mumbles’s appearance was his nose. It was as large and as hooked as ever, but in this picture a long, pointed icicle hung from the end, reaching all the way down past his chin. It was this that the boy on the right seemed to be finding so hilarious.
Seeing Mr Mumbles there came as a surprise, but it was the last figure that really shocked me.
He sat off to the left of the image, half out of shot. He was looking across at the boy and smiling – not laughing like the boy was – but smiling, definitely smiling.
His clothes were dark and coated with dust and grime. Across his chest were two small metal trays, attached by straps to more metal on his shoulders, like a crude, homemade suit of armour. From the dents and scratches in the metal, the armour had seen its share of battles.
His face was thin and drawn. A scar ran down the length of it, from above his right temple to below his mouth. The scar wasn’t fresh – a year or two old at least, I guessed. But... how was that possible?
I pulled the picture closer and studied it in the flickering light, searching for anything that would show it to be a fake. It had to be some kind of trick. It had to be, but I could see nothing to suggest anyone had tampered with the image.
I looked again at the third figure. His face was the one I knew best of all, the one I’d recognise anywhere.
Because it was mine.
The third person in the picture was me.
Except it wasn’t. This version of me looked older, taller, with a lean, muscular frame. So, not me, but someone who looked almost exactly like me. And who was having his photo taken with Mr Mumbles.
Did I have an evil twin? Was that it? I’d only recently found out that my dad was imaginary, so discovering I had a brother I knew nothing about wouldn’t really be that strange by comparison.
But... he looked so like me. And the photo was so old. And where were Mr Mumbles’s stitches? And who was the kid on the right?
The picture threw up several questions, but it provided nothing in the way of answers, and answers were what I needed now. I quickly shoved it back inside the wallet with the other three photographs, and looked through the other sections.
Empty. Aside from the pictures, there was nothing else in there. I closed the wallet with a snap. What a waste of time. I was even more confused now than I had been a few moments ago. I was getting nowhere.
I was about to slip the wallet into my pocket, when a tiny triangle of white caught my eye. It poked out from the seam at the wallet’s edge, like a little shark’s fin cutting through the stitching. I studied it more closely. The stitching along one side of the wallet was loose, as if it had been unpicked and then hurriedly sewn back up. My heart skipped a beat. The wallet had a hidden compartment!
It took a few tries to catch hold of the triangle between the tips of my fingers. It was plastic, a little thinner than a bank card. On the other side – the side facing away from me – I could feel a little bundle of paper, just two or three sheets, maybe. They seemed to be attached to the plastic, because when I moved it, they moved too.
I gave the triangle a tug. The stitching held it in place, and my grip slipped off the smooth plastic.
Kicking through the rubbish on the floor I searched for something to help me get the thing out. Bandages. A clipboard. Some rotten grapes. I found nothing useful until my toe pushed aside an old, torn magazine and revealed a surgical scalpel hiding below.
I slipped the tip of the scalpel inside the seam of the wallet, and split the stitches open.
I let the scalpel drop to the floor and hurriedly wiped my hand on my jeans. The plastic card slipped out easily. I shoved the wallet in my pocket and carefully unfolded the paper that was attached to the piece of plastic. It was a map. A map of the hospital. The kind they might give to visitors or patients to help them find which part of the building they needed to go to.
It wasn’t big – about the size of an A4 sheet of paper when fully unfolded – and there wasn’t a huge amount of detail on it, but I didn’t care. It told me everything I needed to know, because there, in one of the smaller hospital buildings off to the left of the main one, was a circle of red ink. It had been scrawled heavily round a rectangular room in the middle of the building. The writing was small and hard to make out in the erratic light, but if I held the map close I could just make out the text printed in the middle of the room.
For the first time in days, I laughed. Actually, properly laughed out loud. Had Joseph been with me I’d have kissed him. He had left me a message, telling me the cure was there in that room circled in red.
In that room marked “Ward 13”.
It took me a little longer to find where I was at the moment. I’d assumed the door we’d come through was a main entrance, but I was wrong. It wasn’t even marked on the map as a way in at all, so I guessed it must be for staff or emergencies only.
I was so happy at finding the map I wasn’t even discouraged by the fact that I was just about as far away from Ward 13 as it was possible to be in the main building. If I stayed inside the hospital I had a maze of corridors and wards to get through until I got to where I needed to go. If I went outside, I’d be eaten alive. It was no contest, really.
Memorising the first few twists and turns of the route, I refolded the map, shoved it way down deep in my back pocket, and set off along the shadowy corridor in search of Ward 13.
Chapter Five
THE SEARCH BEGINS
Every one of the doors along the corridor led into offices of various sizes. Some were litt
le more than large cupboards with just a single desk and chair in them. Others were big, sprawling things with bookcases, filing cabinets and tables too.
Regardless of their size, all the rooms were in the same condition. The furniture was toppled or broken. Books and papers were scattered across each filthy floor. The walls were decaying and the ceiling was damp and the windows – all of them – were blocked with planks of wood, sheets of metal and rusted lengths of barbed wire.
Computer equipment was smashed, chair coverings were torn, and the whole place stank like a sewer. It made me all the more desperate to find Ward 13 and get out.
But I knew if I wasn’t prepared I might never make it to Ward 13 alive. Back in the real world, my abilities gave me at least a fighting chance against the horrors that came hunting for me. I could conjure up a weapon, or a shield, or, or... something. But my powers didn’t work in the Darkest Corners, as I’d discovered when I’d tried using them to attack my dad.
My latest encounter with him seemed like an age ago. Could it really have been only yesterday?
I needed a weapon. Something to fight with, in case anything came after me in here. A gun would’ve been nice, but I’d have settled for a sword or an axe – something I could do serious damage with if I found myself cornered.
The best I could find was a snooker cue. It was half pinned below a heavy wooden desk in one of the larger offices. The desk weighed too much for me to lift it, so I spent three or four minutes puffing, panting and swearing below my breath as I wiggled the cue free.
It wouldn’t have stopped Mr Mumbles, or an army of living dolls, or a flock of flesh-eating crows, but I felt safer with the cue than I had without it. It had a heavy end for hitting and a pointy end for stabbing. It’d do until I could find something better.
About half of the offices had working lights. Most of them buzzed on and off like those in the corridor, but a few remained on constantly. It was the first time I’d been to anywhere in the Darkest Corners that had electricity. It had come as a surprise, and made me wonder what else I didn’t know about the place.
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