Ellie Jordan, Ghost Trapper

by JL Bryan

  We didn’t have much trouble finding our way through a collapsed section of the damaged fence. We had to wade through dense weeds across the long-broken parking lot. A thorny green vine tangled around Stacey’s leg, and she had to whack it away with her flashlight.

  “Should’ve brought a machete,” she grumbled.

  The day had grown intensely hot, without a cloud in the sky, so I welcomed the shade as we reached the back wall of the building. Broken beer bottles were scattered all through the weeds here—good thing Stacey and I had worn boots. Some of the labels were fairly new, too. Somebody had been drinking and smashing here within the past few days. Great.

  The windows back here were barred, too, but that hadn’t stopped people from smashing the glass over the years. I was conscious of how isolated we were as we poked through the tall weeds, pushing and stomping through knots of thorny jungle as we explored the back of the extremely long brick building. Our efforts to hide ourselves from the road also meant that no one would know if some former asylum inmate decided to murder us and leave us in the bushes.

  We found a steel door that stood slightly ajar, its handle and lock broken away so long ago that the remnants of the lock had turned to rust. I grabbed the edge of the door and pulled. It gave a loud, rusty shriek as I opened it wide enough for us to fit through.

  “Great,” Stacey whispered. “Now all the crazies know we’re here.” I didn’t know whether she meant possible vagrants or the ghosts of old patients, and at the moment, it wasn’t an area of conversation I wanted to explore.

  I flipped on my flashlight and stabbed the high-powered beam deep into the darkness. It looked like what you’d expect—more graffiti on the old brick walls, a layer of nameless filth coating the floor. The light fixtures hung on chains high above us, their bulbs shattered into jagged pieces.

  There was a smell of must in the damp air, and a distant sound of dripping water, though it hadn’t rained in a day or two.

  Stacey and I walked shoulder to shoulder up a wide brick corridor scattered with debris—broken sticks of old office furniture, a rolling hospital bed jammed against one wall, its sheets black with grime.

  “Ugh,” Stacey whispered. “Look up there.”

  Her flashlight had found something we did not want to see. Several steps ahead of us, a thin old mattress, maybe the one from the old hospital bed, lay on the ground. A heap of wadded, filthy clothing sat beside it, as well as an open coffee can filled with dark gunk. Cigarette butts were scattered all around.

  Stacey gave me a questioning look—stay or go?

  I raised my stun gun, and she frowned and nodded.

  We continued onward, into the thick darkness of the old asylum, stepping over ripped hospital gowns, a dirty slipper, an overturned cafeteria tray. Noises scuffled and scratched in the dark rooms we passed. They were probably possums or rats, but I stayed on guard, ready to zap an attacker or stab him with the protruding steel edges around my flashlight lens.

  We checked each doorway, peering into more decay, more crumbling plaster ceilings stained dark with water damage. The sound of dripping grew louder.

  I was looking for some kind of filing room, which I reasoned would exist somewhere near the center of the admin building. I hoped there would be something about Mercy I could use.

  If it sounds like we were grasping at straws, I’d call that a pretty accurate assessment. However, finding just one little object with emotional value to Mercy would make it all worthwhile.

  We pushed open door after door, ready to stun anyone who attacked us. We found the remnants of old cubicles and an occasional office chair overgrown with mold.

  Finally, we reached a big room crowded with old filing cabinets, some of them knocked over with their contents spilled into mildewed heaps on the floor.

  “Hooray,” Stacey whispered in a flat tone.

  We dug through the mess, looking for patient records. Stacey found some likely suspects in a row of old cabinets against the back wall.

  “Careful,” she said when I started to look through a drawer. “Some of them are all moldy and stuck together.”

  “Great.” I found a cabinet full of patients with “C” surnames and checked each drawer in turn. Shuffling through the file folders was like peeling apart the layers of a rotten sandwich, complete with the stench of decay. “Hey, what should we grab for dinner tonight? Subway?” I asked Stacey.

  “Ugh,” Stacey said from the file cabinet next to me, holding her nose. “Don’t even joke.”

  “I can’t believe it,” I whispered. I gently lifted out the manila folder, which had the slimy consistency of old lettuce excavated from the very back of a produce drawer. With my scorching-bright flashlight beam, we could make out a portion of the text on the blurry and faded label on the tab: Cutledge, Me….The rest of the name was illegible.

  “That has to be her,” Stacey whispered. “Right?”

  I laid the folder on top of the dirty filing cabinet and gently pried the pages open.

  It looked like our girl. There was a black and white photograph of her in a patient’s gown, her blond hair chopped short, her eyes dark and vacant-looking. I could easily imagine her as the transparent specter who had accosted me in the hallway outside Lexa’s room.

  I skimmed her file. She’d been treated as a schizophrenic, including heavy 1950’s-style doses of first-generation antipsychotic drugs, later followed by years of brain-zapping electroconvulsive therapy. That’s a serious neurological beating. If she wasn’t insane when they put her into the hospital, she definitely was by the time they let her go.

  “What are we looking for?” Stacey whispered over my shoulder.

  “We want to find her old room, for one thing.”

  “Do we really want to do that?” Stacey asked. “That could get dangerous. This is a huge building, we could get lost…”

  “All true,” I said, still reading. “Here we go. Her room was over in building C, apparently the secure ward for dangerous patients. Her personal effects were put into storage when she checked in. There’s a code number for finding it in the storage area.”

  “Where’s that?”

  “Don’t hospitals usually post maps on the walls? For fires and stuff? Help me look.” I shined my light along the corroded plaster walls, stepping gingerly through the rotten muck on the floor.

  We found a pair of big, laminated maps, though I had to wipe grime away with a slightly less grimy scrap of carpet to make them at all legible.

  “Here are our options, Stacey. We can go outside and across the hospital complex, break into the secure ward, and find her room up on the second floor. Or we can go down to the basement of this building and check the storage rooms.”

  “Those aren’t great options,” Stacey said. “Why would any of her stuff still be stored in the basement? Wouldn’t they have returned it to her when she left?”

  “Possibly, but she was released when the whole hospital closed,” I said. “Maybe some things were left behind in the confusion. The employees might have been more concerned about getting out of here and finding new jobs for themselves than with reuniting all the released patients with their long-forgotten possessions. Let’s check the basement first. It’s closer.”

  “Whatever gets us out of here fast. I’d rather not get torture-killed by vagrants if we can avoid it.”

  “Good attitude,” I told her. I slid the moldy file folder into Stacey’s backpack, and she wrinkled her nose.

  We walked out of the file room and back into the main hall, avoiding rotten debris while we walked to the hallway intersection ahead. The map had told us we’d find the stairs there.

  “How about we take the elevators?” Stacey snickered as her flashlight landed on the closed steel double doors. She even jabbed the round button with her thumb.

  “I think you’ll be waiting a long time. If it does show up, it’s probably haunted.” I pushed open the heavy stairwell door under the dead EXIT sign.

  Stacey and I hes
itated, shining our lights down the filthy, damp concrete stairs into the darkness below. It was a cinderblock stairwell, with years of accumulated graffiti on the walls. A streak of dark liquid oozed down one side to accumulate in a puddle on the concrete landing below.

  “What is that gunk?” Stacey whispered.

  “I’m guessing rainwater,” I said. “It’s slowly worked its way down from the roof, getting nastier all along the way.”

  “Sweet,” Stacey said. “Well, let’s go check out the dark basement of the abandoned insane asylum. Nothing could possibly go wrong down there.”

  “Stay close.” I started down the steps, and Stacey followed right behind me.

  Our footsteps echoed through the stairwell. I glanced upward with my flashlight, but could only see the underside of more concrete stairs zagging back and forth into solid darkness above. If any dangerous guys were up there, listening to us, there were plenty of places for them to hide.

  We crept down the stairs, avoiding the dank puddle that had collected on the landing. Unfortunately, the puddle had overflowed, sending a thin but nasty trickle of foul water down the second flight and into the basement. We stayed to one side of it.

  The basement had solid brick walls, with heavy brick columns supporting the building above us. There were lots and lots and lots of spiderwebs down here, plus more of the dank puddles made of water dripping from the ceiling.

  “It feels cold,” Stacey whispered.

  “Temperature is ten degrees lower than upstairs,” I said, checking my Mel Meter. “Not shocking since we’re underground, though. Nothing special on the electromagnetic side.”

  The basement’s layout was less rational than the hallway grid upstairs. It was more like a catacombs, or something carved underground by blind moles, clusters of brick rooms opening onto each other. We could not walk in a straight line, but instead had to pass from chamber to chamber, picking and choosing doorways. I used glow-in-the-dark chalk to mark an arrow by each doorway through which we passed so we’d have less chance of getting hopelessly lost.

  The rooms farther in were more cluttered, and we had to navigate around old beds and antiquated equipment draped in dusty sheets. Great hiding places for psycho killers. We lifted the edges of the sheets, looking for storage boxes or bins, but the first room held only rusting hospital beds, plus dusty cardboard boxes of surgical gloves, gowns, scrubs, cotton balls, and sutures.

  In the next room, Stacey lifted an old sheet and grimaced.

  “Uh, what’s that, Ellie?” Her flashlight revealed a roughly hewn chair. Its arms and legs were abnormally wide, with thick leather restraints built into them.

  Stacey wasn’t looking at the leather straps, though, but at a wooden box that protruded from the chair’s high back. If you’d sat down in the old chair, the box would completely cover your head. There was a kind of knob or crank built into either side of the box, about where your temples would be.

  “Is that an electric chair?” Stacey whispered.

  “I doubt it.” I raised the box on its hinges to look at its underside.

  The knobs on the outside of the box were attached to metal rods on the inside, each of which ended in a small, flat block of wood. The patient could be placed inside, and the wooden blocks used to lock the patient’s head into place.

  “You wouldn’t be able to see anything in there,” Stacey whispered. “You’d just sit there, seeing nothing, not able to move your head or anything else…”

  “That must have been awful.”

  “I wonder how long they kept people locked up like that.” Stacey shuddered as she dropped the sheet back into place.

  We continued in our generally southward direction. The next doorway was so low I almost bumped my head going through it, and I’m not particularly tall. The arched wooden door had long since rotted from its hinges and fallen flat on the floor.

  The room beyond it was narrow, the brick ceiling uncomfortably low and sloping all the way to the dirt-covered floor. Rickety, uneven shelves and tables lined the room, making it almost impassable.

  Stacey and I silently passed our lights over the shelves. My skin crawled at what we found there—studded leather flails, rusty chains with cuffs and weights, rusty iron collars, leather masks for muzzling humans.

  The room was particularly cold—nine degrees colder than the last one. My Mel Meter also picked up a quick spike of electromagnetic energy. I felt dizzy and off balance.

  “I’m going to be sick,” Stacey whispered. “We have to get out of here.”

  She didn’t say aloud what we were both thinking: that a strong negative entity, an evil or dangerous ghost, can make you feel ill with its presence.

  I shined my flashlight deeper into the room. It was narrow and long, almost like a hallway.

  “Come on! Please, Ellie!” Stacey was pulling hard on my sleeve. “Let’s go!”

  “It looks like this room’s a dead end, anyway,” I said. “We need to double back.”

  “Or maybe get upstairs and outside,” Stacey said, towing me along as she hurried out of the room. “I need to get out into the sunlight.”

  “Calm down. Stacey, stop.” I planted my feet. She gave me a couple of frustrated tugs.

  “Are you kidding? There is something in there!” Stacey hissed, pointing her flashlight back into the extra-cold room we’d just left. The shelves of old straightjackets and human muzzles cast creepy, human-shaped shadows high on the walls as her light whipped among them.

  “I agree,” I whispered, making my voice sound as calm as possible. I wanted to run and scream, too, the natural human reaction to walking into a dark supernatural presence. It’s not the professional reaction, though, and I had to make that clear to Stacey.

  “So let’s go!” she said.

  “We walked into its nest, but it didn’t bother us,” I told her. “You don’t want to show fear. You don’t want to draw its interest. We have work to do down here.”

  “Are you crazy?”

  “This is the job,” I said. “You can go back to being a cheerleader if this is too rough for you.”

  “I was never a cheerleader!” Stacey looked offended. Well, good. Anger was a little better than fear.

  “Then stop trying to run away, and be aggressive. B-E-aggressive,” I said.

  “Okay, enough.”

  Since we’d reached a dead end, we doubled back. I kept marking the doors, now using a glowing “X” to indicate where we’d already been.

  We passed through the chamber with the restraint chair again, but this time we took a different doorway out of that room. Another, larger room seemed to be what we wanted. It had rows of metal shelves that reached almost to the ceiling above. It resembled a library, but with the shelves packed full of cardboard boxes instead of books. Over the years, boxes had fallen or been ripped apart by vandals, leaving each aisle full of debris.

  “We’re looking for lot number S146,” I reminded Stacey.

  “Doubt we’ll find anything in this mess,” she said.

  Searching from one aisle to the next, we finally found a few boxes marked with an “S” and a number in faded black marker. The first one I saw was S12, which lay ruptured open on the floor. Through a rip in the side, I could see part of a rotten leather loafer and a plaid coil of necktie.

  We had to push aside boxes and little rat-nests of clothing as we crept down the long aisle. I saw boxes labeled S47, S78, and S91 among the mess, but many of the numbers in between were missing.

  Stacey stopped walking and went stiff, holding up a hand. I froze.

  A footstep echoed from somewhere, as if someone had been walking along with us and stopped abruptly when we did.

  “Did you hear that?” Stacey whispered. “It sounded like the next aisle over.”

  We stood in place, listening. I didn’t hear anything. I tried to peer into the next aisle, but more boxes blocked my view.

  I shrugged and kept walking.

  Once we started moving again, I thought
I heard another footstep from the next aisle. Stacey looked at me, and I brought the zapper out of its holster on my hip. If the thing stalking us was alive and weighed less than four hundred pounds, I could deal with it.

  We moved along until we hit a big pile of fallen boxes, including one marked S132 and another marked S155.

  “You should dig through here,” I said. “I’ll keep watch.”

  “Ugh.” Stacey crouched and began pulling the heap apart, looking for the elusive S146, if it was still here at all.

  I heard something further up the aisle, like cardboard shifting and scrubbing against metal. My flashlight revealed nothing but cardboard, metal shelves, and empty space.

  “What was that?” Stacey asked.

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I can’t find anything down here!”

  I holstered my stun gun and knelt to help her paw through the debris. The room was growing chillier. I wondered if the dark presence in the room of flails and masks had decided to leave its lair and come bother us.

  Something made a sound near my ear. It was almost like a grunt, like a man lifting a heavy weight. I turned with my light, but again I didn’t see anything.

  Then there was a feeling of something crawling across my hair, like a spider. I slapped at it, but didn’t find anything.

  “You okay?” Stacey asked.

  “Yeah.” I tried to shake it off as I pushed more rotten cardboard. “Look, Stacey! This is it.”

  The box was almost flattened from being trapped under the weight of the pile, but I could read the black marker scrawled on its side. S146, Mercy’s lot number. It was where they’d stored whatever possessions she’d brought from the outside world.

  “Is it empty?” Stacey whispered.

  “Hope not.” I lifted the box free and folded it open.

  Clearly, the hospital had not cared very much about preserving its patients’ property, simply tossing their belongings into cardboard boxes in the basement while patients spent years and decades locked away in the cells upstairs.