It was built on top of a grassy hill, a single-floored brick structure that I had only caught fleeting glimpses of when I was asleep. The few details that I’d noticed during my dream-flight were turning out to be right on the money, however: there were the two ambulances, parked side by side on the concrete apron. There was the same wrought-iron fence. There were the Emergency Room double-doors that had flown open to suck me in.
I stopped dead in my tracks. Mom didn’t seem to notice; she kept walking forwards into the parking lot, which had a handful of cars taking up about a third of the available spots. She spoke before I did.
“Well this is…different.”
“It’s a haunted house, Mom. What were you expecting?”
She didn’t seem to have an answer for that.
The place had obviously seen better days, but it was still in pretty good shape, all things considered. I walked across the parking lot onto a grass lawn, beckoning for Mom to follow me. We’d approached it from the right-hand side. When you walked around towards the front, it began to look a lot more like an old hospital, a big mash-up of brick walls and glass windows. It took me a moment to realize that every single one of those windows was tinted. There was no way to see inside unless one of the doors happened to be open.
The main doors looked like they were steel-framed. I wandered on over and tried them. They were locked when I rattled them. Those things looked heavy; I guess they liked to build ‘em sturdy back in the day.
The words Snare of Souls hung above the main entrance, spelled out in snot-green plastic lettering about three feet high. If the effect was intended to intimidate potential customers, I’d say they were doing a pretty good job overall. I just hoped that the meaning wasn’t too literal.
That bad feeling in my gut was growing.
Mom kept on walking, circling around to the front of the building. She ran a hand over the brickwork, a dreamy expression on her face that made me do a double-take.
“Mom, are you alright?”
“Hmm? Oh, yes Danny, I’m fine.” She shook her head as if to clear it. “I was just…daydreaming, that’s all.”
“Are you sure—”
I was interrupted by the sound of a door screeching open. Before I even turned, I knew two things for sure. Firstly, it was the thick steel main door; and secondly, that those hinges really needed some WD40. Like, desperately.
Talk about Deja Vu.
I’d heard doors open like that before. So have you. In horror movies, for a start...but also in my nightmares.
But as ominous as the sound of the door was, what I heard next was far worse.
“Good afternoon. How may I be of service?”
The voice sounded pleasant — almost too pleasant actually — but that wasn’t the reason why my hackles went up from the very first syllable.
It was the accent.
The English accent.
It wasn’t quite the same voice from the Dark Man in my nightmare, but the way he pronounced ‘afternoon’ as arfter-noon made my skin crawl.
I turned. What greeted me wasn’t some creepy monster from the mind of Wes Craven or George A. Romero though. The dude peering out at us from around the edge of the doorframe was more like a librarian than a creature of the night.
If you made me guess, I’d have put his age somewhere in his mid-twenties. He was super-thin, and tall to go with it, enough that he reminded me of the reading lamp we had in the living room at home. His neatly-trimmed black hair was swept straight back over his scalp, in the style of men you sometimes saw in old photos from the 1930s and 40s. Two piercing green eyes looked calmly back at me over the top of the sort of wire-framed glasses that you also only ever saw in old photos, the kind that had to be physically hooked up and over the ears.
The man looked at me, clearly expecting an answer. I looked back at him, offering none. Neither of us said a word.
Mom cleared her throat.
He looked at her over the top of those Heinrich Himmler glasses, and suddenly his expression changed: one minute, it was sort of stern and serious, and the next it became polite and welcoming, favoring Mom with a smile that was clearly intended to melt her heart.
“And who, may I ask, might you be, my dear?” he fawned, sounding like Mr. Darcy as played by that Colin Firth guy from the movie Kingsman.
“My name is Rachel. Rachel Chill.” Mom came closer and extended a hand politely. The man took it gently, but rather than shake it, he rotated it instead and kissed it slowly in a way that I can best describe as ‘super-creepy.’
“Charmed, madame.” The dude just oozed Britishness from every pore. Surely Mom wasn’t buying his line of crap.
I looked up at her face and groaned. That was an expression I’d seen before, though not very often.
She was totally buying his line of crap.
Mom giggled. She actually, honest-to-God freaking giggled. I mean, Becky never giggled, and she was half Mom’s age!
Speaking of age, Mom had to have had a good ten years on this guy—not to mention the fact that he just plain looked like a creeper, pure and simple. It was no one thing specifically, but the dude’s slicked-back hair, glasses, Nineteenth Century suit, and a complexion that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a vampire movie, all combined to make me more than a little uneasy.
“My name is Malachai Falconer, and it is a very singular pleasure to make your acquaintance.”
Oh for f—I mean, Malachai? Really? What kind of a name is Malachai, outside of the works of Conan Doyle, anyway? This guy was a walking, talking, living, breathing anachronism – and to tell you the truth, I wasn’t too sure about the last part, because his pale, waxy skin looked sickly and…let’s face it, undead.
Alright, look…I’ll admit that I was staring. I just couldn’t help it. The guy looked like a freaking ghoul.
His eyes flicked back towards me. Apparently he must have read something into the way I was looking at him.
“Please don’t allow my appearance to distress you,” Falconer said, his smile dimming several orders of magnitude now that it had switched away from my mom. “We are preparing for opening this evening, and I like to get into makeup early. That also extends to wardrobe,” he gestured down the length of his suit with both hands, which were skeletally thin and tipped with perfectly manicured nails, “because I do tend to find that the clothes make the man. Wouldn’t you agree?”
He looked me up and down pointedly, taking in my battered old sneakers, cargo pants and hoodie. All of them had seen better days, and it was obvious that he knew it. A slight smile at the corner of his mouth suggested that he wanted me to know that he knew it.
What a dick.
It did explain his appearance though. The lord of the manor here was costumed and painted up to look like some kind of vampire, I was willing to bet; it was a pretty good character choice for his face and build, and I say that as a dude who weighs less than the average football player’s right leg.
“You know what they say,” I countered. “You can only polish a turd so much…”
“Daniel!” Mom scolded, swatting at my arm and offering Falconer an apologetic smile and a shrug that seemed to say: kids today, what can you do...?
“Well, quite.” Falconer was still playing the stiff upper lip British card, I guess. He switched gears. “Be that as it may, how may I be of service to you?”
“My…uh, friend works here. Well, I think she’s a volunteer,” I clarified. “We just stopped by to visit with her.”
“I see.” He appeared to digest this for a moment. “And what, may I ask, is your friend’s name?”
His emphasis on the word friend managed to rub me the wrong way – don’t ask me why – but I fought down the sudden urge to pop him in the mouth. Getting on the bad side of Becky’s boss wasn’t likely to help my case any, and besides, as wiry as this guy was, he could probably still take me in a fair fight.
“Rebecca. Becky. Page. Becky Page.” Dammit, why was I suddenly falling all over myself to get my
words out? But I already knew the answer. The way this guy was looking at Mom was making my skin crawl.
“Ah yes, Rebecca. My favorite import from…Boulder, isn’t it?” I nodded sullenly. “You are quite correct, young man.”
Young man. Falconer couldn’t have been more than ten years older than me! “Rebecca has indeed been volunteering here for the past few weeks, though I fear that she has not yet arrived for her evening shift. Halloween night is our busiest of the entire year, and who could blame her for making sure that she is properly rested?”
I didn’t like the sound of that one bit. We were nearly out of afternoon. It was already starting to get a little darker, and the evening wasn’t all that far away.
“So she is working tonight?” I asked hopefully. Falconer nodded.
“Indeed she is. Ah, but where are my manners?” he asked, in what had to be a rhetorical way, because nobody could miss the irony there. “Might I offer you a tour of our humble establishment? Gratis, naturally.”
Mom looked slightly confused.
“He means we don’t have to pay,” I whispered, about to accept his offer on behalf of us both. Not that wild horses could have kept Mom away; she was falling for Lord Downton’s shtick hook, line, and sinker.
“My son and I would be delighted to accept your kind offer.” I rolled my eyes. I mean, who talks like that? The dude’s Britishness was rubbing off on Mom now, whether she knew it or not. She was starting to talk like a second-rate Masterpiece Theater reject too.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the whole Brit thing. Doctor Who: awesome. Red Dwarf: double awesome. Sherlock: phenomenal. And that’s before we even start talking about their writers. Pratchett, Adams, Gaiman…the list just goes on and on.
No, my problem wasn’t with the Brits at all.
My problem was with just one Brit. Him.
And I sensed that it was only going to get worse.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
I was just reaching the point of thinking that Falconer couldn’t possibly play the gentlemanly Brit card even one iota more, when he stuck out his elbow in a wordless invitation for Mom. Worse still, she took him up on it with yet another giggle, hooking her arm through his, and the pair went arm-in-arm together through the front door.
It actually took me a second to realize that I’d been left behind, standing in the dust, and had to dash forward and grab onto the door to prevent it from closing and shutting me out.
Ducking inside, I found myself standing on the tiled floor of some kind of lobby. It looked a lot like the school cafeteria from hell. There were no lights on, and my eyes took a moment to adjust to the gloom. What ambient light there was filtered in through the tall street-facing windows, which had been papered over in order to keep out prying eyes, I assumed, not to mention maintaining a little Halloween atmosphere.
“Allow me to give you the grand tour.” Falconer cleared his throat, taking in the entire room with an expansive sweep of his free arm. “This is, of course, our lobby. Once the patrons have paid their admission fee, and signed the inevitable waiver—“
“Waiver?” Mom asked. If Falconer was annoyed at the interruption, then that annoyance didn’t make it into his voice.
“Yes, waiver. We are a full-contact haunted house attraction, my dear Rachel,” he explained, “which is a significant part of our…well, attraction, if you’ll pardon the expression.”
They both laughed. Neither sounded entirely genuine, and I wanted to know why. Mom I could figure out…she was probably just enjoying the novelty of a man, even a much younger one, showing any sort of interest in her. She was lonely and unappreciated, so it would be hard to blame her for that. But what about Falconer – what were his motives? As the owner of this place, surely he had a thousand and one better to things to do with his time (especially on Halloween weekend!) than give a guided tour to a couple of strangers.
Surely he couldn’t really be interested in Mom…could he?
I cringed, hoping he was just being polite for the sake of being polite in that way that some Brits seem to have, or perhaps just wanted a distraction from whatever else he was supposed to be doing today. Procrastination – now, that was a motive I could totally understand and get behind.
“My staff are highly skilled at picking out those customers who are in need of…special treatment,” he went on, leading Mom towards the opposite wall of the lobby where two figures were leaning over a third on a hospital gurney. “They tend to single out the biggest, boldest, seemingly bravest personalities.”
The heavy front door clanged shut behind me, making me jump.
“What happens to them?” Mom asked. I couldn’t see them through the back of her head, but from the sound of it, Mom’s eyes were wide as her imagination started to work overtime.
“We put some of them in here,” Falconer said, opening a closet door for her to inspect. Mom peeked inside.
“It looks like an ordinary closet,” she said warily.
“And so it is; but when the customer is shut in there, all alone in the darkness of an enclosed space, I can assure you that they very quickly succumb to the icy grip of fear.”
I rolled my eyes. This guy talks like the villain from a James Bond movie, I thought sullenly. Then I had to stifle a laugh as I realized that he was even giving us a tour of his facility, just as a Bond villain would, although at least it wasn’t a hidden underground lair. If we came upon a huge map of the world during the tour, I’d rethink that, though.
Turning and stepping closer towards the three figures against the far wall, I could see that of course all three of them were actually mannequins; two of them were a demonic-looking doctor and his evil sidekick nurse, and they were in the process of removing latex entrails from the belly of a third, who was wearing the gown of a hospital patient. With a flash of realization, it occurred to me that I had seen these guys before, as photos on the Snare of Souls website.
“Do you like them?” Falconer was suddenly at my side, which was a little freaky because I could have sworn that just seconds ago, he was fifteen feet away and standing next to Mom, who was still distracted by the contents of the open closet.
“They’re OK,” I said with as much boredom as I could manage. For some reason, I didn’t want him knowing that I really though the mannequins were pretty cool, like a scene from a horror movie where somebody had hit the pause button on the Blu-Ray player. I looked the doctor up and down, and then did the same for the nurse. They were superbly detailed: although each of their faces was hidden behind a surgical mask, both sets of eyes – glass or plastic, I assumed – were so realistic that I almost thought, just for a minute, that they were following me around the room as I walked. “What are these?”
“Ah, therein lies a tale,” Falconer answered pompously. I had walked across to the distant wall, where a whole bunch of photos were hung up in two rows, roughly six feet above the floor. He reached out and flipped two switches. Lights sprang on behind them, and I could now see that what I had mistaken for photographs were actually two banks of X-rays. They were lit up from behind on what I was willing to bet was the actual machine that the docs had used to really do this on, back in the day.
Standing on tip-toe, I leaned forward and squinted to make out what was written on one of the images. “Hey,” I said, “that’s a name! Are these real?”
“Of course they are real. When this hospital closed down, the patients were transferred elsewhere. The staff, on the other hand, simply upped and left. They abandoned all of the equipment, locked the doors, and went on to pastures new.”
“Oh, dear God!” Mom had a hand to her mouth. “You mean…they left behind the medical records?”
“Oh yes,” Falconer nodded. “Most of them are still here. The lion’s share remain in the former medical records building, which is located elsewhere on our property, but some few were left in the hospital itself.”
“That’s horrible,” Mom said.
Falconer regarded the illuminated X-rays with h
is head cocked to one side, like a dog waiting for a treat from the cookie jar. “They add a certain something to the ambience of the place, wouldn’t you say?”
“But what if one of the patients comes back to visit?” Mom sounded horrified. “Or one of their loved ones?”
“That’s highly unlikely,” Falconer dismissed the idea. “this place was abandoned for years before it fell into my gentle hands.”
I ran my eyes along the twin banks of X-rays. There were a lot of ribs, but also more than a few skulls, and one or two wrists and feet. Each image held its own secret story, I knew; each X-ray was a record of somebody’s very real pain or misfortune.
Falconer didn’t appear to care in the slightest. He was already leading us through an inner door, out into a long and very dark corridor. The air out here smelled old and musty, some weird mix of fresh paint that was being used to cover up the odor of rot and decay, and what I felt convinced was the smell of latex. The hallway was quite a bit darker than the lobby, and I wondered how long it would be before Falconer reached out to flip on a light switch, but our guide seemed unaware of just how creepy the semi-darkness made the place feel.
Falconer turned to his left, heading past the sort of standing screen that you saw in most doctor’s offices, and was used to give patients a little dignity while they took off their clothes. This one was a little different; it was splattered with blood, big streaks running diagonally between the corners were accompanied by smaller spots and splashes on the outside.
The screen had been strategically placed at a bend in the hallway. On the other side of it, the shadowy corridor stretched away into total darkness somewhere at the far end. We went another ten steps and found a hospital bed, its white sheets also crusty with long-dried blood. There was a hole at the head of the bed where somebody could poke their head and shoulders through, and then a fake body with the intestines hanging out (that was starting to feel like a common theme here) would complete the illusion that somebody was having their belly torn open.
“One of our devil doctors is positioned in this aisle,” Falconer explained, “and our volunteers will also take a turn in the disembowelment bed. It looks rather impressive, when the victim is positioned properly.”
Last Halloween (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 2) Page 7
