A big rope of guts was tossed upwards from the center of the bed and dangled from some kind of hook or other attachment point that was hidden in the recessed ceiling. The intestine swung ever so slightly in the breeze, which made it seem even freakier, if such a thing were even possible. I looked closer, and saw that the intestines were made of knotted rubber tubing that had been artfully painted.
“What’s in here?” Mom was standing in an open doorway, tentatively looking inside. Taking three very quick steps – so quick that if I had even blinked once, I would have missed them – Falconer pulled the wooden door firmly shut. The door said ‘Doctor’s Lounge’ in gold-painted lettering. I had caught a quick glimpse of computer monitors before it slammed closed.
“That’s nothing of any importance. Simply my security center.”
Now, wasn’t that a strange turn of phrase? My security center. Not the security center, but my. Maybe I was reading too much into all this, but The Right Honorable Mr. Malachai Falconer was starting to raise a lot of red flags with me.
Something just wasn’t right with him. Something was…rotten.
Could he be the Dark Man from my dreams? It was certainly possible. The flowery language and the accent were the same, but the voice was different. Not to mention the small fact that Falconer wasn’t actually dead, although his Halloween makeup made him look as though he was halfway there. He was solid. Real. I’d seen him touch things, like the switch that lit up the X-ray machine…and while some spirits did have the ability to manifest with a body that could touch things in the physical world, appearing just as solid as you or me, they could generally only do so for short periods of time. My spirit guide always said that it took massive amounts of energy for them to do that, a lot of which came from the environment itself. That was why cold spots were so often reported when spirits were doing their thing – paranormal activity leeches a lot of heat from the location it takes place in, along with several other different types of energy which even the smartest scientists don’t even suspect exists yet.
No, my suspicion was that Falconer was every bit as flesh and blood as I was; but just to make sure, I determined to try and prove it. At some point during the tour, probably at the end, I was going to make skin-to-skin contact with him. After all, it would be rude not to shake hands at the end of the tour, right?
All of the rooms on both the left and the right side of the hallway were filled with a bunch of different mannequins. One of them looked like a Cenobite from Hellraiser, a movie that Mom had only made it seven minutes into – yes, seven – before leaving the room in disgust; another looked like some kind of Banshee, a screaming ghoul with a white face and a white choir boy’s robe to match.
“The staff calls this handsome fellow Elmo, though I really cannot fathom why.” Apparently fascinated, Mom took a closer look at the monster.
“Why is it on rails, Malachai?
“Elmo is powered by pneumatics, my dear. Compressed air,” he clarified, in what I thought was the most condescending manner possible. “When the device is properly charged, he can be triggered to fly out of the darkness into the faces of our unsuspecting – and usually terrified – clientele.”
“Isn’t that a little dangerous?” Mom asked, fingering the hem of Elmo’s dirty white robe.
“Not in the slightest. The rails terminate in the doorway, allowing him to go no further into the corridor than the very edge of the frame. You see — there are safety stops,” he said, pointing to welded blocks at the end of each rail that I had to squint to make out. “Elmo here has given more than one guest cause to scream for his mother.”
“He is pretty scary,” she admitted with a nervous smile. Mom wasn’t a big fan of haunted houses, or of Halloween in general, come to think of it; the games and trick-or-treating kiddos were fine with her, but whenever there was something bloody or gory involved, it made her a little twitchy.
“To say the least.” Falconer leaned in closer to her, dropping his voice to just above a whisper in an I’m about to tell you a secret sort of way. Never mind the fact that the corridor was mostly empty. “You know, we had one young chap who actually soiled himself yesterday, if you can believe that. He actually had the effrontery to ask for his money back.”
Mom looked mortified. I snickered — hey, browning your shorts is pretty funny — and even Falconer managed a dry smile, though it looked as if the effort might tear his face apart. This wasn’t a man who smiled a lot, I was guessing. Why he was making the effort now was anybody’s guess.
“Does that happen a lot?” Mom asked, equally disgusted and fascinated at the same time.
“More often than one would think. We have a strict policy where that is concerned.”
“Policy…?”
“Yes. For the staff,” he explained. “It is implemented on the spot, each and every time a staff member here causes a customer to lose control of a bodily function.”
“You fire them?”
“Oh, heavens no,” Falconer shook his head vehemently. “I give them a fifty dollar cash bonus, immediately. One does like to encourage the next generation of artists, you know.”
I have to admit, I was impressed. Paying out a cash prize to your employees for making the customers pee or crap themselves in fear probably wasn’t something they taught at Harvard Business School, but it was pretty damn awesome all the same. My dislike for the stiff-assed Brit went down just a hair.
We continued the tour. Mom and I fell into step behind Falconer, letting him lead us further along the dark and shadowy hallway.
“These used to be patient rooms, back when this was a functioning hospital.” He indicated the doorways to his right. Rooms that had once been occupied by the sick and frail were now home to mocked-up zombies, demons, and what looked like a huge vampire bat that was perched upright on two legs. It was a pretty cool sculpt, I had to admit. A bright-red tongue stuck out from between the thing’s jaws, which had long white fangs that looked as though they had just drunk the blood of a terrified victim.
“What about this side of the hall,” Mom asked, peeking nervously into a doorway on our left.
“Formerly the obstetrical and gynecological wing.” I hadn’t heard those terms before, and it must have shown on my face, because Falconer went on to explain that it was where babies had been delivered, and where certain female problems were taken care of. He and Mom exchanged an embarrassed but knowing look. I just rolled my eyes. It wasn’t as though I didn’t know what female problems meant. Idly, I wondered if that’s what they had actually called it back in the Fifties and Sixties…come this way, Mrs. Smith. Go to the end of the corridor and turn left. Follow the signs for the Department of Baby Delivery and Women’s Problems…
The hallway ended in a big metal door that was bolted securely in place.
“What’s through there?” I asked, curious.
“Our clown maze. Clowns, after all, are one of the scariest things in the world.”
I agreed with him there. Clowns freaked me out. They always had. How anybody could find them funny or entertaining was totally beyond me. Every time I saw one, I wanted to punch it on that stupid red nose and run as fast as I could in the opposite direction.
Then something caught my eye, a flash of movement that made me look to the room on my right. It was entirely dark inside, and the door was halfway closed. The number six was painted on it at eye level, but somebody had painted on an extra couple of sixes in yellow paint that didn’t quite match, so now we were standing in the doorway of Room 666. Whatever it was had been there for an instant, and then gone. I stared into the darkness beyond the doorway for a second, then took a couple of hesitant steps forward and pushed the door fully open. It allowed a little more light through, but not a lot; there was one window in the room, and it was covered by a set of closed blinds. In the gloom, I could just barely make out a hospital bed, pushed against the back wall at a crooked angle; in front of it was an old TV (the big, square heavy ones that you only ever saw on
TV shows any more) and a bunch of old medical equipment and stacked chairs.
“That room is simply junk storage, as you Americans like to put it. There’s nothing of interest in there now, though we do sometimes place a rather ghastly nun in there as part of the haunting experience.”
Nuns. Great, I thought to myself, one of the only things that creep me out almost as much as clowns.
There was nobody in the room…nobody alive, at least. I was sure that I’d seen something move in here, though. Ordinarily I’d have just written it off as my admittedly overactive imagination, or maybe my eyes playing tricks on me, except for one thing — whatever it was that I’d caught sight of was more than just a trick of the light because it had been outlined in dark blue, a thin band of light that Seers like me often saw around spirits whenever they put in an appearance. It had been there one instant and gone the next, but if you put a gun to my head, I would have admitted that it had looked more than a little like a dark head and shoulders peeking around the edge of the door.
Perhaps not all of the old hospital’s former patients had moved on yet.
CHAPTER TWELVE
With Falconer taking the lead, we backtracked along the hallway, past the security room and then the set of double doors that we had arrived through. I didn’t see any other traces of spirit activity along the way, so I wasn’t too worried about the glimpse I’d gotten of the inhabitant of Room 666; if anything, I figured it was just a shy earthbound spirit that had become aware of three living visitors in his or her part of the hospital and had gotten curious, then bugged out when I’d turned my head to look at it. Some spirits were squirrelly like that, preferring to watch the living from the shadows and not be seen themselves. That didn’t mean there was anything necessarily sinister about their motives…after all, one thing that I’d learned from my spirit guide Lamiyah was that physical death changed people, in ways both large and small. Yes, their personalities tended to remain pretty much the same overall, but while some souls became much freer and happier after being released from the grip of a long illness, others found the process of transition to be extremely traumatic; it could cause old, long-forgotten neuroses to surface after many years, or sometimes even create entirely new ones.
If this place had its earthbound spirits, they could be either friendly and well-meaning…or malevolent and down-right nasty.
Caught up in my own thoughts, I’d lost track of Falconer’s rambling. We passed through an open door that looked as though it had been ripped from a church confessional booth, and stopped beside an old-fashioned pipe organ that seemed to have come from the same place. This room had stained-glass windows running down one wall, all of them showing pictures of knights and saints, and all of them were splattered with dried blood. At the far end was a wooden pulpit and an altar. On the wall behind them, a cross was hanging upside down.
“…and this is the chapel,” the Brit went on, walking down the center aisle formed by two rows of wooden benches.
Mom followed him in. I went last. I took a closer look, and saw that the benches were actually church pews: legit church pews, not fake ones that had been knocked together out of wood in somebody’s workshop. The pews weren’t empty either. Each bench had two or three creepy figures sitting on it, silent and still. They were wearing white sheets, and when I reached out a hand to grab a sneaky feel of whatever was underneath, I was pretty surprised to find that the mannequin I was expecting was actually nothing more than a bunch of four-by-four wooden planks nailed together to make a vaguely human-shaped support frame. The arms were filled with a kind of soft stuffing material, and each hand was just a black rubber glove. Simple, but very effective. There were twelve of these bad boys sitting in here, and even though I knew they were just sheets and wood, I just couldn’t shake the feeling that they were somehow watching us.
Watching me.
“Rather off-putting, aren’t they?” Falconer smirked, nodding meaningfully toward his mute audience. “The volunteers do say that every so often, the figures tend to move on their own. Utter nonsense, of course, but I don’t like to stop such stories. More grist for the mill, and all that.”
“People do like their ghost stories,” Mom agreed. “Especially at this time of year.”
“True indeed, Mrs. Chill. It is…Mrs Chill, I assume?” The smirk was even wider now, if you can imagine such a thing. Falconer made a show of running his eyes down to Mom’s left hand, letting his gaze linger on the wedding ring that he found there.
“Yes, that’s right.” She sounded a little uncomfortable now, and I didn’t think it was just the figures in white that were making her feel that way. Mom was a Christian, although she didn’t talk about it much and certainly hadn’t ever forced me to go to church; she and Dad had always given me the freedom to make my own choices in life. I could see how the inverted cross and what was basically a desecrated chapel might seem blasphemous to her, but the way in which Falconer was basically oozing interest in her made him a much bigger creeper than anything else in this room, in my eyes.
“And where is Mister Chill, if I may make so bold?” That same smile was now frozen. Only his eyes were moving, darting back and forth between Mom’s face and mine.
“My husband is…no longer with us,” she answered quietly, with a dignity that made me so proud of her it nearly brought tears to my eyes.
Falconer was about to speak again, but I cut in first.
“My father gave his life for his country. He was a Marine.” I wasn’t quite rude enough to say which is more than you’ll ever be, but I’m pretty sure from the look that crossed his face, that he heard it in my voice anyway.
There was an uncomfortable silence, broken only by an antiquated wooden grandfather clock ticking away the seconds from one corner of the room. My stubborn streak was beginning to surface. Rather than cave in and say something polite, I sat down on a pew, carefully choosing a spot between two of the white-sheeted occupants. The palm of my hand came in contact with the polished wooden seat, and suddenly it was as though I had been struck by a bolt of lightning.
My world went white — a blinding, brilliant white light that exploded behind my eyeballs, totally surrounding me. It was everywhere and yet nowhere, all at the same time. It felt like my brain was caught in a steel vise, giving me the worst headache that you could ever imagine. Actually, no, this wasn’t just pain. This was freaking agony.
And then I was somewhere else.
I raised my hands up to my face, turned them from back to front.
They weren’t my hands. They were an older man’s hands. And they had just the faintest blue outline.
Then it hit me: I could see through them. They were transparent. When I squinted, so were my legs, though they were a little more solid that my hands were; but now that I was actually paying attention, I realized that I could see almost see the pew through my pant legs.
What the…
The walls of the chapel shimmered and warped, like that old camera trick they use in the movies when one of the actors is remembering something from a long while back. This was no special effect though. I was somewhere else now, somewhen else based on my new surroundings, which were starting to bleed in through the Snare’s rapidly-disappearing chapel. It was some kind of bedroom. I knew because I could feel a soft pillow under my head. The mattress was pretty lumpy, sticking into my back in a couple of places. I looked up at the ceiling and saw wooden timbers running across it, connected to thick support beams. More worrying by far was the big splat of bright red blood that was staring me right in the face; more drops of blood drippedslowly down from the ceiling, plinking down somewhere to the left of my head.
So this wasn’t your garden variety house, then, and something bad had obviously happened here. Was it a log cabin in the woods, maybe? Or something much older and more historic?
I was somehow seeing this through somebody else’s eyes, I realized, feeling a weird sensation of suddenly being inside another person’s skull.
&nb
sp; Somebody else was in the room with me. I didn’t know who, exactly, and I couldn’t quite see who it was; but there was definitely a presence in here with me. I could sense whoever it was lurking silently behind me, standing out of sight and just…watching, I guess. To tell you the truth, the feeling was starting to creep me out.
As an experiment, I tried to move an arm.
Nothing.
Then a leg. Still nothing.
I was paralyzed. Now I did start to feel panic. What was going on? Starting to pay attention, I soon figured out that I couldn’t even feel myself breathing either, let alone move my arms and my legs. Which meant I really ought to be dead—
Oh.
Then the panic started to set in. But the panic wasn’t mine. It was as though I was riding on the coat-tails of somebody else, sensing their emotions and piggy-backing on their memories.
Somebody was speaking, and I thought it was a male voice, but it seemed a little too high and squeaky to belong to a grown man. There were words and short sentences but I couldn’t make any of them out. I suddenly felt myself rising into the air, drifting, and I couldn’t do anything except watch and ride the waves of nausea that shot through me as I seemed to fly out of my body and float toward a scratched wooden bench at the side of the room. I was in spirit form, there was no doubt about that any more. My spirit essence flooded into the bench, drawn to it like iron filings to a magnet.
Don’t ask me how, but somehow, despite being basically a piece of the furniture, I could still see. I opened my…well, eyes, I guess, just in time to see the indistinct form of a man leaving the room through its only door. A second man, bigger than the first one and a lot bulkier, was walking across the room towards me.
The big man stood over me. From his clothes, it looked like he had walked straight out of some History Channel show about life in the Dark Ages. His face was dirty and had a blank expression on it that didn’t make me feel any more comfortable. Those eyes were cold and dead, lacking any warmth or emotion whatsoever. He stooped and picked up the bench, tucking it under one arm without even a grunt of effort. The bench had looked solid and heavy, so the guy must have been pretty strong.
Last Halloween (The Deadseer Chronicles Book 2) Page 8
