Hollow

by Rhonda Parrish

  “Okay.” Sevren’s expression shows he has questions about what I’m saying but he’s learned recently that it was best not to ask any questions about me and Keith. I always cut that line of conversation as quickly as I can. I haven’t told anyone about what happened at the park. I don’t want to talk about it with anyone. Not even Sevren. Perhaps especially not Sevren. I couldn’t risk him not believing me. Couldn’t handle it if he started looking at me differently.

  “So, anyway, they heard me and came back there. I was terrified, Sev. Absolutely terrified. Keith and Simon, they looked like . . . predators. Darian not so much. He, I mean, he went along with it but he didn’t seem to like it. Not like they did.”

  “It? What it?” Sevren sits up straight, leaning toward me. “What happened in the showers?”

  “Nothing. Nothing happened because I kneed Keith in the balls and ran away,” I say, trying to play it off as being far less upsetting than it had been. “So nothing happened, but it could have, Sev. It could have. You should have seen them, heard them. It was like something out of a movie. I thought they were going to do something terrible to me.”

  “I think you ought to report them—”

  “To who? For what? Being creepy?” I don’t want this. Can’t afford to get distracted, especially not onto this particular track.

  “I don’t know, I mean, report ’em for smoking pot in the girls’ locker room if you gotta. They shouldn’t be able to threaten you and not have any consequences.”

  “My word against theirs.”

  Sev’s shoulders fall, all the fight gone out of him. We’ve been here before. Several times over the years when one person or another would bully Sevren or I and so often it would come down to that, our word against theirs. Finally, Sevren shifts the conversation back to where I want it.

  “And you think this is because you took their picture?”

  “Well, it might not be,” I admit. “But what if it is? That could explain why Simon and Keith were so very into it and Darian wasn’t, right?”

  “Maybe,” Sevren laughs nervously. “But I’m having trouble believing that your camera is cursed.”

  “But if it is,” I persist. “That makes whatever happened to all the people I’ve photographed with it my fault. It makes whatever they do to other people now my fault. I can’t live with that, Sev. I can’t.”

  “Well then, let’s find out.”

  “Find out?”

  “Let’s find out if it’s haunted.”

  “How?”

  “Oh come on, Morgan. You didn’t prepare this whole thing and tell me your suspicions without having a plan in mind to prove them, did you?”

  “I—” I pause, looking over at the camera on my desk then back to Sevren. “I guess I did, actually. Mostly I wanted to make sure you didn’t think I was crazy.”

  “Well,” Sevren laughs. “I’m not sure we can go that far, but I’m willing to give you the benefit of the doubt like you gave me back in grade two when I was sure a giant mouse was stealing the cookie out of my lunchbox every day.”

  I laugh and push his shoulder until he topples over on my bed. “This is not like that.”

  “This is exactly like that. And remember what you did?”

  How could I not? We’d hidden in the cloak room, hot and stuffy with our jackets over our heads, for a whole week’s worth of recesses, waiting to catch the giant mouse in the act. Instead we’d caught Keith, his hand jammed inside Sevren’s lunch bag. When we told the teacher Miss Budd, she’d said there was nothing she could do. It was our word against his.

  “So what are we going to do? Camp out in the hospital and wait to see if anything else appears where I found the camera? That sounds tedious,” I say.

  “No, obviously we’re going to take my picture and see what happens.”

  “We are not!”

  “How else are we going to prove or disprove your theory? I think we both know that a curse, or magic, or whatever, is the only way I’d be mean to you, so if you take my picture and I suddenly change, you’ll know.”

  “You’re only saying that because you don’t believe it’s evil.”

  “You have a better plan?”

  “Yes. How about I don’t take your picture and you don’t stop being my friend? Because if that happened, then what would I do? I’m counting on you to know how to break this . . . whatever it is. If you don’t like me anymore, that’s not going to work very well, is it?”

  “Then . . . I guess I’ll see you at the hospital tomorrow?”

  “Are you serious?” We’d planned to go look around in the morning to make up for the fact I’d gone without Sevren, but somehow I’d thought given that the camera came from there we’d be staying away now, not going to hang out with whatever other possessed things might be in there, or who or whatever had left them there.

  “Well, we were going to go look around anyway, right? Hopefully,” he says as he crams more chips in his mouth and talks around them, “we won’t have to camp out waiting for some sort of physical manifestation where you found your camera. But other than going back and looking around, maybe finding out more about where the camera came from and solving that mystery, I don’t have a better plan. Do you?”

  “No—” I admit. “But that’s not much of a plan.”

  “Sorry, Scoob, but we’re going to the haunted mansion. Hospital. Haunted hospital.”

  “Ruh-roh, Raggy,” I say in a terrible impersonation of Scooby Doo. “Ruh-roh.”

  Chapter Sixteen

  I’M IN THE minivan, in the passenger seat, arguing with Mom while she drives. She’s shouting at me. So angry. The wipers shove slushy snow off to the side, then down. To the side, then down.

  “We would be there already if you hadn’t—” she shouts.

  Swish, squeak. The wipers. Swish, squeak.

  “I said I was sorry,” I say, not sounding repentant in the least.

  Suddenly, impossibly, I’m in the back of the minivan, laying across the back seat, Keith looming above me, a snarl on his lips. “You like it rough, eh?”

  Then we crash into the truck, or it crashes into us, and I wake with a scream stuck in my throat and the tinkling sound of shattered glass reverberating in my skull.

  No one else is awake. Dad isn’t even home from work yet.

  I feel brutally, utterly alone. Not just in my bedroom but in the universe. In my life.

  Part of me wants nothing more than to go crying to my mother like I did when I was Aric’s age. Back then when I had a nightmare, or something upset me, she would give me a big warm hug, and surrounded by her, by her scent, her presence, I would feel safe again. I could find my footing.

  But everything is different now, and not just because I’m older.

  At least running helps. Some.

  So, I dress, eat, and am out the door before the sun is even fully above the horizon.

  Overnight most of the leaves on my block had yellowed and a whole lot had dropped off as well, leaving great golden circles around the trees’ bases. The cars parked beneath them are covered in leaves and icy lines etch their windshields. The light is clear, the air crisp. Autumn has come in earnest.

  I take a deep breath. It’s revitalizing. The neighbourhood is still, peaceful. I can hear traffic in the background, like the dull drone of insects, but here, on my street, there’s no sign of anyone but me.

  I check the clock on my cell. I have plenty of time before meeting Sevren. Plenty of time to run the fragments of my dream, which cling to the inside of my mind like cobwebs, out of my brain.

  I start jogging, around and around the hospital. I settle into a rhythm and let it take over, numb my mind. Let it push out the dreams of the accident, of Keith. His eyes, his voice, “You like it rough, eh?” One foot after the other, I run through the little circles of leaves which cover the sidewalk. They’re heavy with frost, with moisture, and they don’t scatter beneath my feet but squish instead, and slip and slide, threatening to trip me. They fail. Ag
ain and again I maintain my balance and work up to my usual quick pace. Left, right. Left, right. I run. Around and around the block.

  As I round the corner on my third lap, I see Sevren. He’s standing at the break in the fence, stomping his feet and rubbing his hands together. Meanwhile, my run has warmed me up. I can feel the heat on my face and unzip my jacket to help cool down. “You wuss,” I call as I approach him. “What are you going to do when it gets down to minus forty?”

  “The same as any normal person,” he says. “Stay inside.”

  I laugh, and it feels sincere. It feels good. The run and autumn’s arrival have worked their magic on me, and I’m distanced from my dreams, able to face the day and the hospital so long as Sevren is beside me. “You ready for this?”

  “I was born ready,” Sevren says, slipping through the opening in the fence. “But I still haven’t forgiven you for coming here without me.”

  “Oh, trust me,” I say. “If the thing with the camera is . . . well, let’s assume I’ve paid the price for coming alone, okay?”

  “We’ll see.”

  In the early light, the hospital’s shadow is immense and elongated. It reaches across the grounds, stretching like skeletal hands toward the fence on the far side, and all the outbuildings also have huge shadows. I pull the zipper on my jacket back up and gesture toward the window with the loose board. “It’s that one.”

  “Duh?” Sevren laughs. He lives on this side of the hospital. In fact, if it hadn’t been there, a hulking mass taking up several blocks’ worth of space, our houses would be directly across the street from one another. “I watch people come and go all the freaking time.”

  “I hadn’t thought of that,” I say, pushing the board up so it swings out of the way and gesturing. “Ladies first.”

  “Ha,” Sevren says. He gives me a dirty look but still ducks into the window before me. I hear his feet on the table then the weight of the board is off my hands as he holds it up from the inside and steps out of the way so I can enter.

  I do.

  The hospital is the same as I’d left it. I’d hoped to find it less intimidating with Sevren by my side, but knowing some of its history now, I feel my heart pitter-pattering in my chest. It’s from my run, I lie to myself. I didn’t cool down properly or anything . . .

  Sevren lets the board swing back into place behind us, and we wander through the hallway, peeking into each of the side rooms. “I wonder which one was where they found the evidence of surgeries,” I say as we step out of one dust-filled room and back into the relatively heavily-trafficked hallway. “They all look the same.”

  “Oh, you think?” Sevren says, peering into a room. “You don’t think this one has a distinctly . . . menacing kind of air?”

  “What?” I look in the doorway. It’s the room in which I’d written my name in the dust. My name is still there, the lines blurred but visible, as are the myriad of bird tracks that dance around it like the leaves on the ground around the trees. If the light was better in here it would make a great photograph. Looking closer, I can see that beneath that the floor is sloped slightly to the centre where there’s a drain hole. “Huh. I don’t remember seeing that before.”

  “Well, it was there when you wrote your name in the dirt.”

  “I guess, but I don’t remember noticing it.” I hadn’t noticed that the walls were tiled on my last trip here either. “This might be it.”

  “Could be.” Sevren coughs dramatically. “Doesn’t look like anyone has been in here but you and a bird in a long time though.”

  I step into the room, leaving footprints in the dust which poofs up around my feet, and look around. Nothing. I don’t feel anything. No tingling in the back of my neck, no hairs standing up on my arms. Nothing. I’d hoped that if this was the place Doc Woods had done, well, whatever it was he’d done to the patients, it would be the source of the haunting and I’d feel something. Anything. But no.

  “Well, that’s disappointing.”

  “Yeah, no arms reaching through the drain hole. No shadows moving in the corners . . .”

  “You’ve watched too many—oh my god! What is that?” I shout and point over Sevren’s left shoulder.

  His arms fly up in the air and he spins around wildly to find absolutely nothing but empty hallway behind him. My laughter echoes around us, and when Sevren turns to glare at me once more I laugh even harder. “Dude. You should see your face—”

  “That was good,” he says with a grudging smile, but he still doesn’t look especially happy. “But you wait until I get you back.”

  I come out of the surgery, wiping my hands off on my jeans. Even though I hadn’t actually touched anything in there I feel like every bit of me is coated with the dust which cloaks the room. “I couldn’t help it, Sev.”

  “I don’t blame you, but you just wait,” he hip checks me as I walk by. “So far, nothing scary in here. Where is the psych ward?”

  “Upstairs,” I point to the stairway I’d ascended last time I was here. Unlike the room I’d just left, this part of the hospital is well-trafficked. Muddy footprints and random litter are all over the stairs, and the metal handrail which is attached to the walls is decorated with at least three different colours of gum.

  “God, I love people,” Sevren says sarcastically as he eyes the handrail and then chooses to forgo it in exchange for running his hands over the pock-marked concrete walls. “Seriously. If I was a ghost who had to live in this mess, I would be pissed off too.”

  “I never said there was a ghost,” I say. “I just think there’s something about this camera—”

  “That changes people.”

  “Okay, that may sound absurd, but it’s not a ghost.”

  We climb the stairs, arriving at the heavy metal door to the psych ward at the same time. “A ghost sounds less absurd,” Sevren says.

  I thrust my tongue out at him, then turn to open the door. It had been opened for me when I’d come the first time, I had no idea how heavy it is. I have to use both hands to pull it open. By the time I have it open and Sevren has moved the big cinderblock on the landing to make sure it stays that way, the smirk on my face has been replaced with a grimace. “Damn. It’s almost like they didn’t want people to be able to go through this very easily or something.”

  “Almost, eh?”

  The cell-like rooms are much the way they’d been when I saw them last. All the doors are missing or stand open and I can see the red paint around the inside of the doorframes. Debris and detritus covers the floors, and a faint odour of alcohol is in the air, stronger than I remembered. There has, it seems, been a party of some sort in here between my visits.

  “Cool,” Sevren says and begins wandering from room to room. He sticks his head in them, wrinkling his nose at some and disappearing completely into others. It is kind of cool, I admit, if only to myself. I feel like I should be frightened here, given the place’s history and the fact it’s where the camera came from, but I’m not. Whether that’s due to Sevren’s presence, the daylight which is sneaking in around the boards on the window, or something else entirely, I can’t say. Maybe it’s the fact I’m not likely to run into Keith and his friends here and if I do, at least I won’t be alone.

  That thought brings me back to my reason for being here, and I stop wandering aimlessly in Sevren’s wake, kicking at beer cans and blanching at the contents of toilets that, despite being non-functional, have been used. Some quite recently.

  “I found it over here,” I call, and point to the nurse’s station. It’s at the very far end of the long hallway, and when I finally get there, I can see down each row of rooms, the red paint in the doorway of each bright and visible. My family had gone on vacation to San Francisco a few years back and we’d taken a side trip to Alcatraz. During the tour we’d been told the doorways were painted red so the guards would see when the cell doors were open and would know the prisoners weren’t restrained. “Red means danger,” the tour guide had said.

  Red
means danger.

  I shake off the chill that sweeps up my spine and check out the nurse’s station. It’s precisely as I’d left it before. The door is open and the room dusty and nondescript. I can see the tracks I’d left in the dust, and the bird’s as well. There is even a deep imprint in the dirt from where I’d picked up the camera.

  “I found it in here.”

  “In the control room? How very telling—”

  “It’s not the control room, dork. It’s where the nurses would watch over everyone.”

  “Okay, so then in the observation room? How very telling—”

  I bump his shoulder with mine, and then look around.

  “So now what?” he asks.

  “I don’t know. I was hoping there would be . . . something.”

  “There are a lot of things,” he says. “But nothing that gives any sort of credence to your theory.”

  “Credence?”

  “You know, nothing that verifies—”

  “I know what credence means. I meant, since when do you talk like that?”

  Sevren makes a weird face at me. “Since, whenever. Do you think this place is changing me now?”

  “No. Gah.” I am suddenly irritated. I’d known Sevren was humouring me, and to be fair I knew that if the positions were exchanged I’d do the same thing, but he doesn’t need to be a jerk about it all of a sudden. I know something is going on with that camera. I can’t explain how I know, I just do. I’d hoped that coming back here would lead to answers, or evidence or something. And now, to compound my disappointment with that, Sevren has decided to be kind of a jerk.

  “Look.” He puts his hand on my shoulder until I turn to look at him. While he talks I blink tears away, unsure even of why they’re there. “I get it. I do. You’re dealing with a lot these days. The accident, Aric, your mom, breaking up with Keith . . . I think maybe—”

  “I’m not imagining things. I’m not, like, making up a story about a camera to . . . whatever. It’s real, Sev.”