Archive of Our Own

Nine-twenty-two Brunonia Street is a hard place to find.

Alex is familiar with most of Seattle and its surrounding cities, but once she gets past Bellevue to the east or Kent to the south, she’s hopeless without directions.

Which is why, after making her third illegal U-turn somewhere in Issaquah, she’s close to pulling over and digging her old TomTom out of the trunk. Her phone’s GPS has been sending her up and down the length of Lake Sammamish, ordering her to take a right, then a right, then a right, then – after it loses connection and reloads – another right. When Dante Alighieri wrote about the nine circles of hell, Alex wonders if he’d thought about making this number ten. Though, all these right turns made it a square, and not a circle.

Maybe that’s why Dante nixed it from the final draft, she muses.

She’s tried the number of the woman she’s interviewing several times, but the phone rings and rings, no voicemail set up to let the woman know it’s just Alex Reagan, lost journalist, and not a determined telemarketer.

Spotting a street sign coming up, Alex slows down to read the name. The super-duty, quad-cab, hemi-engine pickup that’s been tailgating her for two miles seems to have better things to do, and jerks around her, crossing the double lines as an oncoming SUV rounds the bend ahead.

Tires squeal as they skid across asphalt, followed by that tell-tale crunch as metal smacks metal. Debris shoots up into the air and across the pavement, a party popper of polycarbonate plastic and fiberglass. Alex slams on her brakes and swerves to the shoulder, her undercarriage protesting as she hops onto the curb. The pickup rolls backward and smacks against Alex’s fender; her car rattles at the impact.

Fan-fucking-tastic.

Throwing on her hazards, she pockets her phone and climbs out, makes her way around the pickup. The young man inside shoves the deflating airbag away and starts wrestling out of his seatbelt. Other than a red mark on his face from the airbag, he looks no worse for wear. Alex knocks against his still-intact window; he jumps at the noise, looking over at her with wide eyes.

“Are you okay? Do you need an ambulance?”

The man shakes his head, then glances up to where the SUV’s driver is climbing out and making her way over, a phone to her ear, her mouth pursed in anger.

“Are you a fucking moron? Did you not see me in the other lane?” The woman shouts, pausing briefly to give the person on the other end their whereabouts. The man stares blankly at her. Before Alex can jump in to mediate, the woman continues, “I have two kids in the backseat, you fucking idiot.”

The man shakes his head. The rest of his body follows suit.

Before he can collapse on the asphalt from shock, Alex ushers him over to sit on the curb next to her car. The other driver returns to her vehicle, so Alex pesters the man with questions to keep him occupied as they wait for emergency services. Slowly, his pale face regains color. After she runs out of talking points, Alex takes note of the cobalt-blue Bellevue College sticker on the pickup’s back window.

“Are you from around here?”

“Yeah, Klahanie.” He jerks a thumb up the road. “Right over the hill.”

Sirens echo in the distance.

“You wouldn’t happen to know where Brunonia Street is, would you?”

-----

Nine-twenty-two Brunonia Street is easy to find.

Once Alex knows to take the right onto LeConte (which she’s been on twice already), she keeps going up, up, up, until it becomes Brunonia. There’s a corner where a street sign must’ve stood before, but it’s long gone now (which she only knows thanks to Tyler, who luckily did have insurance, and a roll of duct tape to fasten her broken fender back together until the Subaru dealership can pencil her in). The road becomes short sections of curves, her car riding tight against the curb as she twists the wheel back and forth with the terrain. To her right, the mountains form a neat semi-circle, rolling up against the sky. Dark trees stagger along the ridgelines before sweeping down in a thick forest of green shadows. Puffy, blue-gray clouds hover overhead, a sure promise of rain.

The house, when Alex pulls up to it, is a traditional Seattle Box home. It reminds her of a craftsman that’s been squished in on either side, making it fat and square. White siding, tinged a light brown from the elements, and green shutters bring to mind a small, out-of-place farmhouse. The lawn is in need of a good trim. An old, iron lamp post marks the beginning of the front walk; hanging from the post is a faded plate that reads 922.

Alex swings her car into the drive.

Behind the house is a decent view of Lake Sammamish, its dark water like a strip of steel under the shadow of the clouds. A sailboat skims along the southern edge, sails puffed out in the heavy winds that blow off the water, flashing bright white between the trees. Pontoons, runabouts, and a few cuddy cabins circle the boat ramp, waiting for their pickup or SUV to be next in line, trailer in tow. To Alex they look like bath toys, bobbing and floating out on the water.

Her phone vibrates in the cup holder, interrupting her thoughts. It’s a text from Nic, reminding her about their plan to get drinks after work at Towner’s, one of their local joints. It’s nearly three now, though, so she’s not sure if she’ll make it back in time.

Three little dots bounce up at her and then there’s a new text: reassurance from Nic that he’ll grab their usual table and wait for her. So, he knows that she’s having sleep problems again (or, he’s become aware of it again – the problems never really go away, they just become less obvious, usually when she takes the time to watch YouTube makeup tutorials on insomnia-erasing techniques. Her recommended videos are rather depressing, as a result).

Alex just sends back a thumbs-up.

She scrolls up in her notifications and finds the other six texts she missed while driving. Two are from Nic, one confirming that he called Ms. Cooper to notify her that Alex would be late, but he didn’t receive an answer; the other text is a generic glad you’re okay! in response to her letting him know about the accident.

The other four are from Strand.

The first is a request for her to call him back about a lead in the tape they’re working on. The following three are questions about the accident: wanting to know if she’s okay, if she needs help getting back into town, and if she wants him to meet her in Issaquah. Strand must’ve gotten in touch with Nic, then.

Alex glances at the clock, decides she can spare another minute, and shoots him a text back. Yes, she’s okay; no, the damage was minimal; and yes, that would be nice, but she’s already here and about to walk in. Without waiting for his reply, she switches her phone on silent, grabs her things, and heads for the front porch. Though the front door is open, the storm door is closed. The glass lets her see into the foyer and down a short hallway to the kitchen, where two women sit at a table. Alex knocks on the aluminum frame and the younger woman gets up from the table, her elbow knocking a cup over as she does. The older woman looks up and eases out of her own chair, shuffling down the hallway while the young woman scurries to clean up the overturned glass.

“Alex Reagan?” The older woman shouts from the other side of the door. It’s the wrong pronunciation, the one Alex is glad she doesn’t have to share with a certain former president, but Alex forgoes correcting her.

“Yes, hello!” Alex greets, gives a wave. The woman pushes open the door and waves her inside. “Thank you for agreeing to speak with me, Ms. Cooper.”

“Oh, none of that,” Ms. Cooper shakes her head as she leads Alex down the hallway, the floorboards whining under their feet, her voice loud in the quiet house, “call me Lucille.”

“Lucille, then.”

Alex is led into the kitchen, which smells of decaf coffee and sweet, rotting fruit. The windowsill over the sink holds a few wrinkled tomatoes, long since ripened; fruit flies hover over the soft, white patches of mold. The fifties are still very much alive in this room, with its faded oak cabinets and blue Formica countertops. Hanging from the cabinet handles are worn dish towels, decorated with overall-clad pigs tending a garden.

Lucille run her hands along the chair backs, shuffling around the table until she reaches the one she was sitting in.

“Sit, sit,” she instructs, leaning over to pat the empty chair next to her. Alex glances up to the young woman who is standing in the corner, holding her cup. The woman pushes her glasses up her nose as she smiles and motions for Alex to take the chair.

“It’s fine, I’ll just be in the sitting room,” the woman whispers, nodding her head down the hallway.

“Thank you." Alex rounds the table and takes the seat. The woman moves off and disappears into one of the open doorways they passed. A moment later, a radio switches on, Ella Fitzgerald low and muffled between the plaster walls. Alex sets her recorder on the tabletop, asking twice if Lucille is ready to start before she gets a response.

“I’m nearly as deaf as I am blind, honey,” Lucille tells her, her volume evident of the fact, “you’ve got to talk louder for me to hear you.”

“I’m sorry,” Alex apologizes and switches on her recorder, figuring she’ll just fix the audio in post. “If you don’t mind, I’ll jump right into the questions.” At her interviewee’s nod, she continues, “So, you worked at Prestwick for over twenty years, is that correct?”

Lucille nods, before she catches herself and leans forward, as if to make sure the recorder gets her response.

“Yes, I was a nurse there from sixty-three until it closed in eighty-six.” Her eyes, hazy with the gray-blue fog of cataracts, drift up toward the ceiling as she talks. She reaches up to toy with her blouse, a purple short-sleeved shirt with glittery butterflies stitched along the boatneck collar.

“What was the reason for the closure?”

“Money, scandal, whatever you like to call it,” Lucille grunts. “It was a state-funded facility. And when the state decides it wants to stop funding, there’s not much to be done.” Fuzzy, purple house shoes scuff against the floor as she shifts in her chair, wetting her lips as she readjusts. She folds her hands over each other, the skin on them marbled, a topographical map painted with olive-green veins that run, raised and bumpy, across the back of her hands and along her forearms. “I think someone bought the place a few years ago – believe they turned it into a haunted house.”

“I spoke with a local historian who believes that the building could be renovated, maybe a new hospital or housing.” At this, Lucille shakes her head and chuckles.

“Oh, I’m sure that would be nice, but I don’t see anyone dumping that much money into the place. It was on its last leg in the mid-seventies, honey – I can’t imagine what’s become of it now.” Lucille sips at her cup of coffee and grimaces. Her chair scrapes against the floor as she scoots back and shuffles over to the microwave. Punching at one of the numbers, the microwave hums as Lucille taps her fingers against the handle to a steady beat. “Have you been yet, to the hospital?”

“No, I haven’t.”

“Hmm.” The microwave trills as Lucille continues, “Well, you know the best thing that place could’ve done is close.”

“Why is that?”

“Patients weren’t getting the treatment they deserved, not with the lack of staff that we dealt with for over a decade.” She tests her coffee and tucks her lips up against one another, as if deciding to expand on that. “And, of course, there’s the other reason.”

“What’s the other reason?”

“It’s haunted.”

-----

Prestwick Mental Health Institute is situated on a small island in the outskirts of Everett, forty miles north of Seattle. Formerly the Prestwick Insane Asylum when it opened in 1896, the name was changed in the late seventies, when public opinion about mental illness (slowly) started to change. Once a sprawling campus of five buildings, only the original Prestwick building remains, the others torn down in 2014 when they were deemed structurally unsound. The property was eventually sold in 2015 to Levi Bell, who turned the east wing’s first three floors into a haunted house. For the off-season, he rents out the west wing in four to twelve-hour increments for ghost hunting groups.

A cursory Google search led Alex to over twenty videos, some of them with a distorted EVP saying ‘help me’ and others highlighting specks of dust that they claim to be orbs. Nearly all the videos feature the same spooky, royalty-free cello music in the background.

The videos are either shot chest-high on tripods, the creepy hallways and dirty rooms steady and still, or held by the investigators’ hands, the picture gently swaying as they walk down seemingly endless, darkened corridors. The one thing they all have in common, though, is that they look nothing like the video that the Institute received two weeks ago.

The video tape, which Ruby forwarded on to Strand when it proved to be worthy of a look, is from one of the haunted house’s security cameras. The black-and-white video shows a morgue, where a few gurneys are strewn about the room, some with bodies covered in sheets, some with lumpy body bags. Two freezer doors line the far wall, one open and full of more mannequins under sheets, the other closed.

Fake blood, appearing black due to the monochrome filter, is smeared down the walls, along the floor, and across the medical equipment. Strobe lights flash as a huddle of teenagers skirt around the maze of gurneys. A body sits up and reaches out for the first in line, who jumps and backs into another gurney, where another body bursts out of a bag and screams, their painted face contorted in mock-terror. The freezer door bursts open and a girl in a bloodied dress crawls out, racing towards the teens.

There’s no audio, but the teens’ panic is visible as they shriek and rush for the door. Dress girl chases after them until they’ve disappeared through the doorway, on their way to the next station. She straightens up from the floor and jogs over to the two performers on the gurneys, tucking the bag back together and settling the sheet back down, before she slips into the freezer.

They must be talking to each other, because the person under the sheet jerks their shoulders up and down, as if in laughter.

Dress girl swings open the door. It’s obvious she’s the one in charge here, her painted expression pinched in anger. She says something before slamming the door closed. It’s still for a moment, save for the piercing strobe light, when sheet person lifts an arm to peek out into the room.

On the floor between the gurneys, it looks as if the painted circle of blood is growing, the black creeping along the tiles. As if on cue, the strobe light cuts out and the room is cast into darkness, only visible through the camera due to the infrared light. Sheet person sits up fully and says something, which makes body bag person sit up, as well. Their eyes glow white from the infrared. Dress girl opens her door again, stretching out farther to yell at the two. Sheet person points to the floor where, unbeknownst to them, the circle continues to grow. Rolling her white eyes, dress girl shuts her door once more.

Two dark hands slither up from the circle, fingers unnaturally long as they curl around the clean tiles. Something pushes up through the paint. A head, doused with the dark liquid, then shoulders. It pulls itself up onto the tile, its back rounded, the knobs of its spine protruding through its wet skin.

The strobe light flashes once.

The single blink of light is long enough for the performers on the gurneys. Their teeth shine as their mouths open to shriek, scrambling to get away. Sheet person throws their cover away and shoves through the far door, disappearing into a dark hallway. Body bag struggles with the zipper of their prop as the figure slinks towards them, paint dripping in thick clumps down its long fingers, its stick-like limbs leaving dark smears as it lurches, dragging itself across the floor.

The strobe flashes again.

Body bag throws themselves to the floor and clambers out of the bag, racing through the same doorway. For a moment, the figure crawls after them, its hunched body shuddering, as if it’s amused by the sight.

The freezer door slams open, bouncing back when it hits the wall. Dress girl is already yelling, her mouth stretching, lips moving quickly. The figure turns at the noise and begins to make its way across the far wall, towards where the girl hangs out, her lips pursed as she waits for her friends to answer her demands.

The figure drags itself closer.

The girl looks to the noise and says a single word, then shouts another flurry of words.

The strobe flashes.

The single blink of light soaks the room. Painted lips open wide, the girl gasping as she fumbles for the door’s handle. The figure suddenly snaps at the waist, its torso bending sideways as it reaches out with those thin fingers, pulling itself on top of the nearest gurney, leaving a dark smear. The girl slams the door shut as the figure’s long legs follow it up and then down as it scrambles over to the freezer.

Fingers curl around the handle and yank. The door jostles open just the slightest, before the girl’s fingers come around to grab the edge to hold it back.

The figure’s head cocks sharply to the left. Then it yanks the handle again, pulling the door back a few inches before slamming it back against the girl’s fingers. Its body jitters with silent laughter. It does it again and again until the girl’s fingers come loose from the door, the pinky and ring finger mangled backwards, a black mess spilling down onto the freezer.

Bright lights snap on overhead, whiting out the screen for a moment. When the camera adjusts, three people rush into the room, two in civilian clothes and one dressed in bloody scrubs. The figure is gone; the dark circle on the floor is already receding, drawing back to its original size. The video goes on for another minute or two, showing them searching the room, moving in and out of the shot. They coax the girl out of the freezer and sit her down on one of the gurneys, where she rocks back and forth, cradling her hand, her body shaking as she sobs.

The video cuts shortly after a paramedic enters the room.

The first thing Strand did was request for the video of the entire day, which he then sent off to a video forensics expert, and then to a special effects designer. Both came to the same conclusion: in their professional opinion, the video wasn’t doctored.

Along with the video, Bell had included photos taken of the room. The red paint smears left behind from where the figure moved across the floor and where it wrapped its fingers around the door handle; the original paint smear where it crawled out from; and the girl’s broken fingers, her skin peeled open from where the door’s sharp edge sliced it, shiny blood pooling in her palm. In the interview she’d done with Bell, Alex had asked why the last one had been included.

“I want you guys to know that this isn’t a joke to us – what happened was real. That photo of Stephanie’s hand proves that, at the very least,” Bell had said, frowning as he shook his head. “I want someone to find out what this is and get rid of it. All the theatre kids are too scared to come back for the upcoming season. And even if they did want to come back, both their parents and I aren’t letting them until something is figured out.”

“If there is something to be found, Doctor Strand and I – we aren’t exorcists. I can’t promise we can get rid of anything,” Alex had reminded him. Bell’s hazel eyes had taken on a familiar wet sheen. Then he’d sighed.

“I know that, Doctor Strand already….” Bell had stopped himself to run a knuckle under his eye, along the purple-brown bags there. “I just want answers.”

-----

Alex cuts the engine and leans over the steering wheel.

Sprawling across two and a half acres, the four-story building looms above them. English ivy climbs up and around the hospital, the grimy, red brick peeking out from behind the thinner patches of green vine. Towering arches border the short veranda, the stone cracked and crumbling. Craning her neck, Alex can see that most of the windows are missing their panes, their trims so dirty they blend in with the brick, resembling nothing but yawning, dark holes. The late evening sun glints against the few glass panes still intact. Thin, brittle blades of tufted hairgrass shift in the wind, where it's been left to run wild on either side of the front steps. Twin masses of grape holly stretch up through the veranda’s railing, where flowers bloom along the branches in dusty, yellow clusters.

Etched into the pale stone above the front entrance reads: Prestwick Insane Asylum, Est. 1896. The concrete sign at the front steps reads the updated name. Black spray paint of various initials and poorly-drawn pentagrams coat almost every inch of it.

Strand climbs out of the car and Alex follows suit.

To the west, the Possession Sound stretches along the horizon. Knots of green land dot the deep blue water, their shorelines just thin strips of sand upholstered with trees. Gulls swoop low over the water, their lonely cries echoing across the island. Peeking above the tree tops to the east are the corroded trusses of the bridge they crossed to reach the island. The acrid scent of sulfur drifts down from a paper mill up the road, where the Snohomish River brushes past, the banks full of mangled weeds.

A conversation held long ago with Dumont floats up from Alex’s memory, in regards to a rumor (which Dumont claimed to be a fact) that an underground river ran below the Sagamore, which prompted more spiritual activity. Dumont couldn’t really answer the question on how exactly running water was a catalyst for such activity, beyond 'water is an energy conductor' and 'I’m a seventeen-time author on the paranormal.' If it was true, then Alex can’t think of a better place for ghosts to hang out than a century-old, decaying mental hospital surrounded by water.

Across the street, a neat row of houses faces away from the hospital, the Seattle sprawl alive and well. Most of them are weathered by the salty wind coming off the sound. Only one house sports a recent coat of paint, the back porch trim a pearly white and the siding a deep gray that makes Alex think of the anchors she used to toss overboard on her dad’s boat.

“Pretty house,” she comments. Strand follows her gaze.

“Poor location,” he says and turns back to the hospital, his shoes crunching in the sparse gravel.

Stretching down either side in front of them is an old chain-link fence, rusty barbed wire curling along the top. The fence appears to surround the property, though with the number of holes in the sections they can see, Alex guesses that it’s not much of a deterrent.

The security guard parked just inside the front gates might be, though. She swings open the gates and instructs Alex to pull her car in properly, so she can close up behind them. Strand looks pointedly at the twenty-foot chunk of fencing that lies across the ground several yards away, long since reclaimed by the tall grass.

“It’s more of a deterrent to the people who drive by. If the gates are open, they might think the place is open for business,” the guard explains as Alex rolls in to park behind them.

“Lots of haunted houses operating in late spring, then?” Strand asks, though it’s obvious by his tone that it’s rhetorical. The guard seems to not catch on, though.

“Oh, I’m sure there are – though you won’t catch me in one, I can’t stand them.” She starts to continue the story of her traumatic childhood experience when Alex walks up for a proper introduction, saving him from hearing about it. The guard shakes their hands and introduces herself as Michelle Murphy.

“I’m usually only here in the off-season when Levi rents out the place to the ghost hunters, but he was worried someone might try to break in, what with the lights being on and all. Attracts all kinds of unwanted attention,” Murphy says, tacking a wink on at the end for good measure. Strand restrains an eye-roll.

“If ghosts did exist, I doubt they’d be compelled by the wonder of electricity,” Strand argues.

“I’m not saying they are, just that I’ve had many a conversation with the investigators when they come out for a break, and they tell me about how ghosts suck energy out of the air to manifest.” Murphy rolls her shoulders in a lazy shrug. “The idea’s definitely scary enough to keep me out of there.”

Before Strand can start up his argument on how energy consumption by spirits is nothing more than a fallacy (she’s heard it seven times now and honestly once is enough), Alex steps in.

“We should get inside before the rain hits,” she says, motioning to the clouds rolling in from the west. Murphy ushers them inside, shutting the heavy wooden door behind them. Despite the broken windows, the lobby shows little damage and appears to be in decent condition. Whether that’s from the place being boarded-up over the years or from Bell fixing it up, Alex isn’t sure. The faux-wood paneling along the walls and the yellowed parquet tiles seem to be authentic to the building, from the few interior photos she found online. The thick layer of dust that covers both seems to be, too.

The only new additions seem to be the mannequins dressed in hospital gowns with various limbs missing, their gowns splashed with red paint. They sit in the worn cloth seats and rusty wheelchairs that line the lobby. Some of their heads are turned towards the door, others are jerked in unnatural angles, their painted eyes still and dull. Fluorescent lights buzz above them, drenching the area in a green-white glow.

A makeshift ticket booth sits folded against the wall behind the reception desk. Stacks of retractable stanchions for forming a queue lay next to a box of fog machines. A framed poster for ticket prices hangs next to a set of double doors, offering a combo deal if tickets for both The Morgue and Prestwick Asylum are purchased.

At the top of the poster is the attraction’s description, the distressed brush script reading:

The world’s most dangerous criminally insane call Prestwick Asylum their home…

…and they know you’re just dying to meet them.

“Nice to see the ‘people with psychiatric disorders are dangerous’ belief is alive and well,” Strand mutters as he skims over the poster, readjusting the camera bag hanging off his shoulder.

“You really haven’t seen a lot of the recent horror movies, have you?” Alex snaps a photo of the lobby with her phone, then turns and snaps another of the double doors. Red spray paint across them reads: ENTER AT YOUR OWN RISK. “Ready to head in?”

Strand holds the door open for her before he follows behind. The door falls shut with a loud, metallic clank that echoes through the massive room.

Twin sets of curved stairs frame the room, leading up to the open second floor. Gray dust coats the wooden spindles and the curled handrails. Red rope, one end anchored to each right post, coils atop the first steps. Rusted wire fencing runs along the balcony, though some of it has collapsed, sagging down in loose curls. Plaster collects in clumps along the floors; flecking green paint leads their eyes up to the dome ceiling, where blue-green glass panes shine and crackle in the withering sunlight. Plywood sheets mar the dome like yellowed teeth, covering the broken or missing panes. The ivy has made its way in here, too, creeping around the edges of the wood and dangling down in leafy tendrils.

Alex cranes her neck to take in the ceiling. The sickly-sweet scent of wood rot and mold tickle her nose, like a musty pile of papers left to curl and yellow with age.

“I wish I’d brought my camera.”

“If these took still photos,” Strand shrugs his shoulder, rattling the bag up and down, “then I’d let you use them.”

Settling with her phone, she snaps another photo and follows him through the door on the right.

The hallway they enter is filled with wheelchairs, their spokes dull and rusted, the cushions ripped and torn. They’re occupied by more mannequins, their limbs akimbo and their heads cricked in unnatural positions. Along one wall spans a mural, showing patients in nondescript clothes leaving out a door of the hospital, then sitting and playing cards underneath a willow tree, which transitions to a few relaxing around a pond, then finishing off with them standing in line to re-enter the hospital. All of them are facing front, their hands held up, as if waving to the passers-by. A banner at the top reads: Healing Hands, Caring Hearts. Underneath, the year 1969 is painted in a curly script.

Parts of the painting have been updated since, though.

Each patient’s face has been painted over. Now, their eyes are black and hollow, their smiles stretching too wide. Some have blood and viscera dripping down their clothes. Reflections in the pond show their faces upside down, something Alex has a hard time looking away from. At the doorway to the hospital is the grim reaper, dressed in his usual black cloak and holding his scythe. Around his neck is a stethoscope, dripping blood.

Strand lets out a sigh, startling Alex. She’d forgotten he was there.

“Not to your taste?”

He shakes his head and points to the floor, where a near-empty plastic bottle sits on its side. Crumpled beside it is a yellow chip bag. A sporadic trail of trash continues up the hallway, until they can no longer see due to the wheelchairs.

“It seems this place isn’t as abandoned as we previously thought,” Strand says.

“It could be from the paranormal investigators.”

“Although I sincerely disapprove of their choice of hobby, I don’t think any ghost hunters left this behind. It’s likely a bread crumb trail that will lead us either to some unruly high school kids, or squatters.” Strand locks his gaze with hers, that familiar long-suffering look plastered on. “Neither of which I want to run into.”

“I don’t think we can expect much trouble if we run into the breakfast club,” she points out, as they continue down the hallway.

Most of the rooms are shut up tight, only the tiny glassless windows letting them peek inside. Aside from a few stored props, the rooms are bare of any furniture. The setting sun is bright enough to illuminate some; Alex can make out several tags spray-painted on the walls. More pentagrams, more lopsided 666s, and more vulgar statements about someone named Brittany.

“You never know with teenagers,” Strand mutters, shoving a wheelchair out of their path. Her mind drifts to Sarah Benning, who cut a girl’s face off and wore it around like a party hat. Alex feels that familiar shiver run through her, despite the coat she’s wearing.

They push through the next set of doors and Alex spots the smears of red paint across the floors and walls. There’s a few more plastic bottles here, too, all together in a little pile.

Alex starts to make a lame, mood-lightening joke about someone being thirsty when the lights go out.

-----

“Any place like that hospital, with all of the things that went on inside its walls,” Lucille says, “of course it would be haunted.”

Alex feels transported back to her freshman year of college, where she and a hundred other students sat in a lecture hall for History of Journalism and Media 1020, watching sepia-toned, Super 8 footage of an exposé. The image of Geraldo Rivera in his leather jacket, touring through the halls of Willowbrook State School that were full of half-clothed or naked children is one that she won’t ever forget, despite the amount of journalism courses she took.

Seven years before Rivera’s 1972 exposé, the Seattle Times ran a five-part series on the alleged political corruption and the subsequent overcrowding, unsafe accommodations, and wrongful dumping of ‘mentally fit’ elderly at Prestwick and another mental hospital in Tacoma. The series sparked public outcry, and changes were implemented in the form of a restructured budget that allocated more funds.

In 1971, just one year before Rivera’s story broke across the country, a local journalist showed up to Prestwick unannounced for a post-midnight visit and saw much of the same conditions as before. After a governor-appointed committee found (again) too few staff, too little training, and inhumane conditions within the buildings, the budget was increased (again). By the next decade, though, the Washington state government – along with the rest of the country – was wanting to focus more on community mental health centers, and move away from large-scale institutions (and, subsequently, rely more on local tax dollars to fund these community-based centers).

“What do you mean by what went on inside?” Alex asks.

“With an institute like ours, the patient to staff ratio should’ve been around four or five to one. Instead, it was close to seventy or eighty to two. The campus originally had three buildings: Prestwick, Estabrook, and Greve. But they built Underhill for overflow, and remolded Prestwick’s first floor to hold more patients, and moved the administration offices into Henley.”

“Did the new buildings help with overcrowding?”

“No,” Lucille says as she shakes her head, “just gave them an excuse to take in more patients. These poor people, we would take them in and try to keep them washed and clothed and fed, but it was all we could do to get all three done within a shift. The newspaper ran a few articles, the budget would increase for the next year, we’d get a decent amount of staff, then the next year they’d cut it and ninety percent of the staff, and we’d be right back where we started. Then a journalist would catch wind of it, and the cycle repeated.”

“Didn’t the state send someone to inspect, someone who would have realized what was going on?”

“Well, sure. But William Fitzhugh, our director, and the mayor were golfing buddies. So, Mister Fitzhugh would personally lead the social worker through specific areas where the patients would be clothed and happy, and we’d pass with flying colors. They’d only see about thirty patients. They’d never see the other 3,700 that suffered in the floors above. And that was hard, to go home every day and know that some of those children would sit in their own filth until the next nurse could get to them… and maybe even not then.”

Lucille stops to cough into a tissue and clear her throat. Down the hall, the young woman pops her head out into the hallway to check on the two of them, and Alex smiles at her in reassurance. She nods once before disappearing back into the sitting room.

“It was difficult, to see patients who would arrive and just get worse without the proper care. I was there long enough to watch children grow up into teenagers, who were transferred over to Greve to live in maximum-security because they became too dangerous. An attendant would shuttle them through the tunnels, and we’d never see them again.”

“Did any of the other patients ever ask where they’d gone?”

“Of course.”

“What did you tell them?”

“That they’d been moved for their safety, but they were in another building, right across the courtyard. And if they wanted to, they could wave at them from the back windows of the rec room.” Her cloudy eyes shine in the warm amber of the overhead light.

“Did you ever work over in maximum-security?”

“No,” Lucille says with a shake of her head. “Mostly was male attendants over there, those strong enough to handle patients when they got too violent.”

“And the complaints about sexual abuse,” Alex says, as Lucille visibly stiffens at her words, folding her hands over one another, “were those widespread across the campus?”

“No, they – they mostly came from the… from the men’s floors and from Greve. I worked on the women’s floors and in Estabrook, with the children.”

“But you knew about it, the sexual abuse.”

“I didn’t, not at first, but as time went on… we all did.”

“Why did it take so long for the abuse to be reported?”

“Because every other reporter I called didn’t give a rat’s ass.”

“You were the whistleblower?” It was something Alex hadn’t been able to find in her research into Prestwick’s history, the name of the person kept confidential even thirty years after the institute’s closure.

“I suppose, but I don’t care for the term. I was a concerned nurse, and honey – after years of not being listened to about every other type of abuse that went down there, I had had enough. There was a line and I had to draw it somewhere.”

“But you talked with a journalist, then – why not go to the police first?”

“The police didn’t care about a hospital full of retarded people,” Lucille spits in anger, crumbling the tissue in her hand into a ball. “I’d give them an account of what I knew was happening, then they’d ask for my name and my address, promise that they’d come by in person since it was such a serious matter, such a serious allegation. Then a police car would drive by, take stock of what he saw, and drive away. Couldn’t build a case on the word of a black woman, it seems.”

She takes a moment to stretch the tissue apart, her worn fingers flattening it against the table. “So, I gave up on the police, and started calling newspapers, asking for reporters. Called the news stations and finally Allan O’Donnell agreed to meet with me. And that was that. I don’t have to tell you the rest – the state got involved, the hospital came under fire and was shut down.”

“Do you think that the abuse that went on is a reason that people claim to experience paranormal activity there?”

“I think it might have something to do with it, yes,” Lucille says, her hand falling from her coffee mug, where she’d been gripping it tightly. “I know it has something to do with it. I saw that firsthand.”

“You saw ghosts while you were working there?”

“Well, honey, of course.”

-----

She latches her arm around Strand’s and feels him tense, the line of his forearm going rigid.

“What are you doing?” Strand asks, his normally low voice set high with confusion.

Alex closes her eyes, pinches them tight and lets them go, so her eyes can adjust to the darkness. The hallway isn’t pitch-dark, but it’s close to it. The light of dusk filters in through the window at the end of the hall, which is too far away to reach them; fiery orange gleams against the tile, carves at the walls. The curls of peeling paint almost look like hands, reaching out from the wall, backlit by the sun.

“I’ve seen this a thousand times. Power goes off, group gets split up, and then funny guy goes first. Or, in this case, funny girl.” Her eyes have adjusted enough to the dark that she can see when he swings the bag over from his other arm and grabs a flashlight from it. He hands it off to her, before digging another out.

“I could be the funny guy.”

Alex snorts, clicking on the flashlight. The hallway around them somehow seems scarier now, though, because now she can actually see the things that might go bump. “You are most definitely not the funny guy. You’re smart, though. You’ll make it to the hour-twenty mark.”

“This isn’t a horror movie. It’s probably a power surge from the storm.” On cue, thunder rumbles in the distance.

“All right, ease up on it, Richard Jenkins.”

“I don’t know what that means.” Strand finishes adjusting the bag back onto his shoulder and starts off down the hallway, Alex still in tow. Her fingers tighten around his bicep as she chuckles under her breath.

“If you watched more horror movies, you would.” For that, she gets a halfhearted scoff.

Their twin beams of light jostle along the dark hallway. The light catches on the bloodied gurneys that line the walls and the fake webbing that hangs from the ceiling. More threatening messages, written in more fake blood decorate the walls. It’s as if a ghost consulted a thesaurus for all the synonyms of the word ‘leave’.

Outside, the storm rolls in. With the lack of windows in the hall, they can’t see the lightning as it webs across the sky, but they can certainly feel the rattle of thunder. The air feels heavier, too, like breathing through wet cotton. Real and fake stains on the tile start to resemble puddles, and Alex surmises that it wouldn’t be too difficult for this place to flood, being so close to the sound. The wet marsh that surrounds the island could easily flood, the water creeping up over the banks and onto the road until it reaches the building and seeps in through the aging wood. Whatever sealant that was there – if there ever was any – is certainly gone now. The water would have no problem pouring right on in. And it wouldn’t take very long for the first floor to give over to the flood. The narrow halls filling up, the dark water lapping at the glass dome. And if they didn’t find a stairwell in time, if they weren’t able to climb up to avoid the water—

“This is odd.” Strand’s voice snaps Alex out of the macabre daydream. His flashlight moves across the corner they’ve come to. The window at this end is mostly intact; rain beats steady at the glass. Water that manages to get through the crack near the sill patters on the floor, forming a neat, oval puddle.

“What’s odd?”

“The morgue should be here.” He twists and aims the flashlight down the other end of the hallway. “I – unless Bell got the layout backwards, it should be in the northeast corner. Which is where we are.”

“Don’t tell me this place is going all Rose Red on our asses.”

“It must be on the first floor,” Strand mumbles to himself, not bothering to respond to the reference. “I can’t imagine a facility built in the late 1800s would have a morgue on the second floor.” She lets her grip drop from around his arm, so he can hunt freely and not tug her around like a child’s doll.

He glances back at her, something much like concern flickering through his gaze, before he seems to read the situation. The rigid line of worry along his spine softens. He’ll berate himself later over the fact that he shouldn’t be so worried over making Alex upset – he’s done it a hundred times, and he’ll likely do it again a hundred more.

The flashlight lands on a metal door with the faded, white label of ST R written across it. He shoves it open, the metal hinges screeching from disuse. The stairwell is grimy, the air warm and stagnant. Underneath the stairs leading up is a pile of Christmas decorations, which Alex shines her flashlight over; dusty tinsel and ornaments spill out of an overturned box, the tinsel glinting in the beam’s circle. It’s clear that this stairwell is only used by employees, given the lack of props and blood smears in this area.

“Don’t dead, open inside.”

Alex stops snooping underneath the stairwell and follows Strand to the other set of stairs that lead down to another metal door, where red spray paint mars the door. She rolls her eyes at the tag.

“It’s supposed to say, ‘don’t open, dead inside.’”

“It’s a hospital, of course there would be dead people inside.” She’s about to explain that it’s referring to zombies when he continues. “They should’ve written it sinistrodextrally so the average English reader could interpret it correctly, then.”

Alex snorts.

“What?”

“Just imagining you going around and critiquing graffiti for some art house magazine.” She drops her tone and continues, “Use of red too extreme, the lack of space between letters is its weakest value, while the syntax also leaves something to be desired.”

His dark eyebrows pinch down at the impression.

“I don’t sound anything like that.”

“Yes, you do.”

He gives up the argument and takes the stairs down, avoiding the handrail that’s covered with flaking rust. Alex dutifully follows him down and through the door, swinging her flashlight down the corridor and regretting it immediately. Where the hallways upstairs have open doors and props to fill the yawning space, this corridor is caked in nothing but inky darkness, so pitch-black that it seems to swallow the light.

“Where do you think this leads?”

“There was a tunnel system between all five buildings,” Strand says. He shines his light down to the right where a damp concrete wall, newer than the aging brickwork around it, blocks the way to what used to be a tunnel entrance to another building. “It probably continues the length of the building, shuttles the pipework down until it reaches the other end.” She can see where the pipes cast oblong shadows against the ceiling. “I wouldn’t recommend exploring to see if I’m right, though.”

“Why not?” Something in his tone causes Alex to turn from that ever-encroaching darkness to face him.

“Rats.”

“Oh.”

“You seem visibly relieved. Were you expecting me to say ghosts?” He grins down at her, but doesn’t wait for her to answer, and instead pushes open the only door in this section, ushering her ahead of him. A corrugated metal banner above their heads notifies them that they’ve entered The Morgue. Waxy, red paint drips down from the sign’s bottom, keeping up with the ongoing, incessant theme of blood.

“Please check to ensure your name is on the guest, and not the cremation list,” Alex reads from the poster that lists the rules and ticket prices. “Not confirming with the attendant could lead to… deadly consequences.”

Strand mutters under his breath about an appropriate lack of space for a cremation chamber as he pushes through a PVC strip curtain – once again splattered with red paint. They pass through a disheveled medical lab full of specimen jars, each containing various organs suspended in green liquid, like an off-brand Mütter Museum. After an autopsy room and a makeshift viewing room that are also spattered with blood, making Alex feel like she’s just walked onto the set of Dexter, they come out to the main attraction: the morgue.

Aside from the gurneys pushed up against the left wall, it appears the same as in the video. Alex gives the red smear of paint in the center a wide berth. Strand sets up his equipment and Alex fills the silence by asking him to explain how the IR camera works for the audience.

They spend half an hour sitting behind the camera, waiting. Aside from the storm rolling overhead, nothing of note happens. Alex, feeling restless from the lack of activity, moves to sit on one of the gurneys. She busies herself by swinging her legs back and forth.

“I meant to ask, where’s the rest of your equipment?”

“This is just a preliminary investigation today. If something bites, which it won’t because ghosts don’t exist, then I’ll come back with a full work-up. I don’t drag around thousands of dollars’ worth of equipment unless need be.”

“Let’s hope we don’t get skunked, then.” Strand shoots her a strange look – she can’t see it, her eyes haven’t adjusted that well to the darkness, but she can feel it. Another minute of silence ticks by. And then, “This must be the footage they cut out of those paranormal shows.”

“That and the process of setting up their so-called evidence.”

“Nic is in the process of securing an interview with a group of investigators out of Vancouver. I might even get to be featured in one of their episodes – like a ride along.”

“Which group?”

“The Canadian Paranormal Society.”

“Whose initials are CPS.”

“Yeah.” Strand doesn’t seem to have anything to volley back from that, so Alex forges ahead. “So,” she drags out the word, the zippers on her boots tinkling as she continues to kick at the air, “what happens if – well, if nothing happens?”

“We pack up the camera and leave,” Strand says with a shrug. “The lack of power does pose a problem, though – I only brought enough batteries to last for about six hours of filming.”

“Six hours–” Alex starts and he can comprehend that tone well enough. He lets out a breathy chuckle, a Doctor Strand standard.

“Not that I plan on being here that long. I’ll give it another two hours.”

“Not that I’m vying to have a sleepover here but isn’t that a bit…” Alex’s words trail off. Strand can still hear the jingle of her boots.

“A bit what?”

“Limited, I guess. A few hours aren’t really giving the place its due diligence.”

“Like I said, this is just preliminary.” Picking up the second camera, he loads a fresh battery into it. The sharp bite of the plastic cover locking in place echoes across the tiled walls. “Besides, if the stories that Ms. Cooper shared with you are accurate, then we shouldn’t have any worry about getting skunked, right?”

Alex doesn’t have much to say about that, which he finds surprising, but he refrains from commenting on it. He checks the first camera, still blinking away on the tripod, before standing up. “You want to come along or keep watch here?”

She hops down from the gurney, skirting around the smear on the floor, and joins him at the door.

“Lead the way.”

-----

“This would go a lot faster if we split up.”

“Ah, no.” Turning back to hold the stairwell door open for her, Strand shoots her an amused look. “Weren’t you arguing about what happens when groups split up in haunted houses when we got here?”

“Would that be you admitting to this place being haunted?”

“No.”

“We would’ve heard kids by now. If they’re breaking in and trashing stuff, they’re going to be loud and obnoxious about it.”

“Not with security out front, they’re not.” His flashlight hovers on graffiti next to the door, scrawled in the familiar black spray paint. The camera in his hand tracks down the words.

As I was going up the stair
I met a man who wasn't there
He wasn't there again today
Oh, how I wish he'd go away!

“At least they seem well-read,” Alex says as they step out onto the third floor. Having spent the last hour trailing behind Strand through the second floor’s attraction, listening to him explain away every set of footsteps or whispered conversation that comes out of the darkness as the wind or foundation issues or, his personal favorite, apophenia, she’s eager to clear through the parts of the building Lucille talked about.

“You recognize it?”

“William Hughes Mearns, I think. A colleague of mine from London sent some of his stuff to me. He also deals with… strange tapes in his line of work.” She surveys the section they’ve come to. “The poem is certainly fitting for this place.”

“Is this colleague in need of a professional skeptic’s opinion, as well?”

“Probably,” Alex surmises with a grin, “he actually emailed last week. He might be coming to the states soon and needs help with whatever he’s working on. Apparently, he’s gotten in over his head on something.”

“How well do you know him?” Something in his tone – it could almost be jealousy if she tilts her head and squints her eyes, but she lets the thought roll away – makes her glance at him over her shoulder. He’s not looking at her, though. Instead, his attention seems captured by another one of the bloodied nurse mannequins – one of roughly fifty they’ve come across.

“Don’t go all Lifetime original movie on me. You do know that when I was hosting PNWS’s Commuted program that I interviewed Jeffrey Carroll, right? The Cascade Killer – he’s the one who butchered that family up in those cabins in Brushy Valley.”

“Yes, I am aware. But that was within a maximum-security prison, not a corner Starbucks.”

“Potayto, potahto.”

She racks up another scoff for that. Her mind flashes to the Days Without Pissing Off Dr. Strand poster that the interns made last year, the one that used to hang in Intern A’s office, but now proudly has a spot in the breakroom after Strand came across it and chuckled at it. She guesses she’ll have to swipe the eleven off and replace it with a zero when she’s back in the office on Monday.

“Alex–” Strand bites off whatever he was about to say and shakes his head. He changes course, heading now for the connecting hallway while Alex steps into a large, open room near the center of the wing.

Toy dolls, rocking horses, and rusty cribs fill the room. The wallpaper must be original; it’s worn and peeling, but Alex can make out the circus design. Clowns, lions, elephants, and ringmasters – once a happy yellow, light blue, and bright orange, but now faded, given it’s been probably fifty years since installation. A plastic tea set sits in the middle of the room, a trio of roses printed on the cups now scratched with age. Four dolls sit around it, as if ready for their tea party to start. More dolls are scattered around the room, most missing their clothes, their plastic limbs soiled from the dirty floor. Alex bends down over a nearby crib and isn’t surprised when a doll gazes up at her from a mess of torn blankets. It’s about the size of a toddler with ratty, brown curls.

All four of its limbs are tied to the crib bars with twine.

The sight of it is a rock that forms in her stomach, weighing her down. She takes a step back.

And notices the other dolls. They’re propped up with their faces hidden from view, pressed against the walls, making her think of the ones her grandmother had against her sitting room walls. Alex remembers being excited to play with such pretty dolls, having toted around the same worn, knock-off Barbie for years. Each was wearing a pretty, jewel-toned dress trimmed with white lace; their hair fell down their backs in long, springy ringlets of chocolate brown, cherry red, and honey gold.

She’d put her hand on one of the doll’s shoulders – the one with the little basket full of silk flowers hanging from the crook of her elbow. When she’d turned it around to play with it, she was met with a blank face. No eyes, no mouth – nothing.

Alex had jumped back as if bitten. The doll had tipped over, hitting the ground with a crash, the porcelain arm shattering. Rosebuds and porcelain had sprayed across the wooden floor. Her grandma had chuckled at the look of horror on her face, pulling her away from the mess while her dad had cleaned up. They’d had to spend several minutes reminding her it was an accident, and that she wasn’t in trouble.

“We won’t put you in time out for being curious, sweetheart,” her grandma had assured. That’s what the dolls were in, apparently. Time out dolls, her grandma had called them. Alex never ever wanted to be in time out again.

A loud knock of thunder pulls her out of the memory.

The time out dolls here aren’t made of porcelain. The cloth hands that cover their faces are dusty and their outfits aren’t as fancy as her grandmother’s – cotton pinafores, denim overalls, and footie pajamas. She doesn’t need to turn the dolls around to know their faces are blank – or they should be, barring any vandalism.

One doll stands out among the rest. A clown, its garish yellow jumpsuit covered with polka dots, its red hair topped with a party hat that flops sideways. In its gloved hand is a little red horn, that Alex is sure would work if she tried it.

The hell she would.

To put the proverbial cherry on top, one of the taggers was in this room, as well. You’ll float too! is above the clown’s head, scrawled in red. Trails of paint drip down from the bottom of the letters.

The far wall, devoid of any dolls, holds a bank of windows that face the overgrown lawn. Alex leans on the damp windowsill and peers out. Gossamer strings of lightning flash against the night sky. This high, she can see out over the property. Peeking out from underneath dense layers of ivy is a cracked concrete slab, the footprint of Underhill, built sometime in the forties to deal with the overflow of patients.

Washington’s open-air cemetery, she recalls as she looks out over the tangled mess of the grounds. That’s what the Seattle Times (and everyone else) had called it, due to the amount of bodies that were dumped on the property from the early 90s to the mid-2000s, most being the result of gang activity down in Seattle. Over fifteen bodies left to rot, their smell not immediately noticeable above the stench of the marsh and the nearby paper mill. The most recent body was found in 2012. It’d been there for seven years, though, Alex reminds herself as her gaze tracks along the weeds. Wanting to see if she can spot anything while, at the same time, not wanting to find anything. And doesn’t that just sum up her entire attitude towards this visit to Prestwick – and to these black tapes of Strand’s?

Past the mangled fence is the parking lot of the paper mill. A solitary streetlight drowns the asphalt in a green glow. Familiar tingles skitter their way up her neck and over her right ear. Her eyes immediately dart across the dark landscape, searching. It takes a few seconds for her vision to adjust, given the distance and the blur of rain, but then she sees it.

Someone is standing underneath the streetlight.

Her first thought is a sign post, or a parking space marker, or anything sensible.

But it’s not. It’s a person, facing towards the hospital, silhouetted against the light. It’s like a scene from a horror movie, that stationary shot where the audience waits with trepidation, watching with hands dug into their seat for something to happen. She wonders if they can see her, hidden in the darkness of the third floor. Wonders how long they’ve been standing there, watching.

Then she glances down and sees that she still has her flashlight on. It’s aimed at the floor, but it’s bright enough to curve up the window casing and illuminate her. She might as well have hung a sign from the window with a flashing arrow pointing to herself. Dark fills up the room when she switches the light off.

The person lifts an arm and waves, their forearm ticking back and forth, making a show of it.

“Alex?”

She doesn’t jump out of her skin, but it’s a near thing; she didn’t even hear Strand approach. He comes up from behind and joins her at the window, the camera pointed down to the floor. Wordlessly she points to the parking lot, where the person seems to have grown bored of the staring contest and is walking away, heading towards the main road. The light catches the back of them until they’re gone, melting into the night.

“There was a someone at the paper mill watching us.” He doesn’t seem surprised by the notion.

“The security guard did say that we’d probably get some attention. They probably saw our lights, wanted to check out what’s going on.”

“Still creepy.”

“Not creepy, just human nature.” Her eyebrow seems to lift of its own accord.

“They waved at me. When I caught them.”

“If you’d like, we can go downstairs to Miss Murphy - inform her to be on the lookout for a polite bystander.” His lips do that thing where they want to form into a smirk, one corner of his mouth twitching.

She’s made it a game, trying to get a real smile out of him. He’s not completely without emotions, of course, this man who can squeeze the universe into a ball so easily. He knows the right cues to laugh, knows when to shake his head fondly. She’s sure he means some of them. But with others it seems like he’s acting off a script that only he’s privy to. Coralee’s sudden return and subsequent departure certainly did a number on the man.

So maybe she tries a little harder some days. She’s sure that he knows about her game, but it’s another unspoken thing between the two of them (of which there are so very many).

“Funny,” she says, moving away from the window and out of the room, eager to be far from all those dolls.

Stepping aside to let her pass, Strand scans the parking lot across the way, but whoever it was has moved on, their curiosity sated. There is a thought tugging at the back of his mind: maybe there never was anyone there to begin with. It’s no secret to her coworkers and podcast listeners that Alex has been having trouble lately, in terms of her sleep habits and nightmares. If there were ever an appropriate setting to stir up those restless thoughts in her, he can’t think of a better place. It’s why he shot down the idea of them splitting up. If he can keep an eye on her, then he can be a rational voice, an anchor to keep her grounded in reality, to keep that skeptical spirit alive in her. Which, of course, is easier said than done – like trying to keep a wave upon the sand.

And how do you solve a problem like Alex Reagan? he muses as he trails after her, only remembering to aim the camera up when she teases him about it.

The true decay of the building makes its presence known when they cross into the west wing. With the lack of props, the dilapidation is much more obvious here. Thick sheets of dust coat the floors, disturbed here and there by shoeprints from past investigators. Hospital debris fills the rooms and halls. Rusted bed frames, overturned medical trays, chipped number plates, all left to time and the elements. More graffiti lines the hallway here, black and red and yellow across the flaking, white paint:

Im going to kill u

STAY SICKK :P

they can hear you!!

A pile of chairs takes up most of one room, a heavy metal desk shoved into what little space is left. Alex tugs open the drawers, which make an awful racket as metal scrapes metal. Tucked inside are some faded papers, a laminated poster on how to prevent the spread of HIV, and a crumbling newspaper with the headline: Soviets cry for help after Chernobyl nuclear disaster!

Some of the less nostalgic parts of the eighties.

Alex starts on about how she’s been in contact with a duo from Grand Rapids who are full time urban explorers and how interesting of a career that is and that she might go out east to explore an abandoned theater with them.

“I think they’d love this place,” she says as she searches through the rest of the drawers, “although I think they don’t like the whole pay-to-play kind of exploration.”

“This is for your ‘remarkable occupations’ podcast that never came to any fruition?”

“Well, it did – it just sort of... stalled on the tracks with these tapes.”

“Ah.”

There’s a pause and it’s long enough to almost become awkward, before Alex breaks the silence again.

“Did you know that Levi thinks the reason this supposed evil spirit is here is because he’s related to the Bells of Adams, Tennessee?”

“That’s absurd.”

“As absurd as thinking a scientifically-impossible tune could be played to conjure something evil? Or as absurd as thinking that it’s just a coincidence that a cult can somehow commit suicide at the same time as one of their members who’s locked in prison sixty miles away?”

“Yes – that absurd.”

“If I ask you a question, will you answer it honestly?”

“I… always do.”

The skeptical look on her face sends that familiar sense of guilt rushing through him.

“Do you think we’ll ever solve one of these tapes?” He opens his mouth to answer her, but she steamrolls over him. “Because I have to admit – this not knowing thing, it’s getting to be exhausting. It’s like what Tannis said to me: we have to go deeper, not wider. But I feel like we are, we have been, and now we’re just… stuck, digging again and again for something we’ll never reach. It’s like these tapes are a well, and we keep digging to reach the water, but when we reach it, it sinks back down, and we have to start again. I feel like we’ll never figure it out. Any of it.”

“You talk of wanting the truth, and yet you’re quoting Braun at me?”

Frustration works through her, hot and quick like lightning; she shoves the drawer closed, the screech reverberating through the room.

“Really. That’s your response.”

“Sometimes it’s enough that we’re the ones who start looking, if only for others to finish.”

Some of the fight in her slips away at his words and he’s sorry to see it go. Overcome by the need to comfort her, he approaches and hopes his increased presence is enough. Alex is an affectionate person; she gives reassuring squeezes on the interns' shoulders when they worry about deadlines, she hugs Nic when he brings her tea, she lays her hand on interviewees’ arms when they struggle through telling their stories. And he’s not sure if he can handle something like that right now.

“That’s not good enough for me. I’m a journalist – I want to know, I want all of the answers.”

“Alex, sometimes there are no answers.”

They watch each other, dust motes dancing around their flashlights. Something shifts between them, a convergent boundary, the tectonic plates of professional colleagues and budding friendship sliding closer. Strand’s waiting with baited breath for when they collide, because he may not hold any degrees in geophysics, but he’s smart enough to know what happens. And he hopelessly, desperately wants it to happen.

“Would you,” he starts, before clearing his throat and continuing his attempt to change the subject, “like to go to the fourth floor? I’m sure there’s a decent view of the sound from there, if nothing else.” Her gaze flits over him and he’s not sure what she sees, but the line of her shoulders eases and she offers him a half-smile before motioning him to lead the way.

They continue down the hallway, Alex breaking off to duck into a room to read the graffiti inside. Needing some space to think about the fact that he suggested they go look at a nice view of the water together, as if this is some sort of romantic excursion, and not a defunct mental hospital that’s crawling with asbestos and lead, Strand decides to forge ahead to look for the stairs. Which he finds another twenty feet down the hallway.

So much for the space he wanted.

The room Alex finds herself in looks like someone found the Wikipedia article on occult symbols and went wild with spray paint. Upside-down crosses, Baphomet sigils, Leviathan crosses, and even a few out-of-place valknut symbols decorate the far wall.

Above the symbols is a cheery, bubble-letter script that reads: Baphomet Welcomes You! Scrawled across that is an ichthys symbol, underneath which someone has tacked on que te folle un pez, with EHS CLASS OF 2011 finishing off the masterpiece.

On the left wall, the one she had her back to when she walked in, is something else entirely.

“Richard, can you come here?”

Incomprehensible equations border a familiar symbol: a pentagram, though this time within a single circle. And if the window to the right faces west, then this means this wall faces south. She trails a hand over the symbols, drawing away when her fingers come away tipped with fresh paint. Her mouth suddenly feels like it’s been filled with sand; a wave of vertigo pushes at her, sending her stumbling back against the door. Reaching out to steady herself, she smears the black paint across the doorframe, leaving a long-fingered handprint; she can’t be forced to care about adding to the vandalism, though, in her desperation to want it off her.

“What is it?” Strand asks as he steps inside the room, before drawing up short. It’s empty, nothing but four water-damaged, vandalized walls and a broken window. Thinking he’s just mistaken the room he saw her go into, he ducks out and sticks his head into the next one.

Empty.

As are the next twenty he checks, kicking up dust as he moves swiftly down the hallway, calling her name, before he remembers his phone. Ten agonizing seconds go by before he hears that familiar, synthesizer-heavy ringtone that he’s had to endure hundreds of times when Alex has misplaced her phone.

The acrid taste of panic fills his mouth when he finds it in the original room, finishing its last ring before it rolls over to her voicemail.

Hi, you’ve reached Alex Reagan with Pacific Northwest Stories! I’m sorry I missed your call, but if you leave your name and number, I’ll be sure to get in touch with you just as soon as I can!

He hangs up and bends down to pick up her phone; it’s the same model as his, but somehow feels so much smaller in his hand. Aiming the flashlight around the room, he fruitlessly searches for anything that will tell him where she went. The beam lands on the sacred geometry scribbled across the wall, which he scoffs at before leaning out of the doorway, the darkness swallowing his light.

“Alex?”

-----

“I saw stuff, heard stuff, smelt stuff. Lots of things,” Lucille says.

“And these things… you believe they were paranormal?”

“Of course, honey,” she says. “I’d look down a hallway at night, and I’d be one of two nurses on the floor, and I’d look down and see these heads poking out around corners or out of doorways. The patients were all locked in their rooms at night, mind you, but here I’d see these flashes of these things.”

“Did you see this in every building?”

“Mmhmm.”

“Did you ever recognize these… things that you saw?”

“No, I never got a good look at them,” Lucille says, pausing as she runs her fingers over her shirt’s collar again. “But I don’t – I don’t think they were patients. I think certain places can attract things. Especially places where there’s suffering, or lots of sadness. And the hospital had enough of that to go around. And I think these things, whatever they are, wherever they come from… I think they feed on misery.

“We did have a few instances where we would see the same ghosts, though. Back in sixty-eight, there was a nurse that fell down the back stairs and broke her neck – her name was Sarah, and she had the prettiest red hair. And after that, I would see her sometimes – a quick flash, you know, of her walking down a hallway or by the windows that look over the courtyard. Always during the day; she didn’t seem to come out at night.” Lucille huffs a quiet laugh and adds, “Night was Big John’s time.”

“Who was Big John?”

“Well, that was just the name we gave him. We only saw him late at night – he seemed to like it when most of the lights were off, when the place was quiet. We’d be at the nurse’s station and look up and he’d be down at the end of the hallway. We called him Big John because of the song – he was like a tall shadow, probably about ten feet or so.”

“Was he a former patient?”

“No, I don’t believe so. He was just… there, even before I started. I remember the first time I saw him, though, me and another nurse were making the rounds and she looked up and grabbed my arm,” Lucille reaches up to her own arm and grips it tight. “And she’s shaking it and pointing. I look up, thinking maybe one of the patients has gotten out, and I see this big shadow in the hall beside us. And it’s like it sees us too, and it starts backing up until I can’t see it anymore. Like I said, he mostly came around at night and he always just seemed to hover near one of us. I think he was lonely, maybe,” her lips turn down for a beat, “if ghosts can be lonely.”

“Did you ever see anything in the morgue?”

The hand that’s still wrapped around her upper arm travels down to rub at a spot on her forearm.

“Well, we weren’t allowed down there. When a patient passed, we notified the morgue attendant, and he’d come get the patient, until the coroner could arrive. I went down there once; the place gave me the willies. But I know when Thomas – he was the attendant for as long as I worked there – when he would come up, he’d talk about how the Crawler scared the new junior attendant, and how the bosses would have to start looking for a new one soon.”

“What was the Crawler?”

“Back sometime in the forties, there was a mute boy who was given over to the hospital when he was just a child. He was kept in a crib until he was twelve or so, though. Never learned to walk and was forced to crawl everywhere. Sometime after that next winter, a nurse found that he’d somehow gotten down the stairs and out into the snow, and he’d died from hypothermia. The attendant came and got him and shut him up in a drawer until the coroner could get out there.”

An uneasiness wraps around Alex’s chest like a pair of arms encircling her, the pressure tightening as Lucille continues the story.

“When the coroner did come the next day, he pulled the drawer out and found scratch marks on the walls of the freezer. The boy had been able to scratch at the wall, I assume hoping someone would hear him, but he died sometime before the coroner took him out.”

Lucille stops to drink her coffee and wet her lips; Alex tries to avoid thinking about what those hours must’ve been like for the boy, the cold attacking his already weakened body, his only option to scrape at the walls. How scared and alone he must have felt when no one came for him.

“So people-” Alex cuts herself off to clear her throat, before trying again, “-so you said people saw this boy?”

“Yes, although he seemed to keep to the tunnels and the basement. I never saw him in all of my years working there, but Thomas and other attendants would talk about him. They’d hear him dragging his body along the floor, or hear him scratching at the walls.”

“Do you think these entities are still there?”

“Place has been shut down for some time – but maybe since they turned it into a haunted house, that might attract those things back to it, all that fear and anxiety.” Lucille folds her hands up over each other, copying the action with her lips, until she continues, “I think if you go poking around in that place long enough, if you aren’t afraid of looking for things in the shadows, then you might find something.”

Icy fingers dance up and down Alex’s spine; she shivers in the sudden chill that’s overtaken the room.

“How did you know I plan on visiting?”

“Honey, nobody asks questions like you’re asking unless they plan on proving me wrong,” Lucille says with a smile and shrugs. “Though, in your case, I think you want to prove me right.”

-----

“Richard?”

Alex moves out of the room. Her only answer is the wind that brushes through the hallway, whistling as it blows through the broken panes. She searches her coat pockets, cursing when her phone isn’t there. She calls his name, louder this time, the words echoing down the long hallway; she continues down until she reaches a caged stairwell. Still no Strand.

Bolted up next to the stairwell is a plexiglass map, the red You Are Here dot showing that she’s on the third floor. She heads up the stairs to find Strand and have a very serious, non-shouty conversation with him about ditching people.

A loud clang from down below stops her in her tracks.

“Richard?” She maneuvers the flashlight so she can see down the center of the stairwell. The wire cage creates long, thin strips of shadows that drape across the walls, the light carving around the dust piles along the rails, making it seem like someone is peeking up through the darkness. She strains to hear around the constant hush of the rain. Distant, rhythmic taps against the floor sound from below, like steady footsteps on the tile. If it were Strand, then surely he would’ve responded by now, even if he were chasing down someone.

Where are you going? asks the red graffiti on the far wall.

Since she’s already called attention to herself by shouting, Alex attempts to make as little noise as possible as she makes her way down the stairs. The vibration of her footsteps makes the wire rattle against the handrail, a chorus of soft, metallic pings following her down. Melodic sounds, almost like two people having a quiet conversation, float up to her from below. Maybe Strand has found whoever painted the demonic math across that wall – or maybe they’ve found him. A cocktail of fear and curiosity sends her down another two flights, chasing after the noise, the constant turn of the staircase almost dizzying.

It’s not until the first-floor landing that the noise becomes apparent.

Rain runs along the pointed teeth of the broken pane and patters against the floor. It echoes up the stairwell like someone talking, the words stretched and warped. The flashlight reflects off the murky puddles that have formed on the tile, the dirt and paint curls splintering the beam. Dejected, she resumes her path to the basement, where she’ll hopefully find Strand. And if not she can always go outside to see if Murphy can reach him on his phone, so Alex can find out where he’s been hiding. And then chew him out for leaving her in the (literal) dust.

The noise of the rain disappears when she reaches the basement, though water drips somewhere farther down, echoing out from the black behind her. The stench of mold down here is stronger than before. Alex wrinkles her nose at the smell as she continues down the tunnel, following the crumbling pipework. She watches the shadows, almost expecting a pair of red eyes to peer out at her, that childhood nightmare she can’t seem to shake. The tunnel seems to go on forever.

Until it doesn’t.

What she thinks might be just a doorway within a load-bearing wall is another concrete block wall. Which seals off the passage, as well as her direct (and preferred) way to the morgue.

Where have you been? asks the red graffiti scrawled across the concrete.

She figures that this section of tunnel is in disrepair and that they sealed it off for safety reasons. It still doesn’t stop her from standing on her tiptoes and aiming her light into the hole chipped out for the pipes to see into the other side. The dark eats away at the light as she swings it across, the plastic casing scraping at the concrete. She aims it down the center of the tunnel, but the scratching sound continues. Her thoughts jump to the boy, forced to scratch against the freezer walls. And the attendants’ claims that he continued to haunt the basement for decades afterwards.

A pair of red, beady eyes pop up next to her outstretched arm.

Her yelp cuts off as she slaps a hand over her mouth – the same hand that was holding the flashlight, that’s now on the other side of the wall. The rat emits a squeal of its own before scurrying off.

“Shit.” Alex pulls herself up to glare at the flashlight that might as well be a world away. “Fuck,” she adds for good measure, before turning away and squinting at the way she came. The encroaching black of the passage seems to press against her, and though she’s never been claustrophobic, she can’t help but imagining the walls closing in around her. As if to dissuade her overactive imagination – the one Strand calls into question so often – she reaches out and touches the cool brickwork, as if to prove it hasn’t moved closer. The stone bites at her palm, almost cold enough to burn; she draws away in surprise, wondering if she should worry about stumbling across a pit down here, too.

Tracing the wall with just her fingertips, Alex starts back; her footsteps almost in sync with her heartbeat as she hurries along, wishing she’d thought to keep track of how far she’d gone. The dark continues to play its dirty tricks, conjuring up the image of her doing this forever, hopelessly dragging her hand along the wall, waiting for a break that would never come, her mouth and throat growing fuzzy with mold, her own voice echoing back at her each time she calls out for help, until she goes so far that the wall falls away and she’s forced to crawl on her hands and knees, just so she can feel the floor underneath her until the only way to mark where she’s been is the trail of bloody handprints where the rough stone has eaten away at her palms and she begs for the walls to come back and close in and tuck in around her like a weighted blanket and press and keep pressing until she can no longer move or breathe or hope for anything but for this incessant misery to end.

There’s a break in the wall. It’s a jarring sensation, her hand meeting empty air, and it’s enough to drag her out of her head; she stretches farther, swiping at the emptiness. Moving into the space, she reaches both arms out, her fingertips barely brushing the brickwork on either side of her. It’s an alcove, one she hadn’t noticed on the way down.

More importantly, it’s an alcove with a door that – when she holds up the tiny, blue LCD screen of her recorder to it – reads MORGUE. It must be the route they take the patrons through for the other attraction, down the caged stairs and through the tunnel, for the extra spook factor. It’s certainly working on her.

The door whines as she pulls it open and enters another dark passage. She takes a left, knowing the morgue is in the northeast corner, and calls out Strand’s name. Hearing nothing in return, she pushes forward with renewed determination, her boots clacking against the floor. Despite the sheer darkness, she keeps her gaze down. The voicemail Simon left her plays on repeat in her head, how some people can see further into the shadows than most – if there’s one thing she never wants to be, it’s the type of person Simon is always rattling on about.

When the passage dead-ends into a new one, she takes another left. The air here is heavier, tinged with the musty smell of mildew and damp iron. Her fingers slide along the uniform shapes of doors – they’re smoother than the stone encasing them, a thick metal that’s cold under her palm. She can hear Lucille’s voice in her head: we weren’t permitted to go downstairs.

Up ahead, footsteps scuffle to a halt.

“Hello?” Alex calls, slipping behind the door and gripping its edge like a shield. Whoever it is remains quiet. They might not have known she was here before, now that she thinks about it, but she’s already thrown the stone into the pond and created a big, loud ripple. So, fuck it. “I heard you. There’s no use in hiding.”

There’s a soft sound, like someone speaking under their breath, too low to be anything intelligible. Then something steps out from one of the doorways, silhouetted within the darkness. Something that’s darker, denser than the black. It’s tall and thin and seems to stoop in the tunnel, too tall to stand up straight, forced to hunch as it twists its body to face her. Its mouth stretches back and its jagged teeth form sharp points that seem to gleam impossibly in the oppressive black of the hallway. Fear is a metal spike driving through her limbs, preventing her from fleeing. Alex thinks of Lucille’s story about Big John – the lonely ghost who just wanted to be around people. Whatever she’s seeing only has her thinking of the video, of the creature with the knobby spine and long fingers.

Footsteps, slow and muffled, head towards her before they abruptly stop again.

“Who’s there?”

Bright, piercing light eclipses her vision and Alex hisses at the sting of it, shielding her eyes as footsteps rush toward her. She lashes out and swipes at the air, blindly reaching for the safety of the door when something slams into her, her arms pinwheeling as she tries to regain balance, but she’s too disoriented from the blinding light and she tips backwards, feeling that spike of panic drive up her spine as she falls. Every other emotion falls to the wayside as pain lances through the back of her skull and the scream leaves her mouth as nothing more than a rush of muted air before she hears that solid, hideous crack of bone meeting metal; her chin smacks against her chest, her jaw grinding as her body meets the cold floor, the coarse, fibrous ropes of pain seizing and tightening around her.

The shadow hovers above, stretched and warped from the light. I’m sorry, it whispers to her, I’m sorry.

She tries to reach out to fight back, to push it away, to get away, but the light has melted everything away and now it has her, and it’s like breaking the surface of the water to feel the blanket warmth of the sun; and it wouldn’t be so bad would it, to go –

– so she does.

-----

Someone is saying her name. Again and again, a song left on repeat. Thrown in occasionally is a whispered request to wake up. There’s a light tickle against her cheek that she wants to brush away, but her body won’t seem to cooperate. Someone's left a radio on; it plays some awful, high-pitched static.

I’m not asleep, she wants to point out.

The world blinks its way back into existence in the form of Strand and his proton-scattering, halogen-beam flashlight that he’s pointing directly into her face. At some point, she’ll teach him proper flashlight etiquette. She’ll pencil it in, right between How to Stop Being a Pompous Dick 136 and Lying by Omission is Still a Lie 335.

“I’d have a higher score on RateMyProfessor than you,” Alex tells him, though what comes out is a slurred mess of words.

“What?”

“Stop pointing that thing in my face,” she complains, in lieu of an explanation for the previous statement. Strand thankfully drops the light as she struggles to sit up.

“Easy, easy.” The relief in his voice is almost palpable, a hefty weight underneath the words that she could almost grip. His hands come around her shoulders to steady her as the room spins and she lists to one side, a boat taking on water. She swallows reflexively at the thick swell of nausea.

“What happened?”

“You tell me. You were with me upstairs and then you just disappear, and I find you down here like this.” Strand’s lips mash against each other, as if he wants to say more, before he changes course. “Apparently, one of the theatre kids decided to sneak in here before we showed up to make us think the place was haunted. He cut the power, then snuck back up to rattle doors and toss bottles. He was trying to get over to the morgue to mess with my equipment when he ran into you, then panicked and knocked you down trying to get away.”

Alex rubs at the knot that’s formed on the back of her head, wincing when she brings her hand down and sees blood, the bright red spots of it shining in the flashlight’s beam. Strand frowns at it.

“I ran into him on the way down here and made him take me to you. I didn’t want to leave – he’s supposed to be getting Miss Murphy, so she can call the police and an ambulance.”

Alex wants to protest at the latter, but her head is still too foggy to put up much of a fight. Avoiding his concerned gaze, she takes a moment to look around at what was lost to the darkness earlier. Lining the walls around them are metal doors with old turn-key locks that seem to stretch on forever. Probably the original maximum-security ward, before they built the other buildings.

“What happens if he decides to skip out?”

“He won’t,” Strand says with such a finality, his words like a sword’s sharp edge.

And Jesus how hard did she hit her head?

Surveying the area, there’s no sign of her long-legged shadow friend – not that she would tell Strand what she saw, because she already knows what his response would be. Nic already informed him of her issue with waking nightmares. Somewhere Strand must have a custom prize wheel in his office that he spins when he needs to rationalize one of her experiences. Apophenia, insomnia, and jumping to conclusions are definitely three of the options.

“Can you help me up? I really don’t want to hang out in this hallway all night.”

Outside, the air is heavy with the scent of rain. It makes her think of dropping pennies into the mall fountain as a kid. If you watch it sink, then your wish won’t come true, her brother had said, two years older and obviously wiser than she to come up with bullshit like that. But she always did clench her eyes tight when she flipped the penny in, opening them and futilely searching the water for her penny among the hundreds.

Murphy meets them at the steps and helps Alex into the passenger seat of her car. Strand crouches next to the open door and hovers awkwardly, holding the three water bottles that Murphy hands off to him as she flutters back and forth between the car and its trunk.

A teenage boy sits in the back, his dark hoodie stained with dust and his face streaked with tears. He starts rambling apologies and Alex spends five minutes calming him down before he can work himself into a nervous breakdown. Soon enough two police cruisers pull up, an ambulance following them in. Another car swings in behind them and Alex recognizes Bell as he steps out.

“What the hell were you thinking, Arnold?” Bell asks when he reaches the car, three Snohomish County officers sauntering up behind him. Arnold glances between all the adults surrounding him, shrinks back into the seat, and resumes sobbing. Leaving the kid to Bell and the officers, Strand parts the sea of bodies as he helps Alex over to the ambulance. For once in her life she keeps mum, her head thankful for the quiet hum of the truck.

A paramedic pokes and prods at her, peppering Alex with questions about her injuries, but she’s cute and laughs at Alex’s exhausted attempt at flirtatious banter when she requests for Alex’s coat to be removed so she can continue her exam.

“You want me to call your guard dog back over?”

The question throws Alex off-guard. She stares up at Leslie until the other woman tilts her head to where Strand is giving a passionate statement to an officer. Her automatic response would be no. She doesn’t need to be coddled and she can take care of herself. But at the same time, there’s that base instinct that wants her friend by her side, and just because he’s a male friend doesn’t mean she’s weak, and just because she wants to occasionally (often) press him up against the door of her office and kiss him senseless certainly doesn’t mean anything.

Leslie appears to be well-versed in the art of reading a patient’s thoughts. She hops out of the ambulance and calls for Strand. He paces over, his hands working over themselves as he glances between the two women.

“Is everything all right?”

“Yes."

“You have a moderate concussion,” Leslie corrects, ignoring Alex’s long-suffering sigh. “It’s nothing too serious, but if you wouldn’t be averse to it, I would suggest a trip to the hospital. Just so they can run a CT scan on you to double check.”

Strand offers to follow in her car, as if Alex has already agreed to this impromptu (pointless) hospital trip, which she is quick to point out that she hasn’t. Leslie watches from the bumper as they bicker about ER wait times versus subdural hematomas. Alex shoots her a dirty look, knowing that she only suggested calling Strand over to have someone back her up on the hospital recommendation.

“If you were still unconscious, she’d have to take you,” he points out. Alex lifts an eyebrow at him, and even Strand looks chagrined at himself for such a poor argument. Knowing that she’s toed over the finish line and won, she turns to Leslie.

“Does someone need to wake me up every few hours?”

“Nope. Just some good, old-fashioned R and R. If your headache becomes worse or your nausea returns, I do want you to go to the hospital.” Leslie puts her hands on her hips and glares at Alex. “Seriously. EMT’s orders.”

She turns and points a finger at Strand, who straightens under the sudden scrutiny. “And you need to drive her home. Stay with her if you can or get someone else to, because I’ve spent twenty minutes with her and I already know she’s not going to do anything if she feels worse.”

“Hey!” Alex protests, albeit weakly, as Strand nods.

“Understood.”

“Now, I’m going to check on the kid,” Leslie tells them as she hefts a medic bag over her shoulder, “and you, gorgeous, are going to stay here until I come back.” Alex nods, watching her leave, before she returns to the man in front of her. She pats the space beside her, pleased when he relents and takes a seat.

The bay window in the pretty gray house across the street is lit up, the blinds dipping near the windowsill as a kid looks out, watching the red and blue lights flash. Under the hum of the engines and muffled conversations of the officers, beyond the cracked asphalt of the road and the row of houses and the looming factories, the sound’s waves roll against the island. Alex feels as if the moon could almost be controlling the steady throbbing in her head, too, as it seems to follow the motion of the tide.

“Remember when I said I didn’t want to be Scooby Doo?”

“Yes.”

“I think the universe heard me and decided to make me Daphne instead.” That gets her a half-smile and that familiar, breathy chuckle. “So, where did you go?”

“Hmm?”

“You left. I wanted to show you some sacred geometry that I found, but I couldn’t find you. Well, I thought I heard you, but then it ended up being the rain playing tricks on me, and I decided to head for the morgue to see if you’d gone there and, well… you know the rest.”

Strand's eyebrows dip down with concern. “We must have missed each other somehow, then. Because I was also looking for you.”

“Oh. I thought you… went back to the basement without me.”

“No, I wouldn’t have left you alone. Especially not without telling you. It’s obvious now that my assessment about the teenagers was correct.”

“Right.”

From the open door of one of the cruisers, a police radio chatters away. Alex waits a beat before scooting closer to Strand and slipping her arms around his waist.

“What are you doing?”

“Giving you a hug.”

“I can – can ascertain that for myself. Why are you… for what reason?”

“You look like you need one.”

He thinks back to the last hug he received, with Charlie when he left Italy, standing there in the Fiumicino Airport. It had been stilted, their arms stiff, still not used to hugging one another despite the weeks they’d spent together. Before that, the last time he’d hugged his daughter had been within those five awful days, when she’d grown exhausted and worried for Coralee. He’d held her close, trying to give her some sort of comfort. Suffice to say after two decades, their hugging (and relationship) needed some work.

Alex’s hugs are just like her, though: they’ve overwhelming, they linger too long, and they’re… nice. He slips his arms out from her hold and wraps them both around her shoulders. She’s cold to the touch without that bright red peacoat of hers. He breaks the hug and fumbles behind her for it, where the paramedic tossed it aside to examine her, and tucks it around her shoulders. For good measure, he keeps a hand on her back, rubbing it through the wool.

And then the button at his wrist catches her hair and she winces at the pull on her scalp and this is why he doesn’t hug, this is why these sorts of things should be left to people like Alex, and not him.

“Thanks,” she says, a smile on her face. Her eyes are soft with the hazy sheen to them, like the world is too much to bother focusing on right now. And to think she was going to go home by herself like this.

“If anyone here needs a hug, it’s you. You’re the one who has a concussion.” Something flickers there in her gaze and it sharpens for a moment, as if she can read the insecurities ticking across the front of his mind.

“Consider us even, then.” Affection for this woman pours into him, filling up his veins, a Macallan 1824 to his soul and maybe he hit his head too, maybe he should wave the paramedic over because he’s thinking in metaphors again and that only happens – well, that only happens when Alex is around. “Do you need to go back inside for your equipment?”

“Oh. Yes. Well, Bell and one of the officers is going to accompany me, so I can show them what happened.”

“I can go with you, if you need me to–”

“No, you should stay out here.” Alex opens her mouth to protest. “Remember, EMT’s orders. I’ll be back shortly, and then I’ll take you back to my place.”

“Your place, huh?” She grins up at him and he fights against the heat that prickles his cheeks. Preserving his objectivity is like clinging to a wet rope; he holds on for dear life, but he keeps losing his grip.

“Well, I don’t think I can fit on your couch, seeing as you bought it with people under six feet in mind.”

“Relay is there, though.”

“Relay is a dog. He can’t take you to the hospital if you get worse.”

“He’s a good boy, I’m sure he’d figure it out. But I need to let him out is what I meant.”

“Oh,” he draws up short, realizing that she wasn’t protesting to going back to his house. Not that it should matter which house they go to, what matters is that she lets him stay so he can make sure she actually rests. But there’s something nice about knowing she’ll be under his roof, that when he wakes up in the morning she’ll be there, and he could make pancakes, maybe, the recipe that Grandma Loveday passed on to him. They can talk about her family, or where she grew up, because he’s spent more time with her that anyone else in his life over the past few years and yet he knows so little. They’ll talk about whatever it is people talk about over Saturday morning breakfast together, and maybe they could do it every Saturday, maybe she’d like – he cuts off the fantasy because Alex is still waiting for a solution for her dog.

“Your place is on the way to mine. We can swing by, pick him up.”

“You make me take off my boots so I don’t scuff the new floors. And now you’re fine with my dog walking around on them.”

“Unless you’re thinking of making him wear the boots, I think it’ll be fine.” Alex wants to continue arguing – more for just the sake of it than anything – but concedes with a nod of her head.

“If you’re sure.”

“Don’t worry, I have it on trusted authority that he’s a good boy.”

-----

“Did you see anything, when you reviewed the tape?” Alex asks from the passenger seat, the red light of her recorder blinking merrily in her hand. Strand scratches at his stubble and glances back at the Labrador mix stretched across the backseat.

“Curiosity killed the cat.”

“And satisfaction brought it back,” her voice chimes in. “C’mon, it’s fine. I want to record this while it’s still fresh. So, did you?”

“No, I didn’t see anything unexplained on the tape.”

“But you found something.”

“Hmm?”

“You get this little wince when you talk, if you found something interesting. So, spill.” He makes a show of sighing in defeat, but eventually caves.

“I went back up to the room where you saw the sacred geometry.” She waits for him to finish the sentence, but nothing comes. His gaze is steady on the road ahead; the red glow of brake lights flash around them, a herd of cars heading into the city.

“Okay, you’re being just as bad as Nic with these long pauses. Talk to me.”

“There wasn’t any.”

“What do you mean? I know what I saw, I – I touched it and the paint was still damp.” She wiggles her fingertips for emphasis, the pads tinted a dull black, as if she’d been drawing with charcoal and not touching mysterious symbols in a spooky, abandoned building.

“The wall was painted over.”

“With… with what?”

“With paint,” he glances over at her, his brows furrowed. The bloody wall of Maddie Frank’s apartment flashes through her mind; she turns her head to rest it against the seat, away from the brake lights.

“But who would’ve painted over it? The kid?”

“No, he wouldn’t have had time since he was making his way back up when he ran into you, and that must’ve been only ten minutes after we got split up.”

Alex wants to point out that it didn’t feel like ten minutes – more like an hour – but she’ll leave that thought unvoiced for now.

“Maybe there was someone else there with him, and he didn’t want to rat him out,” Strand continues, glancing back and forth between the traffic and her. She thinks of the tall figure she’d seen in that pitch-dark hallway.

“But why would they paint over the symbols? Was the graffiti on the other walls painted over, too?”

Strand shakes his head, before remembering the recorder. “No, just that one wall.”

Alex doesn’t seem to have anything to say to that, and instead reaches an arm back to run her fingers through Relay’s brown fur. Strand is the one who fills the silence, explaining that Arnold was able to get inside the building via the tunnel through an exterior hatch close to where the Estabrook building once stood. Therefore, someone else could’ve snuck in the same way, and painted over the symbols for whatever unknown reason.

“Are you going to go back, since this investigation was a bust? I can rearrange my schedule if you want me to go with–”

“No,” he cuts her off. “Now that I have prior knowledge that they’re not above playing tricks and faking activity, I see no reason to go back. Bell can buy some holy water off the internet and claim the place has been exorcised if he wants to re-open this year. We will not be going back.”

Alex wants to point out that just because Strand’s investigation is done doesn’t mean that hers is, but she’s too tired to argue with him right now.

“Did you take a photo of the wall?”

“Yes.”

“Can I…” she trails off, the car in front of them letting off the brake so the glow isn’t tinging her face, and he can see just how pale she’s become. “Can I see it?”

“Sure. Tomorrow, when you’ve had rest.”

“Richard.”

“Tomorrow, Alex.” He reaches across to the hand that’s holding her recorder and switches it off. “You need to take it easy.”

Alex sighs, but she caves to his suggestion, and rolls her shoulders back into the seat. The blue glow of her console shines across her dark hair. She starts humming a familiar tune; Strand smiles, quietly to himself. The plates shift closer again.

-----

They reach the side streets where only the far strings of traffic reach. The car in front of them taps their brakes to roll through a stop sign ahead and Alex winces at the light, having become accustomed to the quiet dark of Burien’s streets.

“You’re still quite pale,” Strand says, concern softening his voice.

“Do I look like I’ve seen a ghost?” Alex mumbles against the seat, breathing out a chuckle.

“Considering they don’t exist, no. You look like you got hit in the head with a metal door.”

“What if I told you I saw one?”

“You did see one, right before that idiot kid pushed you into it.”

“No.” She scratches a nail against the door’s armrest, working at an invisible stain on the gray cloth. There’s a Starbucks straw wrapper in the cup of the door handle, evidence of the coffee run with Nic a few days ago. The man is always leaving something in her car. As opposed to Strand, who takes everything with him when he goes – whether that’s into his house when she drops him off on occasion, or all the way to Italy without a moment’s notice. “A ghost.”

“I would probably respond with a need for proof, or at least the story of the supposed encounter.”

“You won’t believe me.”

He won’t, she knows. But there’s that what if, that pull in her chest, some invisible power tugging on strings. What if Strand can help find a simple explanation for it. She’s been stacking experiences and strange events and nightmares up like a child’s block tower. Maybe he can help bring it down, before it collapses onto her. The pounding of her head is getting to her, it seems, since she’s gone all metaphorical again.

“Alex.”

They ease past the cars lining either side of the street, their windows dotted with rain. Strand’s house sits on the crest of the hill, its driveway sloped as it follows the natural curve of the land. Douglas firs frame the driveway, blocking most of the house from view of the street. They pull in front of his detached garage and he kills the headlights. The outdoor motion light winks out after another thirty seconds, drenching them in the cool night, save for the weak porch light that hangs beside the front door. The house’s wood shingles have seen better days; the sunny, yellow paint that once made this place look like a sunflower sprouting from the earth is faded, the exterior now a patchwork of bleached yellow and crusty brown.

Alex can see past the side garden, where the Puget Sound is a slick, black stretch of water. The lights of Vashon Island are fuzzy orange dots across the way, outshone by the moon that hangs high above, illuminating the dark shapes of the distant shores.

“Your house needs a new paint job.”

“You’re stalling.”

She winces at the bite in the words, which he must see because he reaches across the armrest and places a hand on her shoulder; his fingers squeeze there, his thumb dusting against the fabric of her coat, moving back and forth.

“Okay, fine.”

-----

Lucille finally asks why she’s so interested in her experiences at Prestwick and Alex can’t help but cave and explain the video they received. This explanation requires another, Lucille wanting to know about this podcast business, and Alex tries for a short summary that ends up being another hour of back and forth between the two.

At some point, the young woman comes into the kitchen and runs the water to wash her cup, the dish clinking softly against the metal sink. Lucille waves her away, telling her off for helping her and insisting that she can take care of herself. Alex shares a look with the woman, who smiles and rolls her eyes, but puts the cup in the drying rack and moves off back down the hallway.

“You have a lovely home,” Alex tells Lucille as they stand at the front door, having finished the interview so Alex can get home (before those roads get too dark, honey). The sun is starting its descent behind the house; the world in front of them is a gauzy blue with smears of pink, a tease of those summer sunsets that will arrive in a few weeks.

“Believe it or not, this house used to be filled with so much noise I couldn’t stand it.” Her clouded eyes are on the horizon. Alex wonders how much of the scene she can see. “But then my daughter Eleanor left for college and my husband passed in ninety-nine.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Eleanor ended up in Colorado with her husband and had my two grandkids. They’d come up for Thanksgiving and Christmas. And Bree, the oldest, she lived with me for a year before she planned to go off to college in Chicago. Antwan, the youngest, he was going to attend college up here and live with me, but he – well, he changed his mind. Ended up at Eastern Colorado University.”

“Do they visit you often?”

“Eleanor does, sometimes.” The clipped reply is heavy between them, and Alex sets it aside, not wanting to dig into family drama.

“Well, it’s nice that you have someone to take care of you, then.”

“Hmm?” Lucille turns to face her, her gaze somewhere over Alex’s shoulder, confusion painted in the pursed lips and set of her jaw. For a moment, Alex stumbles over her words and points to the sitting room down the hall, before realizing that’s not going to work.

“Oh, I’m sorry. I thought the young woman – I figured she’s a caregiver or – or a neighbor.”

“Honey, there’s nobody here but me,” Lucille says and then with a smile, “well, you and me right now. And I do hope you’ll come back and tell me about your visit. I don’t get many visitors anymore.”

“Of – of course.” Alex looks down the hall, hoping the woman will pop her head out of the doorway and clear this up. The thought of a concerned neighbor dropping in and Lucille just not hearing her crosses her mind, but nothing about it makes sense. And earlier, with the dishes – Lucille told the woman to not bother with them.

Lucille chuckles and reaches up to pat Alex on the arm, rubbing her palm there. “I hope I haven’t scared you with all of my ghost stories.”

Alex has no choice but to let go of the point and offer a self-deprecating laugh.

“Maybe you did.”

Her car is stuffy when she climbs inside, so she rolls down the windows and decides to let the breeze air it out. As she reverses out of the driveway, she can’t resist a peek up at the second-story windows, where stereotypical lacy curtains hang. The curtains don’t move for the entire minute she spends looking at them, before she shakes herself out of her head and releases the brake.

Only to slam down on it again when her eyes drop to the front door where Lucille still stands, her hand resting on the screen door, looking out at the world she can neither see nor hear well. Just behind Lucille is the young woman, who waves goodbye to Alex and follows Lucille as she shuffles back down the hallway until they both disappear from view.

Back at the station, Alex ignores another text from Nic about what time she’s meeting them at the bar and wakes her computer from its slumber. Outside her office window, pairs of headlights race down the street, running late to dinner with their spouses or wanting to snag a decent seat in the theater or heading to their overnight shift at work. She watched the last spread of sunset through her windshield on the way here, the stars winking into existence as the pale gold of twilight gave way to the deep, dark blue of night.

She wonders if any of the passing drivers even take note of the square of light from her office window, if they take a second to think about the person working late. It’s not as satisfying as people-watching, but sometimes the cars get stalled at the red light on the corner, and she can make up her own stories. There’s a silver Mazda with a couple in it, decidedly not talking to each other, that she’s about to give names to (Ted and Lorraine? No – maybe, yeah, Patrick and Kellie, who always complains about how she can never find her name on those cheesy keychains in souvenir shops) when the desktop finally loads. Popping in her recorder to start downloading the audio, she opens the browser. If she can locate some of Lucille’s family members, maybe she can get in touch with them about the woman. Although she sincerely doubts it, the woman could be a neighbor who’s preying on Lucille; she could be stealing from her and threatening her not to tell. That’s not the vibe she’d gotten at all, but she’s heard of the increase in elder abuse from the news and from her brother (who’d been trying to convince Alex to go in his place to a work conference with California’s Department of Aging that was interfering with his weekend getaway).

The third hit for Lucille Cooper Issaquah WA is listing her as the living relative of Bree Sheppard, who passed away in a drunk driving accident at the age of nineteen. In the result’s preview, a photo of Bree smiles out at Alex from behind a pair of red, plastic-rimmed glasses, her hair set into springy curls that brush against the tops of her shoulders.

Alex feels her heart drop down to her feet as a chill sweeps through her body.

Breanna (Bree) Renee Sheppard passed away on Friday, April 10, at the age of nineteen.
Bree was an active young woman who was planning to pursue a degree in social work at the University of Chicago. In her spare time, she enjoyed hiking, taking care of her Nana, and spending time with friends. Bree will be remembered for her loving spirit, her endless compassion, and the joy she brought to everyone she met.
Bree is survived by her parents, Eleanor and Marcus, her brother Antwan, and her Nana Lucille Cooper. She is preceded in death by her Pop-Pop Paul Cooper and aunt Leticia Sheppard.
A celebration of life is scheduled for Thursday, April 16. In lieu of flowers, Bree's family requests that donations be made to Boys and Girls Clubs of America in Bree’s name.

The second result for Bree Sheppard is a news article naming her as the victim of a drunk driving accident that occurred while she was on her way home from work. The article’s tone is dry, the only phrase popping out at Alex being the mention of the accident occurring on Brunonia Street. She thinks immediately of Lucille’s insistence about getting home before dark. The same photo as the obituary is featured in the article; Alex blinks at the young woman’s face, every muscle coiled tight as those same brown eyes stare back at her, that same pair of red glasses perched high on her nose.

A notification dings, popping up to let her know that her audio file has finished downloading. Alex concentrates on her breathing as she waits for the audio program to open, her fingers clenching around the microphone stress ball the interns gifted her last Christmas (which paired nicely with the Bordeaux she received from Strand). Pulling the scrubber across the file, she listens and waits. Suddenly, finally she hears the soft clank of the plumbing, the hissing of the water as it spits out and then becomes a solid stream, the ceramic knocking against the sink. Proof that she didn’t just imagine it.

The paused timestamp stares back at her for a long time. Alex knows there’s no way to prove a ghost was washing dishes and even if she left it in, if she told their listeners that she saw an IRL, hashtag actual ghost – what then? Some of their listeners have gone and done investigations for themselves (she’s received quite a few shouty phone calls from Chief Collins about people showing up to the cabin they found Sebastian in, a few emails from Fred Barnes complaining about people asking for information about Simon). She found Lucille from a quick search of former employee lists – and there are those on the message boards with greater internet powers than she.

The want to leave it in is strong, though. It isn’t exactly proof, it’s her words (and audio) against the rest of the world, but it’s… this is what the podcast is for, right? Her experiences investigating these black tapes and the people surrounding them.

But then.

But then, at the same time.

It feels wrong to cut it out, to leave out such a chunk of information, but Lucille doesn’t deserve to have lookie-loos and people peeping in her windows, sitting outside of her house, and… and if. Alex sucks in a breath at the thought. There’s no analog clock in her office, but she can hear the soft ticking of one that seems to match her heartbeat.

But if it is Bree, if she’s… there, somehow. Staying behind from whatever follows the end of all of this, keeping an eye on her grandmother, then she doesn’t deserve that either.

Alex highlights the segment of audio and clips it from the tray without another thought, reasoning with herself that she wouldn’t have used the original audio anyway, it’s just her recounting the podcast to Lucille. She takes another few seconds to splice the leftover audio together, a neat little seam without any hiccups, to seem as if it were never there. The knock at her door drags her gaze up and away.

“Come in.” The door opens and Strand fills her doorway, tall and imposing with his careful eyes.

“How was your interview with Ms. Cooper?” He takes a seat across from her, easing back and crossing his legs; she mimics his posture, trying to project a calm she certainly doesn’t feel.

“It was… interesting.”

Strand lifts an eyebrow. “Do tell.”

“You wouldn’t believe me if I did.”

“Try me.”

She tries not to fidget under his gaze and moves hers back to her monitor.

“Maybe another time. Did you, um, did you need something? How did you know I’d be here?”

“I was passing by and saw your light on. Just wanted to confirm with you about going to the hospital on Friday. My class ends at four, so I’d like to leave here by six, if that’s fine with you.”

“Yeah, sure,” she tries for a smile that falls short, if Strand’s expression is anything to go off. “Sounds great. You could’ve just texted, though, saved a trip across the bridge.”

“Like I said, I was… in the neighborhood.” He gives her another once-over. “Are you sure you’re all right?”

“Yeah, just rattled from today.”

“The accident.”

“Yeah.”

He looks around the room, as if he hasn’t sat in that chair with that same view a hundred times before. Clearly, he wants to ask what else has happened, because she attached him in the email she’d sent to Nic of the damages to her car, reassured them both in her email that she was fine. But he doesn’t; he won’t push when she’s pulling back. One of the very many differences between the two of them.

“Would you… like to get something to eat?”

Nic’s invitation to their local bar floats through her head, but she can just text him, let him know she’s calling it an early night.

“Yeah, I could eat.”

“Good.”