I aimed the iPhone into the cabinet and shone it over the various shelves inside. There were pill bottles on every shelf, but whether they contained what I was looking for was another story.
The first shelf had some innocent looking white pills that matched the ones that Dex had, but when I got a better look at the name, it seemed too dangerous and risky to take. I had to stick with what I knew. What I wanted were placebos.
I went to the next shelf. Here I found tiny yellow pills. I picked up the bottle and looked at it closely. It said diazepam on the label. I knew this wasn’t the best thing to be taking, but at least I knew what it was. I had spent half of my life on Valium. Plus they looked exactly like the pills that Dex had been taking for his hallucinations or whatever apparently ailed him.
I quickly opened the pill bottle and poured half of the contents into my hand and shoved it into my pocket. Then I continued searching. I didn’t find the placebos until the very end, but at least they matched Dex’s pills with their round, Aspirin-like body and there were a lot of them. I took a generous helping of those out of the bottle and shoved them in my other pocket.
I didn’t want to waste any more time. Two different pills were enough for my experiment to go through. I closed the cabinet door, slowly this time, and crept over to the door. I poked my head out into the hallway and breathed a sigh of relief when I saw it was still empty. I was shaking all over. My body, and my subconscious.
I closed the door behind me with nothing more than a gentle click and started walking down the hall back the way I came.
A loud POP came from behind me while the hall in front of me became a smidge darker. The loud and unexpected noise caught my breath and made me jump mid-stride. I stopped and stood still.
Another quick POP followed by another level of dimness. I turned around expecting to see someone but what I saw was the overhead lights at the very end slowly going off.
Pop. Pop. Pop. They were fizzling out and leaving the once-bright hallway in darkness, as if some invisible being was going along and removing the bulbs. I knew enough that the scenario wasn’t all that crazy.
The dark was catching up with me. I turned and started to run as quietly as possible, chalking it all up to faulty wiring on a stormy night. But as I neared the stairwell at the end, the stairwell lights went off and so did every other light in the hallway.
The darkness engulfed me. I paused, disoriented and scared out of my wits.
Thump, thump, thump.
The sound of footsteps raced toward me from the far end of the hallway. They didn’t sound quick but they were coming.
For me.
I ran blindly for the door and felt around for it until my hands connected with the handle. I yanked it. It wouldn’t open. The door had locked behind me. There was blackness outside and in. I whirled around, hearing the footsteps still coming, this strange, slow and sloppy run.
They stopped somewhere in front of me, maybe a few inches away. I held my breath. All I could feel was that terrifying notion that something was standing in the dark and watching me. Wanting me.
“Please let me die.” The voice from earlier came from down the hall.
“Yes, please let me die,” another voice came, this one closer to me and from the left.
“He let me die,” said one more. This one sounded familiar. This one wasn’t a human being, a patient in a room with no hope or normal life left. This one had an accent. This one was dead. It was coming from right in front of me.
I slowly stuck my arm straight out in front of me. I wanted to see how close it was. I waved it around but hit nothing.
Raucous laughter erupted from the rooms. It caught on like a wave, crashing down the hall until it was all I could hear. Insane, unforgiving, unrelenting laughter, the type that you’d hear being howled at the moon. It reverberated through the hallway until it forced me to cover my ears.
I thought about calling Dex. He could come down and let me out. I could tell him I went to look for the bathroom on this floor. I took one hand away from my ear and took out my phone, conscious of not crushing the vulnerable, secret meds in my pocket.
BANG!
The lights above me suddenly came on with the sound of snapping wires and the low hum of a generator kicking in. The area just in front of me was illuminated, hurting my eyes. I could see again.
And there was nothing there.
The same went for the rest of the hallway. As each light went back on, it showed how empty the place was. And the laughter stopped along with it.
Until the end.
The last light went on.
There was a woman standing beneath the waxy light bulb. In the middle of the hall. Facing me. She was far enough away that I couldn’t make out her face. But I knew from the snakelike angle of her head that I didn’t want to.
She stood as still as night, not moving. Just facing me like a gunslinger during a standoff.
This…wasn’t good.
I slowly lifted up my hand that had the phone and dialed Dex while keeping my eyes on her.
She still hadn’t moved. But I knew it was misleading.
I put the phone to my ear and after a few rings (I could almost hear it ringing on the floor above) he answered.
“Perry? You OK?”
“I’m locked on the second floor,” I whispered. “Please come and let me out right now.”
“OK, one sec,” he said. I heard him hang up, a few footsteps from above and then the sound of the third-level door opening onto the stairwell. I breathed a sigh of relief, not taking my eyes off the figure at the end.
Which was good. Because she twitched. And now, she was moving, walking toward me, twice as fast as a normal person, almost gliding down the hall as if she were on skates.
Her arms were outstretched, her head wobbled back and forth with each quick stride, and a thick flow of blood flowed off of her, falling to the floor behind her like a red bridal train.
It happened so fast.
She was there.
And then she was in my face.
Her grey, decaying hands around my neck. Her hands felt ice cold. She smelled like gin. She buzzed like bees. And her mouth opened wide, wider than any mouth should ever open, like a steel trap on loose hinges, with brown, rotting teeth as a horrific frame. A single wasp crawled to the edge of her bloated, black tongue. The whole hallway vibrated with an incredibly loud drone that was deafening and debilitating. I couldn’t move. Couldn’t think. Couldn’t live.
“Perry!”
The door swung open and before Dex could enter, the girl was suddenly gone. Vanished into thin air and taking her dead hands, split face and infernal noise with her.
Dex looked around the empty hallway wildly and then focused on me. “What just happened to you?”
I shook my head, placing my fingers at my throat where the icy feeling wasn’t going away. I pointed at the floor above. “Need to get out of here,” I croaked.
He nodded, got me through the door and up the steps. Halfway up, I stopped on the landing and motioned for him to stay. I leaned over on my knees and tried to get my breath and my bearings.
Dex had the small camera on him and brought it up to my level, aiming it on me. “What happened?”
He was filming but I didn’t care. I was having a hard time gathering my thoughts, almost like someone else was sucking them out of my head.
I raised my finger in the air for him to give me a second and slowly breathed in through my nose. I felt at my neck again and gestured for him to touch it.
He did. His hand was hot.
“It’s freezing. You’re ice cold, Perry,” he said. He removed his hand and put it up to my forehead. “You’re hot here though. What happened? Did you see something? Did something…hurt you?”
He stammered through those last words in a way I would have normally found touching except I didn’t know how I felt.
I nodded. “I went…I went to use the bathroom here. I got halfway down the hall and all the lights started going out…one by one. Then there was this laughter. I think it was the patients. From behind their doors. They were all laughing. And then they stopped. The lights slowly came back on. And when they hit the very end…I saw her.”
“Saw…her? The girl you saw in the apartment?”
“Yes. It was her. I saw her earlier today too.”
He nodded, not looking very impressed. He nibbled on his lip for a few seconds and then said, “In the bathroom. At the restaurant. I wanted to ask you about that but…I didn’t want to pry.”
That was an odd thing for him to say. Dex liked to pry about everything and anything, especially when it had something to do with me. It was almost like a hobby to him, just as bugging him for information was a hobby to me. But I let it slide. For now.
“Yeah. It was her. And her again now. She ran after me. And suddenly she was right here.” I waved my hand in front of my face. “I could smell her…the gin.”
Dex turned a wicked shade of pale. All expression left his face and the camera lowered an inch. I watched him carefully, not expecting that reaction.
“What is it? Dex? Have you seen her too?”
He shook his head, blinking hard, seeming to come out of what mini-episode he just had. “No. It just…reminded me of something.”
“What?”
“Did she hurt you?” he peered at my cold neck inquisitively.
“She wanted to kill me. I don’t know if she hurt me. But she would have if you had not shown up. Then she just…” I snapped my fingers.
I put my hands back to my throat and felt around again. My skin temperature was returning to normal but my heart was still racing, the beat popping out my jugular like a drum. “I’m OK.”
He nodded, not looking too convinced, and then turned off the camera. “We’ve got 20 minutes left. Care to do the rest of the third floor with me? I’ll understand if you say no.”
I didn’t actually want to do anything but go back in the car and return to their apartment with Jenn and Fat Rabbit, as funny as that sounded. But at the same time, I felt like as long as I was with Dex, I would be OK. For whatever reasons, this ghost was not showing herself to Dex. Only to me. As long as I was with him, I would be safe. At least, that’s what I was counting on.
“That’s OK, let’s do it,” I said and stepped onto the first step.
Dex reached out and put his arm around my shoulder and gave me a squeeze. “Are you sure, kiddo? You’re my most precious equipment here.”
I gave him a brief smile. “Yeah, I’m fine. At least if she comes back now, maybe we can get her on film.”
“Now we’re cooking with gas,” Dex said with a smile. He was pleased to keep going; lord knows how important the show was to him, but I could tell he was the tiniest bit torn up about leading me up there and inviting the same kind of torment.
I was torn, too, but I determined to go through with it. One of those instances where turning back wouldn’t really make much difference. This ghost was appearing in his apartment for crying out loud. It was wherever I went. That thought sunk my chest like a heavy rock through water.
We walked up to the third floor and entered the hallway, which was still barely lit by the lantern on the ground. Some of his equipment lay scattered about, including the EVP gadget, which was propped up against the wall, lights blinking, obviously recording.