I looked at Ryan and then back to rippling water in the doorway. No one was supposed to be there. No one was there; we'd just been through every other room in the decrepit clinic.
A person would have had to come straight here like they knew where they were going. A person without a flashlight. A person who didn't give a shit about seeing two men with flashlights in an office in the basement of a hospital that had been abandoned for over 20 years.
Or maybe it wasn't a person.
Ryan had moved his hand to his police-issue Glock, but otherwise stood frozen. You could see the tension in his whole body, riveted in place. The ripples in the hallway dissipated. "Ryan," I whispered as quietly as I could. My voice was the first sound audible in thirty seconds, and despite my best attempt, it shattered the silence like a pane of glass. Ryan didn't respond, except for a flick of his eyes to me and then back to the door. I took it to mean that he'd heard me. "Did you see it?"
"No."
"Is someone here?"
"... Maybe."
I took my sledge from the desk and took a step around it toward where Ryan was, close to the door. I could feel the numbingly cold water up to my mid-calf swirl around my boots. And hear it. Whatever was in the hall had to have been moving very slowly in order to keep quiet.
Ryan jutted his head out into the hall. I knew he couldn't see anything. Without the flashlights, it was perfectly dark down there. He held his hand backwards like a relay runner reaching for the baton. I struck the weighty Maglite into his palm, which he pointed down the hall. Right, left. He looked back at me. "All clear."
"What was it?"
"Dunno." His face was serious, focused. His eyes flicked around in a sweep of the room. There wasn't anything we needed to bring with us. "Let's go. Slow. Quiet. It went to the end of the hall and to the right." I could barely hear Ryan's whisper. He seemed to want to make up for his low volume by moving his hands more. It looked like he was giving directions to the nearest gas station.
I nodded and followed him out into the hallway. We took one step at a time, hugging the wall, making tiny waves in the black water but remaining silent. The term "silent as the grave" forced its way into my brain. All I could hear was my own breath inside my head. The pace was excruciatingly slow.
About 40 feet past the office door we'd left was another doorway, one that was large and open to the gaping blackness. Past that door, the hallway ended against another cement wall with a dark brown window set into it. A ventilation duct, I guessed.
We slowly approached the open double doorway. The beams of the flashlights barely touched the wall inside it - more flat, gray cement. As we got closer, the light panned around the room. A couple of rusted, metal, rolling tray tables. An I.V. fluid stand.
Ryan stopped and pulled his gun from its holster. I could hear his sharp intake of breath. He held it, his arms so tense that they shook. I heard splashing from the room ahead.
"FREEZE!" The word boomed through the empty hallway.
I can't see, oh god, what is that, is that a person, what the fuck are they doing there, what the fuck are they doing what the fuck, fuck, fuck.
"Who are you?" Echoed Ryan's voice again.
I nearly lost control of my bladder when I heard the voice that responded.
"Hello," a woman's voice, tonal but raspy like sandpaper brushed along a metal pipe, spoke from the darkness. "Yes? Can I help you?"
More splashing, someone's legs as they waded through the water.
"Ma'am, stop where you are."
"Ohhh, am I in some sort of trouble?"
Ryan paused, seeming unsure of how to respond. "Ma'am, it's not safe here."
"Bah," she hissed, and the wading continued.
I shifted, keeping one hand on the wall as I looked around Ryan and into the room. An old woman in all white was walking through the flooded room. Her skin was pale with a yellow tint, criss-crossed by blue and red veins, made more noticeable by the harsh white light of the flashlight. You could see her slightly yellowed teeth through her parted, thin lips. A large, angry sore on her nose drew attention from the rest of her face. Her hair was gray, pinned up in a tight bun under a small white hat. She was wearing a bright, white nurses uniform.
"Stop." Ryan called again, his voice quieter, the panic leaking out of it.
With a frustrated movement of her hands, she huffed and turned toward Ryan. "Stop! Stop? You stop! I'm working here!" She splashed through the water again, heading toward an ancient, completely rusted operating slab in the center of the huge room. As if as an afterthought, she added, "Don't make me call the police!"
Ryan looked at me, fear in his eyes. Before he even said anything, I realized that he was out of his league. "I need to call someone, we need back up - an ambulance, maybe," he said half to me, half to himself. "This is wrong, something isn't right with her." He retreated back into the tunnel and pulled out his cell phone. "Watch her," Ryan ordered, before slipping out of sight.
The woman had reached the operating table and went to work with long, bony hands to undo the rotted leather straps there. "Ma'am? Um, do you need help?" I cautiously offered. My own voice sounding strange to me in the large room. I stepped toward her, but she didn't respond. I looked around. Most of the objects in the room were shoved against the right wall, which couldn't be seen as you approached from the hallway. It looked like about two dozen overturned desk-chairs, the type I remembered sitting in during school. Another metal tray table held brand new leather straps, wing-nuts and attaching hardware, the only new things in the building. The back wall was lined with shelves in bad disrepair. Ryan's voice echoed from the hallway as he argued with someone.
The woman, intent on her work, gasped and sniffed, the noise bringing my focus back to her. I saw that she seemed to be crying. I walked closer, feeling a sudden unexpected compassion for the old woman. I don't think I'd ever seen a clearer diagnosis of insanity.
She squeezed her eyes shut, shaking her hands out like a person with bad arthritis. I tried again, "Ma'am?"
"Your friend doesn't like me," she spat.
"Oh he's -"
"I think I know why."
She stretched the word "know" unnaturally long, as if giving a small moan of pain. She reached a finger up to the sore on her nose, drawing blood from it with a long, dirty fingernail, but giving no indication that she'd noticed. "He's afraid of me. It's because I'm - I look like a -" She frowned with sadness, unable to even say the words. She moved her left hand to cover her face and turned back toward the table, continuing to scratch with her nails.
I turned back, feeling as uncomfortable as I could possibly imagine. I looked for Ryan in the hallway, but his flashlight was just a thin glow of light around the corner. The woman was crying again, louder now. When I turned my light back to her, I saw that the entire side of her nose was now shiny and red with blood. "I was pretty once," she moaned. She was scratching her cheeks and forehead with both hands now.
"Ryan!" I called, alarmed. I heard him splash through the water, but he didn't respond. The woman, however, snapped her head toward me like a feral cat noticing a predator for the first time. She winced at some unseen pain, and gave a horrible groan.
"Ryan!" I yelled again, backing away toward the hallway. The woman reached her hands up, feeling along her emotionless face. She reached up to her hairline, just below the white nurse's cap and sunk her fingernails deep into her scalp. I could see the resistance of the skin and then the eight little *pop*s as the skin gave way, the nails sinking deep into the flesh. With a blood-curdling scream, she pulled down. The strain of it bent her neck.
I tripped backwards, landing in the hallway, splashing water onto the wall behind me. When I regained focus, the woman was sloshing forward in my direction. Her face was a mask of blood. It poured down, soaking her bleached white scrubs. Long pieces of skin stuck to her fingernails like tangled strips of scotch tape. I scrambled back to my feet, turning to run back up the way we'd come in.
I took a full step before I saw Ryan in his dark clothes, balled into the corner. Someone was standing over him in the center of the hall - another person in pure, fluorescent white. My screams reverberated off of every cement surface in the narrow hallway. I ran against the wall, backing into the corner at the end of the hall, trapped like an animal with nowhere left to run.
An explosion ripped through the underground chamber. My ears were suddenly in so much pain, I could think of nothing else. I opened my eyes again to see blood run like an open faucet from the wound Ryan's face, having taken his own life. His body slowly sank beneath the surface of the water.
I was still in the corner. Solid concrete behind me. Beneath me. Above me.
A tomb. That's what this place was.
The nurse had left the operating room. She wiped the blood from her eyes, and began to stagger toward me again. Purely on animal instinct, I tried to run again; to escape. I felt the wall, solidly behind me. A sharp angle dug into my left shoulder. I punched at the brown glass of the vent with my right hand, having forgotten that I was still holding the flashlight. The window shattered, freeing years of accumulated black rot and pine needles in fetid rainwater. Everything was plunged into darkness. I dove headfirst up into the air vent. It was completely hopeless, I knew, but fear and need had taken over.
I had my head and shoulders in the hole, and groped for anything to pull myself with. Jagged pieces of glass cut across my belly. My hand brushed across something flat and metallic about four feet into the hole. I grabbed and pulled, hoisting my lower half up into the opening. The metal handhold rotated in my hand - a fan blade. I planted my foot against the inside of the window frame and rammed my shoulder and head against the fan. The rusted metal tore away and I army-crawled further into the hole, the sides pressing uncomfortably tight against my shoulders. I pulled my legs up to my chest and away from the opening behind me. There were solid walls on three sides of me now, a thick bed of muck and pine needles beneath me. I stood up in the dark. I was able to stand almost all the way up before the arm covering my head made hard contact with a metal bar above me. Past the bar, the ceiling made a hollow metallic sound. I pushed straight up, as hard as I could, feeling the quarter-inch-thick steel cover slide away. I pulled myself up, out of the air duct, and found myself on the edge of the hospital's side parking lot.
I ran. An overdose of adrenaline commanded my legs. My body's momentum slammed into the side of Ryan's car. I yanked open the door and got in. The keys were under the visor where he'd left them. I struggled frantically to find the ignition for a minute, then started the car and tore out of the gravel parking lot. I didn't take my foot off the gas pedal until I reached the next town.
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