Now she’d gone too far. “Such a comedian,” said Neil. “Maybe I should tell them what I found under your bed last month.”
“Don’t you dare!”
“I don’t believe every story I hear,” said Eric smoothly, keeping his voice low. “About this place especially. Maybe there are no padded rooms. No bloody hallway streaks. But we haven’t even seen a tenth of what this place has to offer yet.”
Neil took a deep breath and let it out slowly.
“Look,” said Wesley, pointing at a sign that was posted on a nearby wall.
Activity Rooms
Adult Ward
Cafeteria
Exercise Yard
Youth Ward
“Sweet,” Eric said. “Maybe the cafeteria is serving snacks. I could totally go for some nachos right now.”
Bree chuckled.
Wesley grabbed his brother’s sleeve and tugged him in the opposite direction. “Come on, Eric. You’re gonna drive Neil crazy.”
As they all headed toward the youth ward, that word hung in the air, collecting dust.
Crazy.
Neil took the lead, trying to outrun it.
Worn linoleum covered the floors, and cracked white ceramic lined the walls. The hallways in this section of the building were long and straight. The group’s footfalls echoed, ringing in their ears, as every step brought them farther away from their entry point and closer toward what they hoped was their goal. They walked without speaking — as if out of respect for the former occupants. Or out of plain old fear. Maybe a little of both.
Neil marked down each turn in his notebook so that they would have a clue about how to get back out.
He understood quite well how clues worked. His mother, Linda, had been fine until January, when his father had announced he was moving out. Marriages ended all the time, Neil understood, but usually there was some big sign that something was wrong — fights mostly, at least according to those of his friends whose parents had split up. But Neil’s clues had come during the strange silences at dinners, or nights when he listened to his mom cry herself to sleep.
Neil closed his notebook. Eventually, the group came to a double door. Through panes of glass that were embedded with crisscrossed wire, they saw the doors led to a large, rectangular room. Sunlight spilled in from tall windows along the opposite wall. Eric pulled on the door handle. A sweet, almost nauseating scent escaped. Wesley sneezed.
After they’d all slipped inside, Bree gasped. On the far left side of the room, a table had been set up as if for some sort of party. A festive cloth — faded blue with whitefaced, grinning clowns — covered the table. Someone had arranged paper plates for a large gathering that seemed to have never occurred. A cake, which looked as though it had solidified underneath its faded pink sugar coating, perched in the center on a small silver stand. A large chunk of it was missing. Several conical party hats littered the floor. And a banner had half-fallen from its place on the wall beyond. It read HAPPY BIRTHDAY.
“Weird,” Bree whispered, entranced. She bent to pick up one of the hats from the floor but stopped herself, as if she needed to protect the site in the same way an archeologist would.
“Still hungry?” Neil said as Eric stepped forward. “It’s not nachos, but petrified cake might be yummy too.” Eric ignored him, turning slowly in a circle, taking in the room, mesmerized by what they’d found.
The youth ward.
Toys lay scattered on the floor. The glass eyes of a wooden rocking horse stared out at nothing in particular, waiting blithely for its next rider. An incomplete jigsaw puzzle sat on the floor a few feet from the windows, its image bleached nearly white by the southern sunlight that had moved slowly across the room every day for the past fifteen or so years. To the right of the windows, a shelving unit was packed with a large variety of dolls and stuffed animals, some of which had inexplicably toppled to the ground, lying like corpses at a murder scene. The rest of the creatures seemed to wait, as if their dormant lives could be reactivated by someone picking them up and offering to play.
When Neil raised his camera and flashed another picture, his fellow explorers all exclaimed their version of a yelp. “Sorry,” Neil whispered.
“It seems like everyone left in such a hurry,” said Bree.
“Maybe once the staff knew they were being forced out,” Eric suggested, “they realized that packing up, or even cleaning, would be pointless.”
“Still …,” said Bree, unable to comprehend what had gone on here during the institution’s final days.
Neil understood what she was feeling — it was as though they had stumbled upon a car crash, its victims long gone. This must be what Alexi and Mark experienced in places like this. He lowered his camera and simply observed the stillness, listened to the silence.
Outside, a duck settled noisily upon the lake, quack-quacking, splashing the water’s surface with frantic wings.
“What’s upstairs, I wonder?” said Wesley. He’d noticed what looked like a large cage in the far corner of the room, next to the party table. Inside white mesh bars, a set of metal steps stretched up into the ceiling.
“Or downstairs,” said Neil. Underneath the “up” staircase, blocked by another wire door, more steps disappeared into the floor.
“Look,” said Eric, pointing at a sign on the wall.
Dormitory
Up
Boiler/ Exit
Down
“That’s where they slept,” said Wesley.
“Wouldn’t hurt to check it out,” said Bree. And suddenly, Neil wished she hadn’t made that assumption. The darkness — both upstairs and down — seemed to hum at him tunelessly.
“The cage door looks locked,” said Eric as Wesley reached out to grab at the grating. But the door squeaked open. Wesley raised an eyebrow, and Eric shrugged.
Neil grappled with his flashlight and flicked it back on. Beyond the lip of the highest stair, another hallway stretched off into inky darkness. “Guess I’m first,” he said unsurely as he moved away from the comforting sunshine of the common room.
Once he’d made it to the top, he turned around to make sure his friends had followed. Their wide eyes reflected his own nervousness. The hallway up here unsettled him more than any area they’d already wandered through. Maybe it was that multiple doors stood in opposite walls every few feet, closed and blocking out whatever light they might otherwise have let in. Maybe it was the curve of the hallway at the end of the corridor that appeared to lead off into nothingness. Maybe it was the intimacy of knowing that this was where the patients had slept, lived, dreamed — patients who had not been much older than Neil. He wondered what they had done to end up here. What had been wrong with them?
When his father had left, something shifted inside Linda, as if she’d become possessed by the spirit of someone else. This new mom frightened Neil; he didn’t know her at all. She cried. She screamed. She was silent for hours at a time. New Mom’s emergence made him wonder if he had a shadow person hiding inside him too. He certainly felt like it sometimes — especially when he thought of his parents. What would happen if the shadow decided to come out? Would that mean he was crazy? Would they send him away to a place like Graylock Hall?