The Ghost of Graylock (23 page)

G
RAVEL AND DIRT SPAT UP FROM THEIR SHOES
as they splashed through sodden ground. Their wet clothes clung to their skin. The hailstones had mostly melted, and the sky that had created them was almost clear. A bright-white half-moon was coming up over the horizon ahead. Neil and Bree raced along the side of the building, past the boarded-up window where they’d first entered the hospital, toward the shattered patio at the other end of the island. Their ears pounded with sounds of their own making, so that by the time they reached that broken back door, they were both unsure if Andy had heard where they’d gone.

Standing on the concrete among the invasive weeds, Neil grabbed the handle of the door to the youth ward, feeling both panic and relief when it turned. Pulling the door open with a nearly imperceptible slowness, he managed to dampen the possibility of squealing hinges until he’d opened a wide-enough gap for Bree to squeeze through. He followed her briskly onto the platform just inside, then just as slowly as before, he closed the door, wishing there was a way to lock it.

All they had left was a slight hope that they’d been quiet enough to escape. They only needed to hide in here until they were sure that Andy had given up. Gone home.

And then what?

Neil knew Andy wouldn’t stop there. What about Wesley and Eric? What about the aunts? No. He and Bree couldn’t merely hide. They needed to get back. To warn everyone else. To tell them what they’d learned.

Someone was walking outside the door. Heavy boots kicked gravel.

Neil’s heart sank. He imagined that fireplace poker reaching out for the doorknob, the hook catching hold.

Neil held the inside handle as tightly as he could, his palms slipping over the smooth metal. The door rattled. Bree took hold of the handle as well, leaning backward with all her weight. But it wasn’t enough. The door creaked slowly outward.

Through the slight crack that appeared, Andy peeked in at them. His eyes were wide, lifeless. Practically robotic. The man had a mission. He would not be talked out of it. Raising his top lip in a canine grimace, Andy threw his shoulder backward, yanking the door even farther open. Neil and Bree strained with every ounce of strength to simply hold on, and somehow, they managed to keep their feet just inside the jamb.

“I can’t,” said Bree, her strength fading.

“Let go,” Neil whispered. “On three.” He nodded and they released the door.

Andy stumbled backward.

They had only seconds to run.

The staircase led up to the youth ward’s common room and down to the mysterious depths of the boiler room. It wasn’t even a choice which direction they’d take.

At the top step, Neil and Bree slammed themselves against the cage gate. It swung wide and hit the wall. Behind them, the outside door yawned open too. Neil reached out and shut the cage as Andy burst through the entry onto the platform at the bottom of the stairwell. He glanced up at them, clutching the poker in both hands. Then he came, taking steps two at a time.

Bree dragged Neil to the other side of the cage just as Andy used the hook to smack the mesh door open. Andy pulled himself into the common room, swinging around the corner as Neil and Bree clambered to the opposite side and the stairwell leading to the bedrooms above.

They slammed this next gate shut, but it swung open again, refusing to catch. Andy approached, chortling a wheeze of triumph. Bree paused at the bottom step, her fingers sticking through the small diamond-shaped openings in the wires, trying to latch the cage door before Andy could work it open again.

Andy raised his hook and slammed it against the metal. Bree screamed and pulled her fingers out of the way as the mesh was crushed. But the latch held. When Andy tried to pull the door open again, it caught with a jolt. He’d smashed the cage so hard, the crushed metal had blossomed inward, creating a makeshift lock, putting a barrier between himself and his target. Realizing his error, Andy released a howl of anger that echoed through the room.

Neil wanted to sneer, to stick out his tongue or worse, but Bree was already halfway up the stairs, calling for him to follow her. When Neil turned back, he found that the common room was empty. Andy had already gone.

U
PSTAIRS, BLOCKS OF BLUE MOONLIGHT
spilled through the open bedroom doors, illuminating the otherwise pitch-black corridor. Bree and Neil stood at the beginning of the hall, glancing back and forth between the direction they’d come and the darkness they knew they would find ahead. Bree held Neil’s hand, and he felt very young. He thought he could feel her heartbeat pulsing in her fingertips. If this had been some other place, some other time, he would have pulled away. Left her alone. Maybe even made fun of her. But here, he understood that inside that thrumming feeling, that beating beneath their skin, the same blood flowed through their veins. He knew he needed her. Now and for the rest of their lives — however long that happened to be.

Wind battered the building, and something knocked against the nearby windows. Twigs, leaves. Remnants of the storm. Bree squeezed his fingers even tighter.

“It’s just how we left it,” Neil whispered. It was something to say. His voice sounded funny up here. Lonely. Loud.

From down the stairs, a clanging noise echoed through the common room. “He’s looking for another way up,” Bree said. “We have to get out of here.”

Neil glanced down the stairs at the busted mesh gate. “But the door’s stuck.”

Releasing a measured sigh, Bree stepped into a puddle of moonlight that shimmered out from the closest room. “Then we need to look for another way
down
.”

At the end of the hall, they turned the corner and met a wall of darkness.

Stepping lightly, noiselessly, they passed the point where Neil was certain they’d first encountered Rebecca Smith. Room 13. The shadows here were so dark, they almost seemed to be filled with color, in the way strange shapes sometimes appear behind your eyelids if you press on them.
Where was Rebecca now?
he wondered. Was she watching them? She’d pulled them from the lake, but did that mean she was on their side, or did she simply wish that they’d die
here
instead?

They felt their way along the walls to another bend. Another double doorway. Another hall.

“What do you think happened back there?” Neil whispered as they blindly continued on. “At the aunts’ house? When we heard Andy calling Rebecca’s name?”

“It wasn’t Andy, obviously,” said Bree after several seconds and several footsteps. “It was Rebecca’s memory. Wasn’t it? I mean, that’s what’s been haunting us all this time. Andy’s voice, his apparition, was just another part of it. What I don’t get is why would Rebecca reveal that part only now? What’s so different about tonight than any other night we’ve been here?”

“Dad came to bring us home,” said Neil. “If Rebecca’s ghost has been learning how to show herself to us, to tell us the truth about what happened here at Graylock, then she might have had a reason to blast us with everything she had.” They’d come to another part of the hallway, lined with windows. For the moment, they could see each other.

“Yeah!” said Bree, stepping quickly past a long-forgotten wheelchair shoved against the wall. “Maybe Rebecca needed the storm and all of the electricity to reveal who killed her.”

“But we never saw his face,” said Neil. “She
didn’t
reveal who killed her.”

“Sure she did. She got us to call Andy. She knew we’d find her clues at his house. The antlers, the piano bench, and the birch logs.”

“She set us up,” said Neil, wishing he could stay where he stood, in the light of the moon. But the darkness of the hall ahead seemed to call to him. Forward was their only option.

“Maybe,” said Bree, pulling him along. “But maybe not.
She
didn’t ask us to tell her father everything we knew.”

“Still,” Neil whispered, dragging his heels on the rough linoleum, “how were we supposed to know who he was? What he’d done?”

Bree huffed. “It’s too late now to worry about that.”

“Way too late,” said Neil.

He stopped and managed to hold Bree in place. With her arm outstretched, she turned and threw him an irritated glance — bug-eyed, the one she was so good at. “Please,” he whispered, his voice sounding as if it belonged to someone else — someone both older and younger than him, as if it were possible to be those two things at once. “Tell me we’ll get home okay. That everything is going to be fine.” He didn’t care if it wasn’t true. He just needed to hear her say it.

“I promise,” said Bree. Her words were like an impossible glimmer of light in deep water.

When they’d crossed into the new line of shadow, and their eyes adjusted to the darkness again, Bree and Neil found themselves standing in front of another door. Bree nudged it open with her toe. The hinges popped as the door swung against the wall.

Inside, a desk sat against a line of windows that looked out upon thick pine branches. Beyond those, moonlight flicked silver flecks off the surface of the lake.

“Wait a second,” said Neil, glancing at the wall next to the desk. He strolled over to it, reached out, and his hand disappeared into a recessed cavity in the stone. “I know where we are.” Bree followed, and together, they peered into the opening. There was just enough moonlight to show them several steps spiraling down. “This is the way Eric came that first day, when he found us in the ballroom. These stairs lead all the way down to the basement.”

T
HE STEPS WERE SLICK, THE STONE WALLS DAMP
. Neil left a fingertip trail as he felt his way along, twisting slowly into the depths of the building.

His sister’s breath hushed in his ear, a comforting signal. In his blindness, his imagination soon began to buzz. He imagined turning around to find himself alone — what he’d thought had been Bree would turn out to be nothing, or worse …
something else
. “You there?” he whispered, to be sure. His voice came out a little too loud. He wished he could catch it as it echoed up and down the stairwell.

“Yes.” Bree touched his shoulder and he felt better, even as he wondered where Andy might have gone.

Maybe he’d be waiting for them back at the bridge.

Don’t think about that
, he told himself as they passed a small landing and continued down.

After another short while, Neil’s foot met liquid instead of stone. He splashed up to his knee as he nearly fell face-first into cold water. Somehow in the dark, Bree managed to catch his arm before he toppled over and doused himself completely.

“The storm flooded the basement,” Neil said.

“How deep?”

Neil took another step and sank down to his waist. Reaching forward, he knew that they had several more stairs before the bottom. “Pretty deep. I’m not sure. Do we swim it?”

Bree sighed. “To where? The boarded-up window? Maybe we could use that desk we climbed in on to get back up and out. But how are we supposed to find leverage when half the gym is underwater?”

Neil didn’t want to say what he knew they were both thinking. He squeezed his eyes shut, discovering the same blackness there as when they were open. “We have to find another way.”

Turning back, they climbed back to the landing. Neil felt for the wall. “This must have been where —” Before he could finish, he managed to knock open the bookshelf door that Eric had come through on that first day. Before them, the old ballroom appeared, lit dimly by the night spilling in through the tall windows.

They stood in the doorway, listening to the silence, alert for any indication that someone was waiting for them here. A breath, a footstep, a rustle of clothing, a shifting of weight. A trickle of water echoed faintly from somewhere nearby, but that was all. The crows that had met them here several days ago had found shelter elsewhere. The two were alone.

Stepping into the room, Neil turned toward the door that he knew was on the far right wall.

“Wait,” said Bree. “That just leads back into the maze of corridors.”

“But there’s no other way,” said Neil. “There’s the flooded basement or …”

But Bree glanced at the windows across the room. His heart fell.

“You want us to jump?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t say
want
,” Bree answered, stepping farther into the room. “More like
need
. Come on. Don’t think about it, or you’ll chicken out.”

“We could get seriously hurt. It’s a long fall.”

“Well, we’re not safe in here either. Andy could be anywhere right now. I personally don’t want to find him waiting for us around some corner.”

Neil shuddered. He knew she was right. “Fine. But be careful. I can’t carry you home by myself if you break a bone.” As if that was the worst that could happen. “And watch out for the floor,” he said. “It’s weak.”

“I remember.”

Together, they stepped toward the broken window in the farthest corner, the one beside the giant mantelpiece where the crows had jeered at them. Several panes of glass were shattered but the frame was intact. Even though they were careful to avoid the jagged hole that had tried to claim Neil as its victim, the floor groaned and whined, sounding like a tired child on the verge of a violent temper tantrum. Feeling safe enough near the sill, Bree grounded her feet and pulled up on the wooden sash. But it refused to budge.

“Locked?” asked Neil.

“Stuck, I think.”

“Just break the rest of it.”

A crash echoed through the room as the far door — the one that led back into the hospital wings — flung open and hit the wall. As Neil and Bree turned, they saw a white streak enter the room and quickly disappear.

“What was that?” said Bree, pressing herself against the frame.

“Shh.” Neil waved her quiet. “Listen.”

From down the hall, they heard a flurry of footsteps. Someone was running toward them. The sound grew louder as the person barreled along. Even from far away, he managed to shake the floor.

Wham. Wham. Wham. Wham.

Neil and Bree instinctively crouched beside the rolled-up carpet that sat beneath the length of windows. They huddled as close together as they could, trying to shrink, to hide inside darkness.

The sounds, the tremors, stopped.

In the doorway across the room, Andy stood, his chest quickly rising and falling. He was still clutching the hooked poker.

For a moment, Neil was certain that he couldn’t see them.

The man stepped forward. “Sorry, kids,” Andy said through harsh breath. “Dead end.”