MAYBE IT WAS watching Marcus go or the emotional rollercoaster ride the day had been, but the house felt even more painful than usual.
I buried myself in some Jane Austen until dinnertime, which was about as fun as getting a cavity filled because I felt bad for what I’d said at lunch. Finally, it ended, which allowed me to escape to my bedroom where I could flip through today’s photos on my phone, cropping and filtering them before uploading.
My favourite shot of the day is one of Amy’s empty slush cup, the disposable plastic straw bent at a right angle by her teeth, that I want to filter and title to say something about human consumption and waste. I settle on a dramatic over-saturated filter and am trying to think of a title when Sevren’s ringtone interrupts me. For a moment I consider ignoring the call, but it is Sevren so I press Accept.
“Hey,” I say.
“What’s goin’ on, Morgan?” He sounds worried and I feel guilty. Of course he’s worried. I haven’t texted him all day and the gossip mill must have been working full-time since before lunch.
“It’s been a crazy day.”
“I’ve heard. Wanna catch me up?”
I do. I try to minimize the bad bits and play up the parts about Marcus.
“Sounds like a good guy,” Sevren says when I’m done.
“I think he is.”
“Just,” Sevren hesitates a moment, and I can almost hear him deciding how to finish his sentence. “Be careful, eh?”
I wonder how else he might have ended that, but not enough to push. Not today.
“I will,” I say, and we leave the conversation there. Sevren goes back to his scary movies and I title the photograph “Hunger”, upload it, and then watch cats say “Hey” on YouTube until I fall asleep.
AMY’S SCREAM WAKES me, and for a moment I think—I hope—it’s only an echo from my nightmares. Then it repeats. Amy’s voice, raw with fear. “No! No!”
I kick off the blankets and stumble out of bed and down the hall. I shove Amy’s door open and flick on the light. A dozen My Little Ponies stare at me from the posters on her wall, and Amy, sweet Amy, sits upright in bed, eyes unseeing but wide, mouth wider, screaming, “No! No! No!”
“Amy,” I say, but she doesn’t hear me so I touch her shoulder. She starts, spins her head like something from The Exorcist to look at me, and dissolves. Her back curls, shoulders slump, and face goes slack, then she begins to cry. “Oh, Morgan!”
“Shh, it’s okay, Amy.” I sit on the edge of her bed, put my arm around her, and let her soak my shoulder with her tears. I don’t mind, I really don’t, but this isn’t my job. This isn’t my place. Mom should be doing this, comforting Amy. Not me. I should be sleeping. Like every other normal teenager in the world. Except I’m not. Normal, that is.
“It was the rollercoaster,” she says between sobs, like I couldn’t have figured that out already. It was always the rollercoaster.
Amy is terrified of rollercoasters. Hates them. Dad took her on one once, when she’d been a bit too small for it. Amy swears the harness didn’t fit her right. She says every time the cart went upside down she fell a few inches before the too-big shoulder harness caught her.
I’m not super sure that reflects reality but it doesn’t matter, it’s what Amy believes. She’d been traumatized. Each time the car went upside down she thought she was going to die, to fall like a raindrop from the top of the loop and splatter on the tracks below. Since then, even the sound of a coaster is enough to bring her to tears, and since the accident, her nightmares about them are a weekly event. She should really be in counselling, but all the grown-ups in her life are too busy to notice.
“It’s okay,” I say. “Only a dream. You’re safe. You’re safe.”
I smooth her hair and let her cry. When her sobs turn to hiccups and she pushes me away, looking embarrassed, I leave so she can compose herself.
It’s too early to go to school and too late to go back to sleep, even if I could, which I couldn’t. There’s only one thing to do.
I dress and pull on my running shoes. On my way by, I knock on Mom’s door. She doesn’t answer, which makes sense given she slept through Amy’s screams, so I slip inside and shake her lightly until she opens her eyes.
“Amy had a nightmare,” I say. “And I’m going for a run.”
She nods groggily, and I can tell my words haven’t quite penetrated yet, but they will soon enough. I leave her and am out in the crisp morning air before either she or Amy have left their beds.
I’m on my second lap around the hospital, letting the one-two of my shoes on the pavement stomp out the echoes of Amy’s screams, when something pulls me out of my head and back into reality. A sound. A car. A car, but not any car, Keith’s car. I would know its specific rumble and rattle anywhere.
I cannot deal with him. Not right now. As his Trans Am turns the corner in front of me, I see I’m at the gap in the chain-link fence around the hospital. The sun is coming up behind me so there’s no way Keith can see who I am. Not for sure. Not yet.
I’ve never been brave enough to ignore the NO TRESPASSING signs before, but now I don’t hesitate. I duck through the hole in the fence and run around the corner of the hospital.
As Keith’s car drives right by without even slowing, a little thrill goes through me, shifting all my misery off to the side a bit, and it has nothing at all to do with him. It’s only a few steps through a fence but it feels good to be doing something forbidden. I don’t linger on that thought because at first being with Keith had felt good for the same reason and then suddenly it had felt very, very bad.
This is different, I tell myself.
There is no one here except me and the pigeons. So many pigeons. I often photograph them. Some people call them flying rats, but I think they are beautiful. They whirl in and out of the empty windows of the hospital, dancing in the air in giant flocks before suddenly veering off in a random direction. One day, what must have been hundreds of pigeons, crows, and magpies, had been roosting up on the top of the hospital. I don’t know what startled them, but suddenly they’d all taken flight at the very same moment, rising up into the sky as one massive flapping, squawking cloud that whirled and twirled before shattering into individual birds which then swooped and dove and vanished into different windows, nooks, and crannies.
I approach the nearest outbuilding. It’s built of grey stone that looks like someone had made the frame and then poured concrete over the whole exterior. Giant cracks spiderweb all the sides, and the single window has long since been shattered and its glass scattered. Now grass clumps poke through the hard-packed gravel all around it, and when I peek inside, I see nature has reclaimed the interior as well. The floor had once been concrete but now cracks split it into sections and dandelions and weeds peek up from between them. It’s small, a single room. Rather boring.
Leaving it, I peer up at the hospital. I grew up beside it, have seen it every day, but it looks completely different from this close.
Standing in its shadow and looking up at its cold, grey walls, I feel a shiver go down my spine, a shiver that can’t be completely explained away by the cool autumn morning. Given my current mood, however, that chill is more of an incentive to keep going than a deterrent to it.
Though I’ve never been on the grounds before, I know, as well as anyone in the neighbourhood, how to get into the hospital. There’s one window in the South East corner of the main building that provides the easiest access. It’s boarded over, the same as every other one in the building, but not securely. Once it had been screwed in on all four corners but now only one screw remains so the board pivots on it. It looks closed but if you push on it, it swivels up and out of the way so you can climb in.
Dirty glass litters the ground, and I’m careful about where I place my feet on my way to the building’s corpse and the loose board that will let me into it. Nothing stands out about the board, there is no X on it to mark the spot, and it’s as filthy and tagged with graffiti as all the others on the bottom floor, but every kid knows about it. It’s how the junior high kids get in to cause mischief and the high school kids to party and make out. The only people who don’t know about it, it seems, are the adults.
Suddenly I’m not sure entering the haunted hospital is a good idea. I don’t believe in ghosts. Not anymore. Not really. But I do believe in rusty nails, crumbling supports, and unpredictable vagrants. I look over my shoulder, at the neighbourhood I grew up in. I can’t see my house from here, it’s on the other side of the building, but all the streets around here are as familiar to me as my own. All safe. All boring.
Maybe what I need to deal with Keith and all the other troubles in my life, is to learn to be braver. Maybe that’s what this trip will teach me. Maybe. I look back toward the hospital.
“Twenty seconds,” I tell the boarded-up window. “I’ll give you twenty seconds to start.” If I’m too frightened after twenty seconds I’ll leave, but not before. You can do anything for twenty seconds.
“One one-thousand . . .”
I push the board out of the way and peer down into the darkness of the hospital.
“Two one-thousand,” I whisper. I can see a table pushed against the wall beneath the window. It’s filthy from the passage of countless feet but very welcome as it saves me from a substantial jump down into the hospital’s basement.
“Three one-thousand,” I say, putting my left foot down carefully, testing the table before putting all my weight on it. It looks sturdy but there’s no telling how long it’s been there or how many hundreds of kids and vagrants have tromped across it. Better safe than sorry, as Mom likes to say. The table wobbles a little beneath my weight, but it seems stable enough. “Four one-thousand.”
I pull my other leg through the window, followed by the rest of me. The plywood over the window swings shut behind me, taking the light with it. Suddenly it’s dark. A new flutter of fear flits in my belly, and my voice shakes a little when I whisper, “Five one-thousand.”
My mouth is dry and the familiar taste of fear fills it, tangy and bitter. I strain my ears against the darkness, slowing my breathing to minimize its interference and searching for any sound. Any proof I’m not alone.
I wait, my back pressed against the cool concrete wall, for my eyes to adjust to the difference in light. Nebulous blobs of colour float across my field of view and I imagine a dozen sets of eyes on me. Eyes belonging to rats and spiders and other creatures unhampered by the darkness.
“Six one-thousand,” I say as the darkness bleeds away into a grey half-light and shapes begin to become visible. A filing cabinet leans in one corner; three of its drawers are missing completely and the remaining two stick out at drunken angles. Obviously this had been some sort of office. Nothing to be afraid of.
I sit on the table, dangling my feet over the edge before making the tiny hop to the floor. “Seven one-thousand.”
I scour the ground with my gaze as well as I can in the dim light, making sure there are no hazards waiting to trip me and make me break a leg. Or worse. All I see are water stains and tracked-in dirt.
“Eight one-thousand,” I say after much more than a second has passed with only the sound of my heartbeat heavy in my ears.
“Nine one-thousand,” I say, though the more time I spend in the shell of a hospital the more comfortable I become in it. Besides, despite my count I’ve already been here substantially longer than nine seconds. “Right,” I say, and look around the room once more before taking the first step to follow the tracks of hundreds of other adventure-seekers deeper into the old hospital.