33

Full-on panic sets in, and Sarah scrambles under the desk. Once there, she realizes she left her phone flashlight up top, shining on the ceiling. She holds her breath, begging her heart to stop beating like a machine gun while she listens to see if perhaps the noise was just an old building settling or if someone else is down here. If it’s George or Gail, she’s in trouble. If it’s Lucas, she has to stop him before he hurts himself. He must’ve been sleepwalking earlier, and there are too many holes in the floor for a kid to be wandering around alone and senseless. Especially if he’s still shoeless.

Footsteps are coming up the hall toward her. Slow, measured, careful, echoing down the cold white tunnel. These are not bare feet, she thinks; these are not the stark, curled-bone toes of the girl in the coffin, not some squelchy, ghostly monster.

They’re shoes.

And they’re not immediately outside the door, so Sarah pops out, grabs the phone, tucks herself back into the tiny cubicle of space, and flicks off the flashlight. Hard to believe she shared this same tiny cube of air with Ingrid, the last time she was here; it’s barely big enough for one person, much less two.

The steps get nearer and nearer, gently tapping, and stop outside the office door. Sarah focuses every cell in her body on being quiet, on not moving, on barely breathing. She’s getting a little light-headed, but she can’t get caught. If only she had another chunk of Ingrid’s pill, whatever it was. If only she didn’t feel like she was having a panic attack again. She starts counting breaths, but it’s harder alone.

After a long pause, the steps enter the office and move around to the bookshelves. A soft scraping noise suggests someone has picked up the ledger Sarah threw.

Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Kyle always told Sarah that her temper was one of her worst features, that she made bad mistakes because of it and it would hold her back from the things she wants in life, but…did he ever really see her temper? She used to get mad, but she never acted on it. She’s beginning to think it’s just one more thing he gaslit her about, and that really her fury has only come out again now that she’s free of him.

“That’s not where you go,” the voice says, and Sarah exhales in relief.

It’s just Ingrid.

“Yeah, I threw it,” she says, gratified to hear Ingrid gasp and stumble back as she crawls out from under the desk. Her feet are numb from being all contorted, and she shakes them gently one by one as Ingrid glares at her in the ambient glow of her flashlight.

“I am going to expire.” Ingrid huffs a sigh as she holds the thrown ledger. “I am going to have a heart attack, and it will be your fault, and that will be your third run-in with a corpse here, and they will kick you out. Three strikes, no thank you, good day, sir.”

“You’re the one who snuck up on me,” Sarah shoots back. “I was just down here innocently throwing ledgers at the wall when you slammed a door and scared me to death.”

“And I was innocently taking photos of a padded cell when I heard someone throw a ledger against the wall and had to assume poltergeists were hard at work and tiptoed over to try and catch a pic.”

Sarah’s head snaps up from where she’s been idly digging through the paperwork on the old desk. “Wait. How did you know it wasn’t George?”

“I heard Gail tell Bridget that he went into town to take care of his mom.”

“Is his mom…the Cryptkeeper?”

“Yes. Definitely. Because he is a thousand years old. Anyway, since he’s the only person who ever bothers to visit this place, I figured I had the all-clear.” She puts the ledger on the desk where it belongs, and her black-painted nails tap on the moldering green cover. “Looks like I was wrong. So what are you investigating?”

Sarah nudges her aside and flips through the ledger to the final entries. “So the girl in the coffin was Emily Engle. She was a guest of the hotel for her honeymoon and did the whole Change of Air thing. Her husband tried to rape her, and she understandably freaked out and smashed a chamber pot against his head so he needed stitches, and they sent her down here, where a different doctor was basically running an insane asylum for rich women who didn’t behave.”

Ingrid’s eyes go big. “No shit?”

“Just look.” Sarah runs a finger down the line of the ledger. “Hysteria, mania, schizophrenia, melancholia, sexual aberration, refusal to submit to her father. These women weren’t at a spa. They were locked in cells. They were restrained and given drugs and blasted with cold hoses. Maybe the story back home was that they were being treated like treasured racehorses, but they were really being treated like…like lab rats. You were right. This is very much a medical facility that did sneaky shit.” She pauses, realizing something, then flips past several pages to make sure. “And every single name in this ledger is female.”

“That is fucking disgusting.” Ingrid shines her flashlight on the ledger, shaking her head. “Hold this.” She shoves the flashlight in Sarah’s hand, then adjusts it to shine exactly where she wants it. Sarah’s arm is already getting tired as Ingrid holds up her Leica and takes several pictures. When she’s satisfied, she lets the camera dangle from the strap around her neck and takes back the flashlight. “This is going to be one hell of an exit show. As long as Gail doesn’t find out what I’ve been up to and kick me out first, that is. I found the hydrotherapy room.”

“And?”

Ingrid heads out of the office as if Sarah has already agreed to follow her. And of course Sarah follows her, because she’s seen what she needs to see and doesn’t particularly enjoy being alone in an abandoned asylum. Ingrid leads her down the hallway she hasn’t seen yet, and it’s just another dark tunnel with mold-streaked walls, something right out of a horror movie. The first set of double doors has a plaque that reads Hydrotherapy, and Ingrid goes inside and shines her flashlight around on…well, a torture chamber. Maybe they have posh baths upstairs and carved pools outside flowing with mountain springwater, but this room is a rusting sepulcher of pain. The walls are white, stained with bumpy blooms of algae, with odd metal light fixtures hanging seemingly at random from the ceiling. There are big metal tubs with doors that close over the top so that the patient’s head would be the only thing visible. There’s a row of white tables shaped like gurneys that are draped with ghostlike sheets. There’s a white-tiled corner with a drain in the floor and a steampunk-looking hose coiled on a hook. Pipes crisscross the ceiling like something out of the boiler room in a slasher flick. All the metal is rusted, the white tiles grimed over and outlined with blackened grout. Somewhere, impossibly, a showerhead drips.

“Shit,” Sarah says, a chill running up her spine.

“Shit is right. They didn’t even have electricity back then, so this whole place had to be lit by gas. No sunlight, no fluorescents. Just a tiled underground room that could go pitch dark at any moment.”

“I don’t like this place,” Sarah says. The hydrotherapy room fills her with foreboding, with a sinking sensation that makes her want to run right back into the office and hide under the desk. “Can we leave?”

Pain permeates the air, heavy as mist. Horrible things happened here. It’s as if someone has just finished screaming. It’s as if the orderlies might come back at any moment.

No one could see this room and think these women were being pampered.

“Yeah, this place wasn’t meant to be liked.” Ingrid inclines her head toward the double doors. “But I found a better way out than the hole in the lobby door, at least. Come on.”

Sarah feels a thousand times better the moment she’s back in the hall, which is saying a lot, because the hall is a place stolen from nightmares. They continue into the darkness, passing door after door, and Sarah can’t help thinking about the noises that would’ve echoed down the corridor, long ago, women moaning and screaming, begging for help, crying alone in the night. She can’t imagine what it must’ve been like for pretty, pampered Emily Engle, marrying well and going on a whirlwind honeymoon with her handsome banker husband, only to end up barefoot on the cold tiled floor in her chemise, experiencing real pain and fear for the first time in her life.

The orderly who attacked her deserved whatever he got, Sarah thinks. He was “reprimanded”; she was assaulted by someone with power when she was utterly defenseless.

Nothing and nowhere was safe for that poor girl.

And she was even more vulnerable once they drugged her to keep her quiet and calm. Who knows what happened to her, once laudanum was involved? The orderly most likely got his revenge, because who was going to stop him? A hand over the drugged girl’s mouth, restraints on her wrists, and he could do whatever he wanted.

It makes Sarah sick.

Beyond sick.

And now she wants to know how a living girl came to be in that coffin, because even if her sanity might’ve been questioned when convenient to wealthy men, rich girls didn’t just disappear back then.

They reach a staircase, the mirror of the one on the other hall. “It’s safe,” Ingrid says. “Sturdy. They sure knew how to build ’em.”

“What’s down the hall?” Sarah shines her flashlight down the corridor and sees only more doors, seemingly extending forever in the darkness.

“A rec room and cafeteria, I guess? Tables and chairs and a small kitchen. I bet the girls down here didn’t get the same chow as the ones upstairs who behaved.”

The steps wind upward in the opposite direction of the other stairwell, and Sarah is momentarily discomfited, as if she’s entered a mirror world. They emerge on familiar carpet, but there’s an acrid odor here that she doesn’t recall from the other identical hallway.

“What’s that smell?” she asks.

“Dunno. I was a little focused on getting to the gory bits downstairs, so I haven’t fully investigated up here.”

Nose twitching, Sarah moves ahead of Ingrid, who stops in front of a door.

“There’s a way out here,” she says. “A back door to a storage room. No crawling over glass. Vast improvement.”

But Sarah shakes her head and keeps on. “I need to know what that smell is. It’s so…familiar. It’s going to bother me.”

Ingrid pauses a moment before following her, swinging her flashlight up ahead. “Why not? Maybe it’ll be something cool.”

They pass a few more doors, and the smell is getting stronger. Sarah recognizes it now. It’s fire—or the ancient remains of fire. Strange, that she didn’t see any evidence from the outside of the building…but then again, the outside walls are thick stone, and she’s mostly been on the other side of the hotel, the one closer to her cottage.

And then she’s standing in front of a partially open door. She shines her flashlight in, pushing back the blackened wood to reveal what’s left of a room—a study, maybe. She can see the old bones of bookcases, the skeletal fragments of club chairs and sofas struggling to rise from the black swamp of ashes. What was once perhaps a pool table lies in two pieces, its legs sticking out stiffly like charred animal bones. The curtains have burned away, the windows boarded over from the outside. Sarah walks to a powdery black wall, knowing the ashes will ruin her jeans, and touches the remains of what was once a portrait, its subject now reduced to empty eye sockets and curled canvas.

“Somebody wasn’t careful in the smoking room,” Ingrid says as she frames a photo of the destroyed bookshelf.

Sarah gasps as she makes the connection.

If this is the smoking room, this is where Dr. December was going to speak with Mr. Engle about his wayward wife. She knows gentlemen of that time period met alone in rooms like this to enjoy brandy and cigars and billiards, purposefully hiding away from the womenfolk who might spoil their fun. Here, they could speak freely, swear, have conversations ranging from ribald to erudite. She can almost see them, two men in nicely tied cravats, settled back in leather club chairs, cigars in one hand and expensive tipple in the other as they blithely determined the future of a woman causing them both distress due to her refusal to fit into the pretty little box they’d built for her.

Sarah takes another step, and something rolls under her foot. She trips and drops her flashlight, falling hard on her hands and knees, elbow deep in ancient shifting ash. Sensing her distress, Ingrid sweeps her flashlight over the ground. There, almost close enough to kiss, is a charred human skull.