Chapter 16 - The Girl in Green

On Sunday morning, I put on the warm wool sweater, in case it was cold under the school. I shoved a couple of protein bars and a water bottle in the small blue drawstring backpack the school had given me. Then I added some tampons and a pack of tissues in case my period started while I was on the run. I’m not the kind of girl who can’t survive without mascara, but I did throw in a tinted lip balm. Chapped lips are the worst.

You have to think about these things.

It was just as much as I could fit into a purse, if I had a purse, which I didn’t. I would have packed more, but I didn’t want Ava getting suspicious. If I got the opportunity to escape, Ava would understand. Still, I didn’t want to tell her my plans in advance. We were supposed to be looking for Layla.

When the time came to go, we walked down the stairs to the dining hall. There were a few people milling about in the foyer, but the dining room was empty. We walked toward the kitchen, looked both ways, and then the two of us slipped through the door to the service corridor.

A long narrow hallway lit by dim overhead bulbs, the service corridor to the boiler room paralleled the kitchen. Most of the school had a threadbare, old-world, white tablecloth glamour, so it was strange to see this service hallway open, exposing rough wooden paneling that looked even more ancient than anything in the main halls. Grubby cracked linoleum floors. There was something menacing about that corridor, the dim watt bulbs in timeworn, gray-beige fixtures, that made my heart beat faster.

The kitchen staff had just finished Sunday lunch and we had to move fast. Church would be over in less than an hour.

If we got caught here, it wouldn’t be good.

Toward the end of the hall, along the side of the wall that bordered the kitchen, there was a row of coat racks. There were boxes underneath for boots, like kindergarten cubbies. The floor near the kitchen door was covered by industrial black rubber matting. Opposite the door that led to the kitchen was a thick metal door with a safety wired-glass window.

Ava pushed the door open, and we stepped through quickly.

A strange waft of damp warmth came from behind the door, smelling of machine oil something dark and metallic.

Inside was ancient fluorescent overhead lighting, the low-key hum of the boiler, and a metal staircase. It wasn’t the filigreed wrought iron of the spiral staircase in the reference library tower. This staircase was grated, industrial metal of a more modern, utilitarian mold. The staircase led down to a metal landing and then took a 90-degree turn.

Ava turned and looked at me as though she was suddenly reluctant to enter.

I couldn’t blame her. Anxiety thrummed along my skin. We were in a place where we weren’t supposed to be.

I took a step onto the metal staircase and it creaked under my weight, making a heavy ringing sound as though no one had been down here for a while and the whole thing had settled. It was solid though, and I made my way down the stairs, holding the rails to avoid stepping too noisily.

We got to the bottom and stood together on the rough concrete floor. The hair stood up on my arms. It felt like there was something down there, a heavy weight of silence.

“Hello?” I croaked.

“Shhhhh,” Ava hissed.

Pipes ran alongside the wall, and at the bottom of the stairs was a white tube large enough to fit on the bed of a semi. It had pipes on the side and a red release valve. I assumed that had to be the boiler.

Ava motioned past the boiler toward a brick wall.

“Behind that wall is the rest of the hospital,” she said.

The back wall looked like it had been put up quickly and haphazardly. There were places where the mortar had squished between bricks, as though no one had bothered to wipe it off. We ran our hands along the wall looking for a way in. Somehow, I’d expected the double doors to still be there. It seemed strange to completely wall off part of a building. What if a pipe broke? There’d be no way to reach it without tearing down a wall.

Ava got on her hands and knees and looked at the base of the floor along the wall.

“There’s got to be a way in,” she said.

“Maybe there isn’t?” I whispered.

“Keep looking,” Ava whispered impatiently.

I found a piece of metal on the floor, a small hunk of pipe with a chewed off end, and tried to use it to pry a brick free. The pipe slipped and went flying across the room, landing noisily on the floor.

“Shhhhh,” Ava hissed.

While she searched the baseboards, I ran my hand along the wall looking for a hidden door or anything that might give way. The wall was solid.

“Maybe this isn’t it,” I said, feeling discouraged. There had to be a way in, but this didn’t look promising.

“There’s a loose brick here,” Ava said. “Bring me that piece of metal.”

I walked to the spot where the pipe had landed. On the wall above was a round door, maybe two and a half or three feet in diameter. It had a large handle with a rubber end that fit into a metal slot on a plate surrounding the door. It was in a dark corner, shadowed on one side by a small partial wall that jutted out into the room. The brick wall butted up against the metal plate, as though the wall had just been dropped there.

I reached over and pulled up on the handle. It was stuck fast.

Ava straightened and craned her head in my direction.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she said.

“Why not?” I said absently. I tried to brute force the door, but it didn’t budge. I looked closely and realized that it had a notch holding the handle in place. I pulled down the handle and pushed it in slightly and the door unlatched with a thunk. A soft cloud of ash puffed out from behind the door.

“Because that’s the medical incinerator,” Ava said. “It’s on the blueprint.”

“Medical incinerator?”

“You know, where they burn leftover parts from surgery, bones and organs. Maybe unclaimed dead people.”

I coughed out a lungful of human dust and shook my sweater frantically. The door to the incinerator swung open.

A dim red light shone through the soft haze of floating particles I’d dislodged.

Red glow.

From inside the incinerator.

I backed away reflexively from the heat that wasn’t there.

I blinked away dust, but when I opened my eyes, the faint red glow was still there.

I picked up the piece of pipe, carefully reached into the drum of the incinerator and tapped the sides. It made a dull pong, and I felt long-rusted metal give way under the tapping. I held my collar over my nose and mouth as the dust of human remains settled, trying not to cough. My stomach whirled and threatened. The dust in my mouth had an acrid, metallic taste.

I felt a simultaneous rush of excitement and dread.

“What are you looking at?” Ava asked.

“I think this is it,” I said. “A way in.”

I moved forward, slowly, through the incinerator, expecting to make contact with bone shards or, worse, a tarry slurry of blood and old organs. I expected remains of the unfortunate dead who didn’t even make it as far as the potter’s field in the valley below. But time and heat had done the work of reducing everything to a fine powder.

I closed my mouth to keep from inhaling bone dust.

The bottom of the staircase was visible in the dim red light. The edges of a large hole curled inward as though someone—or something—had pushed through the opening with great force. I hit a sharp point with my forearm, and pain shot up my arm.

“Be careful of the edge,” I whispered to Ava behind me. “There’s a place where it’s sharp.”

I took off my pack, pushed it through the hole, and squeezed through the back of the incinerator. I flopped inelegantly onto the floor.

I shouldered my backpack and stood. The dim reddish light I’d seen through the backside of the incinerator came from a nearby exit sign. I turned and held a hand out for Ava.

“My skirt is stuck!” Ava’s voice held a frantic note.

We’d crawled through a rusted-out piece of machinery to a long-abandoned part of the school. Dr. Jacobsen’s warning about the dangers of the building ping-ponged through my brain.

I reached in and grabbed Ava under the arms and pulled. There was a ripping sound and Ava popped out of the back of the incinerator like a cork from a bottle. We fell on the floor together with a dull thud that reverberated strangely in the darkened space.

“Thanks, I guess,” Ava whispered.

“Shhhhh,” I said softly. Barely a whisper.

I thought I heard someone, a soft female voice whispering. It had to be an echo of Ava’s voice, but the red-gloom darkness felt inhabited.

We were here. Somewhere down the hall was the operating room where Gay-Lynne Sims had her terrible surgery. But if Star was right, beyond the operating room was a service tunnel and freedom.

Ava stood and pulled out the phone from the shreds of her skirt. My phone.

Ava turned on the flashlight and waved the light around the space.

It illuminated a few hazy feet ahead and not much more. The incinerator backed up against a wall, and we were in a short hallway next to the massive central staircase.

“That can’t be the only way in,” Ava whispered. “Not if Layla is down here.”

“Maybe she isn’t here,” I whispered back. “This place looks pretty abandoned.”

Layla couldn’t have come through the medical waste incinerator as we had. There was no way she could have shut the door behind her. Whatever happened to Layla, she probably hadn’t found the service tunnel.

I shivered, thinking of the fate of a girl I’d never met. Ava could be right after all. Maybe Ms. Burton was holding her prisoner somewhere in the building—just not here.

All the more reason to find the service tunnel and escape.

The ancient exit sign hung over the opening, casting a diffuse red glow through a layer of dust. The stairs matched the main staircase on the first floor.

Ava shined the light up the stairs. They led up to a landing and a 180-degree turn to the upper half of the staircase that went—nowhere. When the hospital had been turned into the school, they’d simply blocked this part of the stairs off.

“Why is the exit sign on?” Ava asked.

“Must be on a live circuit,” I said in a barely-there voice.

Ava and I crept forward quietly, compelled by some deeply buried instinct to make as little noise as possible.

As we cleared the bottom of the stairs, Ava shined her flashlight toward two double doors leading into the old hospital. We walked away from the comforting red glow of the exit sign into near dark. Ava held the flashlight, and I pushed open one of the doors.

The red light on the other side of the door barely illuminated the long hospital corridor. Ava’s flashlight roved the walls, revealing an overturned hospital gurney, cave-like rooms so dark, the tiny light on my phone revealed nothing of their insides.

Ava focused the small light on the floor. There were footprints in the thick dust in the middle of the hall leading toward the double doors. Footprints made from deck shoes. School standard issue.

“Someone’s been here,” I whispered.

“Layla,” Ava murmured.

“Maybe?” I said. “But if so, she didn’t come the way we did. There were no footprints by the incinerator, and she couldn’t have closed the incinerator door.”

I looked down at the footprints. They led to the double doors and back again, as though someone had come from another direction but had turned back before reaching the blocked staircase. If Layla had come this way, she must have opened the doors, seen the blocked stairwell, and realized she couldn’t get out this way.

There was no way she could have known about the hole in the medical waste incinerator. Even if she had, the door was closed on the other side.

My heart rate spiked at the thought of being trapped down here, and I fought the urge to run back and check the hole in the incinerator, just to make sure the door was still open.

I took a deep breath in and out again. We moved forward.

The hall took a 90-degree turn past what looked like an ancient nurses’ station: a clipboard on the counter, an open room behind full of cabinets that must have once held drugs. Another exit sign cast a red glow on the counter.

Across from the nurses’ station was a large room with double doors. Ava tentatively pushed the doors open and shined the light in.

Inside there were three hospital gurneys, each with a round overhead light and a small portable table for surgical tools. There were curtains on tracks designed to separate beds from each other.

The operating theater.

I remembered Dr. Jacobsen telling me that the doctor who invented transorbital lobotomies designed the surgery so it could be in a van, if necessary. Or in a surgical center like this one.

It was possible that Gay-Lynne Sims had her brain scrambled in this exact spot.

“I think they did lobotomies down here,” I whispered.

“That’s not all,” Ava whispered back. “Look around. What do you notice?”

Ava ran the flashlight across the walls, oxygen bottles, and old rubber hoses. I caught a whiff of something sharp and medicinal, like rubbing alcohol. The scent disappeared and I wondered if I’d imagined it. There was something odd about this room, but in the near dark, I couldn’t place it. She scanned the room slowly, light coming to rest briefly on the floor, on one of the gurneys.

And then I saw it.

The room was clean.

We’d walked through years of layered dust in the hallways, thick enough to leave perfect footprints. Here, there was nothing.

“There’s no dust,” I said.

“Layla was here,” Ava said. “I know she was.”

“How?” I said. “She didn’t come through the medical waste incinerator. The main stairway is blocked.”

“There has to be another way in,” Ava whispered.

Another way in, or another way out. I thought of the dotted lines on the blueprint.

Star had said that it was possible that there was a service tunnel in the old hospital. Only she didn’t call it that.

She called it a mortuary tunnel.

Ava walked to one of the operating gurneys covered with a sheet. It looked too fresh. She directed the light to a small metal table nearby. It had surgical instruments wrapped in plastic.

“What the hell?” Ava said. Surprise had pulled her out of a whisper, and she spoke in her normal voice. “Are they doing surgery down here?”

I walked to the table and looked down, half expecting to see a surgical metal ice pick.

There was a scalpel, surgical scissors, and what looked like clamps.

No orbitoclast.

“This doesn’t make any sense,” I said.

Ava leaned over and lifted the sheet on the gurney.

“Oh my god!” she exclaimed.

I followed her gaze to a spot underneath the table. There was a chunk of scalp attached to long black strands of hair with purple overtones.

I stared at the crusted, scabbed piece of scalp as a jolt of raw panic hit me. I lurched backward into one of the gurneys, and it made a horrible metallic sound. Too loud.

“Quiet!” Ava hissed.

Someone would hear us. Someone with a scalpel.

We had to get out of here.

“Is that . . . ?”

“Layla,” Ava said. “This is her hair.” She reached down and touched the strands of hair lightly, almost reverently. “What happened to her?” Ava whispered.

A noise came from outside the operating room. It was a small soft noise, like an “oh” of mild surprise, or an exhalation of air.

I went instinctively still. We’d been talking in normal voices, loud enough to be heard. There was someone out there.

“What was that?” I whispered.

“I don’t know,” she whispered back.

“I’m going to look,” I whispered.

Together, we crept toward the doors of the operating room and out into the hall. Ava dropped my hand and turned with the phone, making a wide arc. No one in the dim light.

We moved in the opposite direction from where we’d come. I was convinced that the noise had come from down the hall. The farther we got from the nurses’ station, the darker it became.

I turned the corner and waited for Ava to catch up with the light.

“Jess, where are you going?” she whispered.

“The noise came from down there,” I whispered back.

At the end of the hall, past a half dozen or so rooms, was a set of double doors underneath a red exit sign. On either side of the door were rusted-out sections of what looked like very old wrought iron fencing.

The doors were located at the spot where Star had drawn the dotted lines on the map. Mortuary tunnel. The words refused to leave my brain.

“Is that the service tunnel?” Ava whispered.

“I think so,” I whispered back.

If a tunnel lay behind those doors, it was my best chance of escape. Maybe my only chance.

I had to look.

I crept down the middle of the hall, avoiding dark shapes of abandoned wheelchairs and equipment along the walls. From behind me the light of my phone shook in Ava’s hand, barely making a dent in the surrounding darkness.

I reached the doors and pulled them open.

The greasy cracked linoleum ended at the double doors, giving way to a square concrete tunnel that tilted away from the floor at a sharp angle. Next to the ramp were a series of steps, then a ten-foot-long slab of concrete, followed by three steps, another long slab of concrete, three steps, repeated into the endless dark. Ava came alongside me, the light from the phone illuminating a small circle, no deeper than ten feet, but a damp breeze coming from below gave the sense that the tunnel stretched on into oblivion.

This was it. My escape route.

I willed my feet to move. If I put my hand on the wall and just kept moving down, I’d reach the bottom eventually. Three steps forward, three steps down over and over again. I could do it.

I took a step forward and froze as a soft cry came from deep within the tunnel. There was someone down there, someone lost and alone, who desperately needed my help. I took a step into the tunnel. I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was someone hiding in the darkness. Something listening, waiting.

Silence.

A small, piteous whimper pierced the darkness, full of despair and longing.

It came from the tunnel below.

Far below us.

I took another step into the darkness.

“There’s someone down there,” I whispered.

I walked down the tunnel, out of the shaking circle of light.

“Jess, what are you doing?” Ava said sharply. Her voice echoed strangely through the tunnel, a hiss of sibilance that cut through the air like a knife.

My head cleared.

“What if it’s Layla?” I asked.

I turned to look back. Ava shined the light in my face, temporarily blinding me. She lunged for my arm and grabbed me, pulling me back from the darkness.

“It’s not Layla!” she said.

She shook me roughly, still holding my phone. The light bounced across the wall of the tunnel, landing momentarily on what could have been eyes in the darkness.

My head cleared, the sweet, sticky inertia of longing turning to blind animal panic in an instant. And then we ran, without ever having made the decision to run.

The red light from the exit signs interspersed along the halls was barely enough to give shape to the walls, but we ran anyway, the corridor filling with the sounds of our shoes scuffling through the dust, our cries and groans as we bumped into walls or worse, flailed into each other shrieking from the ancient fear of the unknown in the dark.

We pushed through the double doors, the looming grand staircase giving the comfort of near escape.

Ava found the hole in the back of the incinerator first by running her hands along the wall.

She stuck her head in and I pushed her from behind, more to move her through the space quickly than to help. We crawled through the incinerator dust into the now blinding light of the boiler room, and we kept running, not bothering to shut the door behind us. We didn’t stop running until we were up the metal stairs and into the service hall by the kitchen.