Chapter 22 - The Girl in Green

Eleven came too quickly. I put on my gym shoes instead of my slip-on deck shoes and tied the laces tight. I slipped on my wool sweater. It was dirty but it was the warmest thing I owned. It was cold in the old hospital.

I looked around the room for anything that could be a weapon, but I didn’t find anything. I put Star’s penlight in my pocket.

There was a small rap on the door, and a moment later Kenzie came in.

“It’s time,” she said.

I thought of my mom at that moment. My mom who was in Chicago, probably in bed with Clear or out at some sort of weird art happening. I was no longer mad at her for not being honest—I was past that.

I missed her.

“Kenzie,” I said softly. “If . . . something happens to me, will you tell my mom something?”

“I don’t even know what I’d . . .” she began. She stopped mid-sentence and nodded. “What do you want me to tell her?”

“Tell her that Oliver wasn’t her fault. She didn’t know,” I said. “Tell her I knew that.”

“Oliver?” Kenzie asked.

“I’ll tell you later,” I said. “I need to tell you something else.”

Kenzie raised a quizzical eyebrow.

“Barlow said he’d go with us,” I said. “He’s strong and if anything has happened to Ava, he could help me—”

“Yeah, that makes sense,” Kenzie said quickly. “He’s a good guy.”

She didn’t want me to finish the sentence, to flesh out all the possible things that could have happened to keep Ava in the old hospital for so long.

Kenzie and I tiptoed out of the room and down the hallway to the end of the girls’ dorm. I pulled open the door and we stepped through. I pushed it closed behind us with a loud click—too loud for the nighttime quiet of the building. Kenzie and I froze. It was past lights-out, and the hall lights had been turned off, leaving only the emergency lights at the baseboard.

A form descended the stairs. He stopped halfway down.

“Jess?” he whispered.

Barlow.

I twisted the penlight on and shined it in his direction. He grimaced as the light hit his eyes, and I turned it off. He tiptoed over to where we stood.

The three of us made our way slowly down the stairs together, trying to make as little noise as possible.

We were nearly at the bottom when a light from the guards’ room near the office came on. I froze. I glanced at Kenzie behind me on the steps.

Kenzie motioned us forward. “Go on,” she whispered.

Barlow and I ran around the corner and into the dining hall, tucked behind one of the double doors.

“Who’s there?” a young male voice rang out sharply. A flashlight swung across the large open foyer, the light moving toward the dining hall.

“It’s me,” Kenzie said softly. “I couldn’t sleep. I was worried about . . .”

“Miss Kenzie?” the voice said, but it had lost all its sharpness. “You know you’re not supposed to be downstairs.”

“I’m sorry,” Kenzie answered. “I just needed someone to talk to.”

She trudged down the steps toward him, making an uncharacteristic amount of noise for someone so graceful. It took me a moment to realize that she was making noise to cover our movements.

We wove through the tables of the dining room toward the service door.

The service door to the long hallway by the kitchen was cracked open, a thin beam of light coming through.

Kenzie was still talking to the security guard, her voice a murmur of indistinguishable words behind me, interspersed with monosyllabic answers from the guard. I wondered briefly if the guard was simply starstruck by her presence. He was young enough to have followed her on TikTok. Either way, she’d launched an all-out charm offensive and it seemed to be working.

I slipped through the door to the hallway first and Barlow followed, pulling the door shut behind us.

We walked quietly down the long service hallway.

Barlow opened the door down to the boiler room and I followed. He turned and held a finger to his lips and pointed at the metal staircase down to the floor of the boiler room. Having spent enough time here and in the reference room, I understood. Metal staircases are noisy.

I waited until he reached the landing to start down. There was a heavy industrial hum and it seemed unlikely that anyone could hear us over the machinery, but I stepped carefully.

It wasn’t until we were at the bottom of the stairs that either of us spoke.

“How do we get in?” he asked.

“It’s over there,” I said. “Behind that half wall.”

We walked toward the end of the room, a large brick wall with the old incinerator near the left corner.

I turned the corner of the small wall and my stomach dropped. The incinerator door was open, just as we’d left it. I’d wanted to believe that Ava had simply gotten locked in, and all we had to do was open the door and pull her through the bone ash and dust. She’d be dehydrated and hungry, but nothing else.

I hoped that she’d be waiting for us on the other side.

My heart beat noisily in my chest, my breath coming in short spurts. I felt like I was standing at the edge of a cliff, ready to dive into waters of uncertain depth.

I pulled out the penlight. “It’s rusted through at the back,” I said. “You can see the light from the exit sign coming from the other side.”

Barlow leaned over and looked into the incinerator.

“I’ll go first,” I said.

I put the light back in my pocket. I pushed past Barlow and crawled headfirst into the incinerator, reminding myself not to breathe in the bone dust.

I flopped out on the other side and pulled the flashlight out of my pocket.

Barlow emerged from the hole in the incinerator a moment later.

I waved the light around the space. It was stronger than my phone light had been, and I saw things more clearly than I had last time. The walls were covered with a moldy industrial tile to waist height. Above the tiles, they were a sickly pale green. The air was thick with dust and bone ash, a cloud of particles in the stronger beam of light.

“I can’t believe this is here,” Barlow said. “How did you find . . . ?”

I shushed him, a noise that reverberated strangely in the space of the stairwell. I hoped that the closed double doors to the main hall would block at least some of the sound of our voices, but chances were anyone—or anything—that was down here already knew we were here.

We froze as the echoed hiss of his voice fell away, leaving an unearthly silence. I had that same feeling I’d had the last time I was down here.

I waited for a sound, hoping that Ava would have heard us.

Silence.

I leaned close to Barlow and whispered, “I’m sure she went to the operating room.”

“Okay,” he whispered back. “You know where that is.”

I took the lead. I pushed through the double doors, my flashlight beam making a wide arc around the walls. I shined the light on the floor, tracing the footsteps Ava and I had left in the dust.

The beam of my flashlight bounced down the hallway, announcing our presence to anything with eyes. Hopefully, to Ava. I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone or something else was down here with us. As we walked down the hall, I scanned the empty rooms, looking for a sign that Ava had been there. All the rooms were empty and the footprints in the dust continued in an unbroken line toward the operating room.

We turned the corner and I pushed through the doors to the operating room and Barlow followed. I flashed the beam around the room, into the deeper dark of the corners.

“It’s so clean,” Barlow whispered.

“That’s why Ava came down here,” I said. “She thought someone had been . . . using this room.”

Barlow shot a glance in my direction. “Using this room?” he said. “What do you mean?”

His voice was rough, and I couldn’t tell what he was thinking.

“For surgery,” I said.

I pointed my flashlight to the floor and the place where we’d found Layla’s hair. There was nothing there. Ava must have picked it up.

“I don’t understand,” he whispered.

“Ava thought Layla was here,” I said, as quietly as I could. “She thought that . . . someone . . . did surgery on Layla.”

“She’s not here now,” Barlow said firmly. “Neither is Ava.”

I could tell that he didn’t quite believe me. It was a lot to take in.

A sick dread settled in my stomach. Where was Ava?

“Come on,” I whispered.

Barlow followed me out of the operating room.

I pointed the flashlight at the nurses’ station and ran the beam across the floor piled with papers and empty vials, all covered in untouched dust. A thick layer blanketed the counter and the floor behind it. No one had been back there.

There was only one place left to look. The hall that led to the service tunnel.

I turned the corner and walked slowly toward the tunnel, willing my feet forward. The flashlight bounced past open doors of patient rooms. I searched the ground in front of all the rooms, hoping to find footprints, any sign that Ava had found a place to hide.

Dust covered everything. The light revealed the outline of our earlier footsteps but nothing else.

“You came this way before?” Barlow whispered, close by.

“Yes,” I said softly.

We turned again into the corridor that ended at the mouth of the tunnel. A sudden cold breeze carried the undeniable stench of something rotten from the tunnel.

“Oh god,” Barlow said, covering his nose with his hand.

At the end of the hall, the double doors were open to the darker black of the tunnel beyond. Ava and I had left them open. I flashed the light across the hallway, looking for footsteps detouring off the main path.

The beam of the flashlight bounced off something rectangular and shiny in the middle of the hall.

My phone.

My stomach roiled with dread. Ava wouldn’t have dropped my phone unless something had happened to her.

I rushed to the spot to pick it up and turned the phone over. Same old dollar store case, the crack I’d put in the corner of the screen now a full-blown spiderweb. The phone was dead.

“Is that your phone?” Barlow whispered.

“Yes,” I said. “She came down here for proof,” I said. “The phone was everything to her.”

Barlow put an arm on my shoulder.

“Maybe she’s down there,” he whispered. He gestured toward the tunnel. “We have to check to be sure.”

A strange strangled noise welled up in my throat.

I didn’t want to look.

I had to look.

Barlow walked to the mouth of the tunnel. “Ava?” he called softly.

Even though it wasn’t likely, I hoped Ava was in one of the hospital rooms hiding and could hear the sound of his voice.

“Ava?” Barlow repeated.

I turned the phone over in my hand and stared at the cracked face in the unnatural brightness of my flashlight, as though staring at the phone would give me some clue of what had happened to her.

Nothing.

I shoved the phone in my pocket.

I pointed the light through the double doors, into the tunnel. The light barely penetrated a few feet, revealing a square concrete tunnel that seemed to extend down forever.

A small cry came from the tunnel. It ran across my spinal column, all my nerves firing in recognition.

“What was that?” Barlow said. He took several steps forward and leaned in to peer down the long, slanting tunnel.

I crept toward the tunnel. I wanted so bad for it to be Ava.

“Help me,” a small voice called from the bottom of the tunnel.

The pathos of that cry ripped into my heart. It was a familiar feeling: that tug on the fishing line, the cry from the bottom of a well.

A girl crying out for help.

A girl who’d died seventy years ago.

The dim light from my flashlight caught the shine of a pair of eyes in the distance.

Barlow reached over and gripped my hand tightly.

We stood together, frozen, waiting, the beam of light pointing straight down the tunnel into nothingness. Even the eyes had disappeared in the dark.

“She’s gone,” Barlow whispered.

“No, she’s not.”

I knew the girl in green was still there, waiting in the shadows. I could feel her. Gay-Lynne. She must have escaped her captors after the surgery—a chunk of her brain gone, but a portion of her feral will still intact. Enough to make her run. She’d fled into this tunnel and died here in the dark, alone.

Misadventure.

Maybe she’d fallen. Maybe they’d killed her.

Whatever had happened, she’d remained here, all this time unaware that she was dead. It was so unfair.

She’d suffered so much in life, and she was doomed to suffer in death.

“We have to help her,” I said.

I took a step down the tunnel, and Barlow tightened his grip on my hand and pulled back. I strained against his grip like an animal on a leash, but he held firm. I wheeled around in the dark, my free hand still gripping the flashlight ready to fight him, but one look at him stopped me.

His face, lit underneath by the tiny flashlight, was a mask of barely contained terror, his breath coming in short, anxious spurts.

“You can’t go down there,” he said, his voice echoing strangely in the darkness of the tunnel. “She’s not what you think she is.”

I shook my head, feeling a fog of emotion lift.

I turned back and pointed the light down.

The thick scent of decay in the air, a pair of eyes flashing from the bottom of the tunnel, set off alarms in my brain.

I wanted to run, but I couldn’t leave her.

Where was that smell coming from?

I searched the tunnel with my flashlight. The beam ping-ponged around the sides of the tunnel, passing briefly over the form of the girl creeping along the left side of the wall. It was Gay-Lynne Sims, bare legs dirty underneath the faded green hospital gown. Hair covering her face.

But something was off.

Her neck was tilted at a strange angle, one arm too long as though we’d caught her by surprise in the dark just before putting on her makeup.

Gay-Lynne’s face, but utterly blank.

“Help me,” she said, taking a step forward.

She looked up and the light caught her eyes, the back of her corneas flashing bright in the darkness. A too-wide mouth soaked in blood.

So much blood.

I was stuck fast to the spot, held by her gaze, all the hopelessness I’d thought belonged to her, my own.

Gay-Lynne Sims.

Monster.

Barlow yanked hard on my arm, spinning me around, breaking me free from the sight of her.

Instinct took over and we ran back through the hospital hallway. I crashed into a gurney and careened back toward Barlow. He grabbed my arm and then we were running arm in arm. We found the incinerator and Barlow scrambled through first. I stuck my head in and Barlow grabbed my arms and forcefully pulled me through the barrel of the incinerator, dragging me through the ashes.

I fell on top of him in the bright light of the boiler room spitting out powder, blinking away dust.

Barlow stood up and pushed the door shut. He pulled up on the handle and slid it into place with a clang.

“This door is iron,” Barlow said through ragged breath, panting from the run, from adrenaline, from fear. “It will hold. It has to.”