Page 32 of Into the Dark

“No idea.” She led the way past the elevator to the northern stairwell.

Nigel stretched his legs to keep up with her. “So what’s the plan?”

“We’ll start on the fourth floor, with the creeper,” she said. “Zeek and I will set up the mirrors, then you film anything that happens.”

They started up the stairs; Nigel rested his hand on the smooth wood of the banister. How many other hands had touched it over the years? “Do you have any guesses as to what the creeper is?”

“I think it’s like, from another dimension or something,” Zeek put in.

“Shadow people aren’t aliens from another dimension,” Adrienne said, not bothering to hide her annoyance.

“You don’t know that! They could be.”

Nigel privately agreed with Adrienne. Human ghosts were real; there was no need to invent wild alternatives. He kept silent, though; thanks to the congestion building in his lungs, he was too busy sucking in oxygen to talk. By the time they reached the fourth floor, he was thoroughly winded.

The northern wing of the fourth floor was a mirror-image of the southern. The same half-tiled walls, metal doors, and gritty floors. Discoloration crept across the plaster ceiling highoverhead; no doubt the slate roof was leaking somewhere. An abandoned gurney, complete with thick leather straps, sat askew in the hall.

Grit crunched under their shoes as they made their way through the long halls to the ward where the creeper was said to lurk. The air remained oppressively quiet, as though the walls swallowed up every sound. How many screams had they muffled over the long years?

“This is where you found the camera from the first investigation?” Nigel asked.

“Yeah.” Zeek looked around, then pointed at the floor in front of one of the patient cells. “It was laying right about there. Covered in dust, of course.”

“I wonder what staircase the man died on,” Adrienne said. “If we could find out, we could use a spirit box or EVP.”

“Ghost hunters talking to a dead ghost hunter?” Zeek grinned. “That would be super cool! He’d know all about this stuff from life, so I bet we’d get some great responses.”

“Especially if we could learn his name,” Nigel mused. “One of the survivors still lives in Weston. It might not hurt to talk to him.”

He caught himself—should he be giving the other team ideas? They were working together for the moment, but if this was indeed some sort of competition for Ms. Montague’s patronage…

Curse the woman for putting them in this position. For not being upfront with them when she called to say she’d secured the site for investigation.

It shouldn’t sting. Dr. Lawson had warned him from the beginning. He’d known there were strings attached to Montague’s help, even if he hadn’t known what they were.

Adrienne was silent as well, perhaps thinking similar thoughts. Zeek, however, seemed untroubled by any musings.“Great idea! Maybe we can drive over tomorrow afternoon and talk to him. Does that doctor lady know how to get in touch with him?”

“Dr. Lawson, and probably.” Maybe he should go with them. Or Oscar—someone fromOutFoxing the Paranormal, anyway.

“Let’s get the mirrors set up, then we’ll shoot the intro,” Adrienne said, clearly ready to get to work. “Nigel, there’s not much for you to do right now, so just stay out of the line of sight of our static cam in case anything interesting happens. Zeek, change out the cam’s batteries, would you?”

Nigel stood out of the way, watching with curiosity as they set up. Two well-wrapped mirrors emerged from Zeek’s backpack, along with two white candles and a small fire extinguisher. “If either candle falls over, stop filming and grab the extinguisher,” Adrienne instructed him. “The last thing we need is for this place to burn to the ground.”

“Where would the ghosts go if that happened?” Zeek asked.

“That’s hard to say,” Nigel replied. “If the asylum was completely destroyed and razed to the ground, they might move on. If ruins remained, some might continue to haunt the place, so locked into their own suffering that they still see the asylum as it was when they died, no matter its current state.”

Adrienne glanced at Zeek. “Remember that crybaby bridge? The old slaughterhouse that was supposed to be beside it?”

“Oh yeah. That’s one of the first videos on our channel,” he added in Nigel’s direction. “There was this crybaby bridge in Tennessee, and legend said there was an old slaughterhouse right on the other side. No trace of it left. We got some readings where we thought it might have been, but…” He shrugged.

“What about the crybaby bridge?” Nigel asked, curiosity piqued. Crybaby bridges were too numerous to count, at least legend-wise. All had the more or less the same story: a distraught woman, living in an era without safe access toabortion or birth control, throws her newborn off of a bridge. Half the time, she was said to jump in after it; one-hundred percent of the time, the cries of the baby were supposedly still heard by anyone stopping on the bridge.

“We just heard a couple of weird sounds that probably came from foxes,” Adrienne said with a grimace. “The place was pretty much a bust, so we really focused in on the stories behind it. Zeek challenged the baby to a fight for control of the bridge.”

“He wanted to…fight a baby?”

“I wouldn’t have actually punched a baby,” Zeek hurriedly put in. “And the viewers loved it! We sold atonof ‘Fight me, ghost baby!’ t-shirts.”

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