Page 38 of Into the Dark

“Trey Nelson, and no. I don’t have anything to do with ghosts, or ESP, or psychics, or any of it.” He glowered at them. “And if you have a half a brain, you’ll get as far away from that crap as possible.”

“I’m a medium, so it isn’t really an option for me,” Oscar said. “Listen, I understand something bad happened to you, and you probably don’t want to think about it, let alone talk to us. But my grandmother died in that asylum, and it’s my duty to help the spirits in it move on. I’d really appreciate any help you can give us.”

Trey studied Oscar through narrowed eyes. “You look familiar. What’s your name again?”

“Oscar Fox. If you follow college football, I played for Clemson a few years back.”

His eyes cleared. “Right, that must be it. Defensive tackle, right?”

“Right.”

Trey sighed and swung the door open. “Fine. Come on in, and I’ll see what I can do to convince you to get the hell out of that asylum before it’s too late.”

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

Howlston was even moredepressing away from the main thoroughfare they’d driven on the way in. Faded signs, boarded-up storefronts, and sagging roofs lined the dilapidated streets of what had once been a thriving downtown. An old shopping cart lay on its side in the road; Chris steered the van carefully around it.

The library was on the outskirts, at the edge of a neighborhood of once-beautiful homes gone to ruin. When they got out of the van, the only sounds were those of nature: bird song, wind, the distant chatter of squirrels.

“Crazy how this place just dried up after the asylum shut down,” Chris said, pausing to snap a picture of some crumbling brick on the front of the library. “Though I guess it was already in the process once the mine closed.”

“Boom and bust,” Nigel agreed. “How do we get inside?”

Someone had boarded up the front doors, but Chris led the way around the back of the small, two-story building. Blackberry brambles clutched at their jeans, as if begging them not to go inside. The service door in the back was unlocked, and opened with a squeal of rusty hinges when Chris pushed on it.

They found themselves in a small office, complete with old computer, fax machine, and copier. A door on the other wall let them out into the library proper.

As Chris had mentioned before, everything had been left in place. Books lined the shelves, some in relatively good shape. But the roof had sprung leaks, and everything beneath them had become a solid mass of pulp and mildew. Between the damage and the tell-tale smell of mice filling the air, Nigel’s heart sank.

“I don’t know if we’re going to find anything,” he said unhappily.

Chris took a series of pictures of some book spines mottled with rot. “The archives in the basement are in better shape, or at least they looked like it at a cursory glance. I didn’t go through them, though.”

Nigel sighed. “Well, let’s hope.”

They found the stairway leading to the basement, and Chris hit the light switch. Fluorescents flickered, stuttered, and finally came to life.

“I still can’t believe the power is on,” Nigel said, descending the concrete stairs. “But Oscar said that happens more than you’d think?”

Chris ducked beneath a curtain of spiderwebs. “I wouldn’t call it common, but it’s not the first time we’ve found power in an abandoned building, yeah.”

The basement was indeed drier than the upper floors. The brickwork ceiling formed thick vaults, as if this had been an important storage area when the building was constructed—though what had originally been kept here, Nigel couldn’t guess. Metal shelves crowded the space, the books on them plainly bound volumes of compiled magazines, court proceedings, and town records.

Near the back, they hit the jackpot: shelves upon shelves of oversized tomes that turned out to be newspapers boundtogether. At one end were bundles of loose papers, which must have been waiting to be bound when the library closed for good.

“The photograph was from 1932,” he said, scanning the spines as he worked back further in time. “We’ll start there—you go forward in time, and I’ll go back.”

Chris took down the heavy volumes for 1932 and 1933 with a grunt. “So I just scan for any headlines referring to the asylum? That’s going to take forever.”

“I know, but we don’t have a choice, since it doesn’t seem they digitized anything before shutting down.” A shame all of this had been abandoned to rot. If he had the amount of money Montague seemed to, he’d spend it on saving archives like this. How many other lonely, abandoned places held the final traces of the people who’d once called them home? Names, dates, and events being slowly lost to the inevitable creep of decay?

To be fair, it was no different than most of human history. Only the tiniest sliver of memory existed of events a hundred years ago, let alone the dim reaches of a hundredthousand.

And this wasn’t a helpful line of thinking. Pulling down the weighty volume labeled 1931, he got to work.

“Your grandmother was a nurse who died at the asylum?” Zeek asked as they entered Trey Nelson’s small house. The front door opened onto a short hallway, cluttered with old boots and stacks of newspapers waiting to be recycled. The overhead lights were dim, ancient incandescent bulbs still hanging on to dear life. Or maybe the dimness came from a layer of nicotine; the entire place reeked of cigarette smoke.

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