Nightmare (9 page)

"You're absolutely certain we're the only people in here?" she
said, raising her voice to full volume now that the commotion
had passed.

"There's no way to be a hundred percent sure! It's a huge building situated on a massive plot of land. It wouldn't be that hard
for someone to sneak in, even under controlled conditions."

She let out a long sigh.

I kept talking. "But if the sound we heard was coming from
someone alive ... then where did they go?"

Jordin looked around the room anew, her spirits rising. "The
sounds were definitely coming from somewhere down here. Had
to be in one of these two rooms," she agreed.

I nodded. "I don't think it could have gotten past us."

Jordin was grinning all of a sudden, no doubt feeling the
rush of having experienced something genuinely unexplainable.
"So what are you thinking? Residual haunt? That thing you said
where a place stores a recording of something that somebody did
while they were alive?"

I walked outside and examined the doorpost. It was marked
as room number 502.

Of course. I should have remembered....

"I know this room," I explained. "The story goes that one
of the nurses working here hung herself in room 502. She was
pregnant but either she lost the baby or aborted it, because it
was found at the bottom of the elevator shaft not long after the
nurse was found dangling from the rafters."

Jordin looked around the room again and rubbed her arms,
feeling a palpable chill.

I felt like nothing more than a glorified tour guide as we
made our way down to the slanted tunnel nicknamed the Body
Chute. I suggested the stop after we left room 502, explaining
its history to Jordin.

The hospital administrators decided that with so many
people dying daily of tuberculosis under the facility's roof, it
could be detrimental to morale to see bodies constantly being
taken away through one of the main exits. So the tunnel was put
to use, allowing the bodies to be removed via a railcar.

A popular urban legend suggested that when the number of bodies grew to be too overwhelming, the hospital staff
decided to forgo the railcar and just let the bodies tumble
down through the tunnel. I had studied the history of the place enough to know that this was just a spooky story told
to unnerve people into thinking that many of the ghosts of
Waverly Hills were victims of this mistreatment and were still
here to take revenge.

We stared down into the corridor to the point where the
light was swallowed by darkness, stretching into infinity. Jordin
grabbed a small piece of broken-off brick from the floor and
sent it sliding and rolling down the tunnel. We heard it much
longer than we could see it as it rattled on and on against the
cement floor.

A new voice called out in the distance, a man's voice.

Jordin and I froze again, listening hard to get our bearings on
the new sound. We couldn't make out what the voice was saying,
but as we listened, it spoke again.

"Is that you?" the muffled voice echoed down the hallway
behind us.

Jordin let out a nervous laugh, pumping her fists in triumph.
"This is un-stinkin'-believable!" she whispered.

I shushed her, listening hard. The voice was speaking again.

"Caroline?" the feeble, worried man's voice called out. "Honey,
is that you?"

"Yeah! Yeah, it's me!" called jordin in reply, still exuberant
and celebrating that the whole place had suddenly come alive.
"This is Caroline!"

I grabbed Jordin by the front of her shirt and shoved her up
against one of the heavily graffitied walls just outside the Body
Chute. Jordin was on some kind of endorphin high, but as she
opened her mouth to protest, I cut her off.

"Stop it!" I hissed. "Do not provoke an intelligent haunt. Don't
taunt them, don't play with them. Don't ever!"

"I thought you said it was a residual!" she asserted.

"The first one was," I said slowly. "This one reacted to us. It called
out after you threw the rock into the tunnel. It's intelligent."

I let go of her shirt, and for a moment I wondered why I'd
reacted so strongly, almost violently. Then I remembered that
haunted locations like this could get to you sometimes, transferring emotions from those who'd died here into you. Plus, Jordin
had all but insulted the poor soul who'd died here, and that sort
of thing just didn't sit well with me.

Jordin frowned as she straightened her shirt back out, trying to process something. "But ... your parents provoked spirits
sometimes on their TV show. I've been watching it a lot lately. It
was their way of trying to get the ghosts to do something, communicate in some way."

"Yes, they provoke sometimes," I grudgingly admitted. "I
don't like it. It's disrespectful."

"But if it-"

"Don't ever forget," I whispered, "we are trespassing on their
turf. We are the ones who don't belong here. We're here to observe
only."

Jordin looked around in frustration and raised hervoice. "But
if we can't interact with them, then what's the point?"

"Interact all you want. But treat them with respect. And the
point of this, since you asked, is to prove they exist."

I couldn't understand why Jordin's brow was still wrinkled.
"What if that's not enough?" she asked.

I had no answer.

The male voice did not call out to us again all night.

When four a.m. arrived and the activity seemed to be settling down for the night, I declared that we were done, and we
began rolling up our sleeping bags. While Jordin had originally insisted on our staying the entire night, the last hour's
excitement had wiped her out and she put up no arguments
at the mention of getting a pair of hotel rooms before we flew
home.

Once we were back in the rental car and out on the highway again, she turned to me and said, "So where are we going
next?"

I'd been afraid of this. Paranormal investigation is a field
in which closure is a very rare commodity. The nature of how
it works-positioning oneself to observe highly random paranormal events-all but prevents you from ever feeling like the
job is complete. Usually you wound up feeling instead like you
stopped only from exhaustion, and often right when things were
just getting interesting.

That lack of closure made it a very addictive activity, particularly for newcomers. It was a difficult business to walk away
from, which had made it all the harder for me to return.

I knew that no matter how many times I took her investigating, it would always run the risk of never being enough, since
there would never be any resolution to the experience. There
was no evidence strong enough to convince the whole world
that ghosts exist.

I looked at her, frowning, and tried to think of a way of cutting off that craving in her before it grew too strong. "You said
you wanted to touch the paranormal. You just did, Jordin. More
than most people ever will."

She was silent for a moment before she quietly said, "But I
didn't find what I'm looking for."

"And remind me what that is?" I tried to coax her.

"Pick the next place, Maia."Jordin's expression hardened as
she stared out the windshield. "We're going again."

Carrie Morris had tired eyes.

I was trying to give Jordin's roommate time to sort through
her memories, using kind-but-firm questioning techniques I'd
learned in class. But I'm not known for my patience. And this
chick wasn't going out of her way to hide her disdain for my
presence.

The three of us sat on a sidewalk bench in the courtyard
outside Hogan Hall in the cool morning sun. Carrie was on one
side of me, and Derek-who hadn't said a word since introducing
the two of us-was on the other.

It turned out that the group of friends Jordin routinely went
off on this "annual vacation" thing with were all members of the Columbia volleyball team, of which Jordin was once a proud
member. But not anymore.

"So you saw Jordin Thursday afternoon, August 5, on the
beach ... ?" I tried to prod her. "You're sure that was the last
time you saw her?"

"Yeah," Carrie replied, watching other students bustle about,
bobbing one knee up and down in agitation. "She kept saying
how she wanted to go to England, she was planning a trip to England, she talked about it all the time. So when she disappeared,
we figured she'd finally gone."

England. Jordin's interest in England didn't surprise me. I
knew all about it.

"So you didn't suspect anything was wrong right away. How
long was it before you went to the police?"

"The next Wednesday, I think."

"Derek said they didn't take you seriously."

Carrie yawned. "Well, this officer gave us a big condition
that had to be met before a person could be declared missing.
We were in the middle of explaining to him how long Jordin had
been gone when he recognized her name. He said it was probably
some kind of `rich person eccentric impulse' and suggested we
`contact her estate.' "

Every time she quoted from someone else, Carrie made annoying little rabbit-ear quotation marks with her fingers.

I turned to Derek. "Has Jordin ever done anything like that?
Disappeared for an extended period of time without warning?"

He shook his head, and I caught the wary look in his eye,
though he was trying to hide it. He didn't want to appear ungrateful for my help, but he was indulging me without a lot of confidence in my abilities or in this particular witness. I supposed that as a future pastor, it was a good thing that honesty came
so naturally to him.

Whatever. I wasn't here to pacify him. I was sure there had
to be more details I could wring out of Carrie. My mind spun,
thinking through the kinds of questions a detective would ask.

"Did you notice anything unusual about Jordin before she
disappeared?"

Carrie glanced at me warily. "You mean more than ever? She's
always been weird, even more so since she met you."

When I said nothing-I was trying to practice reading Carrie's
expressions and body language, and ignore her belligerence-she
went on. "She used to be a fun person, you know. Carefree. Spontaneous. Really funny. And an amazing athlete. Then you came
into the picture, and she quit the team and stopped hanging out
with us. We had to beg her to go with us on this year's trip."

"And when you say `go with us,' " Derek quietly interjected
while examining a nearby tree, "you of course mean `pay for.'"

Carrie squinted at him but made no response.

"Why didn't she want to go this year?" I asked, trying to stay
on point.

"Guess she had `more important things to do,' " Carrie replied,
popping out the quotation marks again. "But she may as well not
even have been there, because we barely saw her. Well, she would
always turn up in her room each morning, but we could never
find her in the evenings when we wanted to go out."

Well, sure. That wasn't surprising at all.

"What about her behavior? Any sudden mood swings? Did
she complain of any odd pains?"