Project 17 (8 page)

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men and women, maybe, or maybe the crazies from the even craziers.

"Where are we going?" Tony asks.

I stop a second at the top of the stairs, angling my headlight over the map, trying to figure things out. The place is a freakin' maze. "We need to find the reception room," I say, noting how far away it is, how it seems you need to access it from another floor. "I thought we could start there--use it as a meeting place."

"I want to look around first," Mimi says, peering down the long corridor. There are rooms to the right and left. A clock hangs off the wall, the time stuck in place at quarter till three.

I nod, eager for the footage, noticing how Liza seems a bit more together now. "Are you sure you're okay with this?" I ask her.

But instead of answering, she steps away--into one of the patient rooms. Greta and Tony, still arguing, do the same, moving into the room directly across the hallway from her. And Mimi moves into a room a couple doors down.

"If anyone needs a little something to ward off evil spirits, now's the time to ask." Chet pulls a necklace of garlic from his duffel bag. The thing is huge; I'm surprised he even got it in there. He hangs it around his neck and poses for the camera. I'm tempted to call him on it--to call him the buffoon that he clearly is--but when it comes right down to it, I'm glad he's here, that someone like him is around to lighten up the mood a bit.

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"I'm all set, man," I say, hearing the banging sound again. My heart pumping hard, I step into one of the rooms, noting how tiny it is. I wonder how someone could stand to stay in here for five short minutes, never mind spend a couple or twenty years.

The walls are peeling--huge curls of paint flaking off everywhere. You can see a ton of paint bits and chunks on the floor, as well as debris from the ceiling. There are a bunch of beds crammed in here. I take a step toward the one in the far corner, noticing a series of scratches on the wall right beside the headboard. Zooming in even sharper, it looks like maybe the scratches are from the bed. I can almost picture it, can almost see some nut job lying here, all strapped down, trying to get out--writhing like crazy ... but no match for the harness.

I move in a little farther, drawn to it--to the scratches-- like I have to touch them, like I have to feel where the paint was scraped off. I reach out and move my fingers slowly toward the wall. A second later, I feel a hand tap my shoulder, totally making me jump.

I turn around. It's Mimi.

"What the hell are you doing?" I shout.

"Sorry," she says, a huge-ass smile across her face---like she isn't sorry at all. "I was just checking up on you."

I shake my head, trying to get a grip. My heart thrashes around inside my chest.

"Big strong man like you," Mimi says with a grin. "I didn't think your kind
could get
scared."

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"Not scared," I correct. "Just surprised."

Yeah, right.

"What were you doing?" Mimi asks.

I look back at the bed, at those scratches, still tempted to run my fingers over them. But instead I shake my head. "Just checking things out," I say, taking a deep breath. I notice a book on a bedside table, the bookmark stuck somewhere in the middle, like whoever it belonged to never got the chance to finish it.

"Sad, isn't it?" Mimi says, motioning to the barred windows, now boarded up with pieces of plywood. "The bars were so they couldn't jump out, I guess. I mean, what else
would
you want to do if you had to stay here?"

"I guess," I say, zooming in on the graffiti. A bunch of people have marked the territory with their names. Somebody's even drawn a picture of a tombstone with the number seventeen on it.

Mimi sits down on the edge of one of the beds and runs her hand over the mattress. "It's almost like you can feel them," she says. "All the people who slept here."

"I'll take your word for it," I say, holding back from calling her the nutcase that she clearly is.

Mimi gets up and continues to poke around, checking underneath all the mattresses. I follow her with the camera to see what she finds--an old pack of cigarettes, a box of old crayons, some candy wrappers, an ancient copy of
Good Housekeeping
magazine. She moves to the bed in the corner, the one that made those scratches.

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"This is just like that Brad Anderson movie," she says. "Did you see it?"

"Session
9?"

She nods. "Pretty freaky, huh?"

"Definitely," I say, remembering the film--about a clean-up crew hired to remove asbestos from this very hospital. I rented it one night with a couple of my buddies. The crew ended up going crazy by the end of the movie. And a bunch of people got killed. "But that would never happen in real life," I say, and wait for her response.

But for once she doesn't have one.

"Hey, check this out," she says, working a slit at the bottom of the mattress, right beside the seam. She goes to stick her hand inside.

"Are you sure you want to do that?"

She nods, continuing to maneuver around in there, pulling out a hair comb and some change. But then her face lights up when she feels something big. She pulls it out.

A notebook, all wrapped up in wax paper.

"Jackpot," she says, smiling like it's her freakin' birthday. She tears off the wax paper covering, opens the notebook up, and starts to read:

March 5, 1981

This is my second day at the castle, that's what everybody calls this place. I guess it sort of looks like one, except the rooms are tiny. There's not even enough

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room between my bed and the person's next to mine to manage a leg. So you can't walk between. You have to crawl across the foot of the beds when you want to go to sleep.

They took my shoes. And they dumped out my suitcase and tool all my clothes. Some red-haired woman told me I'd get them back, but I didn't understand when. Then some doctor asked me all these strange questions: What year it is, if I know my name, if I could tell the color of his shirt.

But then he asked me if I wanted to dies.

I told him that sometimes I do.

And then he sent me to the A wing without so much as another word.

More later.

"Pretty cool, huh?" Mimi says, closing the notebook.

"If that's what you want to call it."

"Oh, come on." She rolls her eyes. "You can't tell me that didn't give you tingles."

"Not exactly my idea of tingle-worthy," I say, watching as she shoves the notebook into her coat for a later look. "Just help yourself."

"What do you care?"

I shrug, pretending like I could give a shit. But the truth is, for some reason it does kind of bother me. A moment later, Liza walks in. "Hey," I say.

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"Hey." Her bottle-green eyes look right at me, like maybe she doesn't completely despise me.

I focus the camera so that it zooms in on a wall full of old and yellow-stained photographs, all corroded and rotted: a picture of an older couple holding a giant codfish, a photo of someone's dog taking a piss, a picture of someone's totaled Corvette, a Polaroid of a little girl with missing teeth. There's also a bunch of magazine cutouts: an apple with a bite missing, and people posing in seventies clothing, like right out of a Sears catalogue.

"So weird," Mimi says.

I nod, wondering what the pictures mean--if any of these people are the person whose thrashing around on the bed made all those scratches on the wall.

A moment later, the door slams shut, freaking me out.

It's Chet.

"Anybody for a little brain play?" He's got that stupid brain cap on again, and he's holding something long and pointy high above his head.

"What the hell is that?" I ask, angling my camera at it.

"Is it a knitting needle?" Mimi asks, grabbing it out of Chet's hand.

"Beats me. What do I look like, Martha Stewart?"

"Now that you mention it," I say.

"What can I tell you?" Chet says, ignoring my remark. "I found it in one of the rooms."

"Doubtful," Mimi snaps. "They wouldn't let patients get their hands on something sharp like this."

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"Fine, don't believe me," Chet says, grabbing the needle back and stuffing it into his duffel bag. "But this baby's gonna bring me some fine booty on eBay."

"The only booty
you'll
ever get," she zings.

"You're seriously gonna sell it?" I ask.

"Are you kidding? I plan to sell whatever I can cram into my bag."

Before I can even respond, Mimi steps toward Chet. He opens his arms, thinking she's gonna give him some action or something, but instead she moves behind him, staring at something on the wall by the door.

"What is it?" Liza asks.

I look, too. There's a watercolor picture tacked up, the edges all curled and yellow with age. It's of a girl with dark stripes of hair and gigantic purple eyes. The twisted part is that the girl is missing chunks of herself--like, she only has one arm, half a set of hips, and she's missing her mouth entirely. She doesn't have any feet, and someone's torn her heart right out--you can see the tear marks in her chest.

"It looks kind of like me," Mimi says.

"Last I noticed, you had
all
your parts." Chet growls, giving her ass a wink like it can talk back.

"No," Mimi barks. "I mean, it looks like the way I used to paint myself--the hair, the eyes. I always forgot to draw in the feet, too." She rubs the picture with the palm of her hand, trying to smooth down the curled-up edges. Then she peels the thing off the wall, turns it over, and reads the back: "C. B. February, 1982."

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Mimi caresses the thing the way a twelve-year-old boy does with his dad's stash of dirty magazines. "Are you okay?" I ask her.

"Yeah," Chet says. "Maybe the asbestos is getting to you."

But before Mimi can get into it with him, I suddenly realize: "Where's Greta and Tony?"

The others stare back at me with blank expressions, like they don't know either.

I fling the door open and boot it down the hallway, shouting their names a bunch of times.

But no one answers. All you can hear is the echo of my voice. And that endless banging racket.

I hurry as fast as I can, more pissed by the minute. I check a bunch of rooms. No luck. I move farther down the hallway, my headlight beginning to falter again. "Where the hell are they?" I shout, nearly dropping the camera.

All of a sudden, out of nowhere, I hear someone scream behind me.

It's Liza.

I look back. She's got her hands gripped over her mouth. "I just saw a rat!" she screeches.

"Come on," I say, and turn back, continuing to look for Greta and Tony.

One of the rooms toward the end of the hallway has its door closed, totally tipping me off. I go for the knob, but it just jiggles back and forth, refusing to open. "Tony!" I shout, pounding my fist against the door. I try the knob

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again. This time it turns, and I throw the door open.

But the room is empty. All except for a rubber doll. It hangs by a noose from the center of the ceiling, making me almost piss myself. It's swinging back and forth slightly, like someone just pushed the thing. Even though there's nobody here.

I take a deep breath, wondering if the rush of the door made the doll move like that; if there's an open window. I peer toward the back of the room, but everything's boarded up.

"Baby Debbie likes to cry," a voice says, making me jump. It takes me a second to realize the voice is coming from the doll--from the
fuckin'
doll!--one of those talking ones. It's got a high-pitched voice with a grainy sort of quality, like an old, static-filled tape.

I aim the mic right in the doll's direction, my fingers shaking, wondering what kind of twisted shithead would take the time to rig up something like this.

The doll's just staring at me--right into my camera-- all dirty, with crazy messed-up blond hair and tilty blue eyes, the kind that open and close.

"Baby Debbie wants to die," the voice continues. At least I think that's what it says. It's even grainier the second time; the words are all drawn out like her battery's dying.

A few seconds later the doll starts laughing.

"Holy shit!" I shout, backing away.

I go to touch the thing, to look for a tape recorder, but

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the laughing gets louder, like the thing has a mind of its own. "What the fuck?" I shout, my heart beating fast.

"What's wrong?" Mimi calls, from somewhere down the hall.

I don't answer. I just shut the door and move away, down the corridor, trying to pull myself together, to forget I even saw it, even though I can still hear that twisted little laugh.

I stop at the very last room at the end of the hallway, my adrenaline pumping something fierce. That's when I find Tony and Greta. They're standing at the foot of a mattress. Greta's got her hands around Tony's neck as though she's just about to plant him one.

"What the hell do you think you're doing?" I shout, aiming my camera right at them.