Chapter 1

In a darkened bedroom, a fluorescent black-light bar

gives a surreal glow to anything that fluoresces under ultra-
violet. A string of glow-in-the-dark plastic skulls hang
across a wall over a set of cardboard cut-out skeletons
with glowing bones, with metal rivets at the joints. They’re
positioned like they’re dancing or fucking or both at the
same time. A cone of incense smolders in a skull-shaped
incense holder, the smoke wafting sinuously out of the
mouth and eye holes. A desktop computer glows low with
an animated Matrix screensaver, the neon green
characters trickling down like rain. Bela Lugosi Is Dead by
Bauhaus creeps out low and growling from the computer
speakers, the drumstick clicking against the rim of the
snare as the bass vamps through the three note intro.
Jason, wearing thick black-framed glasses and a
careless beard, is sitting in the command chair for the
computer desk. He picks up a prosumer handheld camera
and turns it on. The camera’s viewscreen shows spiking
bars on the side when he speaks.
“Alright kids. Let’s get ready for the big show.”
Jason looks through the lens and pans around the room
semi-revealing the three others in the relative darkness.
To the left, sitting on the bed is Jack, a thin young man
with dark disheveled hair and pale blue eyes. Sitting to his
left is Dani a young girl with dyed black hair cut into spikey
bangs, a ring through her eyebrow, a scar next to that
piercing where a previous eyebrow piercing was rejected.
In a black pleather beanbag chair with his knees framing
his face is Nathan, a lanky young man with sunken eyes
and a set of big headphones around his neck, fiddling with
a shotgun mic trying to unscrew the battery compartment
so he can test the inline mic battery.
 “Test. Camera test.” Jason says and points the
camera at Jack and Dani. He zooms the camera in on
Dani who shoots him an exasperated look.
“Smile!” Jason says and Dani tucks her chin into her
chest, hiding her face with her hair.
“Fuck you, Jason. You’re gonna kill the battery.” Dani
says from behind her veil of hair.
Jason takes the camera away from his eyes, waving the
camera around, talking with his hands.
“For your information, this camera is fully charged.
Five full bars. And we have two spare batteries to boot.
So shut your pretty face.”
Jack says “Do we have enough memory sticks?”
“Twelve hours’ worth. Don’t worry. I got this. This isn’t
my first rodeo.”
Jack takes out a hand-held digital recorder and turns it
on, speaking into it, “Test. Test. EVP one. Test.” Jack
presses a button to stop recording and presses another for
playback and his voice plays back small and tinny. “Test.
Test. EVP one. Test.” Satisfied with the results of his test,
he turns off the power on the handheld recorder and
stashes it in the pocket of his black trenchcoat.
Nathan finishes replacing the battery and puts his
headphones on and presses the power button on a
compact digital recorder. “Can I get a room tone?”
Jason scoffs. “What the fuck does it matter? We’re not
shooting a movie, and we’re not even going to be filming
here anyway.”
Nathan sighs. “I just want to try to get a base level and
make sure this thing works, okay?”
“Fine then. Test. Test. Testicles. Are you fucking happy
now?”
Nathan hits stop on the recorder and presses playback
listening intently, pressing the over-sized headphones to
the sides of his head, eyes squinted in concentration.
Jack asks, “Are we happy?”
Nathan continues to listen to the signal from the
headphones.
Jack shouts, “Nathan!”
Nathan snaps out of his concentration and looks at
Jack. “Yeah, what?”
“Does it work?”
Nathan pushes the headphones off his head like he’s
done a thousand times and they drop down to yoke his
neck. “Yeah. We’re happy.”
Dani sighs, restless, eager, filled with nervous energy.
She takes out a stiletto knife with black plastic imitation
snakeskin on the grips, clicking the blade in and out.
“I don’t know why you always insist on fucking around
with that thing. Someone’s gonna get cut one day.” Jason
says.
Dani swipes at Jason. “Yeah, maybe you.”
Jason pretends to be scared and talks at Jack.
“Hey, man, you better keep your bitch on a shorter
leash.”
Jack’s heard it all before and if anything the banter
bores him. “She’s not my bitch.”
Dani stands up and stabs the air around Jason’s head
and Jason put his hands up in front of his face half-
heartedly swatting at her feinting stabs. “Hey! Cut it out!
Someone’s gonna lose an eye!”
“Fuck you, four eyes! I’m not anyone’s bitch!”
Jack sighs, bored by their childish bickering. He takes
out his cell-phone and checks the time. “It’s almost time to
go.”
Dani gives Jason her best hard look, presses the button
to flick the blade of her stiletto back in its handle and
pockets it.
 “What time is it?” Jason asks.
Jack checks the time on his cell phone again “Almost
nine.”
Jason leans over in his chair to a nearby window and
pushes the plastic blinds aside, peering outside.
The sky is a bruised purple with fiery orange on the
horizon.
It’s late summer in the northern states, the weather
taking the slow inevitable turn towards autumn, the days
warm and the nights crisp. The leaves beginning their
annual dance towards death.
Jason lets the blinds slap back into place. “Alright, let’s
pack up the gear and hit the road.”
They all open their packs and do a final check of their
amateur level ghost hunting equipment.
Jack picks up a black canvas courier bag with a
shoulder strap from the floor by the side of the bed. He
opens it up and takes out a mini-mag flashlight, quickly
twisting it on and off, testing to see if it works.
Dani has a brown plush-backpack shaped like a domo.
She pulls out a digital SLR camera with a big flash and a
flash bouncer mounted on top. She turns it on and tests
the auto-focus on Jack who is leaning over. Jack turns
around and gives her a deadpan look. Dani clicks the
camera off and puts it in a protective case and stashes it in
her backpack.
Jason undoes his belt and straps on a long-handle D-
cell Mag-lite in a black web-cloth holster and a hunting
knife in a leather holster.
Dani sees him threading the knife holster onto his belt
and snickers.
Jason looks up at Dani’s snickering. “What?”
“Why do you always bring that fucking thing along?
What are you gonna do? Stab a ghost?”
 “Hardy fucking har. What if we run into a stray dog or
something? You won’t be chuckling if I have to pry the
foaming fangs of some fucking hell-hound out of your calf.
Plus you won’t like having to get rabies shots at the
hospital.”
“Any animals we’re gonna see at this place are more
scared of us than we are of them and will probably just
want to be left alone.”
“Well, what if your clothes get caught on something and
someone has to cut you lose?”
Dani takes out her stiletto and clicks the blade out.
“Fuck you, little miss know-it-all.” Jason says, focusing
on finishing strapping his belt back on.
Nathan is self-contained, wearing his digital recorder in
a heavy-duty black canvas pouch on a shoulder sling, the
mic in a web-cloth case attached to the pouch.
They all stand up in turn.
“We good?” Nathan asks.
Everyone except Nathan pats their pockets and checks
their zippers and buckles one last time.
They all look up, look at each other, and nod.
Jack says “We’re good.”
“Let’s go then.” Jason says and opens the bedroom
door.

Chapter 2

The four teens pile out into the yard of a rural single
story home of an indiscernible grey color, the night settling
in around the treeline, the sounds of crickets tuning up for
their evening orchestra.
The group walks across the yard to a dark-colored late
model sedan.
Jack pulls out a set of keys, jingling mutedly, and opens
up the driver’s side door.
He leans over and pops the lock for the passenger side
door.
Dani opens the passenger side door and clicks the
lever, flipping the passenger side seat forward letting
Jason clamber in. Dani gets in front seat, and Nathan gets
in behind Jack, Jack leans over to make room for him to
squeeze in.
Jack fires up the car and flips the headlights on,
backing it up, cutting the wheel, and steering it out onto the
two-lane blacktop heading away from the darkening
driveway.
Dani takes a pink iPod shuffle out of the pocket of her
tight black jeans and plugs a black wire into a port labeled
“Aux.” on the car’s stereo. She leans over, turning the
stereo on and presses play on the iPod, the drum intro
from Marilyn Manson’s The Beautiful People staggers out
of the car’s speakers.
“Seriously?” Justin complains from behind Dani.
“Fuck you, fat boy, you like Bauhaus. Suck it up or
suck my dick, buttercup.”
Jason huffs and crosses his arms looking out the
window at the trees along the roadside as they whip past.
Jack rolls down the driver’s side window and breaks out
a pack of American Spirit cigarettes, flicks one up out of
the pack, and tucks it between his lips. He fishes a zippo
out of the pocket of his black jeans and in a practiced
motion, flips the cap open and scrapes the flint. He holds
the car steady with his knees, cupping his hands around
the lighter and the tip of his cigarette. He gets the tip lit
and inhales a drag. He puts his left hand on the wheel and
replaces the lighter with his right hand.
Nathan rolls breaks out a small hand-carved wooden
box. He slides one end open and takes out a brass one-
hitter. He packs the tip of the metal rod with fine ground
weed and fires it up, sucks in the smoke and holds it. He
looks over and offers the bat to Jason with a raised
eyebrow. Jason waves him off. Nathan taps Dani on the
shoulder. She turns and sees the bat in Nathan’s
outstretched hand.
Dani takes the bat from Nathan, takes out a clear pink
plastic lighter, and torches the tip inhaling until it’s cashed.
Dani exhales, turns and hands the one-hitter to Nathan
who takes it and exhales out the window. Jason makes a
face at being fumigated by his friends but he knows that
any complaint will only earn him derision. Nathan starts
the process of repacking his one-hitter from his little
wooden dug-out.
Dani turns to Jack. “Tell us the story again.”
“You already know it.” Jack says and takes a drag from
his cigarette, holding it for a moment then exhaling it into
the slipstream.
“I know, but I like it when you tell it.”
“Okay.”

Chapter 3

“Back in the early 1900s, they set up The Gate…”

Jack finishes his cigarette, flicking the butt out into the
night sky to bounce off the blacktop leaving behind an arc
of sparks. He takes out his pack and flicks up a fresh one,
plucking it out of the pack with his lips and lights it.
“Back then instead of trying to treat people with mental
illness, they would send them off to this place out in the
country. They called it a “work farm”. But what it really
was, was like a concentration camp for the insane. You
know that phrase “Arbeit macht frei” they used to have
over the gates to the German concentration camps? Well,
this place had the same philosophy. The place was totally
self-contained. It had its own housing, hospital, church,
graveyard. Topiary garden. The works. It’s a wonder
what you can do with free labor. The doctors at the time
figured fresh air and hard work would help to kind of
bleach and sweat the crazy out of these people.
Sometimes they were determined to work towards being
cured and they left. Sometimes they didn’t. This was back
when they did all sorts of fucked up things to people. Cold
water shock baths and solitary confinement, straitjackets…
sometimes they even performed lobotomies. But that was
just for the more extreme cases.”
Jack takes a drag of his cigarette and exhales it out into
the darkness whipping by.
“The problem was, the place became overcrowded.
After World War Two, there was this secret governmental
project called Project Paperclip. All of these Nazi scientists
were offered new lives, new names, and clean slates if
they would come to America and work for the U. S. So
these mad scientist types all got shipped over to America
and got put in charge of all of the major mental hospitals to
see if they could maybe cure some of the incurable cases.
At first they tried analysis but when that didn’t work they
got up to all of their old tricks.”
Jack takes a drag of his cigarette and exhales it out into
the darkness whipping by.
Dani looks on hypnotized and slightly stoned.
“Sensory deprivation, hypnotism, trance-induction,
physical punishment, behavior conditioning, you name it.
When that didn’t work they started to really cut loose. A
lot of that Third Reich stuff was tied up in black magic.
You don’t hear a lot about it on the history channel, but it’s
true. These Nazi doctors started to fuck around with some
really dark stuff. You see, there’s these tunnels that run
underneath the whole place so that every building was
interconnected. It was designed so that people could get
around from place to place even if the snow was ten feet
deep. There were stories about people being taken out of
their cells in the middle of the night and getting dragged off
to who knows where. They were never seen again.
Record-keeping back then wasn’t what it is now, and there
wasn’t a lot of oversight. Pretty much as long as the crazy
people weren’t being a nuisance in the community the
general public didn’t care. Out of sight. Out of mind.
Every now and then all of the rich philanthropists from the
area would come out and visit and check to make sure
everything was alright, but they probably cleaned everyone
up before the visit. You know, run the hose over them and
whatnot. In the fifties, electro-shock therapy was
discovered and they’d experiment with all of these helpless
lunatics. Give them so many shocks that they’d glow in the
dark and be able to turn on light bulbs from five feet away
practically. They started calling the guy running the place
“The Shock Doctor”.”
From the back seat Jason interrupts, “Are you fucking
kidding me?”
Jack ignores Jason.
“Then they discovered how to extract psilocybin and
started to experiment with LSD.
Nathan grins. “Yeah, magic mushrooms, man.”
Jason says “Bullshit.”
Jack tilts his head leveling a look at Jason in the rear-
view mirror. “MK Ultra, man, do your research. And don’t
fucking interrupt me. They’d dose these patients so
heavily they practically had them on an IV drip. Serve
them a tall cool glass of acid every morning with their eggs
and bacon. You think you trip hard? You don’t trip like
they did. Combine all of that deep trance and sensory
isolation and the black magic shit and there was some
seriously fucked up shit going on here. So many people
started going missing and so much fucked up stuff started
happening that they started to close the place down. In
the seventies, they discovered Lithium and other
psychiatric drugs that could actually treat schizophrenia
and other mental health disorders. In the eighties, during
the Reagan administration, the hospital was pretty much
abandoned. All of the mentally ill were either having their
symptoms successfully managed by drugs or they were
shipped off to different regional mental hospitals since the
whole work farm model was obsolete. But sometimes the
patients would come back.”
“There were rumors of a whole underground civilization
of inter-breeding lunatics living in the tunnel works
underneath the buildings. People’s pets started going
missing. Then kids from the area. Not a lot. Not all at
once. But after a while the police had to intervene. You
can’t find it in any of the papers, not that it’s the kind of
thing that people want you to know about, but rumor is that
the sheriff’s department deputized damn near the whole
county. All of those ex-Vietnam Veteran types. You know
the ones that can’t sleep at night because they brought the
jungle home in their heads? Rumor is they went down to
the National Guard armory and stocked up on all of that
Vietnam surplus stuff. Flame-throwers and M-16s and
hand grenades. They went down into the tunnels and
didn’t come back up until there was nothing left alive down
there.”
Jack finishes his cigarette and flicks the butt out the
window. He fishes out his pack and flicks up another.
That breaks the trance. Dani shivers. She holds out her
lighter and Jack leans in, one eye on the road as she lights
his cigarette for him. Jack takes a drag and exhales it
ashing out the window.
Jack looks in the rearview mirror.
Nathan and Jason look traumatized in the backseat.
Jack laughs. “Where’s your ‘bullshit’ now, tough guy?”
Nathan takes out his dugout and packs his one-hitter
again.
Jason regains his composure. “This is the place you
want us to fucking wander around in?”
Jack levels a stare at Jason in the rear-view mirror.
“Relax. The place is fucking empty now. Every now and
then you get some fuckhead Satanists break into the
church and say the mass backwards and kill a cat or
whatever, but they’ve got security posted at the entrance
and the Satanists pretty much fucked off. Most all you’ll
find is some poorly rendered spray-paint pentagrams and a
dead old cat. You’re not scared of a dead old cat are
you?”
“No.” Jason replies sulkily.
“Good. Besides you’ve got your trusty hunting knife
with you. We’ll be fine.”
Jason’s hand unconsciously checks for the butt of the
knife at his waist. “So you’re telling me we’re just going to
drive right past the guard and he’s going to be okay with
that?”
“You’ll see.”
Jack takes a right-hand turn off of the main road onto a
smaller access road, easing off on the pedal, reaching over
and turning the stereo down to a low murmur, flipping off
the headlights. The inside of the car only lit by the dash
lights and the outside by the moon half-concealed by
clouds.
Jason is unamused. “What the fuck, man? Turn the
lights on.”
“Be cool, man. You want to get busted?” Jack drives
on steadily in the darkness. “There’s more than one way
into this place.”
Jack navigates the darkened car along a chain-link
fence that surrounds the property, concertina-wire strung
along the top. Every twenty feet or so, a red and white
reflective sign reading “NO TRESPASSING” is wired into
the fence at eye-level. Jack drives until he comes to a
gate. He hits the brakes and puts the car in park, getting
out, leaving the door open. The idiot indicator pings that
the door’s open with the keys in the ignition but he leaves
the car running and walks up to the gate.
The gate looks chained shut, but the padlock is old and
rusted and closed over, but not locked. Jack turns the
hasp and takes the padlock off the chain. He pushes the
gate open wide enough for the car to pass through and the
gate gives forth a discordant whine. Jack walks back to
the open driver’s side of the car and gets back in. He pulls
the car through the gate and stops the car. He gets out
and closes the gate behind them, putting the chain and
padlock back on the gate, closed over, but not locked.
Jack walks back to the car and gets back in, and
navigates the car slowly forward on the access road. He
looks into the rearview mirror and says to Jason, “See?
Told you so.” smirking, fishing for his pack of cigarettes.

Chapter 4

Jack pulls the car alongside an old barn and turns left,
driving the car into the front entrance of the barn. The
dimmed running lights of the car dimly illuminate several
decades’ worth of old machinery gradually returning to
rust, half-hidden by wild weeds that were opportunistically
reclaiming whatever space was available.
Jack kills the engine. “Alright. Let’s mount up.”
 Jack and Dani open up the doors to the sedan and lean
over, pressing forward the latches for the seat-releases to
let Jason and Nathan out of the back seat.
Everyone stands in the cooling darkness of the barn
and settles the straps of their equipment bags on their
shoulders.
Jason settles his belt around his waist, moving the
flashlight and hunting knife into easily accessible positions.
“What about the guard?” he asks towards Jack.
“What about him? That fat old fuck just coops out in
front of the main gate in his car all night so that any of the
high school kids that come around get scared and take
off.”
Jack finishes settling his bag on his shoulder, takes out
his pack of smokes and fires one up with his zippo. “He’s
supposed to patrol the place. You know, drive around
once an hour and flash his prowl spot at the buildings but
he doesn’t. For the most part these places are boarded up
tight.”
“So how are we supposed to get in then?” Jason asks.
“Follow me. And do what I do. Simon says.” Jack
answers and walks towards the entrance of the barn.

Chapter 5

Jack leads them to the back of the towering edifice of

the main building. The building reaches upwards, trying to
claw a hole in the sky with its jagged upper floors. He
walks towards a concrete outcropping that comes to
around waist-height. Inside, behind the concrete
outcropping is a thick sheet of plywood that seems to be
securely bolted to the ground.
Jason looks at the sheet of plywood unconvinced.
“This is your big plan?”
 Jack drops down, crouching and slides his fingers
under the edge of the plywood sheet. “You’ll see.”
The bolts securing the plywood had been turning into
rust, the freeze and thaw of years of rain and snow rotting
the plywood around the bolts. Jack stood up, his legs and
arms tensing. The plywood cover came up, the wood
splintering around the edges, although it wasn’t as difficult
as it should have been. The plywood had apparently been
removed before and replaced to give the illusion of security
to any passing observer. Jack pushes the plywood until it
leans over and falls on its top side, revealing a short drop
with a rusty iron-rung ladder leading down to a concrete
box. Inside of the concrete box is a ventilation shaft with
its gridded metal cover lying off to the side in a pool of
stagnant rusty water.
Jason looked down into the shadowed shaft, his eyes
widening. “You’ve got to be fucking kidding me.”
Jack chuckled. “Come on. Don’t puss out now.”
“I’ve got claustrophobia. You know this.”
“Dude, it opens up once you get inside.”
Jason looks none too sure. “How do you know?”
“Because I’ve been in here before.”
Dani gasped, “You came here without us? Dick!”
Jack half-turns and shoots her a look, “Someone had to
check the place out and make sure it was safe. Come on.
I’ll show you.”
Jack hunkers down and crawls into the tunnel,
disappearing into the darkness. There’s a shuffling, then a
thud as Jack jumps down onto something firm. An echoing
whisper slips out of the mouth of the tunnel. “Come on…”
The remaining three look at each other uncertainly.
Dani sighs and rolls her eyes, muttering, “Pussies.”
She crawls down the rusty iron ladder into the concrete
box and crouches down, crawling into the tunnel,
disappearing into the darkness with a slightly less robust
shuffling and thump.
Jason looks at Nathan. “Rock paper scissors?”
Nathan shakes his head and clambers down the ladder,
crouching down and clutching the satchel containing his
recording deck to his side as he enters the tunnel.
The opening of the tunnel stares up at Jason, having
consumed his friends.
Jason stares into the blackness, and it seems to almost
cast a trance on him. A shuffling sound echoes dully out of
it and Dani pops out of the opening into the moonlight
startling Jason out of his half-trance with an involuntary
gasp.
Dani smirks and rolls her eyes, “Come on, you big
chicken. It’s fine.”
Dani disappears backwards into the darkness of the
tunnel and Jason turns around, feeling into the emptiness
for the rungs of the ladder, gradually lowering himself and
disappearing from sight.

Chapter 6

Jack, Dani and Nathan stand in a small compartment,

underlit at a ghoulish angle by Jack’s mini-mag as Jason
shimmies out of the exit of the tunnel, ass first, making the
short drop to the debris littered concrete flooring of the
ventilation shaft.
Jack shines his mini-mag around the small concrete
room as Jason slaps the grime from the tunnel off onto the
thighs of his black jeans.
The ventilation shaft has thick rust-streaked pipes
running along one wall, traveling down into the darkness of
the tunnel.
Jason fumbles for his big twelve-inch D-cell mag-lite,
drawing it from the holster on his belt. He turns the head
of the flashlight and it bursts into light, everyone flinching
at the brightness as their eyes struggle to adjust. Jason
points it down into the unrevealed darkness of the
ventilation shaft. The flashlight’s beam carries about thirty
feet down the length of concrete walls flanked by rusty iron
pipes but doesn’t penetrate far enough to show what waits
at the other end of the tunnel.
Jack shines the beam of his mini-mag up into his face
giving his face sinister shadows. He grins, “Will you walk
into my parlor? Said the Spider to the Fly.”
Jason shudders off a chill. “Cut that shit out.”
Jack laughs and lowers his mini-mag, slinging his
shoulder bag around to the front, opening it up and shining
the flashlight into it.
Following his lead, everyone fumbles for their bags and
gears up.
Nathan takes his shotgun mic out of its protective pouch
and uncoils a short length of XLR cable, plugging it into his
recorder and then into the base of the mic. He puts his
headphones on and turns on the recorder, blowing into the
mic, saying, “Test. Test. One. Two.” Small bright lights
jump with each sound and settle back to mildly reacting to
the ambient sound of everyone scritching loose dirt, rust,
and dust between their feet and the concrete floor.
Dani takes the case for her DSLR camera out of her
backpack, removing the camera, pressing the power
button and switching on the flash which whines thinly as it
powers up. She takes five steps backwards down the
tunnel and points the camera at the three boys, shouting,
“Hey!” triggering the camera and strobing them with the
flash, capturing the three boys fumbling with their bags and
gear.
Jason blinks, “What the fuck! How about a little warning
next time?”
Dani presses the review button on the camera,
checking out the image, replying off-handedly, “Shut up.
You’ll be fine.”
Jack takes out his mini-recorder and turns it on, tapping
the silver grill of the microphone hole, watching the
indicator to make sure that he gets a reading.
Jason opens up his backpack and takes out his
prosumer handheld camera, turning it on. He points the
camera down the hallway, bringing up his flashlight,
shining it in the same direction. All he can see is a tiny
digitized version of what he could already see. He tries
turning on the night-vision feature and all it does is turn the
scene captured in the viewscreen green. “Ah fuck.”
Dani looks up at Jason’s hiss of exasperation.
“Problem?”
“Nah. I’m just not really getting a lot out of the night
vision on this thing.”
Jack pockets his digital recorder. “Well, it’s meant for
shooting under low-light conditions. That mag cannon
you’re carrying pushes a fair amount of lumens. Better
leave that feature off for now. Save batteries.”
Jason nods his acknowledgement and clicks the feature
off. The viewfinder returns to the tiny high-contrast window
it showed before.
Jack resettles the shoulder strap of his courier bag on
his shoulder and looks at the other three aspiring
paranormal investigators. “Alright. Everyone ready?”
Everyone nods. “Let’s go.”
Jack steps past Dani, leading the way and the others
follow in a loose single file, making their way down the
tunnel.
They walk for thirty feet or so, their shoes scrunching dit
and rust underfoot, the sound echoing flatly off of the lime-
scaled concrete walls of the tunnel.
Jack brings the beam of his mini-mag up from the floor,
pointing his flashlight towards a sharp-left turn five feet
ahead, the pipes jutting out at head height, wrapping
around the bend in the tunnel. He calls back over his
shoulder, “Watch your head.”
The other three make it a point to avoid the turn in the
pipework and potential concussion as they maneuver past
it.
After the turn, the tunnel widens up abruptly into what
looks like a room built into the tunnel.
Jack and Jason flash their flashlights around revealing
a rusted old children’s see-saw with bright yellow plastic
seats sitting in the middle of the room.
Jason groans. “What. The. Fuck.”
Jack turns and says, “Relax. Someone just put this
down here to fuck with people. You know, they thought it
would be creepy or whatnot.”
Jack walks past the see-saw and the others follow.
Jason films it with his video camera as he passes, and
Dani knocks off a few pics of it, her big bright flash strobing
the room for a split-second each time.
Jason pauses as he passes and pushes down on the
raised seat. The see-saw lets out a screeching groan.
Nathan, with his shotgun mic and headphones on winces
and cries out. “What the FUCK, man?”
Jason puts on a sheepishly apologetic expression.
“Sorry! I just wanted to see if…”
Nathan shakes his head and shoots Jason a final dirty
look. “Well next time don’t.”
Chapter 7

A rust-streaked metal door sits silently at the bottom of

a concrete stairwell.
In the landing at the bottom of the stair-case, an inch-
deep pool of slick black water settled, silently reflecting the
ceiling as it has done since it accumulated and will
probably continue to do until the building rots where it
stands and falls in on itself in a hundred years or so.
There’s a thud against the door. Then a thud and a
grudgeful scraping sound as it is forced open against its
will.
Jack shoulders the door open, grunting quietly with
each shove, budging the door a few more inches each
time until it lurches open. He steps through the doorway,
splashing into the formerly mirror still puddle, rippling his
reflection. “Watch out. There’s water here.”
Jack steps over the puddle and climbs the stairs, each
step with a rusted, flaking finial of metal on its lip that
crunches underfoot as he ascends.
Dani follows next holding onto her camera securely in
case she slips on the stairs so it doesn’t fly out of her
hands.
Jason reaches out for the handrail.
Jack turns around. “Don’t. Touch. Anything.”
Jason jerks his hand away from the handrail like it was
electrified.
Jack says, “Who knows what kind of weird mold and
fungus and who the fuck knows what is crawling around in
this place?” He makes it to the landing on top of the short
set of stairs, a hallway tiled with gritty chipped linoleum
tiles that scritch and shift undependably underfoot with
each step. “Plus we don’t want anyone to get cut on
anything. The last thing we want is to have to cut this little
trip short so we can take someone to the hospital to get a
tetanus shot.”
Jason steps up to the landing, taking a couple steps to
make room for Nathan. He shifts his feet and the grit
underfoot scritches against the tile flooring. “Hey man, is
this shit asbestos?”
Jack shrugs and Dani takes a couple steps down the
hallway, shooting off a shot down the hallway briefly
illuminating it with the flash.
Jack says, “Maybe. That’s just the chance you take.”
“But shouldn’t we be wearing masks or something?”
Jack chuckles ruefully and asks, “What are we, the
fucking A-Team?”
Jason pouts at Jack once again establishing himself as
the leader of their little group.
“This ain’t fucking Ghost Hunters. No one knows we’re
here. And we’re fucking trespassing by the way.
Breaking and entering too if you want to get technical
about it. Any one of you idiots hits their head or sprains
their ankle, we’re in deep shit quick, so stay fucking
focused, okay?”
Jason kicks at a loose tile that skitters across the
hallway thwocking against the wall opposite with an
echoey clack. “Fine. Just sayin’.”
Jack pats his pockets for his cigarette pack, and, finding
it, takes it out and flicks the bottom, popping up a cigarette
that he lips out of the pack. “Well don’t. You want out?
Go wait in the car.”
Jason looks back down the stairs to the now darkened
doorway to the tunnel. Waiting in the car by himself while
his friends explore the abandoned asylum didn’t seem like
a very good way to spend the night. “Forget it. I’ll be fine.”
Dani takes a few steps in the other direction and snaps
another picture down the other end of the hallway briefly
illuminating it with the flash, loose cross-laid tiles fractally
tessellating the hallway until it ends about a hundred feet
away.
Jason looks back up at Jack who’s regarding him with a
haughty look.
Jack breaks out his zippo and lights his cigarette,
drawing deep and exhaling up at the ceiling with a
wolfishly triumphant grin. “I thought so.” He turns on his
heel and shines his mini-mag at the wall.
On the wall at eye-level are plastic signs with raised
letters, trails of ichorous grime and rust leaking down from
them.
Three signs to the right read “Cafeteria”, “Auditorium”,
“Gymnasium” with arrows pointing off to the right.
The three signs on the left read “Hospital”, “School”,
“Residential Wings” with arrows pointing off to the left.
Jack contemplates the signs for a second, then points
the mini-mag down the hallway to the right. “Let’s go.”
Jack starts down the hallway. Dani takes a few big
strides until she’s walking beside him. Jason and Nathan
follow, bringing up the rear.

Chapter 8

Outside, thin clouds race across the waning moon.

The breeze is light and cool, and gently rustles the stalks
and leaves of the opportunistic weeds, dry and dead after
an early cold snap, a taste of what was to come in the
coming months.
Inside the barn the sedan sits silently, the engine
occasionally ticking while it cools in the evening air.
Outside of the barn, the sound of scrunching gravel
gradually increases, seeming to draw nearer. The sound
that loose gravel on asphalt makes as a something drives
across it.
The sound of an engine growling smoothly adds itself to
the symphony. A set of headlights flashes into the barn,
illuminating the rear of the sedan. The arriving vehicle
turns into the barn, stopping a foot or two away from the
bumper of the sedan the ghost hunters inside the building
arrived in. The headlights blink off, followed shortly by the
sound of the engine of the vehicle being turned off and
idling down in the darkened interior of the barn.

Chapter 9

All is quiet inside the gymnasium until the sound of

footsteps approaching down the hallway outside increases.
Jack pushes through the creaky double doors which moan
and squeal on their hinges.
Jack steps inside, stepping to his left, holding the door
for the other three to enter.
The parquet floor of the gym is wavy and warped,
littered with chunks and granules of thick safety glass
shattered inward by rocks thrown by vandals or fallen
down from the wide skylight panels in the ceiling.
The swelling and shrinking of the glass in the summers
and winters, without anyone to administer the proper
maintenance to insure the interior of the gym was
regulated to keep the air warm enough to melt the snow,
caused the flashing around the skylights to first leak, and
then rot away. The safety glass inside, protected by thin
metal grids against an errant ball when it was in use, first
cracked and then spider-webbed, finally falling in one by
one like jagged blue-green snowflakes, littering the floor
below.
The skylights glassless, the rain and snow fell in
unhindered, settling into the parquet floors, warping them
into sinuous waves.
The inside of the gym was a bit brighter than the
hallway, the cloud-filtered moonlight pouring in through the
skylights in jagged fractured patterns, reflected by the
shiny bits of glass like a constellation.
The night breeze quietly whistled through the rafters
overhead making a lonesome sound.
Jason shines his flashlight around, panning it across
the walls and rafters of the echoey room. He realizes that
the flashlight isn’t making that much of a difference
considering the moonlight and turns the head of the
flashlight, killing the beam.
The gym is cast into pale blue-white moonlight.
Jason’s jaw drops. “Woah! Fucking surreal!”
Jack grins and says, “I told you it would be worth it.”
letting the door close behind him.
Dani cranes her head up, looking at the metal-gridded
holes where the skylights had been. She raises her
camera, turning the flash off, walking into the gym, taking a
picture every few feet, standing still and holding the
camera steady to allow the camera to adjust for the
exposure each time.
Jack calls after her, “Careful, babe, you don’t want to
slip and get any of this shit caught in your hands.”
Nathan holds his mic out at arm’s length, recording the
room tone and the sound of their feet grinding safety glass
into the parquet floors.
Jack shines his mini-mag up into the rafters and two
luminous points of light reflect the light, catching his
attention. A bird, possibly a mourning dove, but difficult to
determine in the relative darkness, is suddenly startled
from its nest by the intruders and takes off into the night.
A stray mote of debris drops out of the rafters and falls to
the floor, startling Dani who wasn’t paying attention
because she was looking through her camera’s viewfinder.
It startles a little squeak of a scream out of her. She
catches her breath and Jack and Jason laugh at this crack
in her otherwise tough demeanor. Nathan listening
intently with his headphones on seems to be the only one
taking his job seriously.
Dani presses a hand to her heart, feeling for its
involuntary racing, trying to compose herself. “Shit! That
fucking scared me!”
Jason chuckles. “No shit, Captain Obvious!”
Dani flicks her middle finger in his general direction and
says, “Fuck you guys.” sounding a lot tougher than she felt.
She wasn’t scared. Just startled. The last thing she
needed was the guys thinking she was your run-of-the-mill
pillowcase Barbie doll kind of girl. Worried about chipping
a nail, or getting cobwebs in her hair. Likely to climb up
on top of a chair or hide behind one of the guys if there
wasn’t a chair nearby for her to climb up on and scream if
they came across a mouse. She wasn’t that kind of girl.
But boys will be boys and she had gotten used to their
stereotypically sexist jokes at her expense. She had to act
tough and be able to back it up if she wanted to be able to
play with the boys and not just have them think of her as
an annoying piece of ass they let tag along in the off
chance that she’d decide to spontaneously bestow sexual
favors on all three of them at the same time. She sighed to
herself and shrugged it off, taking a few steps and pointing
her camera towards the ceiling, trying to get the half-moon
centered in one of the empty skylights limned with jagged
teeth of blue-green glass.
Chapter 10

The road outside of the main entrance to the fenced off

facility had been quiet for the last half-hour.
The chain and padlock on the gate leading from the
main road into the facility was newer than the ones on the
side gate. The chain was still silvery chrome, but scuffed
from being thread across the links of the fence at the
beginning and end of each night. The padlock was
relatively new and the holes where the hasp met the body
of the padlock were greasy with lubricant used to keep the
lock from rusting shut. Each night, the security officer for
the abandoned facility unlocked the padlock with the small
padlock key, one among many on the keyring that he wore
clipped to a small gadget with an extendable length of
twine that would automatically retract, zipping the keys
back to where they were clipped to his belt when he
released them. And each night the security guard
checked the lock to see if it needed a spritz of WD-40 from
the can that he kept in his trunk for just that purpose.
The security guard was nowhere in sight, but in the
shade of an overgrown tree, a late-model Crown-Victoria
sat, solid and still.
Inside the car, in the driver’s seat, Vince sat with his
seat kicked back two clicks, his black baseball hat,
“Vietnam Veteran” embroidered across the front, pushed
down over his eyes but still allowing him to peer under the
brim every now and then when a car would pass by on the
main road.
Vince was the regular security officer for the abandoned
facility. He had been the regular guard for ten years and
had grown comfortable with the job. Each night he’d brew
a pot of coffee and pour it into his Thermos while getting
ready for work. He worked twelve hours a night, 6pm till
6am which was usually from dusk till dawn, except in the
summertime, but the hours didn’t change to match the
variations in the duration of the daylight as the planet
made its way around the sun.
There was a young buck that worked the weekends,
which allowed Vince to go fishing during the summer and
go to the casino and play the slots with his wife whenever
the whim came. He was seventy years old and his vices
were few and affordable. He had retired at sixty on a
pension after spending most of his life working for a local
company that manufactured staples and staplers and other
office products that shut down and took their business
south to Mexico. Like most Vietnam veterans, he had
more than his fair share of insomnia and needed to keep
busy so he checked with some of his friends in the local
police department and was given the job as night guard of
The Gate without having to do an interview. He knew
them and they knew him and they knew that he knew
about The Gate and that was all the qualification that he
needed.
Most nights were pretty uneventful. Every now and
then he’d get some high school kids pulling up to the gate
and trying to fuck with the padlock. He’d flip on his
headlights and they’d freeze like possums and pile back
into their vehicle and take off, slamming the doors as they
drove away. And that was fine by Vince.
He had a .38 revolver in a pancake holster in the glove
box that he kept clean and oiled but he’d never had to take
it out of the glove box while on duty. Everything had been
fine since he and the boys had come down to clean out the
shanty town that had grown in the tunnels under the facility
after the place was shut down in the late eighties.
Someone had to do something, because you can’t have
a kid go missing and not be able to tell their parents where
they went. The local police force was small, but
competent at handling your usual drunk-driving and
domestic disputes. This wasn’t the kind of town that you
had to worry about bank robbery and crack houses.
Anyone showed up trying to get into trouble usually found
it and was encouraged that maybe they’d like to settle in
somewhere else. And if they didn’t take the hint, they were
hinted harder until they got the hint and moved off to be
some other town’s problem. They had their fair share of
residents that used their prescribed medications a bit too
liberally and sometimes people had to be reminded to mow
their lawns so that their houses didn’t look abandoned, but
the police force was small and competent and managed to
keep the peace in their community.
But when it came time to do something about The Gate,
the police weren’t prepared to clear out the tunnels on their
own. They made the rounds of all of the good old boys,
the veterans that had fought overseas in Korea and
Vietnam and a few young bucks that spent some time in
the middle east. The kind of men that were wrapped just a
little too tight and always would be. The chief cashed in a
favor with a friend of his at the local national guard armory.
A variety of rifles, ammunition and phosphorous grenades
were “decommissioned” and “destroyed”.
Everyone rallied in the circle in front of the main building
one Saturday, car-pooling in steady-looking late-model
sedans and pick-up trucks with rust creeping up the side
panels from the wheel wells. Most of them brought their
own weapons from home. Shotguns, handguns and
hunting rifles. Some of them showed up in camouflage,
even though they wouldn’t be hunting and the camouflage
would do them little good at hiding in the tunnels, but the
camouflaged clothing was usually constructed to be sturdy
and would be perfect for clearing out a shanty town that
might have grown in an underground tunnel like a
cancerous cyst in a bladder. No one wanted to wear their
nice clothes, because no one knew what kind of shit they
were going to get into down there.
Vince’s friend Hank, who was the police chief then and
was the police chief now due to the gentle kind of
incumbency that holds sway in small communities, walked
up the front steps of the main building and cleared his
throat. The small mob that had assembled quieted down
to hear what he had to say and Hank laid down the ground
rules.
“Listen up everybody! I think you all know what we’re
here for, but I want you all to conduct yourselves in as
orderly and lawful a manner as possible. We’re going to
go in and clear these buildings one by one, floor by floor.
Each team will have an officer assigned to them since we
don’t have enough radios to go around. I don’t have to
remind you all to keep the chatter to a minimum and keep
it to mission critical dispatches. We’re going to start with
the main building, then move through the residence wing
and the hospital wing, then go down and check out the
tunnels. I want to stress that I don’t want anyone firing
unless fired upon. We are not at war and anyone in there
is not V. C. Anyone we find in here will be detained by the
officers in your team and then processed down at the
station for trespassing, breaking and entering, and
whatever else we think up on the way back and they’ll
spend a few years upstate so we won’t have to worry
about them for a while. Are we clear on what our mission
is here today?”
The small mob of men, some of them with their hair ted
back into neat ponytails, some of them bald or with their
hair cropped short into the high-and-tight crew-cut from
their military years all nodded or mumbled a chorus of
“Yes”, “Yeah”, and “Yup.” half-distracted by double-
checking the action on their weapons, making sure that
there was a round in the chamber, clicking flashlights on
and off, looking into the lens to make sure that they worked
in the bright sunlight of the clear sky day.
“Alright then. Let’s do this.”
Hank walked over to the main entrance and took out a
keyring, unlocking the big padlock, locking it back onto the
end of the chain and dropped it to the ground, the weight
of the padlock dragging the chain snakingly clanking out
from between the sturdy metal handles of the doors to the
main entrance. He opened the door wide and an officer
standing to his side held the door open as he clicked on
his flood beam flashlight and stepped inside.
The main building was vacant. There was a fair
amount of graffiti. Your usual LED ZEP and ZOSO and
the four symbols off of the IV album spray-painted
inexpertly on the walls with no rhyme or reason. Some
pentagrams in circles, the angles never accurate and your
fair share of cartoon penises and vaginas and big-titted
women. Everything that could be broken had been broken
and what couldn’t be broken had been dragged around
and stacked unnaturally so that every now and then
there’d be an improvised set piece that looked like a
stoned poltergeist wanted their presence known. But
whoever had scrawled the graffiti and broken the glass and
stacked the furniture in quasi-pyramidal piles hadn’t stuck
around to take credit for their work. There were empty pint
bottles that still smelled faintly of the alcohol they used to
contain, the occasional nudie mag and the even rarer used
condom littering the floor like the shed skin of a small
snake. Sometimes some worn down shoes or a pile of
dirty clothes or random food wrappers. But each time they
walked up the stairs to the next floor, walking down the
hallways, going room by room, making sure that no one
was hiding under any of the beds or in any of the closets,
they were half-disappointed and half-relieved that there
was no one to be found.
When the main building, the residential, hospital and
school wings were cleared, Hank designated a guard for
the entrances to the building to make sure that no one
snuck back in behind them and he rallied the remaining
men to check out the tunnels that connected the buildings
underground.
Hank led the crowd down the wide stairwell into the
vestibule leading down to the tunnels.
Someone had spray-painted a white skull and
crossbones with a black outline over the double doors
leading down to the tunnels. The floor in front of the door
was filthy with countless footprints tracking old mud and
dirt. Hank turned around before opening the door and
addressed the crowd. “Remember. No matter what we
find down here, if we find anyone, they’re people, and they
have rights just like you and I. Our goal is apprehension,
not termination and deadly force should only be used if
authorized. Am I clear?”
He was answered by an indeterminate rumble of
affirmation by the men who had spent the better part of
their Saturday climbing up flights of stairs and dodging
broken glass. To say that they were no longer as gung-ho
as they were when they started off that morning and that
they were all looking forward to finishing the task at hand
and having a tailgate cook-out with burgers and hot dogs
and beer out in the circle in front of the main building would
be an understatement. Not that everyone who showed up
was excited about having the opportunity to dress up and
play soldier on their day off. But it was something that had
to be done and even the most humble among them would
have to begrudgingly admit that they were proud that they
were invited to participate.
Hank gave the group a stern look and said, “Let’s go.”
opening the double doors to the underground tunnel.
The blackness inside of the tunnel made the dimness of
the unlit interior of the main building seem bright in
comparison. Those with flashlights clicked them on and
shone them around inside the tunnel. The walls of the
tunnel were covered in chaotic murals of spray paint, layer
upon layer like a weather-worn billboard. The group
moved forward gradually getting used to the darkness.
None of the men were afraid of the dark or particularly
claustrophobic, but the air in the tunnel was heavy with
stale smoke and felt thick and fetid.
The men moved ten yards down the tunnel, Hank in the
lead with a huge spotlight shining straight ahead,
disclosing a few more feet of the interior of the tunnel for
each few feet they advanced. The beam revealed a waist-
high round object looming up out of the darkness. A few
more steps revealed it to be a fifty-five gallon metal drum
and when the group of men stopped their forward
progress, a crackling from a low fire in the barrel could be
heard echoing around the tunnel. Hank shone the beam
of his floodlight around, revealing a disorganized grouping
of dirty mattresses with piles of what could be human
forms lying on top of them. He cleared his throat.
“Attention! I am here as a representative of the law in
this county and you are all trespassing! I’m going to need
all of you to get up and proceed in an orderly manner in
this direction where representatives of local law
enforcement will take you into custody!”
One of the men in the group pulled the pin on one of
the surplus phosphorous grenades from the case that had
been passed around and rolled it down the middle of the
tunnel towards the improvised encampment. The grenade
sparked to life, the sparks shooting from the top of the
canister blindingly white leaving behind a trail of stars. The
canister hit a warp in the floor and instead of rolling into the
center of the encampment as intended it rolled towards
one of the filthy mattresses, coming to rest against the side
of the mattress in a pile of filthy clothes. The pile of clothes
smoldered for a second, then burst into flames, the flames
crawling up the pile of blankets on the bed. A human,
whether man or woman was hard to determine due to the
high pitch of their screams, leapt out of the bed, slapping
at themselves, trying to put themselves out as they
staggered around, the flames crawling up their torso. The
flaming form stumbled into a wooden crate, knocking it
over and scattering the half-empty bottles of alcohol that
had been left on top of it. Some of the bottles smashed
and their contents spread out and caught fire igniting other
piles of dirty clothes. The light and heat and screaming
woke up all of the other inhabitants of the tunnel and they
all sat up shouting incoherent questions, or jumped up,
startled and bleary eyed and started to run away from the
flashlights towards the darkness of the further depths of
the tunnel.
No one knows who opened fire first. But after the first
shot was fired, a symphony of gunfire erupted in the
tunnels, the sound of shotguns, rifles and handguns
deafening in the echo chamber of the tunnel. The lead
tore into the fleeing forms, felling them, their clothes tenting
out as the bullets exited the other sides of their bodies,
taking fist-sized chunks of flesh and spattering the floor
and walls of the tunnel. Those that hadn’t had the time to
get up from their mattresses were lain back down by the
bullets punching into them.
The gunfire went on until some of the weapons were
exhausted and the group could finally hear Hank yelling
“Cease fire god damn it! Cease fire!”
Everyone ceased fire, their ears ringing and the smell of
expended gunpowder heavy in the air, the smoke swirling
in the beams of their flashlights.
“Well…” Hank said, taking a thin cigar from a pack in
the left breast pocket of his uniform shirt, “we might as well
finish what we started.”
The group moved forward, picking up the dead and
lining them up side by side in the center of the circle of
mattresses. There were twenty-three bodies in all.
Sixteen men and seven women as far as anyone could
reckon from what was left of them. None of them were
recognized by any of the men. Just a bunch of nameless
people that had fallen under the wheels of society and
whose absence wouldn’t be missed.
When the work of gathering the bodies was over, those
that smoked broke out their cigarettes and lit them, their
smoke adding to the dissipating gunsmoke thinning in the
beams of their flashlights.
Hank turned to a man standing to his left with a double-
barreled shotgun resting on his hip, the barrel pointing
towards the ceiling.
“Bill… Do you think you could get some of your boys to
come down today and wall off the entrance to this here
tunnel?”
Bill furrowed his brow slightly estimating the job in his
head before answering. “Yeah. I think we can make that
happen. Gonne have to swing by my house and call the
boys up and then swing by and pick up the work truck and
some cement but I think we can get it done if everyone
stuck around and helped.”
“Alright then. That’s the plan. Everyone stays until we
get this done. I don’t think it’s necessary for me to mention
that we shouldn’t talk to anyone that wasn’t here about
what happened down here today. It’s a small town, so
anyone that talks about it, the rest of us will find out pretty
fast. You can’t trust people with your secrets. Not your
wives. Not your kids. No one. Some things you just have
to keep to yourself and I think we can all agree that this is
one of those things.”
There was a generalized mumble of agreement.
“Well, let’s get this done. I’m sure you’re all looking
forward to getting back to your families.”
The group turned around, heading back the way they
came.
Outside in the circle in front of the main building the
men sat on the lowered tails of their pick-up trucks or
leaned against their cars, smoking and waiting for Bill and
his crew to return. No one was in the mood to break out
the coolers and fire up the grills and cook the hamburgers
and hot dogs they brought along to celebrate the end of
the day.
Bill’s work truck arrived, filled with four pallets of cinder
blocks and a pallet’s worth of powdered cement mix in
eighty pound bags.
Everyone did their part to help mix the cement and
stack the cinder blocks in front of the entrance to the
tunnel and the exit on the other end, building two new
walls in the abandoned facility.
When the work was done, the police officers on site
talked amongst themselves and set up a duty roster for the
next week to make sure that no one would trespass on the
site until the walls had dried and set while the rest of the
men drove away to deal with the events of the day in their
own way and to lock it away in the places in their hearts
and minds that they never share with anyone regardless of
how much they had drunk or how close they felt to the
other person. Some secrets should stay secret.
At the next city council meeting, a line item allotting
funds towards constructing a fence around the property
and posting a guard at the site from sunset to sunrise each
night was quietly passed in the interest of public safety.
Bill’s crew came out and constructed the barrier fence
around the perimeter of the property. During the day,
whichever officer was on duty would make it a point to
swing by and check out the locks on the gates and the
physical integrity of the fence. At night, the guard would
patrol the facility, using his flashlight to make sure that
none of the plywood coverings to any of the doorways or
ground floor windows had been tampered with.
They never did find the missing kids, and probably
never would, but the missing children reports stopped after
that day, aside from the usual panicked parent calling in
when their teenager misses their curfew, order was
restored in the community.
Every now and then the night guard would discover that
the padlock on one of the gates had been pried off and it
wasn’t that hard to find the unauthorized vehicle after that.
The guard would just call it in to the police station and wait
next to the vehicle until the owner returned with their
friends. It wasn’t worth trying to chase a bunch of kids or
stoners around the site, and unless they wanted to leave
their vehicle behind they’d be coming back at some point
so it was just a waiting game.
There was the occasional bloody nose or dislocated
shoulder if any of the kids got too mouthy when they
figured out they had been discovered, but no one was hurt
so badly that they needed to go to the hospital. Just
enough to instill a healthy fear of the authority of the police
or the authority of the night guard which was about the
same when trespassing was concerned. Any drugs or
alcohol found on the trespassers was seized and poured
out, or if unopened, taken home as a little bonus for a job
well done.
In time, word got around that The Gate was no longer a
decent destination for teens looking for a place to party
and the patrols were cut back to just dark, and Vince and
the kid that worked the weekend shifts did a decent job
keeping an eye on the place at night and scaring away any
high school kids that didn’t know any better.
Tonight was quiet, and Vince had the car radio on low,
listening to the country music station which played old
Johnny Cash and Hank Williams Sr. songs for the most
part with Kenny Rogers and Merle Haggard thrown in to
mix it up.
Vince had always been a light sleeper, and whenever a
car passed on the main road he’d thumb the brim of his hat
up and make sure the car didn’t turn in and head towards
the front gates.
The last car had passed by at least fifteen minutes ago
and it didn’t slow down and turn into the road up to the
fence so Vince didn’t give a shit about it and he pushed the
brim of his hat down over his eyes so he could still peer out
from underneath it if he had to. A police radio quietly,
scratchily burbling a few mostly inaudible beeps and short
indecipherable phrases, the crickets chirping to each other
in the darkness of the treeline.

Chapter 11

The side gate that Jack pulled up to is wide open, the

padlock dangling from the end of the chain loosely
threaded into one side of the fence.
Inside the barn the engine of the vehicle parked behind
Jack’s sedan ticks, cooling in the cool night air. Inside the
vehicle are the outlines of four shadowy figures. The
driver’s side door opens and a black Doc Marten’s boot
ending in a leg clad in tightly cuffed jeans comes out and
rests on the ground. The other three doors open and four
men emerge from the vehicle.
The driver stands up and stretches, putting his fists in
the small of his back, arching his back and cracking a
couple vertebrae, revealing a skin-tight collared white polo-
shirt accented with red suspenders and a clean-shaven
head. In his right hand he’s holding a glass pint of Jack
Daniels and he lifts it up and takes a swig.
“Well, what do we have here?”
From the passenger side a shorter man in a tight black
polo shirt and white suspenders with thick-framed glasses
comes around and looks at the back of the car parked in
front of them.
“Looks like a car, Duke.”
Duke looks at his friend and smirks, taking another swig
of his pint. “Sharp eyes you got there Doc.”
“Thanks, Duke.”
From behind Duke, exiting from the rear driver’s side
door Mikey, a half-keg stomach, pork-chop sideburns and
a shaved head that could use a fresh buzz comes around
and reads a bumper sticker with a bit of effort, reading not
being his strong suit.
“You laugh… because I’m different. I laugh because
you’re all the same.”
Mikey looks at Duke, his brow furrowed in what passes
for contemplation.
“I don’t get it, boss.”
“I’m not surprised, Mikey, my boy.” Duke takes another
swig of whiskey.
Duke turns and looks in the direction of the fourth
passenger from the vehicle, a young black man in a tight
black polo shirt and a shaved head. “What do you make
of this Dutch?”
Dutch saunters over and checks out the bumper
stickers.
Dutch sneers. “I think that’s some faggot shit right
there, boss.”
Duke chuckles. “Why is it always ‘faggot shit’ with
you?”
Dutch just shrugs.
“You wouldn’t like it if we were all ‘Nigger this, nigger
that.’, would ya?”
Dutch just shrugs again.
“It’s a new world out there, Dutch. They’re legalizing
gay marriage all over the place. What are you gonna do
the first time you see two guys kissing each other right on
Main Street in broad daylight?”
“Probably smash their fucking heads together until their
teeth fell out.”
Duke pauses contemplatively. “I do believe you might
at that, my friend.”
Duke puts his boot up on the bumper of Jack’s car and
shoves it noncommittally, rocking the car gently and says
to no one in particular. “Pop the trunk.”
Mikey and Dutch walk around to the back of Duke’s car
and pop the trunk.
Duke finishes his pint and throws the bottle at the rear
window of the Jack’s car and it makes a sharp glass-on-
glass sound but just ricochets off and skitters off into the
darkness. “Fuck! Hand me the bat.”
Dutch takes a well-used Louisville Slugger out of the
trunk and walks over, handing it to Duke.
Duke swings the bat in a circle a few times with a
swagger, limbering up. He plants his feet, lines up, and
swings, smashing out the left tail light of Jack’s car.
 “And she’s outta there!”
Mikey takes a six-pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon out of a
cooler in the trunk and tears one off, passing the other five
still in the plastic rings to Dutch. Mikey pops the ring-tab
and chugs down half the can. Dutch takes a beer out of
the plastic rings and looks over at Doc.
“Doc?”
Doc doesn’t look over, but he nods, Dutch tosses him a
beer like a fastball. Doc catches it without looking. He
taps the top briskly so it doesn’t blow up on him, pops the
top and takes a sip.
Duke saunters around to the other side of Jack’s car.
He lines up his swing and smashes out the other tail-light.
“Pow! Right in the kisser!”
Dutch takes another beer out of the ring tab and goes
to pop the top.
Duke calls over his shoulder to Dutch. “Gimme a beer!
This is thirsty work!”
Dutch shrugs and tosses the beer in his hand over to
Dutch in an easy underhand.
Duke catches it and pops the top and chugs the entire can,
crushing it, grimacing and belching loudly.
Dutch finally gets to pop the top on his own beer and
take a chug, putting the remaining two beers on the hood
of Duke’s car.
Duke looks at the smashed out tail lights of Jack’s car,
smiling with a sense of satisfaction that only he would truly
understand. He comes around and takes another beer
from the plastic ring, pops the top and takes a sip.
“Now, I wonder where our new friends could be?”
Duke looks around, and strides out towards the opening of
the barn looking over towards the main building. He sees
the concrete wall with a swath of grass pushed down in a
path towards the end of the wall, trampled down by the
feet of the group that had arrived before them. Duke looks
from the building, to the boys, then back to the building,
then back to the boys. “You boys up for a little hide and
seek?”
The boys laugh and sip their beers. Doc finishes his
beer and grabs the last one from the top of the car,
dropping the plastic rings to the ground. Dutch leans into
the trunk, fishing around in the half darkness and pulls out
another six pack of Pabst Blue Ribbon. He reaches up to
close the trunk but Duke stops him before he slams it shut.
“Dutch? Hand me my sword.”

Chapter 12

Jack pushes open the double doors to the auditorium

which open with a whisper and a moan. Inside, there are
rows upon rows of modestly padded theater seats, about
half of them having had the upholstery slashed by careless
vandals satisfying their wild impulse to destroy. The
monotony of the row upon row of seats is broken up by two
flights of concrete stairs gradually climbing to the back of
the auditorium.
Nathan cranes his neck, trying to take in the entirety of
the auditorium with his thirsty eyes. “Woah!”
The group walks into the area in front of the stage, and
spreads out. Dani fires off a few shots with her camera,
shooting a panoramic shot of the empty seats and then
turning around to take a picture of the stage. There’s a
giant film screen hanging from a bar connected to a pulley
system. The screen is rust-stained with filthy streaks that
look like an abstract painting executed in old blood but
were made by rain water filtering in from the corrupted
ceiling. There are tattered holes stabbed through it as a
testament to random aggression past. On the back wall
there’s your usual satanic heavy metal graffiti, but on the
screen one inspired graffiti artist spray-painted in big bright
red letters, “Abandon Hope, All Who Enter Here”. Dani
focuses on the message left behind by other intruders and
takes a picture, her flash illuminating it for a split-second.
Jack breaks out his handheld recorder and tests it.
“Test, one two. We’re in the auditorium of The Gate.”
Jack checks his cell phone for the time, the clock reads
9:43 and the bars indicating cell phone reception are all
empty with a small triangle with an exclamation mark
inside of it next to the bars. Jack shrugs off the lack of cell
phone service and continues speaking into his hand-held
recorder. “Approximately quarter to ten. If there’s anyone
here that wants to say anything, we’re here to listen.”
Jack holds the recorder out to the open air, offering it to
any lingering spirits that may be inhabiting the auditorium
while Dani walks around firing off her flash.
Jason and Nathan climb the stairs up to an enclosure at
the top of the stairs in the back of the auditorium.
Jason’s lower center of gravity helps him to gain a lead
over Nathan. He gets to the enclosure first and checks the
doorknob. It’s unlocked. He pushed the door open and
flashes his big mag into the room, revealing an old solid-
looking 35mm projector. “Holy shit! A projector!”
Jason eagerly goes to the projector and tucks the mag
into the fork of his neck and shoulder to free up his hands.
Nathan follows him into the projection booth.
Jason takes a multi-tool out of his pocket and flips out
the screwdriver attachment. He starts to unscrew a couple
screws holding a small shiny chrome piece of the
machinery together.
Nathan frowns, looking somewhat concerned. “What
are you doing?”
“This is awesome! I want a souvenir.”
 Jason finishes detaching the screws and picks off a
small chromed piece holding it up for inspection. “How
cool is that?”
Jack and Dani are walking around the front of the
auditorium. Jack with his arm held out holding his hand-
held recorder over his head, Dani documenting the
remains of the auditorium with her camera.
Jack says to the open air, “If there’s any lingering spirits
here, please let us know.”
Jason and Nathan emerge from the projection booth
and descend the concrete stairs taking them three at a
time with heavy steps that echo around the empty interior
of the auditorium.
When they reach the bottom of the stairs, Jason hurries
over to Jack holding out his trinket. “Hey, Jack! Look what
I found!”
Jack looks at it with a raised eyebrow and a scowl.
“Where did you get that?”
“I took it off this big old projector up there.”
Jason points and looks towards the projection booth
then back at Jack who is still scowling.
Jack says, “Put it back.”
Jason’s jaw drops in surprise. “Fuck you ‘put it back’.
What? Are the ghosts going to come after me to regain
their little whatchamacallit? Fuck you, Jack, you’re not the
boss of me.”
Jack takes a deep sighing breath, letting it out through
his nose. “Fine, whatever.”
Jack turns off his recorder and heads towards the doors
to the auditorium.
Apparently their work is done here.
Jason looks at Nathan and makes a jerk-off gesture
followed by one like he’s throwing his ejaculate at Jack’s
back. Nathan rolls his eyes and turns to follow Jack.
Jason follows.
“Take only pictures, leave only footprints, my ass…
prick.”
Dani brings up the tail, snapping off a few more
pictures, her flash like lightning in the pitch black of the
auditorium.

Chapter 13

The skinhead boys walk confidently towards the waist

high wall of whitewashed concrete.
Duke has a samurai sword in a wooden scabbard slung
across his back with a shoulder strap. Doc has the
baseball bat Duke used to smash out the tail lights of
Jack’s car and is carrying it at port arms, smacking it into
the palm of his left hand every few steps. Mikey is
carrying two sixers of beer and has another beer tucked
into a pocket of his jeans, but it keeps spilling out onto his
jeans making it look like he pissed his pants, but he hasn’t
noticed and even if he noticed he probably wouldn’t care.
It’s just beer after all. As the boys walk, Dutch is clicking
on and off a shock-proof C-cell flashlight. There’s a 9mm
automatic tucked into the back of the waistband of his tight
jeans. Dutch isn’t much worried about bending over and
losing his weapon. His jeans are tight and the weight of
the gun at the small of his back is a constant comforting
reminder that he can handle anything that he comes
across.
The boys get to the lip of the drop and Dutch peers over
the edge and sees the landing and the open mouth of the
tube. “Well, tonight is full of surprises.”
Duke climbs down the ladder followed by the boys.
Doc, then Dutch, then Mikey bringing up the rear making
sure not to drop the six packs as he clambers down the
rusty ladder.
They stand around the entrance to the tube and Duke
looks at Mikey.
“Mikey, get in there and check it out.”
Mikey looks surprised and a bit spooked, but he knows
better than to disrespect Duke. “Okay, Duke.”
Mikey takes the beer out of his pocket and kills it for
courage, dropping the empty to clank on the floor of the
concrete entryway. He gets down on all fours and climbs
into the tunnel, echoing clumsily down the tube, six-packs
clanking mutedly in the darkness. The shuffling ends
abruptly with a yelp and a clamor as he falls off the end of
the tunnel.
Duke laughs and ducks down, peering into the tunnel.
“You okay Mikey?
Mikey’s voice echoes out. “Yeah, boss, I found the end
of the tunnel. Watch out. That first steps a doozy.”
Duke and the boys on the landing chuckle and then pile
into the tube one by one.

Chapter 14

A set of double-doors with security glass windows with

the metal grid baked into them shows a bobbing flashlight
beam in the hallway outside.
Jack’s face appears in the left window and he pushes
open the door which emits a faint squeak.
The kids pile into what was once a cafeteria.
Inside of the cafeteria, the dining tables are all
collapsed and stacked up against the far wall from when
the facility fell into disuse. Scattered across the floor are
hundreds, if not thousands, of ceramic coffee cups, most of
them shattered into sharp abstract forms that look like
bone fragments in the moonlight filtering through sheets of
plywood bolted over the shattered windows.
They walk into the room and spread out. Dani takes a
couple pictures. Jason flashes his flashlight around,
looking for an intact coffee mug. He spots one and walks
over to it, unshouldering his backpack, squatting down and
tucking his mag into his neck joint. He picks up the mug
and unzips his bag. Jack hears the zipper and looks over
at Jason who freezes, caught in the act.
“Really?”
Jason shrugs and Jack turns away disgustedly.
Jason shrugs again to himself and tucks the mug into
his bag. He zips it up and reshoulders it.
Dani snaps a few more pictures, leaning down to get
different angles of the sea of shattered coffee cups.
Nathan fishes around with his shotgun mic, getting the
room tone and listening intently through his headphones.
Jack takes out his handheld recorder and speaks into it.
“We’re in the cafeteria of The Gate. If there’s anyone
here that has anything to say to us we’d like to hear what
you have to say.”
He holds the recorder out into the empty air and notices
a metal barrier rolled down to secure the area where the
appliances used to prepare the food would be. He walks
over and crouches, tugging at the bottom of the roll-up
barrier.
Nathan hears the sound of Jack rattling the barrier and
looks over, calling, “Any luck?”
Jack tries a last time to dislodge the barrier.
“Nope. Either it’s locked or rusted in place.”
Nathan shrugs noncommittally. Jack stands up and
sighs.
“Well… you can’t be lucky all the time. Come on.
We’re burning moonlight. We’ve got a lot more to this
place to check out.”
 Jack walks towards the doors to the cafeteria, grinding
coffee cup fragments underfoot, the rest of the group in
tow.

Chapter 15

The skinhead boys make their semi-cautious way down

the ventilation tunnel.
Dutch is in the lead, lighting the way with his shock-
proof flashlight, a beer in his other hand.
The other boys all have fresh beers, sipping generously
from them every few steps down the tunnel. Mikey carries
one full sixer and two loosies swinging with the rhythm of
his pace on the end of the plastic rings. “This place is
fucking creepy.”
Duke turns and gives him a disgusted look.
“What the fuck are you scared of?”
“I dunno. It’s just creepy. Gives me the willies.”
“If you don’t shut your gob I’ll give you my willy.”
Doc chuckles and takes a hit off of his beer. “Good
one, Duke.”
The boys round the left-hand turn at the end of the first
length of the tunnel, the flashlight suddenly revealing the
abandoned see-saw standing in the middle of the widened
space in the tunnel.
Mikey freezes in his tracks. “Oh fuck!”
Duke sighs resignedly. “What now? You have a
traumatizing incident at the playground? Some tall dark
stranger promised you a puppy and showed you his
pecker?”
“Naw, boss. Just creepy is all.”
“You say ‘creepy’ one more time and I’m gonna have
Dutch pistol-whip you.”
“Sorry boss.”
 Duke walks over to the see-saw and kicks it over.
The see-saw totters and then crashes over, throwing up
a cloud of dust. The crash is devoured by the walls of the
tunnel.
Mikey looks at Duke nonplussed. “What’d you do that
for?”
“Because I fucking felt like it. That’s why.”
Mikey shrugs it off and the boys walk down the tunnel.

Chapter 16

Jack approaches the set of signs at the end of the

hallway at the head of the stairs.
He flashes his mini-mag at the sign and reads off the
signs pointing to the left half under his breath. “Hospital…
School… Residential Wings… Let’s check this shit out.”
Jack turns on his heel and heads off to the left followed
by the rest of his group, flashing his mini-mag down the
hallway. They walk down to the end of the short length of
hallway to the left. Jack opens up the right-hand door of a
set of double doors, stepping through them, followed by
Nathan, Dani and Jason. The door swings closed behind
them, closing with a muted thump which echoes softly in
the empty hallway.

Chapter 17

At the bottom of the stairwell, a sturdy-looking rust-

streaked metal door sits silently.
The door grudgingly grinds open, and Mikey spills out
into the puddle of brackish black water, splashing it up
onto the legs of his jeans.
“Aw fuck!” Mikey yelps, swatting at the water like a
swarm of angry ants.
 “What’s the matter Mikey?” Duke calls from inside of
the tunnel.
“Nothing.”
Dutch steps through the doorway, flashing his flashlight
around the stairwell, stepping over the puddle, past Mikey,
mounting the stairwell, followed by Doc, Duke bringing up
the rear.
Duke stops and looks at Mikey, black rivulets of water
dripping down his legs and soaking into the denim of his
jeans in streaks.
“I can’t take you anywhere.”
“Sorry boss. How was I supposed to know?”
“You can’t just go charging around this place like a
retarded bull in a china shop.”
“I know…” Mikey says sulkily, trying unsuccessfully to
wipe the water off of his legs.
He gives up on his futile efforts and climbs up the stairs
to the landing where the rest of his friends are waiting.
Dutch flashes the beam of his flashlight to the left and right
along the hallway. Dutch focuses the flashlight beam on
the signs posted on the wall.
Mikey catches his breath after climbing the short set of
stairs and continues the conversation they had left off at
the end of the tunnel.
“What about Mary Johnson? Do you think she’d fuck
me?”
Duke snickers and says, “That big-tit slit would blow a
dog for a biscuit. All you gotta do is get her drunk
enough.”
“Yeah, but how drunk is drunk enough?”
“For you? I’d load her up until she passes out.”
“Really?”
Duke just sighs and shakes his head.
Dutch, shining his flashlight at the signs up on the wall,
turns to look at Duke and asks, “Where to?”
Duke sees the sign reading “Cafeteria” and gestures off
to the right with a curt nod.
“Let’s see if they got anything to eat in this shithole.”

Chapter 18

Jack, Dani, Jason and Nathan emerge from the mouth

of a hallway leading into the main hall of the facility. It’s a
towering open hall, a casebook example of institutional
gothic. Crumbling plaster ornamental cornices and thick
carpet splotched with ominous-looking swaths of water
damage and stains.
The central reception desk is wide and sturdy, dark-
stained wood with ornamental panels, arcing across the
entrance like a giant wooden horseshoe. Behind the
reception desk is a huge switchboard from when the
receptionist would have to plug in a different cable to
activate the intercoms and telephones to connect calls
from one part of the facility to another, which the
administration never bothered to have removed.
The urban explorers spread out into the space and
crane their necks to look towards the ceiling. At the front
of the hall, over the main entrance, is a shattered stained
glass window, missing panels taken out by rocks or the
elements. Small bats flit about hunting moths in flashlight
beams shone towards the ceiling.
Jason gasps in startled awe. “This is fucking epic.”
Off of the main hall are three double doorways that
have signs lettered in rusted metal serif fonts over them.
The signs read “Hospital”, “School” and “Patient
Quarters” from left to right, the hospital and school
branching off to the left of the main hall, the ramps leading
up to the patient quarters arching up behind the reception
desk, meeting at a broad platform in front of a wide set of
double doors padlocked together. The residential column
climbing upwards into the sky, taking up the majority of the
towering central structure.
In the middle of the room, behind the central reception
desk, and at the top of a carpeted staircase, flanked by
decorative carved wooden bannisters, two big crucifixes
sculptures poured from molten bronze flank thick wooden
doors with carved and gilded crosses bolted into them.
Jack stops in the middle of the room and turns around,
gesturing welcomingly acting as the concierge, taking a
half bow. He looks at his three friends.
“Where to first?”
Dani says, “I want to check out the hospital.”
Jack grins and announces, “Lady’s choice! The
hospital it is, then.”
Jack starts walking briskly towards the double-doors to
the hospital wing, followed by Dani with Jason and Nathan
in tow.
Jason leans over to Nathan and says conspiratorially,
“She’s no lady.”
Nathan chuckles and Dani turns around, flipping Jason
the bird.
“Fuck you, dog-dick.”
Nathan chuckles at that too as Jack pushes open the
double doors.

Chapter 19

Duke kicks open the double doors to the gym and the
booming ricochets around the big open space.
His friends pile in behind him, crunching glass under
their boots.
Mikey calls out, “Come out! Come out! Wherever you
are!”
Duke turns on him sharply. “Cut that shit out. We’re on
a hunt.”
Duke looks at Doc and Dutch and gestures at two doors
marked “Office” and “Storage”.
“Check those doors.”
Doc and Dutch go off to do as they’re told.
Duke turns and looks at Mikey who’s just waiting like a
loyal dog at heel. He finishes off his beer and drops the
empty can to the ground with a clatter. Duke stares at
Mikey who returns Duke’s stare with a guileless look.
“Don’t just stand there. Give me a beer!”
Mikey snaps out of his semi-trance and fumbles with
the rings holding the two loosies. “Right, coming right up.”
Mikey manages to get a beer off the rings and holds it
out to Dutch.
Dutch just stares at the beer in Mikey’s outstretched
hand.
Mikey smiles awkwardly, trying to think of what else
there is to be done, then he gets it and pops the beer.
Duke swipes it from his hand and takes a swig.
Mikey finishes his beer and drops the can to clatter onto
the floor amongst the fragments of safety glass. He pulls
the plastic ring off of the last loosie, dropping that too. He
pops the beer and takes a sip.
Doc comes out of the storage room. Dutch comes out
of the office a moment later.
“Anything?”
“Nothing in here.” Doc says.
“Nothing.” Dutch echoes.
“Ah fuck.” Duke says and washes down the
disappointment with a swig of his beer. “Let’s go.”
Duke turns on his heels and walks towards the double
doors.
Chapter 20

Jack pushes through the double doors to the hospital

wing, his mini-mag sweeping the floor for any booby traps
left behind by other mischievous explorers or holes in the
flooring left behind by the rot and ruin of the years passed.
Jack holds the door for Dani and Nathan and Jason push
through behind her.
Jason flashes mag-lite around, revealing the central
hallway of the hospital wing, a two-tiered affair like a prison
cell-block with a long central corridor running down the
middle. Most of the doorways yawn open and black, the
doors missing or ajar or askew on their hinges.
Dani steps into the center of the hallway and takes
three shots in quick succession the flash lighting up like
brief fireworks and whining thinly as it recharges itself.
Jack steps over to the doorway of the first room on the
left, leaning in, flashing his mini-mag around. In the middle
of the room is a metal-framed hospital bed with a moldy
bare mattress on it. On each side and at the foot of the
bed frame are tied what used to be leather restraints that
have gone to mold in the cool damp darkness, now fuzzy
and like green velvet. An IV stand stands by the head of
the bed, the bottle half-filled with a viscous black fluid that
could have, at one time been a saline drip or blood. In the
corner of the room is a solid-state piece of machinery
covered in dust and falling into rust. A once-sturdy
wooden chair gradually succumbing to dry rot in front of it,
cobwebs lacing between the chair legs.
On the other side of the hallway, Jason steps into the
doorway of the first room on the right shining his big mag
around the room. The flashlight beam reveals what is
clearly intended to be a chair of some sort, except at the
places where the occupant’s ankles and wrists would rest
there are sturdy leather straps hanging unfastened. The
headrest of the chair is aswarm with wires connected to
sensors, the wires lead backwards and are braided
together into a thick cable wrapped in black rubber hose
and a rusted metal mesh. The cable snakes across the
linoleum tiles, craning up to connect to the side of a big
piece of equipment. The front of the machine is a diagonal
plane littered with switches and dials covered in dust and
falling into rust. Jason does a slow sweep of the room with
his video camera.
Dani walks somewhat gingerly down hallway, weaving
side to side, leaning into each doorway, poking her camera
in and flashing off a shot, checking the captured image in
her camera’s display after each shot. Nathan follows her,
five paces and one doorway behind, poking his shotgun
mic into each room in turn and listening to the somewhat
uniform sound of the interior of the empty rooms.
Dani leans into the next doorway and clicks off a shot,
automatically checking the results in the display. She
furrows her brow at what she sees and calls back down the
hallway. “Hey, guys, check this out!”
The others stop what they’re doing and come as called.
“What is it?” Jason asks, trying to sneak a peek at the
display of Dani’s camera.
Dani dismissively shoves him telling him “See for
yourself.”
Jason apprehensively steps into the blackened
doorway of the room, sweeping the beam of his flashlight
up from the floor of the room. The floor is littered with
hundreds of sheets of yellowing leaves of paper,
typewriting crawling across the yellowing sheets like
columns of ants in formation. Mixed in among the sheets
of paper are old x-rays tinted tobacco brown and charcoal
grey showing the outlines of ribcages, hips and skulls in
blurry contrast. As Jason raises the beam, it reveals the
room as a decent size, both sides and the back of the
room are lined with floor-to-ceiling shelves filled with
medical charts in moldering manila sleeves.
They file into the room.
Jack goes to the wall of files, reaching out at arm’s
height, randomly selecting a thick file.
Jason bends over and picks up a sheaf of x-rays off the
floor.
Jack opens the file, flipping through the pages, using
his mini-mag to skim the alternatively typewritten and
handwritten notes. As he flips through the pages in the
file, some of them fall out, drifting to the floor like dead
leaves in autumn. The file is written on onion-skin paper in
long-hand. Every now and then there’s a black and white
eight-by-ten inch photo of the patient in various states of
undress, insanity, and physical deformity or recovering
from a lobotomy.
Jason holds up a sheaf of x-rays like a hand of
oversized playing cards and shining his big mag through
them. The x-rays are a collage of broken bones, internal
injuries, metal surgical repairs, tumor-filled lungs and
misshapen skulls.
Jason whispers, to himself more than anyone else,
“This is a serious breach of patient confidentiality.”
Jack closes the file he was leafing through and tries to
reshelve it, but the files on the shelf have shifted and the
file in Jack’s hand bunches up and breaks, the contents
showering onto the floor. “All of this kind of stuff is
supposed to be removed or destroyed when a place like
this closes down. Guess they never got around to it.”
Nathan shrugs in the half-darkness, “Maybe they were
in a rush.”
Jack weighs Nathan’s suggestion, but there’s
something missing. “Why would they be in a rush?”
 “I dunno.” Nathan says, shrugging again, then
straightens abruptly his left hand swinging his shotgun mic
around towards the hallway outside the room, his right
hand pressing his headphone tight against his ear. He
turns on his heel, papers rustling underfoot and steps to
the doorway, leaning out and looking down the hallway in
both directions.
Jack asks Nathan “What is it?” but Nathan shushes
Jack, single finger over lips, leaning out with his mic
holding it out first in one direction, pausing, listening, then
the other.
Everyone in the room does their best to hold their
breath or breathe quietly for a minute… then two.
Nathan listens intently for those two minutes, then
frowns and sighs, turning to his friends, “I thought I heard
footsteps. I guess I’m hearing things.”
Jack says “You’re our sound guy. You’re not allowed to
hear things.”
Nathan shrugs it off and steps out into the hallway,
breaking out his dugout, digging into the loose green
flakes, packing his one-hitter.
He puts it between his lips and breaks out his lighter,
shielding the tip out of habit from a nonexistent breeze.
He flicks his bic and takes a hit, holding his breath,
exhaling a blue grey plume upwards towards the second
floor.
Maybe this place was starting to get under his skin after
all.
Chapter 21

Duke kicks open the doors of the auditorium, the sound

booms ricocheting across the open expanse of the space
inside.
Duke’s head pivots rapidly back and forth looking for
any sign of movement, hoping to see the shape of some
startled teenagers diving behind a row of auditorium seats.
As far as he can tell at first glance the auditorium is empty
but he knows that if he didn’t do a thorough sweep, the
lack of thoroughness would nag at him. Although they
started off the night looking for someplace to smash bottles
and when that lost its novelty, maybe do some batting
practice aiming for what few panes of windows were left in
the predominantly windowless facility, the presence of
other trespassers changed the game and now it was hide
and seek. It didn’t matter if they never found whoever
they were looking for. Half the fun was in the hunt. But if
you’re going to do something, you might as well do it right
so he turns to the boys who had piled in behind him and
says, “Spread out.”
Dutch breaks left.
Doc breaks right.
Mikey heads up the stairs to check the projection booth.
Duke takes a couple steps and vaults onto the stage in
front of the auditorium, landing loud on both boots. He
leans side-to-side, testing the flooring underfoot. It creaks
a bit, settling under his weight but doesn’t give, so he
walks across the stage his bootsteps echoing across the
stage and bouncing off of the back wall into the empty
auditorium.
Duke walks over to the screen and scoffs at the graffiti.
“Abandon hope my ass.” He kicks the metal pipe threaded
into the bottom of the screen with his steel-toed boots and
it makes a dull ringing sound, the screen billows and
swings back and forth. He turns his back to the auditorium
and undoes his belt and the fly of his jeans and takes a
piss in the center of the stage.
The spattering sound of Duke’s piss echoes up as
Mikey hits the top of the stairs, breathing heavily, more
than half out of breath. Mikey rests, bent over with his
hands on his knees breathing deeply till he catches his
breath. He straightens up and steps up to the doorway to
the projection booth, planting a hand on either side of the
door-frame, leaning in, poking his head into the darkness,
nosing around.
On the stage below, Duke finishes pissing, gives what
God gave him a shake and a squeeze to milk out the last
drops of errant urine and straps himself back in. Satisfied,
stepping back from the fresh pool of warm piss spreading
out amoeba-like, he calls out to the boys. “Anything?”
From the top of the aisles to the left, now headed back
down the stairs to the front of the auditorium Dutch calls
back. “No!”
Doc, already halfway back down the stairs on the right
side of the auditorium calls back, “Nope!”
Mikey leans back out of the relatively impenetrable
darkness of the projection booth and calls down, “Nuthin’!”
Duke pulls a dis-satisfied face, more to himself than
anyone else and says, “Alright! Let’s keep looking!
They’ve got to be in here somewhere.” Under his breath
he asks himself, “Where are those assholes?” rubbing the
stubble on his head in a contemplative way. He shudders,
shaking out of his trance, walking to the edge of the stage,
landing heavily on both booted feet with the sound of a flat
thunderclap.
Chapter 22

Jack pushes open the double doors to the school wing

the crew following him through.
The hallway runs straight for fifty feet until it hits a T-
stop with arrows pointing in either direction, small signs too
far away to read indicating what is in either direction at the
end of the main hallway.
The school wing is a single-floor affair with a maze of
long dark hallways, metal signs bolted into the walls at
regular intervals with non-descript names reading “Room
1”. The signs are rusted around the edges and the paint
has faded.
Jack walks over to the first doorway and Jason flashes
his flashlight around the dim interior of what looks like it
used to be a classroom. Inside is nothing really exciting.
Twelve or so old school desks made out of bent aluminum
tubes with, synthetic fiber desktops, seats, and seat-backs
bolted to the framework of the tubes.
At the front of the classroom, a sturdy wooden desk sits
silently and seemingly immovably.
On the wall, behind the desk, is an old green
chalkboard. Someone spray-painted “FUCK SCHOOL”
across it in bright red spray-paint letters three-feet tall and
two feet wide.
Jason pans his flashlight across the board, snickering,
“Geez. Tell us what you really think.”
Nathan chuckles at Jason’s joke.
Jack, unimpressed, turns on his heel and walks down
the hallway to the next open doorway. Dani takes three
steps into classroom, kicking up small clouds of dust that
drift across the scant beams of slanting moonlight allowed
in around the edges of the sheets of plywood bolted across
the windows, the glass inside the windows shattered out
except for jagged teeth around the edges. She lifts her
camera and snaps a shot of the graffiti, shuddering to
herself, imagining that this was once a place where
children spent their days.
She turns and leaves, quick-walking up the hallway to
catch up with the rest of her group. As they walk down the
hallway, Jack and Jason flash their lights into the doorways
they pass, but the beams reveal nothing of particular
interest. Just more school desks. More graffiti spray-
painted chalkboards. Sometimes one or two desks
knocked over or smashed apart or stacked to the ceiling by
previous pranksters. Dani pauses to take pictures of the
school desk sculptures. But the graffiti on the chalkboards
isn’t worth the space on her memory card to memorialize.
Metallica spelled with varying numbers of L’s and C’s but
always with the jagged dagger hooks protruding from the
first and last letter, rendered with varying degrees of
proficiency. Sometimes a poorly rendered skull or pot-
leaf. Graffiti hadn’t reached the pinnacle of its artistic
expression in their relatively rural area.
At the end of the hall, the hallway comes to a T-stop
splitting into two narrower hallways. On the wall in the
center of the T-stop a big sign says “POOL”.
Jason reads the sign aloud. “Pool?”
Jack cocks his head at Jason. “That’s what the sign
says.”
To the left and right on the inner edge of the entrances
to the two forking hallways are smaller signs pointing into
the entrances.
One reads “Gulls”. The other “Buoys”.
Each has a cartoon painted on the wall above it.
Above the sign reading “Gulls” is a pelican in a wide-
brimmed straw sun hat with a red ribbon tied into a big bow
on the side, standing on a beach.
Above the sign reading “Buoys” is a red-and-white
striped buoy with a blue baseball cap perched atop it at a
jaunty angle, anthropomorphized with wide open oval eyes
and a giant grin stretching out into thin air bobbing merrily
on a stylized wave.
Nathan sniffs, clearing his nose. “Well, at least they
had a sense of humor.”
Jack looks over his shoulder at the other three and
nods towards the hallways receding into windowless
darkness. “Split up?”
Jason shrugs. “Sure. Why not?”
Jack turns to his left towards the “Gulls” room and Dani
falls in behind him.
Jason looks at Nathan and shrugs again, aiming the
beam of his flashlight down the hallway leading to into the
“Buoys” room.

Chapter 23

The thin beam of Jack’s mini-mag ghosts into the pitch-

black room. It’s a long, narrow room the floor and walls
tiled with small dark tiles between grids of moldy grout.
The light from the mag-lite bounces off the lime-streaked
walls. One wall is lined with toilets stalls, most of the stall
doors kicked in or torn off of their hinges. In the middle of
the room is a long thick, wooden bench. Lining the
opposite wall is a series of small electroplated aluminum
lockers. The doors to the lockers randomly leer open or
have been torn off their hinges and scattered on the floor.
Other than the missing doors, the room is pretty free from
vandalism, the pitch-darkness of the windowless room
discouraging the spray-paint artists that defaced the
chalkboards of the classrooms.
Jack shines the beam of his flashlight at the ceiling and
it glints off a rust-speckled fire extinguisher nozzle. “I
always wanted to know what the inside of the girls locker
room looked like.”
Dani steps over the bench and peeks into a couple of
the open lockers, opening an unopened one, not surprised
to find nothing inside but a thin layer of fine dust. She
swipes an index finger across the dust, bringing it back up
in a half-circle making a capital “D”, leaving her little mark
in case anyone ever looks inside that locker again.
“Well now you can check that off of your bucket list.”
She turns to Jack who brings the flashlight up, shining it
in her face. She narrows her eyes, but doesn’t wince.
Jack says, “Pretty underwhelming.” and walks to the
other end of the locker room using the flashlight to pick his
way through the locker doors littering the floor.

Chapter 24

In the Buoys room Jason flashes his big mag around.

It’s almost identical to the Gulls room, except a few of the
toilet stalls are replaced with porcelain urinals, bolted into
the walls, except the bowl at the bottom of each one had
been smashed out, the jagged chunks of porcelain laying
where they fell like dragon’s teeth,
Nathan waves his shotgun mic around the room. The
tiles act as an acoustical baffle and eat every sound whole.
Nathan shrugs to himself and pushes the headphones
down onto his shoulders where they rest like a yoke. He
stuffs the handle of the shotgun mic into his armpit,
clenching it close and fishes around in his pocket for his
dugout.
Jason sighs. “We need to get some more girls into this
little ghost-hunting group.”
Nathan finds the dugout and rotates the hinged cap in a
practiced motion, extracting the one-hitter and packing it
with loose flecks of orange speckled green flakes. “Why
do you say that?”
Jason flashes the flashlight in Nathan’s face and
Nathan raises an eyebrow.
“Because it’s Friday night and I’m standing around in a
pitch-black men’s room with you.”
Nathan sparks the one hitter and inhales, holding in the
smoke. “Duly noted.” He says, and exhales.

Chapter 25

Jack’s mini-mag comes around the corner on the left as

Jason’s beam fishes around the corner from the right and
the beams duel on the floor until they emerge into an
echoey open expanse.
Jason waves his beam at Jack and Dani. “That didn’t
take you guys long.”
Jack nonchalantly fishes in his pocket for his pack of
cigarettes, finding it, takes it out and flicks the bottom of
the pack, pecking out the jutting end of a cigarette with his
lips. He flips his zippo open, lighting his cigarette, blowing
a plume of blue-grey smoke at Jason who waves it apart.
“Why fuck around? Plus I figured you guys could use
some time alone.”
“Ha. Ha. Motherfucker. Next time I get the girl.”
Dani scoffs and says, “You couldn’t get a girl with a ten-
inch dick and a hundred dollar bill and you don’t have
either.”
Jason furrows his brow and pouts in feigned
indignance, “How do you know I don’t have a hundred
dollars?”
Nathan, bored by their playground banter wanders over
to the edge of a giant black square in the middle of the
room. He stops, his toes on the edge of a drop. The drop
ends in the deep end of the pool. There’s a black, thick
surface of scum ending halfway across the pool towards
the far end where the shallow end rises up out of the muck
like a ramp. The surface of the black scum is oily and
iridescent, swallowing the faint light spilling over from the
landing in blue-violet semi-circles. Nathan stares down
into the pool, hypnotized by the gently rippling surface and
starts to sway.
Jason comes up from behind and claps him on the
shoulder, breaking his trance.
“Easy there, fella. Don’t want you falling in.”
Nathan shakes his head, and blinks, taking a deep
breath.
Jason looks over the edge. He sniffs at the stagnant air
pooling in the empty space where chlorinated water used
to be. “Aw, what the fuck is that shit? It smells like old
gym socks soaked in ball sweat.”
Jack and Dani walk to the lip of the drop and look over.
Jack ashes over the edge and the ash hits the surface
of the ichor with a hiss. “Probably dripped in from the roof
over the years.” Jack flashes his mini-mag up at the
ceiling to prove his point, illuminating blackened patches of
water stains and rust-brown condensation. “Probably
some dead animals in there too. Plus all of the mold and
bacteria. There’s no windows in this place. No sunlight.
A nice cool dark place. The kind of place bacteria, mold
and funguses love.”
Dani swallows hard and makes a face as if she’d tasted
something biter. “That shit smells awful. I think I’m gonna
be sick.”
Jacked takes a last hard pull on his cigarette and flicks
it out as far as he can. The cherry tracer disappears with a
whisper of a hiss. “Yeah, let’s get out of here.”
Chapter 26

Duke kicks in the doors of the cafeteria.

The sound ricochets around and dies in the short reverb
of the room.
The boys swarm in behind him. All there is for them to
see is a sea of shattered coffee cups scattered across the
floor.
Dutch bends over and picks one up, his finger curled
through the finger ring, half a jagged edged coffee cup
hanging in mid-air the other half who knows where. “What
the fuck is this shit?”
“Coffee cups. Hundreds and hundreds of coffee cups.”
Doc answers dryly.
Duke gestures at the kitchen area, which is blocked off
by a roll-down sheet of corrugated aluminum. “Check that
shit out.”
Dutch drops the half mug and it clatters to the floor
among it’s shattered like and walks towards the drop-down
sheet.
Doc scours the floor for an unbroken coffee cup. He
finds one and tosses it up into the air, nailing it with the
baseball bat on its downward trajectory. The cup
explodes, sending bits of jagged porcelain in every
direction.
Dutch reflexively hides the side of his face with his arm,
the echo of the fragmenting chips of mug skittling against
the aluminum barrier. “Hey, chill out with that shit!”
Doc chuckles and crouches, looking for another
unbroken coffee mug for batting practice. “Fuck you,
brown boy.”
Dutch reaches the roll-down wall of corrugated
aluminum and crouches down, trying to worm his fingers
under it. The gate is locked flush against the floor. He
rises and puts his palms against the ridges of the roll-down
barrier just below shoulder height and tries to push it
upwards, grunting with exertion. It doesn’t budge.
Duke calls over. “What’s the deal, Dutch?”
Dutch gives the barrier another shove and when it
doesn’t budge he kicks it in frustration, making a sound like
a large rock thrown at the side of a metal garbage can.
“This shit ain’t going nowhere. It’s stuck solid.”
Duke shrugs at the news and takes a sip of his beer.
“Ah, fuck it.”
Doc manages to find another whole mug in the sea of
porcelain shards and tosses it in the air, nailing it with the
bat, exploding it into sharp shrapnel.
Duke flinches and cackles as bits of it pelt him. He
looks down, trying to find a whole mug too.

Chapter 27

Jack pushes open the double doors leading from the

school wing into the main hall. Everyone follows after,
their footsteps echoing off as they move from the linoleum
tile of the school hallway onto the carpeted floor of the
main hall. The double doors swing shut behind them,
swallowing the echoes of their footsteps.
Jack stops and turns. “Where to now?”
“We could check out the residence wing.” Nathan
volunteers.
“I’m hungry.” Dani says.
“I could eat.” Jason adds. Dani scowls at him.
“You sure can, you fat fuck.”
“Fuck you, you condescending cunt. It’s not my fault
you’ve got the metabolism of a bird and I’ve got the
metabolism of a bear.”
“Just because you eat honey out of a clay pot with your
bare hands doesn’t make you a bear.”
“Just because you suck dick to make friends doesn’t
make you a slut but if it walks like a duck and quacks like a
duck…”
Dani closes the distance between them in two big
strides, swinging at him with a high, wide, over-handed
roundhouse punch.
Jason blocks it and she kicks him in the shin. He yelps,
“Ow! Fuck!” and hops around on one foot, clutching his
kicked shin with his hands while Dani hammer-fists him on
his shoulders and back.
Jack steps in and grabs Dani by the backpack, pulling
her off Jason who hobbles off to safety. “Alright! Enough!”
Jason shakes his leg out and tests it. “Fuck! Dani!
That fucking hurt!”
“Good! I hope you have a limp for the rest of your life
you donkey-show stunt-double!”
Jack shouts, “Alright! Enough! Cut the shit!”
Dani twists around in a circle and Jack loses his grip on
her backpack.
She scowls at Jack and straightens out her shirt,
adjusting the straps of her backpack on her shoulders.
She stomps at Jason who wasn’t paying attention and he
flinches.
Dani spits “I get low blood-sugar, douchebag.”
Jason shoots her back a wry reply, “You’re a
douchebag, douchebag!”
Jack sighs and rolls his eyes, stepping a few paces
away and fishing in his pocket for his pack of cigarettes,
muttering to himself. “I give up.”
“Your mother’s a douchebag, douchebag!”, Dani
shouts.
“Your mother IS my mother’s douchebag, douchebag!
She fills her mouth with vinegar and water and spits into
my mother’s twat while she’s going down on her…
douchebag.”
 Dani tries to stay angry and keep her mean face on
straight but she can’t do it and busts out laughing.
“Did you just say ‘twat’?”
“Yeah, why? Twat’s a perfectly good word.”
“Nobody says ‘twat’ anymore.”
“I say ‘twat’.”
“What, did you just time-travel here from 1975 and
stagger out of your custom van with the shag carpet
interior and a picture of a warrior in a bearskin loincloth
fucking a sorceress on a mountaintop airbrushed on the
side of it?”
“What the fuck are you talking about? Are you high?”
“Maybe. Yeah. A little. I get low blood sugar!”
Jason looks at Nathan who is raising his one hitter to
his mouth to take a toke.
Nathan shrugs noncommittally and says “Dude, she’s
right. Nobody says ‘twat’ anymore.”
“I thought everybody said ‘twat’.”
Nathan hits and holds and offers the one-hitter to Dani
who gladly takes if from him. “If by ‘everybody’ you mean
‘nobody’, then yes, you’re right, everybody says ‘twat’
anymore.” Nathan exhales.

Chapter 28

In the cafeteria the boys each have a pile of four or five

intact coffee mugs at their feet. They take turns passing
the bat around and disintegrating the mugs in mid-air.
Lined up in a loose arc from left-to-right, Dutch, Mikey,
Duke and Doc.
Dutch tosses a mug up into the air and nails it dead on.
The mug explodes and the boys all cheer and laugh like
little drunk kids at a baseball game.
Dutch passes the bat to Mikey who shoulders the bat
for a moment and points out to the far end of the cafeteria.
 Duke looks at him like Mikey’s an idiot and asks, “What
the fuck are you doing?”
“I’m Babe Ruth!”
“Fuck you fat boy. The only way you look like Babe
Ruth is in your waistline. Just take your fucking turn and
pass the bat.”
Mikey leans over exposing a generous slice of butt-
crack. He grabs a mug and shimmies a bit to resettle his
pants above his ass and under the shelf of his gut. He
tosses the mug into the air and hits it off center. The mug
shatters and sprays shrapnel back towards the boys.
Mikey shouts “Aw fuck!” and they all cringe, reflexively
trying to shield themselves with their arms.
Duke’s hand shoots up to his right eye.
The laughter dies down to chuckles then to silence.
Duke takes his hand away from his brow and there’s a
nick over his right eye that starts to leak blood down the
side of his face. Duke looks down at his hand and sees a
streak of his blood.
Mikey is all apologies. “Sorry, Duke! How was I
supposed to know it’d do that?”
Duke, stone silent and grim-faced, reaches into his
back pocket pulling out a bandana, using it to dab at the
trickle of blood. “It’s okay. It’s not your fault. Accidents
happen.”
Duke dabs at the cut a few more times, then holds the
bandana up against the wound. “I think we’ve fucked
around enough in here. Let’s go.”
Chapter 29

Jack drops his cigarette onto the water-stained carpet

at his feet, putting his left foot on it, grinding it out. “Now
that we got our nightly cat fight out of the way…” he says
and gestures towards the stairs leading to the doors to the
chapel, “…who wants to check out a deconsecrated
church?”
Jason looks up to where Jack is pointing at the doors to
the chapel.
“No way. FUCK no. Not me.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t fuck around with that Satanic shit. I don’t like it.
Not one bit.”
Dani chimes in, “What are you scared of? You don’t
even believe in God?”
“I don’t believe in love at first sight either, but just
because I don’t believe in it doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist.”
Jack’s smirks, fearless and unconvinced.
Jason stands his ground. “Look, if you want to come
back some other night with squirt guns filled with holy
water and silver crucifixes, fine and well, but if you want to
go in there bare-ass naked you can fucking count me out.”
Dani says, “No one wants to see your fat ass naked
anyway.”
Jason relieved at the chance to joke his way out of the
situation grabs his crotch. “If I pulled out the viper right
now I’d turn the whole room white. You’d better brace
yourself.”
Dani rolls her eyes and sighs, unimpressed. “Oh
please, I’ve seen one before.”
“Not like this one you haven’t.”
Dani sighs petulantly and turns to Jack. “As much as I
hate to admit it, maybe he’s right. I really am kind of
hungry.”
 Jack’s expression changes. Storm clouds on the
horizon. “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Dani changes course and with a shade of guile she
says, “Let’s just go home and review the stuff we’ve got.
We can come back some other night and do some long
EVP sessions in the church and the residential wing.
Maybe come back with a duffel bag and pack up those x-
rays and a couple patient files to check out. What do you
think?”
Jack lowers his arms, crossing them across his chest.
“I think you guys are scared. Like scared little kids. How
can you expect people to respect us as a paranormal
investigation team when we rabbit just when things get
interesting?”
Jack looks around, staring hard at Jason who looks at
Nathan.
“Don’t look at me. I’m Buddhist. Churches don’t fuck
with me in the least.”
Jason looks back at Jack. “I think Dani’s right. We can
go back to my place and review what we’ve got. Between
my camera, Dani’s camera, Nate’s sound deck and your
EVP recorder we’ve got, like ten hours of stuff to go
through. I think we’ve got enough for one night. We can
come back some other night and check out the church, the
residential wing and the tunnels.”
Jack scoffs. “I can’t believe you guys.” Jack fishes out
his pack of cigarettes and flicks out a cig and pops it into
his mouth. He fishes out his lighter and flips it open and
thumbs the wheel. He takes a drag and exhales it straight
up into the air where the smoke pools languorously. “Fuck
it. Fine. We’ll come back some other night. But if you
guys chicken out on me again I’m fucking done with your
lame asses.”
Jack takes off towards the exit doors at a brisk pace.
 The others in the group shuffle briskly to catch up.
Jason murmurs under his breath so all but Jack can
hear. “Fuck you, James Dean. We don’t all got a death
wish.”
Dani whips her head around and jerks her hand up,
index finger extended across her lips and shoots him her
best “shut-the-fuck-up” look.

Chapter 30

The skinhead boys are coming down the hallway from

the cafeteria in a less than merry mood and the only
sounds they’re making are their boots scratching on the
crumbly tiles and the jingling of heir wallet chains.
The fun is over for the night.
The beers have all been drunk and the young men
aren’t as drunk as they wished they were and one of them
is bleeding.
Granted it’s not a lot of blood, but it doesn’t take a lot of
blood to ruin an otherwise good time.
The boys are five feet away from the top of the stairs
that descend down to the ventilation tunnel when Jack
comes bursting out of the double doors from the main
building followed by the other aspiring ghost hunters.
Jack takes a couple steps towards the stairwell and
looks up and down the hallway, suddenly realizing that
they’re not alone in the hallway. Both groups stop still.
Jason shines the beam of his flashlight at the skins and
Dutch shines his flashlight at the ghost-hunters each group
casting shadows back in the direction they came.
Duke reaches his arm back and pulls his samurai sword
out of its scabbard. It makes a rising singing ringing sound
that fades to silence as he levels it, pointing it at Jack.
All that can be heard in the hallway is the sound of
bated breath.
 Duke says in measured, weighted, words. “Don’t…
Move…”
Jack’s eyes dart right and he breaks for the top of the
stairs, with the rest of the ghost-hunters snapping into
motion.
Duke and his boys charge, surging like big cats
ploughing into a pack of gazelles.
Jack makes the top of the stairs and grabs for the
handrail to do a turn at speed.
Duke slashes down at Jack’s hand, missing it by a hair
as Jack lets go and launches himself down the stairs. The
sword rings and sparks, metal against metal, the handrail
ringing like a bell struck with a hammer as Jack lands hard
at the bottom of the stairwell, the pool of water splashing
around him. He vaults through the open doorway.
Jason almost collides full-on with Doc who has his
baseball bat poised for a swing.
Jason ducks and jabs an elbow into Doc’s ribs which
takes a lot of the piss out of Doc’s swing. The bat only
glances off of Jason’s back, but it still has enough heat
behind it to wind Jason. Nathan crashes into Jason from
behind. Jason, an obstacle between Nathan and escape.
Nathan tries to hurdle over Jason but his pants tent taught
between his legs and catch on Jason’s shoulders. Nathan
lands on Jason’s back, tumbling them both down the stairs,
all knees and elbows, landing in a winded wincing pile in
the pool of brackish water at the bottom. Mikey jumps
down the stairs, dog-piling on top of them, punching sharp
hard jabs into their torsos as the boys try to untangle
themselves. Dani crouches to vault over the pile of boys at
the base of the stairs. As she springs, Dutch swipes out
and grabs a fistful of her hair, stopping her short, yanking
her back. Dani yelps and jerks her hand up into her hair,
clawing at Dutch’s hand as Dutch drags her backwards
from the top of the stairwell, pinning her against the wall
with a hand throttling her throat. Dutch untangles his right,
hand from her hair, snapping out strands and reaches
behind him. He takes the gun out of his waistband and
points it into her eye. She sees it and the black hole of the
barrel and all of the struggle goes out of her. Playtime is
over.
Mikey is straddled over Jason and Nathan, jabbing and
kicking at them as they try to untangle themselves from the
pile of backpack straps and elbows, slipping around in the
brackish black water. Doc saunters down the stairs and
grabs the back of Nathan’s jacket, pulling him out of the
pile and dragging him backwards up to the top of the stairs
the hard way, Nathan’s knees, elbows and heels thunking
out an off-time beat on the edges of the short set of stairs.
At the top of the stairs, Doc spins Nathan, still disoriented
and dripping and throws him up against the wall, winding
him. Nathan puts his arms up like a boxer ready to block
any incoming blows as Doc sweeps up the bat, arcing it
over his shoulder ready to swing it into Nathan’s forearms.
Nathan sees the bat, poised to swing and puts his hands
up, gulping in big lung-fulls of air.
In the bottom of the stairwell, Mikey finally jabs and
stomps Jason into submission, pinning Jason’s face down
on its side in the pool of water. Jason sputters.
Mikey, straddling Jason, leans down and yells into
Jason’s unsubmerged ear. “Stop fucking struggling
asshole!”
Jason goes limp and Mikey stands up and swings his
leg over Jason.
“Alright now. Get up. Nice and slow and easy. You
make any smart moves and I’ll throw you a real beating
you got me?”
Jason gets his hands under himself and pushes himself
up to his hands and knees, staggering to his feet. He tries
to blow all of the water he took in out of his nose and
wrings oily grey-black water out of his black t-shirt.
Duke points at Jason with the samurai sword and
motions up the stairs with it. “Come on up, kid. Join the
party.”
Jason resignedly climbs the stairs with Mikey a step
behind him, rolling his shoulders to try to work out a kink.
Their clothes tie-dyed with wet patterns.
When they reach the top of the stairs, Mikey shoves
Jason into the wall and leans on him with a hand in the
middle of his chest.
Duke squats down and peers into the darkened
doorway. “Give me the torch.”
Dutch hands Duke the flashlight and Duke points it
through the doorway. The beam reveals Jack standing
fifteen feet down the tunnel in the darkness.
Duke grins. “You’ll want to come on back, bright boy,
before something bad happens to your friends.”
Jack doesn’t come forward. “How do I know you’re not
planning something bad anyway?”
Duke frowns and raises his eyebrows bemusedly.
“You don’t. But if you don’t get your ass back up here I
guarantee you’ll wish you did.”
Jack resignedly walks the fifteen feet back and steps
through the doorway. He slowly climbs the stairs, while
Duke keeps the point of the samurai sword pointed at him.
“Play it cool and no one gets hurt.”
“What do you want from us?”
“I dunno. What do you have?”
Jack reaches for his back pocket. Duke tenses up.
Jack puts out his other hand palm-out and moves slowly.
Jack fishes out his wallet and opens it up, taking out his
cash. “I’ve got twenty-three dollars.”
 “I don’t know if that’s gonna be enough.”
From behind them Doc says, “What about their gear?”
Duke smiles and nods. “Alright kids. Cough it up. Put
it all in a pile.”
Jack takes his mini-recorder out of his pocket and
places it on the floor.
Nathan takes off his headphones and unshoulders his
digital recording deck and places it on the floor next to
Jack’s digital recorder.
Jason adds his video camera to the pile.
Dani adds her DSLR to the pile and, as an afterthought,
takes out the case for the camera and drops it into the pile
and leans back against the wall.
Duke leans down and picks up the camera and tries to
figure out how to turn it on. Duke is the center of attention
While he’s distracted, Dani reaches into her pocket and
slips her stiletto out, palming it lengthwise in the hollow of
her hand.
Duke gives up on trying to figure out how to turn on the
camera and looks at Jack. “This all you got?”
“Yeah. Isn’t that enough?”
Duke looks down at the pile of stuff then back up at
Jack.
“You got moxie kid, I like that. Leave the gear and
you’re free to go.”
There’s a tense moment as everyone weighs the
scenario in their minds.
The gear’s going to be expensive to replace, and tough
to explain to their parents, but maybe it was better to just
cut their losses and walk away clean.
Dutch breaks the silence. “Maybe get ‘em to leave the
girl behind.”
Duke looks over at Dani.
Duke raises an eyebrow in Dutch’s direction. “You
might be onto something there, Dutch. You want to party
with us, suicide girl? Maybe get to see what a real man
fucks like?”
Dutch chuckles. “Yeah, girl, you ever suck a black
dick?”
Dutch reaches out and grabs one of Dani’s tits.
Jack yells, “Leave her alone!” and surges forward
grabbing Dutch by the shoulder, turning Dutch around to
face him, pulling his fist back to smash it into Dutch’s
sneering face.
Jack’s punch is strong but poorly aimed and Dutch
knocks it away with his forearm, grabbing Jack by the front
of his shirt, balling the t-shirt tight in his fist and puts his
gun in Jack’s face.
“You want some of this motherfucker? Huh? This what
you want?”
Dani flicks out the blade on her stiletto, stabbing Dutch
in the back between his shoulder blades, burying the blade
to the hilt.
Dutch grunts, surprised and tenses up, his hands
balling up, he pulls the trigger.
The gun explodes, deafening in the close confines of
the hallway. A tiny red-black hole appears in Jack’s face
like magic and his cheekbone collapses as the inside of his
head sprays out of the gaping exit wound, spattering the
wall behind him and everyone in the path of the exiting
spray.
The lights in Jack’s eyes go out like someone flipped a
switch and Jack hits the deck like a duffel bag full of
bowling balls, dead before he hits the floor.
Chapter 31

Vince wakes up in the driver’s seat of his vehicle with a

snork and tilts his hat back with his thumb.
He rubs his face to get some blood flowing.
He checks the LED clock embedded in the dash, then
checks his wristwatch.
Midnight.
He watches the second hand sweep until it swings
around to the twelve and the digital dash clock clicks over
to 12:01 a second later.
Vince shrugs and says, “Good enough for government
work.”
He picks up a thermos from the passenger seat and
unscrews the cap which also serves as a cup. He
unscrews the inside cap and pours himself a half cup of
hot black coffee. He bolts back the black coffee like a shot
and lets loose a guttural groan. He leans over and opens
the car door and the interior lights go on. The idiot
indicator pings to remind him his keys are in the ignition.
He swings his left leg out and leans over, getting it
under his weight and the seat makes a relieved groan and
the car creaks a bit when he relieves it of the burden of his
body.
With the door open, he takes two big steps over to the
bushes and unbuckles his big old cowboy belt buckle,
unzipping his fly and snakes out his dick.
He didn’t have much use for it outside of pissing these
days, and the act was decidedly unerotic. He waters the
bushes with his hands on his hips and lets out a deep sigh
of relief, letting loose a long low fart that tapers off to a
squeak. The urine stream trickles off and he shakes off
and flips himself back in and zips and buckles up.
Vince leans over to get back into the car, but pauses
and straightens up leaning on the hood of the car, bracing
himself up with his arm.
He looks over at the monolith of the main building, half
masked in darkness, half lit by moonlight.
“Might as well earn what they’re paying me.”, because
sometimes when it’s dark and you’re alone, it’s nice to hear
a human voice, even if it’s only your own.
“Silly old man.” He thought but didn’t say aloud.
Vince gets into the car, settling his ass into the well-
earned rut in the driver’s seat.
He leans forward with a grunt and fires up the ignition,
backing up and doing a clean three-point turn, heading
towards the main campus.

Chapter 32

In the hallway, everyone is still and staring down at

Jack’s lifeless body with the gaping hole in the back of his
head where everything that he used to know and love used
to be. Everything that made him who he was sprayed
across a wall in an abandoned building. And all the king’s
horse and all the king’s men could never put Jack together
again.
Duke looks at Dutch. “What the fuck did you do that
for?”
Duke winces flailing his empty hand around trying to
reach the handle of the switchblade buried in his back
while gunsmoke drifts up dissipating from the barrel of the
gun in his other hand. “It was an accident!”
Doc reaches over and puts a hand on Dutch’s shoulder,
nudging him to turn around. Doc grabs the handle of the
knife and jerks it out of Dutch’s back. Dutch hisses,
clenching his teeth and wincing as Doc examines the
blade, streaked with fresh red blood.
Dutch turns around and looks at Dani incredulously.
“You fucking stabbed me!”
 Dani lets loose an ear-piercing scream.
The skins wince and Jason breaks for the door to the
main hall followed a split-second later by Nathan, then
Dani. Doc makes a swipe at Dani but his grip on her
backpack slips off of the stuffed animal skin material and
they charge through the door.
The skins look at Duke.
Duke throws his hands out to his sides. “Don’t just
fucking stand there! Get ‘em!”
The skins charge after the kids, bursting through the
double doors.
Duke looks down at Jack and the pile of gear.
He shrugs and says, “What’s done is done.” and steps
over Jack striding to the double doors to catch up with his
boys.

Chapter 33

The kids bust out of the door into the main hall running
in a cluster, almost tripping over each other. The sound of
boots thundering down the hallway behind them.
Jason yells, “Scatter!”
Nathan yells back, “Are you fucking kidding me?”
Dani, for once in agreement with Jason yells, “They
can’t catch all of us! Split up and hide! One of us has to
be able to make it out of here! Fucking run!”
Jason breaks left for the hospital section.
Nathan breaks center and heads for the school section.
Dani breaks right heading for the stairs to the chapel.
The skins burst through the double doors as the kids
charge through the doors to their destinations.
The boys pause, picking their quarries.
Dutch says, “I’ve got dibs on the girl. I owe her one.”
Doc and Mikey nod as Dutch turns and takes off for the
steps to the chapel.
 Doc takes off for the hospital section.
Mikey takes off for the school section.
Duke kicks open the door in time to see the boys crash
take off in three different directions.
There’s no point in his running after any of them. “I’ll
just wait here in case any of those assholes doubles back
and tries to give the boys the slip.” He heard the voice
inside his head that he knew as his own say.
The night wasn’t over yet. Not by a long shot.

Chapter 34

Vince drove past the front of the building flashing a big,

powerful flash-light along the ground level doors and
windows all securely locked with thick chains and sturdy
industrial strength padlocks or boarded over with sheets of
plywood. He was looking for any broken or missing sheets
of plywood. Any chains that had been cut or padlocks that
had been hammered off. He knew better than to look for
any wild animals. He had been doing the night shift full-
time for years and hadn’t seen as much as a jackrabbit
scampering off into the treeline. It was as if the animals
knew that this was a bad place. A place better left alone.
They gave it a wide berth.
Vince wished he could forget about this place too, but
he carried part of the weight of the responsibility that they
all shared. Everyone who was there that day. Everyone
that had a firearm in his hand that wasn’t just as fully
loaded when they left as when they had entered. No one
knew who shot first, but everyone knew that they had
played their part and now they were all doing their
penance in their own private way. Some moved away and
some drank themselves into an early grave and took their
secret underground where it belonged. Some had
sleepless nights and Vince had his nightly vigil.
 Vince pulled around the building to the old maintenance
barn. Why they didn’t just hire a crew to blow the whole
place to Kingdom Come and be done with it once and for
all was beyond Vince, but he knew the answer. It wasn’t
just because the county couldn’t afford to hire a demolition
team to safely wire the place to collapse in on itself. It was
because it served as a thirteen story reminder to all of
them that dead men tell no tales and not everything that
you do can be fixed with an apology. Maybe, just maybe,
they secretly believed in their heart of hearts that The Gate
wouldn’t let them bring it down. That the demolition crews
would be a bit too curious while doing the job and awkward
questions would be asked and one of them might crack
and it would all end like an Edgar Allen Poe story with one
of them trying to sledgehammer the cinder block wall apart
raving mad, screaming, “Here it is! It’s right behind here!
This is where they all are! We killed every single one of
them and it’s all our fault!”.
Vince shook his head, his imagination had gotten away
with him again. He drove past the open mouth of the barn
and flashed his flashlight inside. He saw the reflective
surfaces of the back-end of a car, the red flash of tail lights
reflecting his flashlight and stomped on the brakes so hard
that the car lurched and stalled, the bottom of the steering
wheel jabbing into his stomach, knocking half of the wind
out of him.
“Fuck me.” He said under his breath, not even really
realizing he had spoken.
Vince got the car to start again and he pulled his car in
behind the two cars, one parked behind the other, almost
bumper-to-bumper.
He put his car in park and turned the key, killing the
engine.
He waited for a second to see if there was any
movement.
Maybe some teenager would poke his head up from
behind the back seat, peeking like a raccoon over the edge
of a dumpster.
Maybe some of the local kids were just looking for
someplace to park and fool around. They can’t exactly
fuck in their driveways, he figured.
He let the digital clock in his dash click over two
minutes.
He leaned over and picked up the .38 in the pancake
holster and removed the weapon. He opened the car door
and eased out slowly. He took a second to pop the snap
on the holster and snapped it onto his belt, sliding it back
over his right hip.
He kept the gun aimed up into the air. No need to get
twitchy and accidentally put a bullet into some fool kid, he
thought. There’s been enough gunfire and lives lost here
already. No need to add bad to worse. This here pistol’s
just for show. He didn’t even know why he bothered
keeping bullets in the damned thing, but an empty gun is a
bad bet and you never knew when someone might decide
to call your bluff.
“Alright now… if y’all are in here, this’d be as good a
time as any for you to show yourselves. You’re already in
trouble and trying to play possum’s only gonna make it
worse.”
He counted ten in his head and listened. The only
sound was the ticking of his engine as it cooled and the
wind whispering through the rafters.
He leaned into his car, scooping up his flashlight and
approached the back of the first car, using his left hand to
wave his flashlight around inside the interior his right hand
pointing his gun at the ceiling.
He walked up to the back of the other car and noticed
the smashed out tail-lights of the sedan.
“This isn’t good.” he said to himself and walked back to
his vehicle.
He leaned in and dropped the flashlight on the
passenger seat, picking up his police radio from the cup
holder between the seats.
He cleared his throat and keyed the mic.
“Hey, this is Vince over at the gate, anyone got their
ears on?”
“Ten-four good buddy. This is Hank. What can we do
you for tonight?”
“I’ve got a couple empty cars out in the barn. One of
‘em’s got its tail lights busted out. Looks like it happened
here. Probably just some stupid kids looking for
adventure, but you never can tell. You mind sending a
couple boys out here for back up in case it gets rowdy?
Over.”
“No problem, Vince. I’ll wake up Jimmy and we’ll come
by with a couple cruisers. Worst case scenario we throw
some bracelets on ‘em and let them cool out in the
backseat of the cruisers for a while and think about
whether or not it’s a good idea for them to come out and
disturb your beauty sleep. Over.”
Vince laughed, his relief making his tension evaporate.
“Much appreciated. I think they came in through the side
gate as I didn’t see them come in through the front gate.
You might as well do the same. I’ll post out at the barn
and wait and see if they come back between now and
then. Over.”
“Ten-four. We’ll be by in about fifteen minutes or so,
give or take. Over and out.”
Vince leans into the car and places the radio back in
the cup holder. He closed the car door and holstered his
revolver leaning against the car, chuckling ruefully to
himself.
“Damn fool kids.” he said, fishing a pack of cigarettes
out of his shirt pocket. He took one out, a Marlboro
Regular Wide and lit it with a match from a half-empty book
of matches he slid out from the cellophane wrapper of the
pack. He took a drag and it caught in his throat. He
bellowed out seven heavy coughs before he cough his
breath and a final solid cough which cleared whatever
caused the cough and he spat the wad of phlegm at his
feet.
“These things will be the death of me yet.” He said,
somewhat wistfully and took another drag. This one went
down smoother.

Chapter 35

In the main hallway of the hospital wing, Jason bursts

through the doors and bangs a left immediately into the
first room they checked out and dives under the bed
squeezing himself as tight against the wall as he can
squeeze. Will it be enough? Is any of him peeking out
around the edges? Fuck it. Too late to change my mind
now, he thought frantically, trying to gulp in air and catch
his breath.
A second later, Doc bursts through the door and stops
stock still at the entrance, breathing slowly, quietly, and
listening to the echoes of his boot falls as they decay down
the hallway. He tilts his head like a fox listening for a hare
jerking his head as if he heard something, taking off down
the hallway looking into the rooms on the left and right as
he runs past them.
Chapter 36

In the main hallway of the school wing Nathan bursts

through the door and keeps running at full speed down the
length of the hallway until he reaches the “T” at the end of
the hall and breaks right into the Buoys room. In a panic,
in the pitch-black of the windowless room he stumbles
blindly over to the toilet stalls hoping to find one with a
door that he could lock and hide behind, but all of the
doors had been torn off and were hanging askew inside
the stalls. He remembers the lockers and for a mad
moment thinks of squeezing inside one but they’re far too
small for him to fit in. He stands in the middle of the room
whining “What am I gonna do? What am I gonna do?”,
slapping at the sides of his head with the palms of his
hands. “Think, God damn it! Think!”
Mikey bursts through the double doors to the school
wing, the sound ricocheting down the hallway like the echo
of a gunshot. He’s breathing heavily, winded from the
short jog. Nathan might smoke pot, but Mikey’s drinking
hasn’t been doing anything to improve his health either.
He catches his breath and yells, “Fuck!” and it echoes
down the hallways.
In a white hot panic, Nathan puts one foot in front of the
other, his arms outstretched in front of him feeling his way
towards the exit to the pool. There has to be a way out.

Chapter 37

Dani swings open the heavy door to the church and

drags it shut behind her.
Did they see me? Do they know where I went? Will
they follow me? Please God, don’t let them find me. But
what if they do? What will they do? Will they rape me?
Will they kill me? They killed Jack. Jack’s dead! Oh my
god, Jack’s dead! What will I tell his parents?
Her thoughts chased each other in circles. She looked
around frantically.
Most of the pews have been knocked over or smashed
to pieces and pages torn out of the abandoned bibles
carpeted the floor.
The walls were painted flat black with a mural of layer
upon layer of spray-painted pentagrams and demons and
occult symbols wrapping around the walls as high as a
person could easily reach.
The wooden statues of Mary and Joseph on either side
of the altar had been repainted as The Joker and Harley
Quinn.
The life-sized wooden Jesus was hanging upside down
over the altar, hanging from a thick length of rope, swaying
slightly side to side. His feet pointing towards the ceiling
the blood that had been painted on his face and torso to
look like it was dripping from his legendary wounds
seemed to be dripping upwards in violation of natural law.
Behind the altar, halfway to the vaulted ceiling, a huge
round hole where a stained glass window used to be
through which pale moonlight pours in, the swaying
savior’s shadow sliding side to side across the altar.
This can’t be happening. I must be dreaming! I’m not
dreaming. I have to do something. What can I do? I have
to run. I have to hide! But where?
Dani looks around her head darting from corner to
corner looking for something to hide behind, under or in.
She looks towards the front of the chapel.
The altar!
She runs down the center aisle vaulting up the steps to
the raised area on which the altar sat.
She sees a door on either side in the walls behind the
altar. Were these the changing rooms for the priests? A
room where the holy men would gather their resolve before
performing the mass? It doesn’t matter. She ran to the
one on the right and tried to turn the knob but it wouldn’t
turn. She ran across the space and tried the other door. Its
knob would not turn either. She shook the knob and
hammered at the door with the flat of her fist and almost
yelled “Let me in!” but she knew that there was no one
there that could save her. She was on her own.
Dani heard the door at the front of the door pulled open
and she dove for the space behind the altar. She used her
hand to break her fall and felt before she saw that she had
thrown herself into a scattered pile of bones. The sharp
edges of the bones shredded her hands. Tiny knives that
opened her skin, stinging as blood welled up into the new
openings. She hissed in pain and balled her hands into
fists. It helped a little, but only a little and Dani’s eyes
welled up and overflowed with tears of pain and fear that
ran down her cheeks leaving mascara trails, as her blood
seeped into her balled fists, the door to the church
thumped closed behind whoever had entered.

Chapter 38

Doc stands in the middle of the hallway of the hospital,

slowly walking up and down the hallway, his boot heels
making echoes that ricochet around and die in the
darkened corners of every room. He offsets every step,
slapping the bat into the palm of his hand, peering into
each room as he passes it.
“You can’t hide all night fat boy. I’m gonna find you
sometime or other. I’ve got all night. Might as well come
out and take your medicine like a man and maybe I’ll go
easy on you.”
Doc walks all the way down to the end of the hallway.
At the end of the hallway is a sturdy metal door. At eye-
level there’s a sliding slot. In the center of the door, below
the slot is a rusted metal plaque that reads “Morgue”.
“Maybe we can even work this out. We’re all adults
here, aren’t we?”
Doc reaches for the handle of the door.
Jason tries to carefully adjust his position in his hiding
place. His legs cramped up after the sudden exertion and
then suddenly trying to stay as still as possible. They feel
like to dead logs attached to his waist. He tries to move
them, to squeeze further into the corner under the bed.
Maybe if he squeezed himself in tight enough and could
stay invisible that four-eyed creep would go away. Maybe
he could sneak out and get to Jack’s car… but Jack had
the keys! Maybe he could run then. He could run back
home and call the police. He grabbed a fistful of his jeans
and lifted his leg, stuck out stiff and straight. He tried to roll
onto his side so he’d be as far back underneath the bed as
he could be with his back against the wall. His shoulder
bumped against the bottom of the bed and the wire under
the bed struck a chord. Jason heard the boot steps stop.
Oh fuck! Oh fuck! The IV stand at the side of the bed
swayed back and forth out of sight. All that Jason could
see was the base totter back and forth. The IV stand gave
up the fight with gravity and fell sideways, the glass bottle
smashing against the tiled floor of the room.
Jason hissed “Shit!” and heard the boots picking up
speed, running down the hallway. It was now or never.
Jason pushes himself out from under the bed and tries
to stand but his legs feel wooden. The blood rushes back
into them in waves of pins and needles.
Jason can hear the running boots approaching. He
stiff-legs his way to the doorway and tries to stagger
towards the double doors to the main hall.
Doc is ten steps behind him. Then five.
 The handle of the door is within reach. Jason reaches
out for it… and Doc slams into him from behind, crushing
him against the door, knocking the wind out of him.
Jason slumps to the floor, gasping to catch his breath
his dead legs coming back to life, feeling like they’re on
fire.
Doc swings his leg back and kicks Jason in the side.
The impact makes a flat deep sound with a muffled crack.
Jason gasps. It feels like he’s been stabbed. Is that
what it feels like when someone breaks a rib? His instinct
is to ball up, to try to weather the storm. But he knows it’s
no use. There’s no escape… but he has to try. With an
animal’s instinctive stubbornness he drags himself to his
hand and knees and tries to crawl away.
“I told you it would be tough for you if you made me
come and find you, fat boy.” Doc jeers, and kicks Jason in
the back of his leg, making Jason’s leg cramp up into a ball
of knotted pain that almost makes him forget about his
broken rib, but Jason drags his dead leg behind him,
crawling like a baby with a limp. Doc steps alongside
Jason and the next time Jason put down one of his hands
Doc stomps on it and Jason feels the bones in his hand
snap. A black flower bloomed in front of him. His hand felt
twice the size it should be and oddly numb. Was this
shock? Was this what it was like to die?
Jason tries to use his remaining functioning hand and
leg to slink forward and he pulls himself forward once
more. Twice more. Where was he trying to go?
Anywhere but here. Just away. The next time he reaches
out his hand to drag himself forward, Doc stomps the heel
of his boot down on that one and the black flower became
a bouquet. The blackness expanded. India ink poured
into a pitcher of water. A tide rolling in, crashing against
the shore on a moonless night. Inevitable and irresistible.
Jason slumps down to the floor, his forehead flush against
the gritty linoleum. Despite the grittiness it was nice and
cool. It felt nice against his forehead. Maybe he would just
go to sleep and when he woke up this would all be over.
Some terrible nightmare fueled by too many horror movies
and too many energy drinks. Maybe if he just closed his
eyes…
Doc raised the bat over his head and brought it down in
the middle of Jason’s back. Jason wheezed but didn’t cry
out. He was beyond caring if he couldn’t catch his breath
anymore. Let it get away. How do you catch your breath
anyway? In a bottle? By the tail?
Doc brought the bat down again hammering it down
against Jason’s side and more ribs cracked, but Jason
didn’t have the breath to moan. He was going away. It
was getting dark. Wasn’t it already dark out? Yes. But it
was getting darker. His ears were ringing and it was
getting hard to hear. Was he still breathing? Would he
know when he was dead?
Doc lifts his leg and straddles Jason’s torso. He lifts the
bat over his head and brings it down with all of his strength
against the back of Jason’s head. It made a sound like if
you dropped a bowling ball off of a parking garage. Doc
swung the bat up over his head and an arc of dark red
blood sprayed across the ceiling. Doc brought the bat
down again and again on what became less and less
recognizable as a human head and more like a poorly
swept pile of hair and bloody rags, fragments of bone and
cottage cheese. The swings of the arc of the bat sprayed
dark red blood and bits of flesh across the walls and ceiling
until it looked like a macabre work of modern art. A
Jackson Pollock study in red and black. Kandinsky in hell.
Doc brought the bat down again and again into what
used to be the places where Jason’s sense of humor used
to live until the bat striking the concrete underfloor through
the thin mush that used to be Jason’s head, transmitted
reverberations up the length of the bat to Doc’s hands
making them vibrate and sting.
Doc stops and loosens the death grip he had on the
handle of the bat. He looks at his hands and they are
more blood streaks than clear skin. He follows the streaks
up his arms and notices that the back-splash had been
painting him, and his shirt glistened with streaks of dark
red blood and bits of greyish snot. He pivots his head and
when he does, some of the spots of blood move too. He
was confused until he realizes that the blood spattered up
onto his glasses. He drops the bat into the spreading pool
of blood. It clatters and splashes. He reaches his hands
up and touches his face and the blood on his hands
smears together with the slashes of blood, painting his
face like tribal war paint. He takes off his glasses and
tried to find a clean spot on his shirt to use to clean his
glasses.
It wasn’t an easy thing to do.

Chapter 39

Nathan stumbles from the pitch black of the Buoys

room into the blackness of the pool area. If human eyes
could adjust to this darkness, his would have. The only
way he knew that he had left the buoys room was that he
felt the outline of the doorway with his outstretched arms.
The air is cool and damp and smells like a walk-in
refrigerator full of rotten fruit and meat. A sickly sweet
aroma that almost returned to being savory were it not for
the rotten weight of it, hanging in the air like a soft black
curtain sliding smoothly across your skin. The echoes of
his feet as he slides them across the floor echo across the
open expanse, taking strange turns as they bank around
the hard surfaces. He slid his right foot forward and put his
weight on it. He slid his left foot forward and put his weight
on it. He sled his right foot forward, and there was nothing
underneath it. He remembered the mesmerizing
iridescence of the black surface of whatever was in the
bottom of the pool as he tumbled over the edge into the
emptiness. He opened his mouth and gasped in a breath
to scream but he fell into the surface of the black viscous
muck while still gasping and inhaled what was once water
but was now something that was wet but not water and
was black but not night. He goes under lashes out with his
arms and legs trying to feel for the bottom, not knowing up
from down. The thick sludge wraps around him. It felt like
he was trying to swim up from the unconscious of a
nightmare where he was drowning a mile deep inside an
oil well. He had a brief glimpse of the terror of the womb,
his lungs filled with amniotic fluid, but the mother carrying
him had died during gestation and he was trapped alive,
inside as everything inside her putrefied and bloated with
the gasses cast off by the bacteria that were dissolving
her. He thrashes and tries to lash out against the sludge
as if he could cause it pain and it would spit him out. He
feels the last of his breath dwindling, his eyes begin to fill
with illusory light. He kicks and his foot hits something
solid. Was there someone else in here with him? A cinder
block? Cinder blocks don’t float… The floor! The bottom
of the pool!
Nathan twists and thrusts his legs downwards, his feet
ramming into the concrete bottom. He stood, bursting from
the surface, gasping for air and coughing, vomiting up the
foul putrescence he had inhaled and swallowed. The
viscous sludge jets out of him in a torrent as his stomach
spasms over and over trying to pump out whatever he had
swallowed while he struggled to breathe. He tries to wipe
the coating of awful ichor away from his face but his hands
are covered and he can’t tell if he’s blind or if it’s only
because of the lack of light that he can’t see. He tries to
swipe away as much of the muck as he can and pats the
pockets of his pants. He finds his lighter and digs for it.
He presses the button and the butane ignites, a small blue
jet. It may be tiny but it was the most beautiful thing that
he had ever seen in this life because it meant that he
wasn’t blind. He looks down and realizes that the thick
black sludge only comes halfway up his torso. All he had
to do was wade towards the shallow end and he could
climb out of the pool and find someplace to hide. Maybe
some way to escape! He laughed gape-mouthed and
silent, still trying to catch his breath. There was still hope.

Chapter 40

Dutch stalks slowly up the center aisle, peering left and

right using his flashlight as a searchlight, scanning the
shadows. Peering into the corners. He knew she was in
here. She had to be. He had seen her just as the door
closed. Unless she grew a pair of angel wings and flew to
heaven she was here. And he would find her.
A fluttering sound rustles in the rafters and a small
black silhouette flits across the ceiling. Dutch shines his
flashlight towards the ceiling trying to track the sound. A
bat or a bird, but it definitely wasn’t the girl and that was his
goal. To find her and… Find her first. Then worry about
the after. He returns to his task, walking one step at a
time, taking his time, making his way towards the front of
the chapel, flipping over a few pews to make sure that Dani
isn’t hiding under them.
The crashing of the pews booms around the high
ceilings of the chapel, scaring away other bats or birds or
whatever the flitting black forms were.
 Dani can hear the sound grow closer as Dutch
methodically covers the space between them row by row,
step by step. Dani crouches into a ball, like a spring in a
can, ready to explode into movement if discovered.
Dutch stops at the foot of the three wide steps up to the
altar. Three steps, three forms that God manifests himself
in. The father, the son and the holy ghost. Mary, Joseph
and Jesus. He shines his flashlight at Joseph as The
Joker, then pans across the nave to Mary done up as
Harley Quinn and sneers.
He shines the light at the altar and the light of the beam
spills past the altar casting its shadow against the back of
the nave. Even though hidden, Dani tries to crouch down
even smaller, shifting her feet and scattering a pile of
mismatched bones from a miscellany of animals. They
tinkle like tiny wooden wind chimes.
Dutch smirks to himself. “We both know that I know
where you are. So you can either come out, or I can come
get you. Your choice.”
Dani stays stock still and silent.
“Fine then. Have it your way.”
Dutch jumps up the steps to the altar level and takes a
couple brisk steps around the right side of the altar,
bringing the light of his flashlight down, revealing Dani
crouching like a frightened animal.
Dutch lunges for her and Dani springs up to escape
around the other side of the altar, but there’s too many
bones scattered on the floor for her to get a solid footing.
Dani tumbles amongst the bones, bone fragments
spraying in every direction. Dutch dives at her and they
struggle in the bones. The light of the flashlight arcing
wildly casting whatever it strobes across in a sinister light.
Dani tries to flail at him, swinging her fists, but she’s
fighting a losing fight. He knocks her forearms away with
his and slaps her hard across the face rocking her head to
the side. She whips her head back and he tries to cover
her mouth and nose with his hand but she jerks her head
back far enough to get the heel of his hand into her mouth
and she bites down. Duke yelps and tears his hand away
from the vise of her teeth. He grabs her left wrist with his
right hand and she punches him in the side of the head
with her right but Dutch just shakes it off and grabs her
right wrist with his left hand pinning her wrists to the
ground on each side of her head. He lifts his left leg,
balancing on his right knee and straddles her legs. He
perches up on his knees to reposition himself and Dani
brings a knee up, driving it hard into Dutch’s groin, trying to
drive his balls into his stomach. Dutch grunts a guttural
groan of pain and winces. Dani takes advantage of his
momentary weakness and twists, squirming out from under
him, clawing at the carpet trying to crawl away, clawing
among the bones. She gets both of her hands and one
knee under her when Dutch grabs one of her ankles and
drags her backwards, grabbing the flashlight and swinging
it at her in a wide arc. The flashlight connects with the side
of her head and the beam jerks on impact. It doesn’t
knock her out cold as she’s made of tougher stuff than that
but even she can be dazed by a hit to the side of the head
with a blunt object. Dutch gets his feet under him and
grabs her by the hair, lifting her to her feet.
Dani yelps in pain.
Dutch uses her hair as a handle, whipping her against
the altar.
She hits hard and probably would have gone down
again if Dutch wasn’t holding her up by her hair.
Dutch reaches into his pocket with his free hand and
pulls out something. There’s a crisp click and a shiny
metal blade appears out of his hand like a sadistic magic
trick.
Dutch shakes her by her hair and pushes her back
against the altar, pressing the blade against her throat.
Dani feels the firm metal against the side of her neck and
forgets the pain screaming from her scalp freezing with her
eyes wide.
“You recognize this, don’t you bitch?” Dutch sneers and
spits a mouthful of spent adrenaline into the scattered
bones at their feet.
Dani breathes heavily, in and out, wide-eyed, not
blinking.
“Let’s see how you like having a knife put in you.”

Chapter 41

Nathan holds the butane lighter high above his head

like the statue of liberty, trying to determine which direction
to wade in. He can’t see the far end of the pool, but he
can see the ledge that he fell off of into the deep end in his
small sphere of dim blue light, so he figures if he puts that
behind him and walks straight forward he should be able to
walk right out of this muck.
The surface of the pool shimmers iridescently reflecting
the spark of his butane lighter in blue-violet rainbow slicks,
the edges lap against the walls in tiny waves subsiding
after his panicked thrashing.
He hears a watery swishing sound behind him and he
turns to try to catch sight of whatever it was that made the
sound. All he catches is the wake of something quickly
submerged. There couldn’t be any fish living in this muck
could there? How would they breathe? What would they
eat?
He hears another watery swishing sound behind him
and twists to try and catch sight of what made the sound
and almost loses his footing. Again, all he catches is the
wake of something quickly submerged.
He feels something slithers sinuously between his
submerged legs like an eel or a tentacle and he recoils
instinctively. The wet swishings increase in tempo,
submerging each time he turns to try to see what made the
sound. The surface of the water churning like a piranha
feeding frenzy but he doesn’t feel any bites. The muck
itself seems to flex itself like the sinews of a muscle,
thickening in its consistency. The sludge writhes and
slithers up his torso forming new appendages, writhing and
tentacular, fluid yet prehensile. The ooze forms into tiny
child-sized hands that climb up Nathan’s shirt dragging the
slick up Nathan’s torso behind them. He tries to tear the
tiny sticky hands away but there are too many of them.
The strength of any one could be resisted, but combined
they are irresistible, dragging him down into the muck. As
they swarm over him, Nathan is dragged under the
surface, screaming a hysterical scream of abject terror that
is drowned out, tapering off into a bubbling gargle that
diminishes as he disappears under the surface leaving
behind only a ripple as evidence that he was ever even
there.

Chapter 42

Nathan’s scream ricochets around the rafters above the

empty air in the pool area, bouncing down through the
pitch black Gulls and Buoys rooms, down the main hallway
of the school where Mikey hears it and it raises his hackles
like a wary animal.
“What the fuck is that?” he asks who or whatever is in
earshot, but nothing answers. He runs down the hallway
charging into the darkness of the Gulls room. In the pitch
black of the windowless room he doesn’t see the long,
sturdy wooden bench and discovers it with his shins, losing
his feet, flying forward, arms outstretched, yelping in pain.
He lands on his hands, which slip out from underneath
him catching most of the impact with his elbows and
knees. “Ah fuck!” he screams in flailing frustration as he
tries to get up, the dislodged scattered locker doors sliding
around on the floor like puzzle pieces. Finally he figures
out that if he stops struggling he would stop sliding and he
rolls over onto his ass, sitting up and fishing his lighter out
of his pocket.
It’s a cheap plastic lighter with a chrome head and a
little black switch to adjust the size of the flame. He uses
his thumbnail to crank it up to crack-torch height and
clambers back onto his feet, using it to navigate the
treacherous locker-door strewn floor limping out to the pool
area.
Mikey walks to the edge of the deep end and looks over
the edge into the pool. The mist over the surface of the
pool swirls underlit by the phosphorescence emitted by
the black slime. The liquid is lapping against the edges,
radiating with ripples indicative of a recent disturbance, but
there’s no sign of Nathan.
Mikey leans with his hands on his haunches, looking
over the edge of the pool. He waits one minute… Two
minutes… When he’s satisfied that no one can hold their
breath that long under the surface of the disgusting muck
he straightens up and peers into the corners of the pool
area, listening for any sounds. There’s no sound except
the gentle lapping of the ripples against the sides.
“Son of a bitch!”, Mikey says to himself and it echoes
around the room. He hawks and spits over the edge onto
the surface where his spit is absorbed like a thirsty sponge
unobserved by Mikey who is rubbing his barked shins.
Mikey knows that crying about a thing never fixes it. If
he hadn’t been able to figure it out on his own, his father
certainly gave him enough slaps upside the head when he
was around to drive the lesson home.
He turns around and heads back the way he came.

Chapter 43

In the main hallway of the hospital wing, Doc stands

astride Jason’s body which seems to end at the base of its
neck. After that it’s a shotgun blast radius of gore and
bone fragments. A poorly swept pile of hair and bloody
rags and fragments of bone and greyish cottage cheese.
He tries to find a clean spot on his shirt to clean off the
blood that’s drying on his glasses.
He doesn’t do a spectacular job.
Regaining his calm, he looks down at the end result of
his work.
He doesn’t really feel anything about what happened
either way.
Something had to be done and he did it.
What were they supposed to do? Just let the kids go
with a cross your heart and hope to die promise that they
wouldn’t tell anyone that Dutch accidentally painted the
walls with their friend’s brains?
Well, let’s just consider this skipping right to the “hope
to die” part of their promise.
The blood continues to pour from where what used to
be Jason’s head was. The pool widening while making a
quiet, wet, trickling sound.
The pool of blood inches towards Doc, flowing under
the soles of his boots and creeping up the sides.
Doc takes a step back. Two steps. The pool of blood
spreads wider, creeping towards Doc faster, and widening
until it reaches the walls of the hallway.
Doc takes another step backwards, then another,
walking backwards deeper into the hall of the hospital
wing.
The blood tide reaches the black rubber wainscoting of
the walls and wells up against the sides of the hall.
The blood climbs the wall in defiance of gravity.
The dark red wetness reaches the ceiling and flows
across it, meeting in the middle and dripping back down
onto the floor. It surges towards Doc in a rising tide.
Doc turns and runs towards the door at the end of the
hallway. He reaches the door, his hands, slick with gore,
slip on the handle as the torrent of blood surges towards
him, amorphous shapes rising out of the tide, with
horrifying tentacular appendages and yawning fang-filled
mouths.
Doc gets the door open, slamming it behind him as the
maelstrom of blood and bone and gore and gristle closes
in on the door.
Doc takes out a zippo and flicks it to life.
He sees a latch on the door and turns the bolt, ramming
the rod into the hasp.
Breathing heavily, the flame of his lighter flickering he
backs from the door as the blood seeps in through the
cracks around the edge of the door, spreading out into the
walls of the small cold room.
Doc turns around in a panic.
The walls of the room are lined with square steel doors
with chrome latch handles on them.
Doc pulls on one of the handles, opening the door
revealing a morgue tray.
He slides the morgue tray out of wall. He climbs onto
the tray and lays flat, grabbing a hold of the rubber gasket
on the inside and pulling the tray inside, pulling the door
shut behind him.
Doc lies in the morgue tray like a coffin, the zippo
providing a scant warm flicker of light.
 He rolls his eyes up, peering over his head at the edges
of the door.
A moment passes. A single trickle of dark red blood
seeps in. Then another.
Soon the trickles combine into a stream and then a
flood, filling the small space.
Doc flails around, splashing in the blood, fighting for a
grip to push the tray back out, but the hungry wet flood has
made the walls too wet for him to find a grip.
The small flame of the zippo is doused by the gore as it
floods in, filling up the remaining space in the small
enclosure.
Inside the enclosure, all is black, the inside of the
enclosure quiet as a womb.
Doc lets go of his last breath in a watery scream.
In the morgue room, the red black tide recedes, flowing
backwards in the direction from whence it came.
The halls of the hospital are quiet once again.

Chapter 43

Mikey emerges from the entrance to the girl’s locker

room muttering to himself.
“Duke’s not gonna like this. Not one bit. Fuck. I am so
fucked.”
He jerks his head up and yells at the ceiling, “You can’t
hide forever motherfucker! I got all night!” with dumb
animal frustration his yell echoing down the hallway to the
entrance of the school wing.
He turns the corner to the main hallway and looks up
towards the entrance.
There’s a stack of school desks halfway down the
length of the hallway, blocking the exit to the main hall.
His eyes widen. “What the fuck?”
Mikey looks around trying to see if he can find Nathan.
 “You want to fuck with me motherfucker?”
Mikey charges down the hallway, peering into the
darkness of each room as he passes.
He reaches the pyramid of desks and kicks the center
one squarely. The pyramid of desks collapses with a
resounding crash that echoes flatly in every direction.
As the echoes die down, from behind Mikey, the sound
of the patter of children’s feet and an echoing giggle
whispers across the hallway.
Mikey wheels around. The hall has been blocked off by
school desks across the hallway behind him.
Mikey walks much less confidently towards the new
barrier of desks.
There’s the sliding sound of desk leg on old linoleum
behind him.
Mikey turns and sees the barrier at the front of the
hallway has been reassembled and moved five feet closer.
There’s another sliding sound and a chorus of pattering
feet and echoing giggles behind him. He twists around
and the barrier behind him has slid closer, now only three
feet away and curved inwards at the edges.
There’s a sliding sound of furniture scraping against
filth-glazed tiles and Mikey spins in a circle as the wall of
desks closes in from both sides at the same time, pushed
by unseen hands, a model of a monster’s mouth made of
aluminum legs.
The sound of dragging furniture and tiny shoes and
childish giggling reaches a crescendo as the desks close in
and crush Mikey, the hard flat surfaces crushing his flesh
and snapping his bones, the aluminum legs punching into
his abdomen and skewering him from every direction.
Mikey stands, immobile, transfixed in the center of this
abstract sculpture, his blood leaking out of his new orifices,
soaking his clothes and pooling at his feet.
 Suddenly all of the desks are yanked backwards
against the walls of the hallway.
Mikey’s lifeless, broken body falls to the floor.
And the sound of children giggling and pattering feet
fades into silence.

Chapter 46

In the chapel, Dutch has the blade of Dani’s stiletto

against her neck.
Dutch reaches out with his other hand and clamps it
across her jaw locking his eyes with hers.
“You know that all this shit was an accident, right? You
know I would have never shot your friend in the face if you
hadn’t fucking stabbed me you crazy bitch! We were just
playing around! All you had to do was leave your shit and
go and everything would have been just fine, but no! You
had to get all crazy! This is all your fault!”
Dani stares at him wide-eyed and unblinking,
hyperventilating through her nose.
She flashes her hands up, pushing the knife away from
her neck with her right hand, jabbing Dutch in the throat
with her left.
Her right hand slides across the blade of the knife while
pushing it away, opening up a mean red gash down the
palm of her hand, but she doesn’t feel it because of the
adrenaline coursing through her veins.
The jab to Dutch’s throat isn’t a death blow, but it does
startle him enough that he loosens his grip.
Dani twists and pushes herself up onto the altar
scrambling up over it to the other side, leaving a fresh
bloody palm-print swiped across a rough pentagram
carved into the hardwood of the altar surface.
Dani vaults over the other side of the altar, looking over
her shoulder to see if Dutch is following, but he is taking a
second to recover and when he regains his voice with a
hard swallow he croaks out in a hoarse rasp. “You’re
gonna pay for that one, bitch!”
Dutch pushes himself up to vault over the altar but there
is a thunder like an earthquake that seems to shake the
whole chapel.
Dutch looks around uncertainly.
Something is definitely not right.
Dani backs down the center aisle towards the door to
the chapel.
Dutch puts his hands on the altar to push himself up to
vault over it but again there’s an epic boom like an
explosion that seems to come from under the chapel.
Another boom, followed by a droning hum that
resonates through the air. It sounds like it could be a low
mechanical engine humming or the sound of a choir all
intoning the same note at the same time.
The booming continues rhythmically, gradually picking
up pace as the humming breaks into murmuring, chanting
of disembodied voices, the shadows in the corners of the
church start to move and grow.
Dutch pushes himself up onto the altar and scrambles
over the top as Dani backs towards the door.
As Dutch goes to dismount over the front of the altar
he’s strafed by a shadow that knocks him off balance. He
tumbles awkwardly onto the floor, tumbling down the stairs
in front of the altar, his flashlight rolling away from him.
The shadows roll in like clouds, becoming more
corporeal as they close in from behind the altar and the
darkened corners of the sides of the church.
Dutch scrambles for the flashlight and when he gets it,
he swings it around at a looming shadow whose outline is
that of someone swathed in a pitch black cloak, dim light
glowing luminescently from where their eyes would have
been.
When Dutch hits the shadow-person with the flashlight,
the shadow dissipates like a puff of air scattering a plume
of smoke.
The shadows close in from all sides, looming closer,
and each time he tries to shine his flashlight at a looming
shadow, the previous one reforms and looms nearer.
The beam of Dutch’s flashlight begins to dim,
swallowed by the enclosing darkness.
Dutch smacks the flashlight against the palm of his
empty hand.
The light stutters, then dims out.
Dani watches transfixed with horror as the shadow
shapes surround Dutch, obscuring him from view
enveloping him, the sound of tearing cloth, then tearing
flesh and Dutch shrieking like a man being skinned alive.
The shrieking stops leaving behind only wet sounds.
Dani realizing that she had forgotten to breathe, gasps
in air.
The shadowy shapes all turn towards her with luminous
orbs for eyes.
Dani turns and runs for the doors of the church.
The booming kettle drum roar intensifies accompanied
by a susurrating choral rendition of the mass, but in
reverse.

Chapter 47

Headlights pan across the monolith of the main

building.
Two bubble-top police cruisers slow down and stop in
front of the barn, their engines idling.
Vince pitches the butt of his cigarette down to join the
other three fresh butts at his feet and walks up to the
driver’s side of the lead cruiser.
Hank, a sturdy old humorless man in a khaki uniform
shirt with a badge pinned into it watches Vince approach.
Vince leans on the ledge of the open window. “Took
you long enough.”
Hank gives him a shadow of a smirk for his joke. “We
stopped and picked up Jake. Had to wait for him to get his
head screwed on. I figured if we have to flush out a couple
cars full of rabbits might help to have an extra dog to chase
‘em down.”
“There you go thinkin’ ahead.”
“I’ve been known to on occasion. Why don’t you climb
in and we’ll go in through the front and see what there is to
be seen?”
“Sounds like a plan.”
Vince walks around the cruiser, opens the passenger
side door and gets in. “By the way, I think that they went in
through that access tunnel over yonder.”
“And where were you when all this happened?”
“Keeping an eye on the main gate like I’m supposed to.
I discovered all this when I did my rounds like I’m
supposed to. You got a problem with that?”
“Don’t figure I do. Just asking is all.”
Hank reaches over to his police radio, picks up the
handset and keys it up.
“Jimmy… tell Jake to take a scatter gun and post out by
that ventilation shaft opening in case any of these kids
come scrambling out when we go in through the front.”
In the dimly lit interior of the other cruiser one of the
occupants reaches over and grabs the handset for his in-
dash radio. “Ten-four, chief.”
Hank goes to replace the radio handset and has a
second thought.
“And tell him not to shoot anyone, okay? I know it’s
easy to get a bit jumpy out here, but the last thing we need
is a dead kid on our hands. If he has to let one off, tell him
to fire into the air and we’ll come a runnin’. Plus it should
settle any questions our little friends might have. Okay?”
“Ten-four, chief.”
Jake gets out of the passenger side of the cruiser with a
shotgun carried casually at port-arms. He stretches and
yawns, walking over to the drop-off and puts a leg up on
the rim of the tunnel.
He looks back at the cruiser and touches his fingers to
the edge of his hat in lieu of tipping it to let the others know
he’s all set.
Hank nods to himself, satisfied, and pulls the gear lever
down, putting the cruiser in drive. “Alright. Let’s see what
there is to see.”
Hank turns the cruiser in a circle and heads towards the
front of the building, followed by the second cruiser.

Chapter 48

Dani bursts out of the doors to the chapel and almost

runs right into Duke who was about to enter the church to
investigate what all of the screaming was about.
Duke grabs her by the shoulders and sees she’s wide-
eyed terrified.
“There you are!”
Dani tries to push past him, clawing at his arms in an
animal panic.
“Please! We have to go! Please! Oh, please, God!
Get me out of here!”
Duke shakes her by the shoulders but it doesn’t do
anything to relieve her panic.
“Where the fuck is Dutch?”
“He’s dead. He’s dead! Something got him in there!
Some things! I don’t know! Please! Just get me out of
here! I promise I won’t tell anyone anything about anything
ever! Just get me out of here! Please?”
Duke pushes her aside and goes to open the doors.
Dani grabs a hold of his arm, hard enough that her nails
dig into his flesh and draw blood.
Duke doesn’t wince, but she does get his attention.
“You crazy bitch!”
Dani is much less afraid of Duke than whatever it was
she left behind inside of the chapel. “You don’t want to go
in there.”
The thrumming kettle drum thunder booms,
blasphemous choral voices growing louder each second,
echoing through the doors of the chapel into the main hall.
Thick black smoke seeps like oily liquid through the
cracks around the doors to the chapel.
The smoke seems to solidify, reincorporating, after
slipping through the cracks around the door, slithering
towards Duke who backs up, Dani hiding behind him using
him as a human shield.
The wraithlike shadows advance sinuously, steadily.
From the direction of the hospital and school wings a
murky writhing oil slick tide of red-black gore oozes in,
evanescent at first, then solidifying, flowing in behind them
between the remaining two intruders and the main doors in
a swirling mass of horrifying shapeless half-human forms
with hundreds of glowing phosphorescent eyes and horns
and fangs and claws writhing into existence.
Duke draws out his samurai sword and holds it out in a
defensive posture swinging it in a wide arc around him
while backing up practically wearing Dani for a backpack.
Chapter 49

Hank pulls up in front of the main entrance to the

building and puts his cruiser in park. Jimmy pulls his
cruiser in alongside Hank’s and puts it in park.
They both turn off their vehicles and all three men get
out of the cruisers.
Jimmy has a shotgun slung semi-casually across his
chest, laying lightly in his hands and a side-arm in a belt
holster.
Hank goes around to the trunk of his car. He keys in,
popping the trunk and takes out a shotgun and a multiple-
lens flashlight.
Hank closes the trunk and looks towards Vince.
“You got a pistol?”
Vince reaches behind him and pulls his snub-nosed
nickel-plated .38 revolver out from the pancake holster
clipped onto the back of his belt.
“You know how to use that?”
“You know I do.”
“Don’t get your dander up. Just making sure. No telling
what we’re going to run into in there. Could be just some
kids playing haunted house…”
Hank lets the sentence trail off, leaving the rest unsaid.
The men walk up the steps. Hank turns on the
flashlight and the beam glares at the front doors which are
chained shut with a thick chain a big padlock holding the
chain together.
Hank turns to Vince. “You got keys to that padlock?”
“No one’s got keys to it. No one’s had any reason to
open up that lock since…”
Vince catches himself mid-sentence and looks over at
Jimmy.
Hank takes his car keys out of his pocket and holds
them out.
 “Jimmy, go get the crowbar out of the trunk of my
cruiser.”
Jimmy grabs the keys and walks off at a brisk pace.
Vince waits till Jimmy walks out of earshot. “Does he
know?”
“About as much as anyone his age is liable to know
about it.”
“Yeah, but does he know?”
“If you mean does he know about this place and what
we had to do back then, then, no, he doesn’t know. We all
swore an oath not to talk about what happened here and
I’ve been keeping up my end of it. What about you?”
“You know me. I wouldn’t say shit if my mouth was full
of it… but what if it’s like it was the last time?”
“You put a lid on that shit pronto. Whatever it was we
burned out of this place last time is long dead and gone.
And it sure as shit doesn’t drive cars and pry up sheets of
plywood from the outside. Most likely it’s just a bunch of
stupid kids trying to play ghost-hunter like on the TV and
that’s all there is to it.”
“But what if it’s not? What if it’s…”
Jimmy jogs up with Hank’s car keys and a long
crowbar.
“Here you go Hank.” Jimmy hands Hank the keys and
the crowbar.
Hank pockets the keys and crams the crowbar in
between the loop of the chain where the padlock is and the
sturdy metal-paneled wooden doors.
Hank leans back, levering his whole weight against the
chain.
The chain goes taut and grinds against the crowbar.
The crowbar’s end bites into the wood of the door but the
padlock is steadfast.
“Ain’t that a bitch?”
 Hank takes a deep breath and sets his feet, grabs
ahold of the crowbar again, and leans back, throwing
everything he’s got into it.
The chain goes taut and grinds against the crowbar and
the crowbar’s end bites into the wood of the door again.
Although the padlock doesn’t give, the handles the
chain is looped through, bolted to the surface of the door,
lean outwards, the fastening bolts squealing loose from the
rotten wood. The handles wrench off of the door, the
handles and the chain and padlock falling to the steps with
a metallic clatter.
Hank wedges the crowbar into the crack between the
doors and looks over his shoulder at Jimmy. “You ready
Jimmy?”
Jimmy doesn’t look spooked. Too young and bold to
know any better. “Sure, Chief.”
Hank looks at Vince. “What about you?”
Vince has his pistol raised pointing upwards in both
hands.
“Ready as I’ll ever be. Let’s get this over with.”
Hank leans on the crowbar until the heavy doors open
enough for him to get a purchase with his hand, and opens
the door, revealing the blackness within.

Chapter 50

The shadowy figures swirl in a churning circle around

Dani and Duke.
Duke, swinging wildly as black skeletal hands and
writhing tentacular appendages snake out towards them,
eagerly angrily clawing at the air around them. When
Duke slashes at the forms they dissipate like he’s slashing
through thick black smoke.
The main door to the hall opens and the glare from the
big four-lens flashlight pierces the darkness. With a shriek
the ominous writhing smoke slithers back like a wave
crashing in reverse instantaneously.
Hank’s beam spotlights Duke, wild-eyed, samurai sword
in mid-air, Dani clinging to Duke for dear life.
“You kids are in a lot of trouble.”
Duke gives him a look incredible and defiant. “Fuck
you, fat man.”
Hank raises his shotgun and levels it at Duke.
“You mind doing me a favor, son, and putting that pig-
sticker on the floor?”
Duke looks at the sword like he forgot that it was even
in his hand.
Hank yells. “NOW!”
Duke snaps out of it and bends over, putting the sword
down on the ground.
“All the way down, you know the drill.”
Duke lowers himself down so that he’s lying face-down
on the ground and puts his hands on the back of his head.
Jimmy takes out his handcuffs from the case on his
belt.
Dani runs over to Jimmy and hugs him around his
waist.
“Oh my god! I never thought I’d be this glad to see a
cop in my whole entire life, but thank God you showed up.”
Jimmy, slightly embarrassed, manages to pry Dani’s
arms from the mini-bear hug she has him in.
“Pardon me, miss. I’ve got a bit of business to attend
to.” He turns to Hank. “Little help here?”
“Why don’t you step over here for a minute, little lady?
We’ve got a couple questions for you if you don’t mind.”
Dani steps over to Hank, still wide-eyed and frantic.
“Okay. Okay. But can we get out of here first please? I’ll
tell you anything you want, just get me out of here.”
“Slow down. Calm down. Is that fella over there your
boyfriend?”
Dani looks at Hank confused. Hank gestures at Dutch
who Jimmy is putting the handcuffs on and helping to his
feet.
“What? Him? No. He’s just some guy. I don’t know
him. Can we go now please?”
“One second. Are there any more of you in here?”
“Yes. No. Maybe. I don’t know anymore. We were
just in here investigating and then we ran into these guys
and they tried to take all of our stuff and then one of them
shot Jack and then…”
Hank holds out a hand in the universal gesture for wait
just one damn minute.
“What’s this about someone getting shot?”
Dani looks over her shoulder at the entrance to the
church as her words trail off.
Hank sees her glance at the church doors.
“You kids been messing around in the church?”
Dani shudders.
Hank shrugs, “Alright. Let’s go check it out. See what
there is to see.”
Dani grabs Hank by the shirt-front, balling up wads of
his uniform shirt in her hands.
“Please, mister, please? Can we just get out of here?
I promise I’ll tell you anything you want to know. Just can
we leave now, please?”
Hank looks over at Vince.
Vince steps over and takes Dani by the upper arm and
pulls her off of Hank.
“Come on little lady. We‘re just gonna check out the
church and then we’ll take you kids down to the station and
we’ll have a little conversation.”
Dani is speechless with fear and tries to set her feet,
but Vince half-carries, half-drags her along as Hank heads
towards the church door with Vince and Dani in tow.
Jimmy prods Duke with his shotgun barrel. “Come on.
You too.”
Duke shoots Jimmy a look over his shoulder. “You
don’t want to do this.”
“I’ll be the one making that decision if you don’t mind.
Now move it.”
The loose-knit group moves towards the church doors.
Hank reaches out and opens them, holding them open so
that his friends and their wards can enter.

Chapter 51

Duke at shotgun-point, followed by Vince and Dani,

enter the church, Hank bringing up the rear.
Hank shines his four-lens light-cannon around the sides
of the church revealing the knocked over pews, the carpet
of bible pages, and the graffiti on the walls.
“This is a god-damned shame.”
The group walks down the aisle. Hank shines his light-
cannon up at the ceiling of the front of the church, over the
altar. A thick rope hangs from the ceiling.
He follows the rope down revealing Dutch hung naked,
upside down by his ankles, the skin flayed off of his body,
his abdomen open and his warm wet organs in a steaming
pile in the middle of the altar.
“Jesus Christ!”
The church thrums with the industrial boom of a gigantic
arcane engine. Hank shines his light around the area in
front of the altar revealing a hundred writhing black-
cloaked shadowy figures that all turn simultaneously
revealing phosphorescently glowing eyes.
The men all instinctively ready their weapons.
“By the authority invested in me I order you all to cease
and desist whatever the fuck you’re up to in here and put
your hands in the air and keep them there or I will put
bullets into each and every last one of you motherfuckers!”
The mass of writhing midnight black forms with glowing
eyes surges towards them.
“Stop or I will shoot!”
Hank raises the shotgun, pointing it at the ceiling and
lets off a blast.
The light and sound of the blast is impressive, but it has
no effect on the approaching swarm of shadowy forms.
Hank pumps the slide racking in fresh shells, ejecting the
spent ones.
“Alright! You asked for it!”
The men let loose a volley of lead, the projectiles
rippling the black forms like shooting into thick smoke,
making them billow like curtains, but doing nothing to
impede their forward movement.
The men back up towards the entrance to the chapel,
firing at will.
The writhing mass of roiling darkness continues to
approach.
Dani backs into the door and turns around, opening it,
as the rest of the group backs out through it.

Chapter 52

When the chapel door closes the men stop firing.

The group turns to exit out the front door, but between
them and the opening of the main door has amassed a sea
of shadowy shapes with glowing eyes, a constellation of
tiny moons.
The group clusters into a circle as the sea of blackness
swarms towards them, the men emptying their weapons
into the swarm as Dani screams, losing the last of her
sanity.
Chapter 53

Outside Jake is idly tonguing a toothpick hanging half

out of his mouth trying to watch the tip dance with his
hands in the pockets of his light duty jacket, his shotgun
leaning against the low wall pointing up at the night sky.
Jake hears the gunfire and screams, bolting upright and
grabbing his shotgun sprinting towards the front entrance.

Chapter 54

Jake arrives at the front entrance breathing fast with his

shotgun at the ready.
He pauses with his back against the wall next to the
main doors and ducks low, peering into the pitch-black
interior of the main hall.
“Chief?”
No answer from the darkness within. Just a wet sound
like someone mixing a bowl of fruit salad with a raw steak.
“Chief? What the fuck is going on in there?”
Still no answer.
Jake catches his breath trying to compose himself but
failing.
“Oh fuck. Oh shit! Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!”
Jake takes a last deep breath and turns, charging in
with his shotgun at the ready.

A moment later a high-girlish scream rings out and the

barking roar of Jake’s shotgun, the muzzle flare lighting up
the scene of swirling nightmare carnage like a camera
flash in a windowless room.

Chapter 55

Jake staggers backwards out of the front entrance to

the building, ragged bleeding claw-marks cut into his shirt
across his chest and face and arms carrying a mostly
forgotten shotgun.
Jake turns to run and staggers to a police cruiser. His
hands, slick with fresh red blood fumble with the door
handle for a second as he looks, panicked, over his
shoulder.
He manages to get the door open and dives for the
hand-set of the police radio, keying the radio handset,
shouting into it. “Hello? Hello? Dispatch? Anyone?”
The radio replies laced with static, “This is dispatch.”
“Oh, thank God! I need you to get on the phone pronto!
Contact Dixon County and get them to send over
everyone… armed to the teeth. Tell them to round up
whoever they can and bring whatever they’ve got. Fuck
that! Call the National Guard!”
“Why? What’s wrong? What’s happening out there?”
A sound like cold wind through curtains and arcane
whispering approaches, the night darkening around the
officer before dropping dead silent.
“It’s The Gate… It’s…"
The hairs on the back of his neck rise up. Jake drops
the hand-set. The hand set swings down, knocking
against the side of the cruiser.
Jake turns, a pair of skeletal hands with blood-streaked
talons grab him by the hair, wrenching his head back,
slitting his throat with razor-sharp claws, hot blood
streaming out of the yawning wound, running down into the
cleft between his collarbones, soaking his uniform shirt.
Jake’s hands clutch at his throat, unable to stem the
flood as his life pours out in spurts. Choking on his own
blood he falls onto his face, the blood pooling in the dirt
underneath him soaking the brown dirt black.
The handset of the radio swings gently back and forth,
each arc a little less wide than the last, squawking, “Hello?
Hello? Jake? Hello? Is anyone there? Hello?”
The door to the main hall swings shut with a resounding
slam.
The clouds race darkly across the face of the moon.
The night is still and quiet once again.
Scott Lefebvre has no discernible scars or marks and where he
lives is none of your business.
If you want to contact him, slit the throat and drink the blood of
a displacer beast under a full moon on the winter solstice and
he will appear.

Or you can send him an e-mail at Scott_Lefebvre@hotmail.com