Page 47 of Scaredy Cat
Zack nods enthusiastically. “I’ll friend you, too. This was really great. Talk to you soon?” His smile is sweet, and maybe a little hopeful. But even though he’s cute in a scruffy kind of way, I have absolutely no interest in him.
How can I, when my knife-wielding stalker has given me a cat to keep me company and made me come on a workbench at Mill House?
The inappropriate comparison makes me feel guilty, even though Zack can’t know what I’m thinking. I make a polite excuse to leave, and within minutes, I’m back on the stairs and heading up to the fifth floor.
Please don’t let anyone else be up here,I think to myself with my fingers physically crossed. The muscles in my legs are stinging by the time I’m finally at the top floor, the level with some of the most tragic history that took place inEasterly Ridge.Thankfully, when I’m standing on the small landing with the open roof to one side and the large recreation room to the other, it’s clear to me that I am definitely the only one up here.
The only other rooms are a supply closet and a bathroom that’s in much worse shape than any other room I’ve seen so far in the sanitarium. But that’s not really surprising, given that even before this place was famous for being the location of too many tragedies to easily ascribe to chance, the fifth-floor bathroom was the site of two gruesome suicides by nurses.
Honestly, I’m surprised that there’s no one up here. While the fifth floor is much smaller than the rest, it’s my plan to do a significant portion of my content here instead of somewhereelse. After all, it’s supposedly the most haunted area of the abandoned hospital.
“I’m sorry for whatever happened to you,” I whisper as I gaze at the crumbling doorway of the women’s bathroom. “And I hope you’re resting in peace.” While I’m not particularly religious, I still bow my head and give a little personal prayer to whatever gods that may or may not exist to let the women who killed themselves here rest easy in death.
A creaking noise makes me look up, and my eyes flick around the landing and into the rec-room beyond. With its waist-to-ceiling glass paned walls, it’s the best for letting in moonlight. Or, back in the day, sunlight to ‘heal’ anyone suffering from ailments of the flesh.
I have my doubts that sunlight ever healed anyone, but who am I to judge? Just because I, for one, prefer the dark?—
The noise comes again, and as my eyes adjust, I lower my flashlight to look around the floor of cracked tiles and detritus from the trees outside. There’s nothing up here that I can see. No furniture except for broken debris and a door lying on its side. Just me and the two large rooms sandwiching the crumbling bathroom.
“Hello?” I call, and my voice vanishes with the wind. I shiver at a strong breeze, pulling my hood up over my head. Even with my hoodie and gloves, it’s slightly freezing up here, and I know I won’t be able to stay up here for that long. Even though the rest of the building is just as cold and dark, at least the lower levels have walls to block the wind that whistles through the cracked concrete.
Another sound has me pausing in the doorway that leads onto the roof, though I still see nothing when I sweep my flashlight along the open area, protected only by waist-high stone walls almost like a castle turret.
There are worse places to die of consumption, I suppose, if one doesn’t take into consideration the questionably experimental surgeries that had gone on two floors down. Distantly, I wonder how the seance is going, though I have no interest in showing up and being a part of it. The little bit of ghost hunting content with Zack will be fun for my followers to see, but I don’t need to go sit around an old surgery suite while a ghost hunter I’ve never heard of tries to contact spirits from the beyond.
My flashlight sweeps around the roof, illuminating a few piles of loose stone and the butts of cigarettes. The latter makes me sad, but I don’t have a bag to put them in, and I’m not about to cram cigarettes into my pocket. It’s disrespectful, and this place is a historical monolith that deserves better.
But I ignore them, and walk to the edge of the roof to lean against the still-sturdy wall that’s as thick as my forearm. Lightly at first, but then with increasing confidence, I press my weight against it and set down my flashlight with my fingers still curled against it.
“So pretty,” I breathe to myself. From here, I can see the trees that encircleEasterly Ridgefor over a mile, getting lower and lower as the ground drops away from the peak of the hill I’m on. Where the trees end, the city begins, and the lights are bright in the darkness like beacons in the distance, though all I can make out from here are the lights themselves and not what they may be attached to.
While my phone won’t do it justice, I take a few pictures, anyway. It’s hard to capture the scope of the sanitarium, or just how impressive the view is without someone being here themselves. But that doesn’t mean I don’t try. Hopefully, when I write about this on my blog, I can show my readers through my words just what it feels like to stand here, where there’sso much history both good and bad without even taking into consideration the idea that there may be ghosts.
Absently I turn, my flashlight pointed at the ground, to make my way back to the door. I still want to walk through the recreation room on the other side of the fifth floor, and my mind suddenly fills with the question of how in the world they got the sick patients up here without any kind of lift. Surely that was dangerous, and exhausting. Especially for someone with a room on the first or second floor.
When my flashlight illuminates something other than the floor, I stop. Confusion trickles through my skull, and I frown, eyes narrowed, as I study the boots in front of me. “Sorry,” I sigh. “Am I in your way…” The words trail off when I shine my flashlight up at the person, and a wolf-skull mask stares at me, my stalker’s head tipped to the side.
“No,” he murmurs. “You’re not in my way at all, Scaredy Cat.”
My stomach does a little flip, then proceeds to tie itself into a sailor’s knot while my heart speeds up in my chest. Swallowing against my pulse, I stare up at him, taking a breath. He won’t hurt me. He hasn’t hurt me yet, and I force away the fear that gnaws on my fingertips with that reassurance.
“What do you want?” I breathe, my fingers tight on the flashlight. “How are you even here?”
My stalker doesn’t answer. He move away from the door, however, and gestures to it a bit dramatically. When I just stare at him, nonplussed, he adds, “This is the part where you run.”
“No.” He tilts his head the other way at my quick answer. “No, I-I have questions.” The words die when he sighs and unsheathes the knife at his belt. “You won’t hurt me. Not like, permanently.”
He stares at me, and I swear I can feel the radiating disapproval at my bravado, along with a touch of amusement. “You’re so sure.”
“You never have before.”
“Well, don’t you know that killers escalate?” He twirls the knife in his hand, prowling a step forward. “And there are a lot of people here Icouldhurt, if I wanted to.”
I hadn’t thought of that.
“Don’t treat me like you know me, pretty girl,” he continues as he edges closer. Then he suddenly reaches out to fist one hand in my hoodie, yanking me forward so I stumble into him. “You don’t know what I want.”
With one, quick movement, he nicks my jaw, pulling a surprise gasp from my throat as hot blood wells to the surface of the tiny cut and sends another surge of terror through me.
