Chapter 7
The van rolled through the gates of the old, dilapidated asylum, and Ben felt a shiver deep in his spine as he laid eyes on the old building and its overgrown surroundings. The fall had turned the foliage brown, with some trees stripped barren, a blanket of brittle leaves on the ground below. The building was run down, with exposed brickwork where paint had once been, and a layer of long built-up grime over everything. The large wooden double doors of the main entrance hung crooked on their rusty hinges.
“What a dump!” Alex announced, and turned to Iris and Ben, grinning. “It’s perfect.”
Ben quirked a token smile, and gazed out of the van, up at the old broken windows. He squinted, seeing something that looked like an all-white apparition in one of the upper windows, but decided it was almost certainly pareidolia—the human tendency for visual pattern-seeking. There was just as much a ghost in that window as there was a man in the moon, or the Virgin Mary in a grilled cheese sandwich.
Still, it would have made for good TV, he supposed.
“Hey, check out that window,” he said to Joey, pointing. “Upper floor, fifth from the left. There’s a figure. Probably drapes or dirt on the window, but…”
Joey put the car into park, pulled the handbrake, and peered up to the window.
“Oh, nice catch, G-man! Let me set up the camera real quick.”
As Joey set about putting his camera together, Ben climbed out of the van. Addison followed, though her exit was much simpler; she merely stepped through the van as if it wasn’t even there.
“Alright,” he announced to his fellow crew, grasping a notepad and pen from under his seat, “I’m going to go do a thorough safety inspection. Now remember: don’t go anywhere I haven’t checked, and only go where I’ve approved. Got it?”
“Got it, boss!” Alex said with a salute, but the smirk on his face suggested he might not have been taking it so seriously.
As Ben strapped his headlamp to his head and swung a messenger bag over his shoulder, Iris climbed out of the van, a nervous expression on her face.
“You gonna be okay in there by yourself?” she enquired. “What about your safety?”
“I’ll be alright,” Ben said, casting a quick look to Addison. I won’t be alone. “Just wait here and I’ll be back with a full report real soon.” He turned around and strode for the entrance.
The front doors were rickety, and Ben had to pull hard to get them to open properly.
“It really is a dump,” he muttered to Addison, who moved more freely into the building, looking around from the reception area inside. The linoleum floor was rotted away and covered in a layer of dirt. Some of the leaves from outside had found their way in, and littered the areas near broken windows.
But immediately inside the doorway, on the floor under some dust and leaves, was a great big pentacle someone had painted on the floor.
“Oh, now that’s just stereotypical,” Addison remarked.
The reception desk was splintered, which Ben marked down on his notepad.
“I’m gonna be busy, huh?” he said.
“Yeah. Not your picture of safety,” Addison agreed. “But listen, let me show you the stairs that are gonna collapse. This way…”
She proceeded down a hall, into a darker, windowless area of the asylum. Ben flipped on his headlamp as he followed.
Addison stopped at a particularly dark area, and gestured to a staircase that led up. “Here it is.”
“Okay. This staircase, off-limits. Easy.” Ben pulled a roll of gaffer tape from his bag and stuck a couple of pieces across the staircase, from the wall to the bannister, creating a sticky barrier. “Job done, right? I just need to point this out to Joey, and I can leap?”
Addison tapped away at her handlink for a moment. “Well, Ziggy gives that 99% odds, so… yeah. I guess.”
Ben watched her unconvinced face for a moment. “You’re worried about all the… the paranormal, ghostly stuff, aren’t you?”
“Shut up, no I’m not,” Addison said, laughing. Ben could see that it was forced. “I mean, it’s stupid, right?”
“Yeah, completely ridiculous,” Ben affirmed. “Nothing supernatural is going on.”
As if to contradict him, a loud bang came from the entrance, and an alarmed Ben took off towards the noise.
Addison had already materialised in the reception area when he arrived back there. She gestured to a door just behind the reception desk, that Ben knew had been open when they entered. “I think this door slammed shut,” she said, looking shaken.
“Nothing supernatural,” Ben reiterated, pushing on the door to open it again. “Just the Bernoulli Effect.”
“Right,” agreed Addison. “Whatever that is.”
Ben gestured to the open front doors. “My opening of these doors, combined with a hefty gust of wind from outside causing a change in pressure, must have caused a vacuum effect inside the building, resulting in the door getting pulled shut. It’s a principle of physics.”
“I’ll take your word for it,” Addison said, arms crossed.
“If you’ve ever wondered how airplane wings work…”
“I can honestly say I never have, Ben.”
“Fine then,” Ben said with a chuckle. “Well, I did when I was nine.”
“I don’t doubt that,” Addison teased. “Now, let’s finish this inspection, huh?”
“Let’s.”
* * *
The sun was low on the horizon when Ben finished up his inspection, and returned to the waiting group.
Alex had a lavalier microphone clipped to his collar, and Joey was filming him, the menacing old building looming large in the background.
“We’re here at the old Havenwell Psychiatric Hospital to find out what mysterious secrets this abandoned asylum holds,” he said into the barrel of the camera. “It’s all part of our quest to find out the truth of whether or not restless spirits really do lurk in the darkness, seeking peace—or, perhaps, vengeance. Welcome to Haunter Hunters.” He paused a moment, before looking up to Iris, who was watching and listening to the audio through a set of headphones. “Cut. How was that?”
“Awesome. Very professional,” Iris said, raising a thumb and lowering the headphones from her ears. She turned to Ben with a smile. “Hey, welcome back. You sure took your time; were there that many hazards?”
Ben held up his notepad, which was now quite crowded with writing. “Oh, there were a ton. I would avoid touching most wooden surfaces due to splintering, and there’s this one staircase that looks like it could fall to bits at any minute.” His eyes fixed on Joey, and emphasised his next words. “I put tape across it. And I’m dead serious when I say don’t go on those stairs.”
Joey raised an eyebrow. “Why are you looking at me?”
“No reason. Alright, let’s go in. Just be careful. There’s some broken glass on the floor in parts, too.”
As the group headed in, Ben could hear the handlink making some noise. He shot a curious look towards Addison, who was looking down at the device with confusion.
“That’s weird,” she muttered.
Ben hung back outside the doors, letting the other three pass into the building. “What is it?” he whispered.
“Ziggy’s… confused.”
“Confused about what?”
“It’s saying Joey doesn’t fall through the stairs now, but the present-day status of Iris keeps jumping from alive to dead and back. What the hell…”
“How? Why?” Ben’s eyes were wide now.
“I… I don’t know.” Addison slapped her hand against the link. “But Ian turned up something else about Iris, it looks like. They traced the number she called… it redirected through five other numbers, and ended at a burner phone somewhere in Hawaii.”
Ben glared at her, incredulous. “What?”
“Who the hell is this woman, Ben?”