13 – Silent Hospital

“We don’t usually go to hospitals,” Leslie said as he advanced down the dark halls of the building, flashlight sweeping into each room he passed.

Erika moved along just behind him, bat resting on her shoulder. “The ghosts too violent or something?” she asked as she checked a room on the opposite side of the hall. The only thing inside was an exam table coated in a thin layer of dust.

No ghosts, no cultists.

“No,” he said with a small chuckle. “They’re harder to sneak into, especially while lugging around equipment.”

“There isn’t much reason to,” Anna added, holding a small squirt bottle up to her nose. She winced as she pulled back. “How old is this holy water?”

Rick, sword out but not drawn, glanced over his shoulder. “Dunno. September?”

“Smells like mold. It’s got floaty bits in it.”

“What? That can’t be. I filled it from the water tank just after the graveyard outing.”

“Probably should dump the whole thing and start fresh,” Anna said, returning the bottle to her pack.

“Why isn’t there much reason to go to hospitals?” Erika asked, trying to direct the topic back. “I’d figure there would be a lot of dead people haunting their morgues or whatever.”

“Surprisingly not,” Rick said with a shrug. “Or maybe not so surprising now that we know about The Eclipse. Even if they view ghost hunting as menial, they probably keep hospitals clean.”

“Guess we’ll find out if The Adjustment ever gets back to us with a real job. Bet they’d love to pass something like that off to us.”

Leslie swept his light over another room, checking the walls, floor, and ceiling before moving on. “This isn’t a hospital, and it isn’t likely maintained no matter how The Eclipse operates.”

Erika’s eyes narrowed as she moved with more gravity. The cult sacrificed people—she had personally witnessed it happening. It wouldn’t be surprising if ghosts did pop out of the woodwork.

Firming her jaw, Erika continued checking each room on her side of the hallway. Examination rooms gave way to proper offices with desks and defunct computers. Single-occupant bathrooms reeked of dried out drains, though the smell still didn’t come close to the zigurrat.

“I think they’re trying to get into a ventilation duct,” The Stalker said, breaking the silence. It took Erika a beat to realize she meant the birds.

Whereas Rick and Leslie were tense, and their tension bled into Erika, The Stalker moved like nothing could possibly concern her. Even the delivery of her comment came flat and bored, though her intense gaze up at the drop-tiled ceiling undercut her tone.

“Can’t they just break through the boarded up windows?” Anna asked, following The Stalker’s gaze. “They did a number on Rick’s van,” she added, earning a muffled groan from Rick.

“Maybe they’re stupid?” The Stalker said in total apathy. “They’re just birds.”

“Birds, especially corvids, are some of the smartest—”

“Don’t care.” She looked around, shimmering eyes staring at blank points of the wall for oddly long times. “A few I was tracking have flown off, but no idea how many more might have joined the flock here.”

“Have The Eclipse shown up?” Erika asked.

The Stalker hesitated, looking around a little more. “The Hanged Man is setting up a sniper nest. The Art—” She scowled. “—is in the area as well. Looks like a token response. They’re probably hoping the birds settle down on their own.”

“Should we try to contact them?” Rick asked.

Erika grimaced, shooting a short glance to The Stalker. “I’d rather they not know we’re involved in this trouble if at all possible. They’ll blame us.”

“My van is registered in my name.”

“Well… damn.” Erika paused, looking to The Stalker again, only to notice the floor as she did so. “Hold up. The dust has been disturbed here,” she said, pointing off down a small hallway between two offices. “None of you went that way, right?”

Not waiting for their denials, she moved back down the short hall, finding an elevator and stairwell at the end. The elevator didn’t look like it had been used in years, but the lack of dust trailed up the flight of stairs.

The first thing Leslie did as he came up behind her was to check the ceilings all the way up the stairwell. At this point, Erika was fairly certain he was just trying to make a point of it for Anna’s sake.

Anna, on the other hand, crouched down and held her light close to the stairs. “Either they were dragging something up or they use this route often enough that there is basically no dust left in the main area.”

“Only one way to find out,” Erika said, taking the oddly short steps two at a time.

The trail of dust—or lack thereof—continued right past the second and third floors with no sign that anyone used them. Erika skipped right past them, more interested in what was on the top floor anyway; the cultists The Stalker saw disappeared there. That meant portal, probably.

Erika didn’t know what she would do from there beyond swinging her baseball bat, but it was a way in.

If it worked.

The smell hit before the landing did.

Erika had been breathing through her mouth since the second floor, catching a whiff of something rancid drifting down from above. Passing beyond the landing to the fourth floor, Erika groaned. The air turned to something that had to be endured. It coated the back of the throat with a foul taste, like the earlier bathroom but mixed with a greasy film that reminded her less of sewage and more of the ziggurat, if not half as strong.

“Ugh,” Anna groaned as they reached the top floor, covering her face with her coat. “Why does it always stink?”

Rick, the only one of the group panting slightly from the exertion of climbing a few stairs, wheezed out, “They’re cultists that probably worship those maggot things.”

“Or their toilets have all dried out,” Erika said, pinching her nose. “Meaning we’re all breathing fresh sewer air.”

Rick coughed, fighting with himself over breathing after the stairs versus not breathing at all. “I don’t know what kind of ghost forms from methane poisoning, but I’m going to haunt these cultists forever if I die from sewer gas.”

“The trail leads this way,” Leslie said, trying to keep the group on track, though he couldn’t hide his heavy coughs as the smell touched his tongue.

Erika backed him up, keeping their pattern of checking rooms, but she felt odd as they moved. It could have been the smell or some poison in the air, as Rick suggested, but something about the space itself felt off to her in a way that she couldn’t exactly describe. It reminded her of the way The Fixer warped time at the motel—that same odd haze in the distance—but it didn’t feel like time was off.

It set her teeth on edge.

Something about the fourth floor was just wrong. Nothing obvious beyond the smell—no pentagrams scrawled into the walls and no blood trails dragging down the floor. The layout was identical to the first floor: the hall branched at the same points, exam rooms and offices filled the rooms, and they even walked past the open door of a bathroom.

“Anyone else feel anything strange?” she asked, breaking open a locked door to a long room with several beds arrayed like it was intended for long-term occupants… despite this being a simple clinic, not a hospital.

There was something odd about the room, more strangeness of this place. The back wall was set so far away that Leslie’s flashlight barely reached it. Each bed was bolted to the floor with thick iron lugs, all of which stood out prominently as tripping hazards.

“Got a chill like a particularly physical ghost is nearby,” Leslie answered, sweeping his light across the beds one-by-one. He experimentally breathed out, checking for fog—it came out clear and invisible, earning a non-committal shrug. “Might just have been a random draft.”

“It feels like The Healer is bending my bones in ways they weren’t meant to bend,” The Stalker said.

Erika shot her a look, but The Stalker wasn’t paying attention, eyeing a random corner of the corridor with her shimmering eyes. “I don’t think bones are ever supposed to bend.”

“Tell that to The Healer.”

Erika just shook her head, stepping into the large room. “No dust in here,” she commented after swiping her foot over the floor.

Anna, over by one of the bolted-down beds, produced a pen from her pocket. Using it, she lifted up a heavy leather strap without having to touch it. “Dried blood, bits of skin, arm hair,” she muttered, more to herself than to the rest of the group. “These beds weren’t willingly occupied, I take it.”

“The last place I saw those cultists before…” The Stalker trailed off, looking at Erika. “Before I lost track of them was somewhere ahead and to the right,” she finished, pointing further into the large room.

Erika’s eyes followed her finger a little faster than her flashlight. In the shadowed darkness between two beds, a figure stood in a pale white dress, barely visible in the dim light. Its arm stuck out, pointing to the wall opposite from the one The Stalker was indicating. Jolting in shock, Erika’s flashlight jiggled back and forth over the space, but the figure was gone.

“Fuck,” Erika hissed, feeling that brief rush of adrenaline.

Everyone else snapped to alertness at Erika’s outburst. Rick and Leslie, respective arms drawn, moved up alongside her while The Stalker started waving her pistol around.

“What was it?” Anna asked, her voice a bare whisper.

Flicking her arms to shake off the shakes, Erika breathed in a bit too much of the unpleasant air and promptly coughed, which only served to heighten the tension in the others. “Nothing,” she said, wafting her hand in front of her face—to no effect. “Just that stupid bitch-ass ghost that’s been haunting me since the graveyard.”

Although Erika wasn’t afraid of no ghost—especially not one that had been haunting her for a while now—the others got a fire lit under their asses. Anna passed off the holy water to Rick, who started spritzing it around the place, while she handed large wooden crosses to everyone present.

“What am I supposed to do with this?” Erika asked, turning it over in her hands.

“Keep it out and visible,” Anna said as she lit a bundle of sticks on fire. She waved it about, chasing away some of that foul stench, though replacing it with an overbearingly thick amount of pine and earthy smell. “It should stop any hostile manifestations.”

“How do you know it is a Catholic ghost?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if it is a Jewish ghost, or some ancient caveman that died before modern religions were invented?”

“That’s not… It doesn’t…” Anna shook her head, looking to Rick.

“We suspect that symbology operates on a collective belief system,” he said, affixing his cross to his belt before taking up his sheathed sword once again. “Because Catholicism is fairly popular, and a fair number of people believe crosses work against ghosts, they work against ghosts.”

Erika shrugged, but deferred to the experts in the matter. “You guys weren’t this up in arms when I mentioned the ghost the other day.”

“Well, to be honest…” Anna trailed off, averting her gaze in a sheepish manner. “After everything that happened, we had a little talk and kind of thought you were just seeing The Stalker…”

“Me?”

“I told you we should have checked more,” Rick said, ignoring The Stalker.

“But you didn’t, because you secretly agreed,” Anna shot back before turning to Erika. “And now, dealing with a haunting on top of birds and cultists doesn’t sound fun.”

That made sense, although, “I’m not that worried,” Erika said, shaking her head as she moved past Rick and Leslie.

“You sure looked scared for a minute there.”

“Startled,” Erika insisted. “Getting scared from a jumpscare is like a comedian tickling you and claiming to be funny. If it does something beyond hanging around in my periphery, I’ll get worried. We’ve got cultists to focus on.”

Despite her words, Erika headed to the side of the room the ghost had pointed out, not the side The Stalker indicated. Each beds had a side table bolted next to it. Most were empty, but this one was not. At first, Erika thought someone had broken a light and left the pieces scattered across its top, or it was some debris from a broken wall.

It was porcelain—large, thick chunks of milky-white porcelain. The pieces were spread apart across the end table, but if she pressed them a little closer together, they formed a familiar shape.

“A mask,” Erika whispered to herself. More than just a mask, it felt familiar. She held up the largest chunk, turning it over in her hands.

“Are you touching things,” Rick said, aghast.

Erika waved him off, shrugging as she stared, trying to bridge that gap from familiarity to knowing. Each of the masks she had seen were different, individualized. They were designed to resemble faces, complete with eyebrows and wrinkles around the eyes and nose.

“I think I broke this mask,” Erika said as a jolt of insight hit. “It’s from the guy who was chasing Delilah around when I first met her…”

She turned her gaze onto the bed the table sat next to, frowning at the dark streaks on either end of the short, rough pillow. It looked like someone bled out the ears, quite profusely at that.

“Were they trying to put it on someone else? Or repair it?”

Erika looked over the array of beds with an unsettling revelation hitting her. Something Delilah said about her cult—the normal, average cultists who ended up cooped by The Monk—was that they were being promoted by being given masks. She had known since the museum that the people with masks had probably been regular people at some point in their lives.

Delilah said that her cult had maybe a hundred people in it. Erika counted the beds in this room alone. Twenty. Forty. Eighty—and that was just one side. Either masking someone took a great deal of time or the cult was processing people on a scale that filled her with dread.

All the beds were unoccupied. That gave Erika some level of hope. If this facility was in preparation for the future, that meant they hadn’t been going about, converting half of Chicago into masked drones—not yet.

“I think we should destroy this place,” Erika said calmly as she turned around to face the rest of the room.

Leslie and Anna stood on the opposite side of the room, along with The Stalker, at the double-doors The Stalker had pointed toward earlier. Rick hovered around her, eyeing the mask fragments with suspicion.

“Not with us inside it, I hope,” he said warily.

Erika rolled her eyes, kicking the end table. The entire thing shattered on impact, falling to pieces that scattered around the floor. “Obviously not,” she said as the other three turned to her in alarm. “I’m not stupid.”

“Didn’t say you were.”

“Trouble?” Leslie called out.

“No. Let’s check this other room before we blow this place up,” Erika said, stalking across the room to the double-doors.

The doors were saloon-style swing open doors. The Stalker had one of the flaps open, stoppered with her foot in the way. Before Erika gave them a little jumpscare of their own, Leslie had been carefully sweeping his gun and its light over the space within.

He must not have found anything, because he pushed open his side of the door as Erika approached.

The room beyond had been gutted down to its bones and rebuilt into something else entirely. A raised dais in the center, topped with a humanoid statue. Its metallic, skeletal features triggered Erika’s recognition instantly. It was the same as the museum; same blank stare, same wrongness radiating off it. She didn’t fully understand what these things were, and hadn’t thought to ask The Daughter or Delilah, but she knew they were some kind of hub for all the masked people running about.

With a flick of her wrist, she flung the mask fragment across the room. It pinged against the statue. The metallic skeleton collapsed in on itself, crumbling as more and more broken pieces struck the more intact whole. In seconds, all that was left was a pile of silvery dust atop the altar.

The others stared in stunned silence, alternating between looking at her and looking at the statue, before Anna finally spoke up. “No discussion about that one, huh?”

“I think,” Erika said slowly, carefully selecting her words, “abiding these statues existence longer than necessary is… unwise. We can confirm with Delilah later, but…” She trailed off, looking over her shoulder at the room filled with beds.

The more statues that existed—the server hubs—the more victims of the masks there might be.

“What about a portal?” The Stalker asked, far less impressed with the display than the others. “That’s why we came here, isn’t it?”

“We came here to hide from the birds,” Rick reminded her.

“Yeah, but—”

“The portal still exists,” Erika said, walking further into the room. She swept her hands through the air, feeling for that film. “Like at the museum, we could get in even though I destroyed the original statue. I think the statues are here because the portals are here, not the other way around.” Shaking her head, she turned to The Hunters and The Stalker. “Should we venture—”

“No,” Leslie interrupted. “We’ve confirmed its existence. The Eclipse can set up guards, but we are not prepared by half—we ran in here with no supplies real and no forethought.”

Erika lingered, staring at the empty space in the air. She was curious, but Leslie was right. “Then I guess we should call up The Eclipse and see if they can cover our escape,” she said with a sigh. “Probably get chewed out like this is all my fault too.”