The Secret Friend

29

Bryson already had a flashlight. Darby grabbed the spare she kept in the trunk of her car and then followed Reed, along with Bryson and the six other men, up the steep access road.

A slick layer of ice covered the pavement. She walked carefully, watching each step. The hill, bordered with pine trees, their branches weighed down with heavy, wet snow, seemed to stretch for miles with no end in sight.

'The campus is in the process of being torn down,' Reed said, his breath pluming in the cold air. 'I told your cop friend the same thing. There's nothing in there, nothing at all. The whole place has been cleared out.'

'When did the hospital close?' Darby asked.

'An electrical fire in the morgue gutted the Mason wing back in eighty-two. The lackeys on Beacon Hill decided it was too expensive to fix – the hospital is over two hundred years old – and with the statewide budget cuts in mental health, the hospital closed the following year.'

'There's a morgue in this building?'

'At one point in time, this place was a research hospital. When a patient died, the doctors would study their brains – this was back at the turn of the century when such things were allowed. Anyway, after the fire happened, the place shut down permanently – lack of funding and all that. I can't say I disagree with the decision. It would have cost a pretty penny to fix this place up.'

Darby nodded, not really listening, her focus turned inward on Malcolm Fletcher. What was his interest in an abandoned hospital? If he was, in fact, looking for something, why didn't he sneak in? Maybe he couldn't find another way in and decided to ask Reed for help.

When they reached the top of the hill, Darby was out of breath, her legs shaking with fatigue. Reed lit another cigarette.

The Sinclair Mental Health Facility, a massive Gothic structure of ancient brick and barred windows, was set around a wide courtyard holding the remains of a water fountain and several trees which were probably even older than the hospital. Some of the stained-glass windows were still intact.

'That there's the Kirkland building,' Reed said. 'Place is over two hundred years old.'

Darby had never seen anything so massive in both size and length. Going in there one could get lost. Forever.

'How big is this place?'

'About four hundred thousand square feet,' Reed said. 'There are eighteen floors not including the basement, which is a maze in and of itself. Kirkland is divided into two wings – Gable and Mason. You can't go inside Mason. The floors are pretty much rotted away, and the fire did a lot of damage, so we had the place sealed off back in eighty-nine. In another few months, everything you see here will be gone to make room for condos. Truth be told, I'm a little sad. This building's a historic landmark, the last of its kind. See those two buildings to your far left? Those used to be the tuberculosis buildings. They had one for male patients, one for female. There's a lot of history here.'

Darby waded through knee-high snow covering the courtyard. The place had the look and feel of a New England college campus from the early fifties – quaint and secluded, a sprawling mass of brick buildings tucked inside a heavily wooded area sitting on top of a hill overlooking Boston, eighteen miles to the south.

'Kirkland's become sort of a local tourist attraction ever since that movie Creepers came out,' Reed said. 'You see it?'

Darby shook her head. She was not a fan of horror movies any more. They hit too close to home.

'The Morrell book was much better,' Reed said. 'The story's about a group of urban explorers known as creepers who break into old historic buildings. The movie producers used the hospital as a location. We've had to increase security over the past five years. We have guards posted around the property twenty-four hours a day. Majority of people we arrest are teenagers and college students looking for a spot to drink and get high and screw, if you can believe it.'

Reed took out his keys and walked up the stairs to the main doors. The glass behind the steel security grate was cracked.

'You brought him through the front door?' Darby asked.

'Yes ma'am.'

'Is this the only way you can access the hospital?'

'The front door is the safest way to enter the hospital,' Reed said. 'There are some other entrances through the basement ducts and some old tunnels that lead out into different parts of the property, but half of 'em have collapsed or are about to. You try and go in that way, you're risking your life. That's why we got all this security around here. Place is a liability. Back in ninety-one, some asshole broke into the property, fell and cracked his head open. He sued and won a nice little settlement for himself. If you saw the legal bills, your head would spin.'

Beyond the front door was a hallway that opened up into a large, rectangular-shaped room stripped clean of its furniture. There was nothing in here but bare floors and walls covered with flecks of chipped white paint.

'This used to be the reception area,' Reed said. 'Grab a hardhat from that box over there. You two don't scare easily, do you?'

'If he gets scared, I'll hold his hand,' Darby said, glancing to Bryson. Tim didn't hear the comment. He was moving the beam of his flashlight around the room.

'This one time, I took a group of ghost hunters through here for some TV show,' Reed said. 'They were carrying these weird gadgets that looked like props from that movie Ghostbusters. One of them thought they saw a ghost and the stupid son of a bitch ran away screaming and fell through a hole and fractured his foot. Stay behind me and watch your step.'