Whispers of the Dead

CHAPTER 23

PAUL RAN ACROSS the foyer. ‘SAM? SAM!’

His shout bounced off the bare walls. The interior of the sanitarium was dark and empty, stripped of furniture and fittings. The windows were shuttered, letting in only slats and cracks of light. I had an impression of space, of dilapidation and dust, as I plunged after him, the phone clutched to my ear.

‘Talk to me, Hunter! What’s going on?’ Gardner demanded, his words fading in and out as the reception wavered.

‘We’ve found York,’ I panted. ‘It’s an old sanitarium in the foothills, about fifteen, twenty miles from where he left the ambulance. There’s…’ But I didn’t know how to describe the nightmare of the garden. I started giving directions to where we’d left the car until his silence checked me. ‘Gardner? Gardner!’

The connection had failed. I’d no idea how much he’d heard, or even if he’d heard anything at all, but there was no time to call him back. Paul had stopped in the centre of the foyer.

‘SAM! WHERE ARE YOU? SAM!’

‘Paul!’ I seized hold of him. He shook me off.

‘He already knows we’re here! DON’T YOU, YOU BASTARD?’ he bellowed. ‘YOU HEAR ME? I’M COMING FOR YOU, YORK!’

His challenge went unanswered. Our breathing sounded hollow in the cavernous foyer. Either termites or subsidence had undermined the foundations, causing the entire floor to cant drunkenly to one side like a fairground funhouse. Dust coated every surface like dirty felt. Faded wallpaper hung down in swags, and the banisters had been ripped from the once grand staircase in the centre of the room so that its railings stuck up into empty air like loose teeth. Next to it was an old-fashioned lift that had made its last journey decades before, its metal cage rusted and full of debris. There was a smell of age and damp, of mould and rotting wood. And something else.

Although it was faint, the sweetly foul odour of decomposition was here too.

Paul ran to the staircase, footsteps clomping on the wooden floor. The flight leading to the lower floor had caved in, leaving gaping blackness and rubble. He started to go up, but I stopped him, pointing. While one side of the building looked ready to collapse, on the other was a service door marked Private. The dusty parquet tiles between it and the entrance were crisscrossed with footprints and thin tyre tracks that could have been from a bike.

Or a wheelchair.

Clutching the wooden spar in his fist, Paul ran across and threw it open. A dark service corridor stretched in front of us, the only daylight coming from a small window at the far end.

‘SAM!’ he yelled.

The shout died to silence. Several doors ran along the corridor’s length. Paul ran down it, flinging them back one by one. They banged against the wall with a sound like gunshots, revealing bare cupboards and storage rooms that held only cobwebs. I followed behind him, until we’d reached the last doorway. He yanked it open, and I blinked at the sudden brightness.

An empty kitchen greeted us.

Afternoon sun slanted through filthy windows, giving the room the murky green light of an aquarium. A camp bed stood in one corner, a sleeping bag rumpled on top of it. By its head were shelves made from breezeblocks and raw planks, bowed under the weight of old books. Congealed pans cluttered a huge wood-burning stove, and two huge sinks overflowed with dirty crockery. Standing in the centre of the room was a scarred pine table. The plates on it had been pushed aside to make way for a first aid kit, from which a length of leftover bandage still trailed. Remembering the buckled steering wheel in the ambulance, I felt a savage satisfaction.

It was only when I looked away from the table that I realized one entire wall was covered in photographs.

York had created a montage of his victims; black and white images of agonized faces, just like those I’d seen at his house. There were too many to take in at once, men and women of all ages and ethnicities, pinned up on the wall like some sick gallery. Some of the photographs had started to curl and yellow with age. Wallets, purses and jewellery had been heaped in an untidy pile on a shelf below them, tossed aside as casually as the lives of their owners.

I felt a sudden, feathery vibration as something sticky brushed against my face. I recoiled, almost knocking over a chair before I realized it was only a strip of flypaper. A swamp darner was caught on it, still alive but hopelessly entangled, its fitful struggles only trapping it more. Other strips hung all over the kitchen, I saw, their surfaces crusted with dead flies and insects. York hadn’t bothered to take them down, just hung fresh strips until there was hardly any space left.

Paul crossed to where a long-bladed knife lay by the stove. Picking it up, he wordlessly passed me the strut he’d been carrying. It felt flimsy and rotten, but I still took it.

Two doors led off from the kitchen. Paul tried to open the first, but it had warped in its frame. He threw his shoulder against it and it gave with a splintering crack. Off balance, he staggered inside and collided with the pale body hanging from the ceiling.

‘Jesus!’

He stumbled back. But it was only the carcass of a pig, split in half lengthways and suspended by its hind leg from a meat hook. The small cupboard-sized room was an old-fashioned cold locker, but the rank smell and buzzing flies told that it wasn’t cold enough. Cuts of meat lay bagged and parcelled on the shelves, and a pig’s head sat on a bloodstained platter like a sacrificial offering.

Pig’s teeth and blood. York didn’t like to waste anything.

Paul stared for a moment, chest rising and falling, then went to the remaining door. This one opened smoothly, and I let out my breath when I saw it only led to a small staircase that descended into shadows.

Then I saw the wheelchair pushed to one side at the top.

It was scuffed and battered, and in the half-light I could make out wet smears on the seat. Remembering what Jacobsen had told me about the bloodstains in the ambulance, I glanced at Paul, hoping he hadn’t noticed. But he had.

He took the stairs three at a time.

I went after him, conscious of the creak and sway of the rickety staircase. At the bottom was a dark and narrow corridor. Chinks of light seeped through boarded-up windows and a set of French doors; the same ones we’d tried from the outside, I realized. The sanitarium had been built on the hillside, and now we were on the lower ground floor. The smell of decomposition was stronger down here, even stronger than outside. But the corridor was empty, except for a single door at the far end.

A brass sign on it bore the legend Spa Rooms.

Paul had already started towards it when a sudden noise cut through the silence. It was like air escaping from a valve, a high-pitched keening that sounded both inhuman and agonized. It cut off as quickly as it started, but there was no doubt about its source.

It came from the spa.

‘SAM!’ Paul bellowed, and charged for the door.

I couldn’t have held him back even if I’d wanted to. Gripping the length of wood so tightly my hand hurt, I was right behind him as he burst through. There was just time to register a large room with white-tiled walls before a figure dashed through another doorway right in front of me.

My heart stuttered until I realized it was my own reflection.

A huge mirror was fixed to the opposite wall, its surface mottled and leprous. A row of drinking fountains stood in front of it, their spigots dusty and dry. A murky light filtered in through a row of high, cobwebbed windows, revealing cracked white tiles from floor to ceiling. Signs proclaiming Treatment Rooms, Sauna, and Turkish Bath pointed off towards the warren of shadowed chambers that led from the room in which we stood. But we barely noticed.

York had left his victims in here as well.

A sunken plunge pool, perhaps six feet square, stood in one corner by a darkened archway. York had turned it into a charnel pit. The bodies nearly filled it. From what I could make out, they were in varying stages of decomposition, but none so far gone as those outside.

The smell was indescribable.

The sight checked Paul, but only briefly. He quickly crossed to the doors marked Treatment Rooms and tore open the nearest one. Inside was a small chamber that must once have been used for massage. Now it was York’s darkroom. A reek of chemicals greeted us. Developing trays and containers of photographic chemicals cluttered an old desk, and more photographs had been clipped to a length of cord suspended above it.

Pushing past me, Paul ran to the next chamber. The smell told me what was inside, overwhelming even the darkroom’s pungent chemicals. I was overcome by a reluctance to look, a sudden fear of what we were going to find. Paul, too, seemed to feel it. He hesitated, his face deathly.

Then he opened the door.

More of York’s victims lay on the tiled floor, stacked one on top of another like so much firewood. They were fully clothed, apparently just dragged in here and left, as though he’d simply lost interest and dumped them in the nearest space to hand.

The body lying on the very top might have been asleep. In the dim light from the doorway, the outflung hand and spill of blond hair looked pitifully vulnerable.

I heard Paul give a sound halfway between a sob and a cry.

We’d found Sam.