You here about the plumbing?
“No,” I whispered, “and neither was he.”
In those few seconds it seemed all sanity deserted us. We were in Hell, and I was so terrified, so overcome with fear, I could barely prevent myself from completely breaking down. Emotion was raw now, and all the rules of life and death had changed. Lies and truth, fantasy and reality, good and evil—they had all become one.
“He’s here.” I took the flashlight back. “I can feel him.”
Rick wiped his mouth clean and gave a resolute nod.
I pushed past him and left the room. There were two small offices and a large metal staircase at the end of the hallway. We inspected the offices quickly. They were filled with broken furniture and garbage but nothing else, so I shone the light toward the staircase. Most of the steps were cluttered with debris. Two large windows at the head of the stairs were smeared with filth, but as more fireworks exploded, the colorful lights bled through the old panes and offered a glimpse of the top of the stairs.
In the flash of light, something on the landing moved.
“Fuck!” I backed away and nearly tripped. I swept the flashlight around but the beam wasn’t strong enough, and darkness again swallowed the top of the stairs.
“What? What is it?”
“There’s something up there,” I whispered. “I just saw it move.”
“More rats?”
I shook my head in the negative. “Too big.”
“There must still be homeless living in here then,” he said hopefully.
Rather than answering, I held my hand up for him to be quiet. We stood still a moment and waited for lapses between the fireworks to listen more carefully, but each time, all we heard was wind and ocean.
I climbed the first two stairs, distributing my weight carefully to make certain they could still safely accommodate us. Rick followed close behind. Once we’d covered three stairs, the flashlight was finally able to reveal the landing. I leaned against the railing and aimed the light, but from our vantage point all I could see beyond it was more darkness. We had no way of knowing if the second floor was safe to walk on, but something was up there, and one way or another, I was going after it.
We crept onto the landing and saw that the second floor was entirely gutted, an enormous open space with high ceilings. Again, the floor was cluttered and the same horrible smells pervaded the area, but the darkness here seemed different.
It was nearly alive.
I slowly swept the pool of light across the vast room.
“Who’s there?” Rick yelled suddenly. “Come out, we just want to talk to you.”
I glared at him but he didn’t notice, his eyes staring straight ahead. There was no answer, no sounds of movement.
“You’re sure you saw something?” he whispered.
As I slid the light along the wall closest to us, it illuminated a nearby open doorway. Shadows darted away, and this time I knew Rick had seen them too. “Positive.”
My heart and mind were racing so fast I wasn’t sure how much more I could endure. I wrestled with a tremor of fear, fought it off and stepped closer to the doorway. The light reflected off something within the room. Tiles. A wall covered in old filthy tiles.
“It’s a bathroom,” Rick said.
The sign buried in the cellar wall of Bernard’s house had been taken from a bathroom, a bathroom in this mill.
With my free hand, I reached behind me, pulled my 9mm free of its holster and glanced nervously at Rick. He dropped a hand to the grip of his knife but left it in the scabbard. His face and neck were slick with sweat.
Another round of fireworks burst across the sky, and on this floor, with all the windows and open space, it lighted the area far more intensely than it had below. I pictured countless people gathered on the public beach several miles down the coast, watching the displays and enjoying their Fourth of July. I pictured Donald pacing near his telephone. I pictured Toni dressed in dark clothes, standing at my gravesite with another man and grinning at me from behind black lace. I pictured Claudia in her dark and dirty cottage, straddled atop me, rocking slowly, hands pressed flat against my chest, pushing me deeper into the worn, stained mattress, her breasts full, wet and dripping sweat as I tell her, “I’m closing in on him.” And her shaking her head and whispering, “He’s closing in on you.” I pictured the families and loved ones of the victims crying and mourning, walking alongside caskets leaking blood. I pictured Bernard painting walls with the same blood, with body fluids and excrement, and from somewhere deep inside, heard the shrieks of the dead mingled with his laughter.
The fireworks faded to black, returned us to darkness.
We followed the shadows into the bathroom. The stench wafting from within was gut-wrenching, and as the flashlight crawled along ahead of us, we saw that the tiled walls were awash in a caked crimson so dark it was nearly black. I moved the beam around the room. The entire area was covered in blood. Even the floors were smeared with it. With the smell, in limited light and enclosed space, I imagined it was similar to being trapped within the bloody carcass of some enormous, brutally slain animal.
“Over there,” Rick said, his voice flat, void.
I swung the light in the direction he indicated.
A large industrial size sink ran nearly the full length of the back wall, above which had once been a mirror, though only shards and small sections of glass panels remained intact, fracturing our dark reflections back at us as if through some demented prism.
There was a line of urinals to our right, but only a few were still attached to the wall, the rest had fallen or been torn free and lay in pieces on the floor. On the opposite wall were the devastated remnants of stalls and toilets. Blood spatters were everywhere, like a painter had taken a very wide and wet brush and flicked it repeatedly about the room for hours, only to finish by taking up the paint bucket and dousing the area with whatever remained.
We inched closer to the sink. It had overflowed long before with what could only be a sickening combination of various body fluids and blood. Whatever the concoction had once been, it was now reduced to a dark gelatinous slop.
And within this demonic fluid lay a bevy of body parts protruding from the mess like dinosaurs stuck in tar pits. I moved the light along the sink, past a human head, to a portion where what appeared to be a torso floated on its side. Maggots writhed along the surface. Rick turned away and vomited again, and though my body wanted to join him, I was hit with violent dry heaves instead.
“Fucking slaughterhouse,” Rick gasped.
I holstered the 9mm, bent over, put my hands on my knees and took several deep breaths. The pool of light fell between us. On the floor, facing the sink, an upside down cross was painted in blood. Other strange symbols had been drawn around it, along with a word that had been smudged and neither of us could make out.
“I can’t even tell how many are in there,” I managed a moment later.
Rick spat on the floor. “Have you ever—ever—felt anything like this before?”
I knew exactly what he meant. There was a pervasive sense of evil here, a tangible essence of it hanging in the air like dense fog, and it was so strong that I could feel it being absorbed into my pores, mixing with the moisture in my eyes, inhaled up and into my nose and clinging to the roof of my mouth. “No.”
“We’re leaving right-fucking-now.” He staggered away and headed for the door.
I followed, trying my best to keep the light aimed in front of him, but he was at a full run before I reached the main room, and once there, it took me a few seconds to locate him. Firing the flashlight in various directions and calling his name, I finally found him running through the room, stumbling through piles of garbage and debris as he went, the knife free of the scabbard and clutched in his hand, blade down.