The front door was closed and locked, so Jason rang the buzzer and waited. The door was opened by an overweight security guard in a soiled blue uniform.
“Can I help you?” he said, making it clear he had no wish to.
“I’m a doctor,” Jason said. He tried to push by the security man, who stepped back to bar his way.
“Sorry — no visitors after six, doctor.” “I’m hardly a visitor,” Jason said. He pulled out his wallet and produced his GHP identity card.
The guard didn’t even look at the ID. “No visitors after six,” he repeated, adding, “and no exceptions.”
“But I…” Jason began. He stopped in midsentence. From the man’s expression, he knew discussion was futile.
“Call in the morning, sir,” the guard said, slamming the door.
Jason walked back down the front steps and gazed up at the five-story building. It was brick, with granite window casings. He wasn’t about to give up. Assuming the guard was watching, Jason went back to his car and drove out the driveway. About a hundred yards down the road, he pulled over to the side. He got out, and with some difficulty made his way through the Arboretum back to the school.
He circled the building, staying in the shadows. There were fire escapes on all sides but the front. They went right up to the roof. Unfortunately, as at Carol’s building, none was at ground level, and Jason couldn’t find anything to stand on to reach the first rung.
On the right side of the building, he spotted a flight of stairs that went down to a locked door. Feeling with his hands in the dark, he discovered the door had a central glass pane. He went back up the stairs and felt around the ground until he found a rock the size of a softball.
Holding his breath, Jason went back to the door and smashed the glass. In the quiet evening, the clatter seemed loud enough to wake the dead. Jason fled to the nearby trees and hid, watching the building. When no one appeared after fifteen minutes, he ventured out and returned to the door. Gingerly, he reached in and undid the latch. No alarm sounded.
For the next half hour Jason stumbled around a large basement he guessed was a storage — area. He found a stepladder and debated taking it outside to use to reach a fire escape, but gave up that idea and continued feeling about blindly for a light. His hands finally touched a switch and he flicked it on.
He was in a maintenance room filled with lawnmowers, shovels, and other equipment. Next to the light switch was a door. Slowly, Jason eased it open. Beyond was a much larger furnace room that was dimly illuminated.
Moving quickly, Jason crossed the second room and mounted a steep steel stairway. He opened the door at the top and immediately realized he had reached the front hall. From his previous visits he knew the stairs to the wards were to his right. On his left was an office where a middle-aged woman in a bulging white uniform was reading at a desk. Looking down toward the front entrance, Jason could see the guard’s feet perched on a chair. The man’s face was out of sight.
As quietly as possible, Jason slipped through the basement door and let it ease back into place. For a moment he was in full view of the woman in the office, but she didn’t look up from her book. Forcing himself to move slowly, he silently crossed the hall and entered the stairwell. He breathed a sigh of relief when he was completely out of sight of both the woman and the guard. Taking the stairs on tiptoe two at a time, he headed for the third floor, where the ward for boys aged four to twelve was located.
The stairs were marble, and even though he tried to be quiet, his footsteps echoed in the otherwise silent, cavernous space. Above him was a skylight, which at that time looked like a black onyx set into the ceiling.
On the third floor, Jason carefully opened the stairwell door. He remembered there was a glassed-in nurses’ office to the right at the end of a long hallway and noticed that although the corridor was dark, the office still blazed with light. A male attendant was, like the woman downstairs, busy reading.
Looking diagonally across the hall, Jason eyed the door to the ward. He noted it had a large central window with embedded wire. After one last check on the attendant, Jason tiptoed across the hall and let himself into the darkened room. Immediately, he was confronted by a musty smell. After waiting a moment to be sure the attendant hadn’t been disturbed, he began searching for the light. To confirm his suspicions, he would have to turn it on even if it meant being caught.
The drab room was suddenly flooded with raw, white fluorescent light. The ward was some fifty feet long, with low iron beds lined up on either side, leaving a narrow aisle. There were windows, but they were high, near the ceiling. At the end of the room were tiled toilet facilities with a coiled hose for cleaning and a bolted door to the fire escape. Jason walked down the aisle looking at the nameplates attached to the ends of beds: Harrison, Lyons, Gessner…. The children, disturbed by the light, began to sit up, staring with wide, vacant, and unknowing eyes at the intruder.
Jason stopped, and a terrible sense of revulsion that expanded to terror gripped him. It was worse than he’d imagined. Slowly, his eyes went from one pitiful face to another of the unwanted creatures. Instead of looking like the children they were, they all looked like miniature senile centenarians with beady eyes, wrinkled dry skin, and thinned white hair, showing scaly patches of scalp. Jason spotted the name Hayes. Like the others, the child appeared prematurely aged. He’d lost most of his eyelashes and his lower lids hung down. In place of his pupils were the glass-white reflection of dense cataracts. Except for light perception, the child was blind.
Some of the children began getting out of their beds, balancing precariously on wasted limbs. Then, to Jason’s horror they began to move toward him. One of them began to say feebly the word “please” over and over in a high-pitched, grating voice. Soon the others joined in a terrifying, unearthly chorus.
Jason backed up, afraid to be touched. Hayes’s son got out of his bed and began to feel his way forward, his bony, uncoordinated little arms making helpless swirling motions in the air.
The mob of children backed Jason up against the ward door and began to tug at his clothes. Frightened and nauseated, Jason pushed open the ward door and retreated into the hall. After he closed the door, the children pressed their mummylike faces against the glass, still silently voicing the word “please.”
“Hey, you!” Jason heard a rasping voice behind him.
Turning his head, he saw the attendant standing outside his office, waving his open book in astonishment. “What’s goin’ on?” the man yelled.
Jason ran across the hall to the stairwell, but he’d descended only a few steps before a second voice echoed up from below. “Kevin? What gives?”
Looking over the railing, Jason saw the guard down on the first-floor landing.
“Well, I’ll be damned,” the guard said, and charged up the stairs, club in hand.
Reversing direction, Jason returned to the third floor. The attendant was still standing in the doorway of his office, apparently too dumbfounded to move as Jason sprinted across the hall and back into the ward. Some of the children were wandering aimlessly about the room; others had collapsed back on their beds. Jason frantically beckoned them over, opened the door, and as the attendant and guard appeared, they were immediately surrounded by a swarm of boys.
They tried to shove their way through the crowd, but the children clung to them, shouting their eerie, monotonous chorus of please.
Reaching the emergency door at the opposite end of the room, Jason depressed its lever which, for safety’s sake, was positioned six feet off the floor. At first the door wouldn’t open. Obviously, it had not been used for years. Jason could see that paint had sealed it shut. Putting his shoulder against it, Jason finally got it to swing free. Stepping out into the dark night, he pushed several of the boys back into the ward before closing the heavy door.