No. Dumas was here.
He had to be.
It was the graveyard I discovered first: several dozen simple wooden crosses encircled by a low iron fence, and jutting at odd angles from the uneven canyon floor. They’d once been painted white, it seemed, but a good long while out in the desert sun had seen to that; now they looked as gray and dead as the bones they served to mark.
Beyond the graveyard sat a smattering of squat, stone ruins, built upon a series of rock terraces carved into the crook of the canyon, and linked by a winding set of stone steps. The smaller outbuildings scattered at the bottom of the incline were reduced to just a couple crumbling walls, but the large main building that presided over them was largely intact —and its windows flickered with candlelight.
Looked like this was the place, after all. I wished like hell I had some kind of weapon; all of the sudden, this plan of mine didn’t seem like the best idea.
I scaled the steps, noting as I did the iron bars that still graced the framed-out, glassless window holes of the ruins that I passed. The bars seemed somewhat out of place on the windows of a hospital —not to mention, this campus was way too small to have required such a large cemetery on its grounds.
That’s when it clicked for me. What I was looking at. The town historians could call this place a hospital all they wanted —but this far out of town, with bars on every window and a goodly cache of bodies in the ground?
This place was no hospital.
This place was a sanitarium.
Isolated. Reinforced. Impossible to escape. A prison in which to stash the terminally contagious, so that the healthy people of Las Cruces could go about their days unburdened by any worry about suffering and death. Once upon a time, I sold my soul to Walter Dumas to keep my Elizabeth from winding up someplace just like this. It’s only fitting that I’d find him here tonight.
As I approached the base of the main building, I abandoned the easy going of the stairway in favor of the rocky slope beside it. I skirted the building at a crawl, freezing every time I slipped and sent a cascade of pebbles pattering to the canyon floor, listening for any evidence I’d been spotted.
But that sign never came. My approach, it seemed, was undetected. And as I circled the building, a hand against the coarse stone wall to guide my way, I discovered something. Or, rather, I discovered nothing —a patch of even deeper black within the darkness that enveloped me, a void where a wall was supposed to be.
I felt around. It was a hole in the foundation, big enough to accommodate a man. Provided, of course, that the man in question didn’t mind sucking in his gut and squirming under a clutch of wobbly rocks held in place by the barest hint of crumbling mortar, and each large enough to squeeze the breath from his lungs should they dare to fall.
Lucky for me, I was just such a man.
I tried feet-first, but no dice —the hole was maybe three feet off the ground, and once I stuck my legs inside, I couldn’t reach anything to push off of to propel myself inside.
Shit. Looked like I was going to have to go in head-first.
The wall was damn near two feet thick. Chunks of masonry clawed at my clothes and skin as I scrabbled through the hole, leaving behind the subtle illumination of the canyon and plunging into darkness so complete I couldn’t see my hands in front of my face. Stone shards sharp as glass bit into my palms. Phantom colors danced before my eyes, blotches of blue and red and yellow-green. I clenched shut my lids, but the blotches remained. My meat-suit’s brain trying to make something out of nothing, I suppose. Not so different from how I’d be spending my eternity, if I didn’t track down Varela’s soul in time.
The wall ended. I spilled forward. A good ten feet of empty space, and then I slammed into the packeddirt floor. For a moment, I just lay there, struggling to reclaim the breath that had been knocked from my lungs. Then I pushed myself up off the floor and took stock of where I was.
There really wasn’t anything to see. I mean there really wasn’t anything to see. The room I was in was windowless, and as dark as the hole through which I’d entered —I couldn’t tell if it was ten feet across, or a hundred. Somewhere in the darkness, water dripped, and the air was cool and damp, raising goosebumps on my exposed skin.
My hands splayed out before me like a blind man’s, I staggered forward, disoriented by the utter lack of light to guide my way. The ground was uneven, and scattered with detritus —the brittle crunch of paper, the ankle-rolling clink of glass vial against glass vial. Occasionally, my way was barred —the cold iron of an ancient boiler, which reeked like blood and rust; the dry creak of old bed-frames, their springs whining in protest as I shouldered a stack of them and nearly sent them crashing to the ground —and I was forced to feel my way around. The going was slow and laborious, and despite the cold, an acrid sweat sprung up across my face and neck —sweat borne of concentration, and of mounting fear.
As I plunged deeper into the dank basement of the sanitarium, I noticed something: a strange, thick, scratching noise like sandpaper against wet wood. I stopped and listened. The sound was rhythmic and oddly repellent, and for the life of me, I couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Suddenly, though, I knew exactly what it was —my every muscle tensing as realization dawned.
It was breathing.
Breathing, but not human.
OK, I thought, no big. You’re just blind and defenseless in a creepy, creepy basement with what is almost certainly a big, scary demon. So what say we see about leaving said basement before big, scary demon decides to earn that big and scary.
I forced myself to take one step, and then another. It wasn’t easy. My meat-suit’s every instinct was leaning more toward curling up into a ball and crying. Of course, this meat-suit’s former occupant asphyxiated in his own home when all he had to do was crack a window, so as far as I was concerned, its instincts didn’t count for much.
I inched across the room, hoping to spy something that would signal a way out. My progress was so halting, and the room so very dark, that at times I felt as if I was walking in place. And all the while, the sickening sound of the demon’s breathing enveloped me, reverberating off the distant walls until it seemed to come from everywhere, and from nowhere at all.
My foot came down on something soft and slick and alive —arm or leg or fucking tentacle for all I knew —and it recoiled beneath me. I pitched forward, falling to the floor. My heart banged out a drum roll in my chest as a massive, unseen hulk shifted noisily beside me in the darkness. But then it settled down again into what I assumed was a skiminduced slumber, the awful meter of its breathing like the devil’s own metronome. And once I managed to stop trembling, I picked myself up off the floor and continued on.
At the far end of the basement was a staircase. Well, half of one, at least. The bottom five steps had rotted out, and the sixth, which spanned the space between the two supports at chest height, appeared to be on its way —it was spongy and smelled sickly sweet like fallen leaves after a rain. But at the head of the stairs was an open doorway, through which spilled the faintest hint of candlelight, so one way or another, I was getting up there.
I placed my palms atop the sixth step and pressed, testing to see if it would hold my weight. It sagged and crumbled like wet paper. I wrapped my fingers around the edge of the one above it and pulled until my toes lifted off the ground, and the wood began to crack. Not great, but good enough. The only problem was, I had no leverage —I’d left my sling back at the squat, but thanks to my tangle with the bug-monster, my right arm wasn’t of much use. And there was no way I was going to be able to hoist myself up there on the strength of my left arm alone.